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Chapter 37: Volume 1, - 37: Playing Up

Chapter 37: Volume 1, Chapter 37: Playing Up

A message came through Coach Tavares on a Tuesday morning, delivered with none of the ceremony Rayan felt it deserved. He was checking in for the regular Tuesday session, still tying his boots on the bench, when Tavares stopped beside him just long enough to say it.

"You’ve been asked to join the under-17 group on Thursday. For one session."

Rayan’s fingers went still on the laces. "Sorry, what?"

"You heard me the first time." Tavares was already moving on, clipboard under one arm, checking names off against the rest of the squad filing in. "Report to the upper pitch at three instead of here. Full kit, boots, and bring your shin guards."

"Why me?"

"Because someone above me asked for you specifically." Tavares paused at the door, glancing back with the flat, unreadable expression that had become as familiar to Rayan as his own reflection over the past few months. "Don’t read anything into it beyond what it is."

But of course Rayan read something into it, because it was impossible not to. He sat there on the bench for a full minute after Tavares had gone, boot half-laced, turning the sentence over and over until it had taken on a weight he suspected it couldn’t actually carry.

He found Rafa by the water station before the session started and told him, unable to keep it out of his voice.

"They want me training with the seventeens."

Rafa’s eyebrows went up. "One session?"

"One session. Thursday."

"That’s..." Rafa considered it, chewing the inside of his cheek the way he did when he was being careful with his words. "That’s good, Rayan. That’s genuinely good. But it’s one session."

"I know it’s one session."

"I’m just saying. Don’t turn one session into six different futures before Thursday’s even happened." Rafa said it kindly, but there was something underneath it too. The particular caution of a friend whose own academy future remained genuinely uncertain, watching someone else’s start to brighten. "You’ve built whole houses on smaller news than this before."

"I’m not building anything."

"You’re already standing taller."

Rayan laughed despite himself, because it was true, and because Rafa had a way of saying the true thing without making it feel like an accusation. But the warmth of the invitation didn’t leave him for the rest of the session, and it was still there, humming quietly under everything, when he brought it up again with Tavares at the end of training.

"This means I’m staying, doesn’t it," Rayan said, unable to help himself, jogging alongside the coach as the rest of the squad dispersed toward the changing rooms. "If they’re already looking at me for the older group—"

"It means nothing of the sort." Tavares didn’t even slow down. "It means someone above me wants to see what happens to you when the players around you are two years older and considerably stronger. That is all it means. One data point among many the club will weigh when the season ends."

"But it’s a good sign."

"It is a sign. Whether it is good depends entirely on what you do with it." Tavares finally stopped, turning to face him fully, and something in his voice sharpened into the particular tone he used when he wanted a lesson to actually land rather than simply be heard. "You have done this before, El Mansouri. One promising moment, and suddenly the whole season is decided in your head before it has happened. It happened after your first assist. Every time, the ground shifted under you the moment reality caught up with the story you had already told yourself."

Rayan didn’t answer right away, because there wasn’t really a way to argue with it. Tavares let the silence sit for a moment before continuing, quieter now.

"You have a session on Thursday with players who have trained at a higher tempo for two years longer than you have. That is the whole of what this is. Go and see what you learn from it. Do not go and see whether it proves something about your future, because it will not, no matter what happens."

"Understood," Rayan said, and mostly meant it, though the hope stayed lodged somewhere under his ribs for the rest of the week regardless.

---

The two days before Thursday passed the way days always did when he was waiting for something. Too slowly and then suddenly not slowly enough, until he was standing at the edge of the upper pitch at ten to three with his boots already laced and his stomach in a knot he couldn’t quite explain given how much bigger matches he’d already survived that season.

The under-17 group looked different from a distance before he’d even joined them properly. Bigger, somehow, in a way that had nothing to do with height. They moved with an economy Rayan recognised from watching senior football rather than academy football, every touch slightly more assured, every run slightly less wasteful. A tall, rangy midfielder Rayan half-recognised from Sporting’s youth highlight reels was already stretching near the centre circle, talking easily with two other players who carried themselves the same way. Like the pitch belonged to them rather than the other way around.

