Football: Maxed Out The Wrong Stat

In the days that followed, the squad found a kind of functional equilibrium.

It wasn’t warmth, the tension from the scrimmage hadn’t dissolved, and Bujerab still moved through the training ground with the slightly closed energy of a man who had made up his mind about something and wasn’t reconsidering. But when Magath was present, which was always, everyone trained properly. The work was the work. You could dislike someone at breakfast and still press correctly when the drill required it.

Mateo kept his head down and learned.

He was in the room for tactical briefings now, which was the most useful thing about his promotion. Magath had dissected three different opponents in the past week. The Cottbus footage again. A preview of the upcoming away match. Defensive shape when teams pressed high. Mateo sat at the back and absorbed it the way a student absorbed material for an exam he actually cared about passing, not because he was told to, but because the framework Magath was building corresponded directly with decisions the overlay had been showing him, and having the vocabulary for those decisions was making him faster.

Raúl noticed he was the only one in the back rows paying full attention. He said nothing about it.

On Wednesday, Farfán mentioned at breakfast that Daniel had been taken to hospital.

”When?” Mateo asked.

”Yesterday evening. Apparently he collapsed after training. They’re saying exhaustion.”

Mateo put his coffee down. ”How serious?”

”The doctors say he’ll be fine. He just needs rest.” Farfán spread butter on his bread. ”He’s been running the U18 squad on his own since Wickliff got moved to scouting duties. Long days.”

”I’ll visit him.”

”He’ll be glad. Probably.” Farfán paused. ”He’s also going to be somewhat irritated.”

Mateo looked at him.

”You leaving the U18 disrupted everything he’d built,” Farfán said. ”Ben Kehi’s injured, you’re gone, and he has a squad that plays a style he spent two months developing around you both.” He picked up his bread. ”None of that is your fault. But he’s lying in a hospital bed thinking about it. Just - be prepared for that.”

He went that afternoon.

The hospital was on the east side of the city, twenty minutes by tram. He bought a bag of fruit from a stall outside, pears and a bunch of grapes because he’d been raised to believe you didn’t show up to a hospital empty-handed and had never had a reason to revise that.

Daniel was in a room on the third floor. He was sitting up when Mateo knocked and came in, which was a good sign. He had the look of a man who felt perfectly fine and had been told by three separate people to stay in bed anyway.

He looked at Mateo. Then at the fruit.

”Pears,” Daniel said.

”And grapes.”

Daniel gestured at the chair. Mateo sat.

There was a pause that might have been comfortable or might have been both of them waiting for the other one to acknowledge the situation. It landed somewhere between the two.

”How is the first team?” Daniel asked finally.

”I’m not on the squad yet. Cup match is probably the first chance.”

”And Magath’s briefings?”

”Quiet good actually. Very detailed.”

Daniel let out a dry, short breath, the sound of someone whose cynical predictions had just come true. ”He’s thorough,” he admitted, his eyes drifting toward the hospital window. ”Maybe too thorough for the rest of us who’ve heard the speech fifty times. But for a rookie? Yeah, I guess it’s useful.

”He shifted slightly, wincing as he adjusted his weight. ”I heard about the scrimmage on Tuesday.”

Mateo went still, waiting for the blow.

”You didn’t snap,” Daniel said. He sounded reluctant, like the words were being dragged out of him. It’s hard to be gracious when you’re stuck in a hospital bed because of the very game you’re discussing. ”You just... kept quiet.”

”I didn’t really have a choice,” Mateo muttered.”

Most people would’ve reacted. You just stood there and endured it.” Daniel looked away, his jaw tightening.

”Raúl helped,” Mateo said, looking down.

”He would.” Daniel lapsed into silence, the sterile hum of the room filling the gap.

”Ben Kehi’s ankle is healing, by the way. They’re saying he’ll be back with the U18s in two weeks.”

”That’s good news.”

The conversation hit another wall. Daniel glanced at the bag of fruit on the bedside table, then back at Mateo, looking like he wanted to say more but couldn’t find the right gear to shift into.

”I’m not angry with you,” he said. It was the tone of a statement that was mostly true with small print. ”You going to the first team was the right outcome. It was always going to happen.” He straightened the sheet across his legs. ”I’m just a coach who had something working and then didn’t.”

