Football: Maxed Out The Wrong Stat

The contract was a single sheet.

Mateo read it twice, carefully, the way you read something when you suspect the numbers are going to disappoint you and you want to be sure before you react. Manager Jennis sat behind his desk with his hands folded, watching without expression. Daniel stood to one side. Old Jes stood to the other.

The weekly wage was €175.

Mateo set the page down.

He knew what €175 a week meant, it was the bottom of the professional pay scale, barely above what the apprentice contracts in the building were pulling. It was the number a club put on a player they believed in just enough to hold, but not enough to invest in yet. It said: prove it first. It also said: we can afford to be wrong about you.

But it carried a €500,000 buyout clause, which an apprentice deal wouldn’t have had, and that meant Schalke were locking the door even as they left the lights off. They didn’t want him taken. They just weren’t sure yet what they had.

Fair enough.

He picked up the pen and signed.

Old Jes exhaled almost inaudibly. Daniel nodded at Jennis. Jennis accepted the signed contract with both hands and filed it without ceremony.

”This is the starting point,” Old Jes said, as they walked back into the corridor. His voice had the slightly forced brightness of a man covering mild embarrassment. ”Show them what you did out there in matches and that number moves. Right, Daniel?”

”It moves,” Daniel confirmed. ”Quickly, if you keep producing.”

Mateo said nothing. He was looking at something neither of them could see.

[Mission complete.]

[Objective: Obtain a first professional contract within 7 days.]

[Completion rating: SSS - exceeded expectations.]

[Reward: Golden Treasure Chest. Note: SSS completion randomly triggers elevated reward tier.]

He kept his face still.

A Golden Treasure Chest. The system hadn’t offered a preview but whatever came out of it was one tier above the Novice Gift Pack, which had already given him a maxed passing stat. The floor on this reward was already interesting. He wanted to find a quiet room and open it immediately.

”Mateo.”

He blinked. Daniel was watching him with the particular expression of a man who has just started to worry about a decision he made forty minutes ago.

”I’m fine,” Mateo said. ”Satisfied with the contract. Really.”

Daniel studied him a beat longer, then let it go.

”Good. It’s nearly lunch, eat first, dormitory after, medical this afternoon. They’ll want bloods and a fitness baseline.” He pointed down the corridor toward the canteen and left without waiting.

Old Jes lingered.

They stood together for a moment in the empty corridor. Mateo looked at the old man, the neat white hair, the worn jacket, shoes that were still polished after a morning at a training ground fence.

”Thank you,” Mateo said. He didn’t elaborate.

Old Jes waved it off, but the gesture was softer than his usual manner. He reached into his pocket and produced a business card, name and a mobile number written by hand below the printed one.

”Call me if anything comes up. Anything at all.” He looked at Mateo squarely. ”You have something that’s hard to find. Don’t waste it being stubborn.”

”Which kind of stubborn?”

”The kind that puts teammates in the treatment room instead of embarrassing them on the pitch.”

Mateo had nothing to say to that, which was probably the right response.

Old Jes nodded once, apparently satisfied, and walked back toward the main exit. The slow, deliberate pace. The old car waiting somewhere outside.

Without that man, Mateo would be in a taxi to the airport right now.

He put the card in his bag and went to find the canteen.

Daniel had pointed him toward the ground floor, but the building’s interior was a maze of identical corridors and Mateo took a wrong turn almost immediately. He followed the smell of food upward instead of down, pushed through a set of double doors, and found himself in a large, well-lit dining room that was clearly not the youth team canteen.

First team. He could tell by the age of the faces, the way the room occupied itself, the particular ease of people at the top of a hierarchy in the place where they worked. He was standing in the wrong building at the wrong level and was about to reverse when someone at the nearest table looked up.

The man was around twenty-five, compact and broad across the shoulders, with the kind of relaxed physical confidence that came from years of playing at pace. He had dark skin and close-cropped hair and was eating with the efficient focus of someone who treated meals as recovery work. He glanced at Mateo, took in the youth team kit, the backpack, the slightly lost expression and his face opened into something between amusement and recognition.

”You’re in the wrong place,” he said. His German carried a South American accent, flattened at the edges by years of use but still there. Then, switching to Spanish without apparent deliberation: ”¿Eres nuevo?”

Mateo answered in the same language, the familiar rhythm of it landing like something unclenching. ”Signed today. U18. I was looking for the canteen.”

”Downstairs.” The man gestured at the chair across from him with his fork. ”But sit. Eat here - no one checks. The food’s better anyway.”

Mateo hesitated for approximately one second, then sat.

”Farfán,” the man said, extending his hand across the table. ”Jefferson.”

Mateo shook it. ”Mateo Silva.”

”Brazilian?”

”Yes.”

Farfán nodded as if this explained something, then went back to his food. Around them the room continued its business, conversations in German, in English, the clatter of trays. No one paid them any particular attention. Mateo looked around the room more carefully and registered, in sequence: Huntelaar at a table to the left. Metzelder beyond him. Raúl - Real Madrid’s Raúl, in a Schalke training shirt, eating alone near the window with the absorbed focus of a man going through something in his head.

He looked back at his plate.

”First day?” Farfán asked.

”This morning I was at Dortmund. This afternoon I’m here.”

Farfán’s eyebrows went up. ”Dortmund released you and Schalke signed you the same day.”

”Old Jes brought me over.”

”Ah.” Farfán said it with the tone of a man for whom this explained everything. ”Old Jes has good eyes. If he vouched for you, you can play.” He ate for a moment. ”What position?”

”Midfield. Technically.”

”Technically.” Farfán smiled at the qualifier. ”What were you before technically?”

”Forward.”

”And they put you in midfield.”

”The passing,” Mateo said, which was all the explanation that was needed.

Farfán nodded slowly. He was quiet for a moment, turning something over. ”How old are you?”

”Seventeen.”

”First time in Germany?”

”First time in Europe.”

Farfán looked at him properly then, not assessing the way a coach would, more the way a senior player looks at a junior one and measures the distance between where he is and where he started. He’d been seventeen once, in Lima, before Hiddink had scouted him for PSV. He remembered the particular texture of that, knowing you could play, not yet knowing if that was enough.

”It’s cold here,” he said finally. ”And the football is physical in a way that takes getting used to. But the training is good and if you’re sharp, people notice quickly.” He finished his food and pushed the plate aside. ”U18 is Daniel’s team. He’s a loud man but he’s honest. If he plays you, you’re worth playing. If he doesn’t, you know where you stand.”

He stood, rolling his shoulders. ”Good luck, Mateo.”

He dropped a hand briefly on Mateo’s shoulder as he passed, the gesture of a man who remembered being new somewhere and found it cost nothing to acknowledge that and walked out of the room.

Mateo ate the rest of his lunch alone, surrounded by first-team players he recognised from television, in a canteen he wasn’t supposed to be in, thinking about a Golden Treasure Chest waiting in his system.

He finished everything on the plate and went downstairs to find Daniel.