The U17 coach, a wiry man named Marques who Rayan had only ever seen from a distance before, called the group in for a brief team talk before the session began, and included Rayan in the gesture without ceremony, waving him over to stand at the edge of the circle like he’d always belonged there.

"We’ve got a guest today," Marques said, nodding toward Rayan without further introduction, and a few heads turned, sizing him up with the quick, unbothered curiosity of players who saw new faces often enough not to make a production of it. "Treat him like anyone else. That’s the whole point of him being here."

Nobody said anything unkind. Nobody said anything particularly welcoming either. It was, Rayan realised as the group broke into their warm-up, exactly the kind of professional indifference that told him more clearly than anything else could have that this session mattered. N because anyone here cared whether he succeeded or failed, but because nobody here was going to make it easier for him either way.

The difference hit him properly within the first five minutes of the possession drill, and it had almost nothing to do with speed of foot and everything to do with speed of thought.

Back with his own age group, Rayan had grown used to a particular rhythm. A half-second, sometimes a full second, between the ball arriving and the pressure closing in, enough time to think even if he didn’t always think correctly. Here, that half-second simply didn’t exist. The ball moved between bodies with an urgency that assumed everyone already knew where it was going before it got there, and Rayan discovered, humiliatingly quickly, that his internal clock was still calibrated for a game that moved noticeably slower than the one actually being played around him.

His first touch let him down twice in the opening exchanges. Not badly, not embarrassingly, but late enough that what should have been a simple pass became a scramble, the ball running away from him a half-step further than it needed to.

[Current tempo exceeds optimal scanning window.]

[Decision speed insufficient for level.]

He didn’t need the notification. He could feel it in his own body, the particular helplessness of being technically capable of something and still a half-beat too slow to actually do it.

The midfielder from earlier. A tall, easy-moving, a boy named Salvador who Rayan would later learn was already being talked about as a future first-team prospect collected the ball from him cleanly after Rayan’s second mistake and passed it on without any particular malice, though there was a flicker of something in his expression that Rayan recognised as mild, unbothered dismissal. Not cruelty. Just the simple, unspoken assessment of a player who had already decided Rayan wasn’t quite operating at his level yet.

It stung more than outright mockery would have.

By the twentieth minute, Rayan had settled marginally, adjusting his positioning to buy himself a fraction more time before the pressure arrived, but the possession drill gave way to a full-tempo small-sided game, and whatever ground he’d made up disappeared almost immediately under the weight of actual physical contact.

The challenge that put him on the ground came midway through the game, during a moment that hadn’t even felt particularly dangerous. Rayan received the ball near the touchline, tried to shield it the way he’d learned to shield it against boys his own age, and discovered that a defender built like someone already playing reserve-team football didn’t need to foul him to move him. A shoulder, perfectly legal, perfectly timed, and Rayan was on the turf before he’d properly registered losing his balance.

Nobody offered a hand up. The defender jogged past without even glancing down, already thinking about the next phase of play, and it was one of the wingers further up the pitch who called back over his shoulder, not unkindly but not warmly either, "Play it before he arrives next time" before the game moved on without him.

Rayan pushed himself up off the grass alone, jaw tight, the sting in his hip barely registering next to the sharper sting of having been so completely, casually absorbed into the flow of a game that hadn’t stopped for him at all.

[Match tempo: 87 actions per minute (academy average: 61).]

[Scanning frequency remains calibrated for lower-tempo environment.]

[Recommendation: reduce touches per possession; prioritise release speed over control.]

He stood there for a moment longer than he needed to, catching his breath, feeling the particular humiliation of being knocked down in front of players who hadn’t even considered it worth acknowledging. Then he remembered, with something close to relief, that the system’s recommendation was at least something he could actually try, a concrete adjustment rather than a vague hope that things might simply feel easier next time.

