The Football Agent System

He went outside on the third try, dragged Didrik with him, and slipped the ball inside to the overlapping runner a beat before the full-back could recover. He kept moving into the box instead of admiring the pass, and the cutback that followed found a foot he hadn’t even seen arrive.

The ball went in off a deflection, scruffy and real, and two of his teammates clapped him on the shoulder on the way back to the halfway line without making more of it than that.

Garcia found him after the session, kit bag over one shoulder, a taxi to the airport already booked for the evening.

They kept it short. The name and number of Jay’s day-to-day contact at the club, saved and confirmed twice. How often Garcia expected an update, and how Jay was to report anything unexpected, an injury, a schedule change, anything at all, straight away and not after the fact. And one thing said plainly, without dressing it up: Jay’s job now was the club in front of him, not proving anything to a phone screen four hundred miles away.

Jay nodded through most of it. There wasn’t much to say back.

He watched Garcia get into the taxi from the car park outside the ground, and something in his chest shifted the moment the car actually pulled away.

Until then, Norway had still felt like something Garcia had arranged, a trip with someone else holding the map. Once the taxi turned out of the gate, it stopped feeling like that. What was left was the flat, the schedule pinned to his fridge, and a building full of people who barely knew his name yet.

The fourth day gave him a job instead of a test, which somehow made it easier.

Egersund had a league match at the weekend, and the coaches needed their first-choice defenders sharpened against something realistic. Jay became the opponent’s winger for the afternoon, given specific instructions on where the man he was imitating liked to receive, which direction he drove in, and when he attacked the full-back’s blind side rather than his strong one.

Jay’s first few reps were just Jay playing his own game, instinct taking over instead of the script. Bjarne stopped it and laid the movement out again, sharper this time, exact angles and timing.

Once Jay understood what they actually wanted, he reproduced it cleanly, rep after rep, and the sharpened defending on the other side of the drill told him the coaches were getting real work out of it. That was its own kind of proof, quieter than a goal but not nothing.

Away from the pitch, the week kept teaching him things nobody put on a training schedule.

He worked out which aisle in the small supermarket had what he actually recognised. He learned the bus times by getting one wrong and standing in the cold for twenty minutes waiting on the next one. The accommodation was quiet in a way that pressed on him some evenings, no teammates down the hall, no noise but his own.

His father sent another update that evening, steadier than the one on the plane but not without weight in it. Jay read it twice, alone in the kitchenette, and let himself wonder for a moment whether coming here had been the wrong kind of selfish.

He did not call Garcia to say he wanted to come home. He laid his kit out for the next day instead, same as every night, and went to bed.

The fifth day eased off, the way the week always seemed to right before a match.

The registered players worked on shape, restarts, and the small tactical details that mattered on Saturday. Jay trained longer than most of them, folded in with the substitutes and fringe players once the first-team work wound down.

Fewer eyes were on that session, and it would have been easy to let the intensity slide. Jay didn’t. He kept pressing when the ball turned over, kept recovering his position after a lost duel instead of jogging back, and finished every rep the way he’d have finished it with Espen watching directly.

One of the fitness staff noticed. He didn’t say anything in the moment. He just made a note on the tablet he carried everywhere and moved on to the next group.

That evening, Bjarne pulled him aside for ten minutes of video, just the two of them and a laptop.

He ran through it plainly. Jay’s tactical adjustments were coming quicker than expected, session to session rather than week to week. His wide isolation was the real thing, worth the trip on its own. But stronger defenders had moved him off the ball too easily more than once, and he needed to start talking to teammates sooner, calling for the ball and organising runs instead of waiting for the picture to arrive on its own.

Bjarne did not tell him whether the club wanted him. He did not pretend five days was enough to know that, and he did not pad the review with anything warmer than it needed to be.

The day before the match, Jay’s work was short and light.

He joined the non-squad group for activation, some technical touches, a little limited finishing, while the registered players finished their own preparation across the other half of the pitch. A staff member confirmed where he’d be sitting on matchday, and when he needed to report afterward, the following morning rather than the same evening.

Matchday itself put the whole week in a different frame.

Idrettsparken felt smaller with people in it, a compact artificial pitch and a single main stand that filled maybe two-thirds full, flags and a scarf or two, nothing like the quiet training ground Jay had spent the week learning. It was intimate in a way that made every mistake feel louder than it would have on an empty pitch.

Jay watched from the area set aside for the club rather than the bench, because he wasn’t registered and never would be for this one.

He paid attention to Egersund’s starting winger more than the scoreline. The man pressed and tracked the opposing full-back constantly, work that never showed up on a highlight reel. He got fewer clean one-on-one chances than Jay had expected watching from the outside, most of his touches built into the shape of the team rather than isolated moments to beat a man alone.

Mistakes got punished fast. A misplaced pass in the middle third turned into a shot at the other end inside fifteen seconds, no mercy for it, no time to recover the error slowly.

Jay understood, sitting there, exactly what the club was actually testing him for. Not whether he had better dribbling clips than their winger. Whether he could do the job that winger was doing right now, inside a team, inside a structure, for ninety real minutes.

Egersund won it late, a scrappy header from a corner, and the small stand made more noise than its size should have allowed.

Afterward, the starters peeled off toward the medical room and the ice baths, and the rest of the squad, subs who hadn’t played, fringe players, Jay among them, went back out for a short top-up session under the floodlights. Not a punishment. Just what was left for legs that hadn’t burned off the match itself.

Jay’s own legs were shot by then, a full week finally sitting on him all at once. He got through the work anyway, and late in the session, tired past the point where instinct usually took over, he still produced one clean action, a controlled touch and a pass played into the right space rather than the easy one.

It was not magic. It was Rafi’s summer holding its shape under fatigue, same as it had two days earlier, proof built through hours nobody had watched rather than anything that had simply been handed to him.

Before he left the ground, a staff member gave him a printed sheet for the following week.

No contract talk. No promise, spoken or implied. Just a schedule, and on it, more sessions than not with his name sitting beside the first-team group instead of the fringe one.

Back at the flat, he photographed it and sent it to Garcia with a short message. Second week schedule through. Moved up for most of it.

Garcia’s reply came within the hour, plain as ever. Good. Report on time. Keep working.

No congratulations. No excitement passed down the line. Jay read it twice anyway, then set his phone down and looked at the sheet again, at his own name sitting somewhere it hadn’t been a week ago.

The club hadn’t decided anything about him yet. But somewhere between the right-back who’d moved him off the ball on the first morning and the cutback that had found a foot in the box on the third day, they had decided one thing.

Testing him against the lower group wasn’t enough anymore.