”The system you built was good,” Mateo said. ”Ben Kehi learned to read the timing. The wingers understood their roles. That doesn’t disappear because I moved up.”

Daniel looked at him steadily for a moment.

”Go,” he said. ”Train or whatever it is you do at three in the afternoon.”

”It’s four o’clock.”

”Even worse. Go.”

Mateo stood, left the fruit on the bedside table, and went.

Walking back down the corridor he heard Daniel call the nurse to ask if pears were allowed on his diet. He was already arguing about it before the nurse had finished answering.

Friday afternoon. Two hours of solo work on the far pitch.

He was midway through a shooting sequence when the system notification appeared.

[Ball Control has reached 80.]

[Threshold cap applied — further increases to this attribute require Overall Rating 75 or above.]

[Current Overall Rating: 68. Cap: 80.]

[Post-cap training cost: 30 hours per point. Maximum: 85.]

He stopped.

Read it again.

He stood there for a moment with the ball under his foot, doing the arithmetic. Ball Control at 80 was where he’d wanted to be, that was always the Bundesliga readiness target. He’d reached it. The cap was a new piece of information but it didn’t change what he’d already achieved. What it changed was the plan going forward.

Thirty hours per point. That was three times the previous cost. The overall rating cap meant he had to develop across multiple attributes before the system would let him push beyond 80 in any single one. It was a design that prevented him from just stacking one skill indefinitely, which was mildly annoying and also, he had to admit, probably correct. A player with Ball Control 100 and nothing else wasn’t a Bundesliga midfielder. He was a training drill.

He had three points left from the week’s accumulation.

He thought about it honestly. Speed was already 80. Stamina was 88. Passing was maxed. The attributes doing the least work were Shooting and Physical Contact.

Shooting was the long-term project - it would matter eventually, and a lot. But the Bundesliga didn’t need him to score. It needed him to hold position under contact, win his first touch when a defender arrived with him, and keep the ball moving when someone bigger was trying to end the sequence.

Physical Contact. Three points.

[Physical Contact: 72 → 75.]

The system reset came, the familiar clearing of accumulated fatigue, joints returning to neutral. He set the ball again and started the next sequence.

75 in Physical Contact wasn’t going to make him a physical presence. But it meant he could take a hit without the ball running loose, which was the minimum requirement for a midfielder who wanted to stay on the pitch in the top German division.

Good enough for now.

Saturday morning. Matchday.

Schalke’s first team were playing away in the afternoon. Magath had named the eighteen-man squad on Friday: the usual starters, the rotation options, Farfan on the bench. Mateo’s name wasn’t on it, which was exactly what he’d expected. He’d been at the first team for a week.

He trained alone in the morning, ate with the handful of players also left behind, and took the tram to the away ground in the afternoon.

He bought a ticket at the away end - the neutral section, since there was no particular reason to stand with either set of supporters and found a seat with a decent line of sight to the centre circle.

The stadium was a different scale from the Garden Stadium. Proper Bundesliga facilities - press gantry, covered stands, the specific ambient noise of twenty-odd thousand people before kickoff. He’d watched this level of football on television for years. He’d played in a stadium that held sixty thousand at a fraction of its capacity. But sitting in the stands of a ground where the people on the pitch were playing the league he was training for gave it a different quality.

He watched the warm-up. He watched the formations set up. He watched Raúl’s movement before the ball arrived at his feet, the way he adjusted his body on the approach to give himself options in every direction. He watched how the opposing defensive midfielder tracked Jurado, and where the gaps appeared when both central midfielders went to the same side.

The game itself was tight. Schalke played better than they had against Cottbus, the midfield was more connected, the pressing more organised. But the final ball was still wrong more often than it was right, and the chances that came fell to players who were a fraction late, or who received the ball facing the wrong way, or who had the right position and the wrong touch.

Mateo watched all of this quietly from his seat and thought about the overlay, and what the red lines would look like in those spaces, and what it would take to put a ball into them from the positions Jurado and Bujerab were occupying.

The match ended 1–1.

He got the tram back.

It was a draw. But for him, it was ninety minutes of information he wouldn’t have gotten any other way.

Plz Drop Some Power Stones.

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