He started deciding before the ball arrived instead of after. One touch to set the ball, immediate release, trusting a teammate to be roughly where he expected rather than checking to confirm it. It felt less like football and more like guessing. Fast, imprecise, occasionally wrong in ways that cost him possession all over again. But it worked more often than his old habits had, and slowly, unglamorously, he stopped being quite so consistently a half-step behind the game around him.

Near the end of the session, it produced something worth having. He received the ball wide again, the same heavy-shouldered defender closing on him fast, and instead of trying to shield it this time he laid it off first-time, inside, to Namir, who he’d clocked drifting into space a half-second earlier than his old instincts would have allowed him to notice. Namir took one touch and slid a return ball straight back into the exact space Rayan had already started running into, the kind of give-and-go that Rayan wouldn’t have had the vision to attempt three months earlier, not because the technique was beyond him but because he simply wouldn’t have seen the picture in time.

It came to nothing in the end. The cross was cut out before it reached anyone dangerous, but for those few seconds, Rayan had kept pace with players who usually made him feel two years younger than he actually was, and something in his chest settled, quietly, into something that wasn’t quite triumph but wasn’t far from it either.

Marques, watching from the touchline with his arms folded, made a small note on the clipboard he carried everywhere, and said nothing else to Rayan for the rest of the session. Rayan spent the walk back to the changing rooms trying to decide whether that silence meant something good or nothing at all, and eventually gave up trying to decide, because Tavares had already told him the answer wasn’t his to work out.

---

By Monday, the whole school seemed to know he’d trained with the older group, mostly because Joca had mentioned it in the group chat within about four minutes of Rayan telling him privately, and the group chat leaked information the way a sieve held water. Which was to say, immediately and completely.

It layered on top of the documentary, which had already softened something in how people looked at him in the corridors over the past couple of weeks. Girls who’d never spoken to him before said hello between classes, brief and easy, the kind of casual attention he’d have given almost anything for a year ago and now found himself accepting with a confidence that surprised even him. A group of younger students cornered him near the vending machines and asked, with real seriousness, whether he’d actually met any first-team players yet, whether the pitches were different, whether the older boys were as fast as everyone said.

Rayan found himself standing a little taller through all of it, answering questions with more certainty than the actual situation strictly warranted. One training session, one knock to the ground, one moment of good combination play that had led to precisely nothing, and enjoying the attention in a way he only half-noticed he was enjoying, the way you don’t notice a current pulling you until you look up and realise how far you’ve drifted from where you started.

Inês noticed for him, because Inês always noticed the things nobody else bothered to.

"You’ve changed how you walk," she said at lunch, watching him cross the courtyard toward their usual table with his bag slung over one shoulder in a way that felt, he realised only after she’d said it, distinctly more deliberate than it used to.

"I haven’t changed anything."

"You have. You used to walk like you were trying not to be looked at." She said it plainly, without any particular judgement in her tone, the way she said most things. Simply reporting what she’d observed and letting him decide what to do with it. "Now you walk like you’re hoping someone will. One training session with older boys and you’re basically doing the interview voice with your whole body."

"I got knocked flat on my back twice."

"Doesn’t matter. Nobody here saw that part." She shrugged, unbothered, popping open a carton of juice. "Just, be careful. It’s a nice feeling, being noticed. I remember exactly how nice it felt after the documentary went up, before people started saying things about it that weren’t nice at all. It’s also the exact feeling that got you punching Vasco, if you think about it honestly. Wanting to be seen a certain way, and getting angry when the world doesn’t cooperate."

Rayan opened his mouth to argue and then didn’t, because she wasn’t wrong, and he’d learned by now, slowly, expensively. That arguing with Inês when she wasn’t wrong rarely ended anywhere good for him.

---

Helena Matos arrived at the flat on afternoon in a plain grey coat, without the polish Rayan had half-expected from someone who worked in football representation, and shook Sofia’s hand like she meant it before accepting the seat she was offered at the kitchen table. Rayan had been told, with unusual firmness, to make himself scarce for the first part of the conversation, and had retreated to the hallway with a book he had no intention of actually reading.

