The Football Agent System

(Joost POV)

The recruitment office at De Adelaarshorst smelled like reheated coffee and printer toner, the same as it had every Monday for the eleven years Joost Brummelkamp had worked there.

Go Ahead Eagles sat comfortably in the Eredivisie now, a level above where a club like Egersund would ever realistically compete, which was exactly why a cheap Norwegian striker made sense to a club like this one. Bring him in as a squad option, give him a season to adjust, sell him on or build him up. Nobody was pretending they were signing a finished article.

Joost covered Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and had done for six years, which meant nobody in this building sent him anywhere without a reason already half decided before he packed a bag.

The meeting ran short, the way these always did once the video work was finished. The head of recruitment, a broad man named Peter Doevendans who trusted numbers more than instinct, pulled up the striker’s clips one more time on the main screen.

They talked through his movement in behind, whether his pressing intensity would survive a step up in league quality, what his contract situation looked like and roughly what a deal would cost. Nothing about him screamed finished product. Everything about him suggested a body and an instinct worth developing properly, at the right price, before somebody bigger noticed.

"One more live look," Peter said. "Controlled game first, then the league match at the weekend. If both hold up, we move."

Joost nodded and started sorting flights.

Nobody in that room said another name all afternoon. There was no reason to. As far as Go Ahead Eagles knew, there was exactly one player in Norway worth the airfare.

He landed in Stavanger two days later and drove south through the same flat, water-broken country he’d driven through a dozen times chasing players who mostly hadn’t been worth the trip.

Egersund’s training ground looked the way it always did, functional rather than impressive, a club two tiers below anything Joost’s employer would normally bother with, made worthwhile only by exactly the kind of player they’d sent him to watch.

He arrived early enough to catch the squad walking out for the controlled game, and one detail caught his eye before he’d even opened his notebook.

An English lad, unfamiliar face, temporary training kit with no name stitched on the back, walked out level with the group instead of trailing behind the staff the way trialists usually did. A couple of players called him into a passing exchange before the warm-up had properly started, easy, no hesitation in it. The striker Joost had actually come for jogged past him and said something short that made the lad laugh.

Joost filed it as background. Some clubs kept a trialist or two floating around all season, most of them going nowhere. His attention belonged to the number nine, and he opened his notebook to that name and nothing else.

The controlled match ran the way these things usually did midseason, substitutes, a couple of players managing their way back from minor knocks, fringe faces getting minutes the league table wouldn’t miss. The English lad went out on the left, in the same team as the striker.

For the first twenty minutes, Joost tracked exactly what he’d come to track. The striker’s movement in behind, timed well enough. His pressing, decent without being relentless. His duels, competitive, nothing special either way.

The winger kept appearing at the edge of it without demanding to be looked at directly.

He took the simple option when the simple option was on. He drove at the space the moment a defender left it open rather than a second later. Twice he read where the striker was going before the striker had to point for it, and put the ball into the exact patch of grass the run needed.

Joost noted the striker mostly. The supply, he noted almost by accident.

The first real chance came from the left winger delaying a half-second longer than instinct usually allowed, waiting until the striker had actually separated from his marker before releasing it into the space ahead of the run. The ball arrived clean. The finish did not, blazed over from a position that should have been buried.

Joost wrote the miss down against the striker’s name. Then, underneath it, in a smaller hand, he wrote one line about the Englishman who’d delivered it.

Winger — English, unfamiliar. Delayed release, good picture. Watch.

The match kept moving, and other players took their turns controlling it. That was normal. What was not quite normal was how often the ball ended up finding its way back to the same flank whenever Egersund actually needed to progress it or finish something off.

Midway through the half, the coaching staff shifted the team’s attacking shape, pushing the shape narrower to overload the middle third. Joost had seen enough of these sessions to know how long it usually took a player, especially an unfamiliar one, to catch up with a change like that.

The Englishman adjusted his position inside two touches, no lag in it at all, as though he’d been playing inside that exact shape for months rather than weeks. That was the part Joost’s notebook actually paused for.

Before halftime, the winger beat his full-back outside on the flank and cut the ball back low across the six-yard box. The striker did not miss that one, a clean first-time finish, simple and correct.

Joost recorded the goal against the striker’s name, the way the job required. Then he rewound the clip on his tablet and watched the three seconds before the finish twice more, because the winger’s decision had built most of that goal on its own.

At the interval, he found Egersund’s recruitment contact by the tunnel and asked, casually enough, who the English lad was.

Sindre answered without much thought behind it, the way a man answers a question he doesn’t consider important. Twenty-one. English. A free agent. Third week of a four-week evaluation. Represented by some small English agency, G11, something like that. Egersund hadn’t signed him, hadn’t made an offer, nothing formal on the table yet. His recent playing record was thin, a gap in it Sindre didn’t elaborate on and Joost didn’t push for.

The lack of a contract interested Joost more than anything he’d seen in the first half. A thin professional record made him cautious in exactly the way a good scout was supposed to be cautious. He did not decide anything off forty-five minutes and half a conversation. He decided to watch the second half properly instead of glancing at it.