"Thank you for making the time," Helena said, once the tea had been poured and Leonor had been persuaded, with some difficulty and a bribe involving her own portion of biscuits, to do her homework in her own room instead of hovering by the doorway. "I’ll be direct, because I think you’d prefer that. I’m not here to represent Rayan. Not today, and not necessarily ever, depending on how the season goes and what you both decide is right for him. I’m here because I’ve seen what happens to families who don’t get the right information early enough, and I’d rather you have it now, before something’s gone wrong, than after."

"What kind of information," Sofia asked, in the flat, careful voice Rayan recognised from the hallway.

"The kind nobody explains clearly enough, in my experience." Helena set her cup down with a small, deliberate click. "There are people who approach families of promising academy players promising trials abroad, guaranteed contracts, connections to clubs they don’t actually have any real relationship with. Some ask for money upfront. A ’development fee,’ an ’administrative cost,’ something dressed up to sound reasonable before anything at all has been signed or delivered. That’s generally illegal, depending on the exact structure of the request, and it is always, without exception, a warning sign regardless of how it’s phrased."

"And the ones who don’t ask for money?"

"Those can be worse, in some ways, because they’re harder to spot." Helena leaned forward slightly. "Some push image-rights agreements on minors. Contracts that sign away control of a child’s name, likeness, and social media earnings for years, sometimes decades, in exchange for very little in return. A young player’s family sees the word ’opportunity’ and doesn’t always read the fine print closely enough to notice what’s actually being given away."

Sofia’s expression didn’t change, but Rayan, listening from the hallway, could hear something in the quality of her silence that told him she was absorbing every word carefully.

"Rayan isn’t signed anywhere," Sofia said finally.

"I know. That’s actually exactly the right position to be in right now, and I’d encourage you to stay there for a while longer, no matter who approaches you or how convincing they sound, or how much they seem to genuinely believe in him." Helena allowed the smallest smile, more tired than warm. "If someone tells you an offer expires this week, or that you need to decide before speaking to anyone else, that is usually the clearest sign of all that it isn’t a real offer to begin with. Real opportunities can survive you asking questions. Only the false ones can’t."

"And you’re telling me this because you’d like to represent him eventually," Sofia said, not unkindly, but with the direct challenge of someone unwilling to accept a stranger’s kindness at face value.

"I’m telling you this because it’s true, whether or not I ever represent him." Helena met her eyes without flinching. "If in a year or two you decide you’d like to have that conversation properly, I’d welcome it, and I’ll be glad to have earned the right to it by then. But that conversation should happen when Rayan has actually earned something concrete worth negotiating over, not before, and certainly not because I frightened you into trusting me first by making everyone else sound worse."

Sofia studied her for a long moment.

"That’s more honesty than I expected," Sofia said.

"Most people don’t expect it. That’s rather the ongoing problem in this industry."

They talked a while longer. About the documentary, about Rayan’s schoolwork, about the ordinary shape of a fifteen-year-old’s life that Helena seemed to ask about with what struck Rayan, when he finally allowed himself to drift closer to the doorway, as genuine curiosity rather than performed interest. She asked whether Rayan still played basketball with his friends. It didn’t feel, to Rayan, like the questions of someone assembling a pitch. It felt like someone actually trying to understand the boy underneath the highlight clips before deciding whether she believed in him.

Eventually, Helena set her cup down and glanced, briefly, toward the hallway where Rayan had entirely given up on the pretence of reading.

"There is one more thing," she said, her tone shifting slightly, more careful now, more deliberate. "I looked into who else might be circling, before I came here. It’s part of what I do before I approach a family properly. I’d rather understand the landscape than add myself to it blindly."

Sofia’s posture straightened. "And?"

"Someone has already reached out to Rayan’s father directly," Helena said. "Within the last two weeks, as far as I’ve been able to establish. I don’t yet know exactly who, or precisely what’s been offered. But I’d rather you hear that from me now, calmly, than discover it later in circumstances that give you far less room to react well."

Rayan felt something cold settle low in his stomach, and beside him, though he couldn’t see her from where he stood, he heard his mother set her own cup down very carefully.