The Football Agent System

Egersund changed the defender marking the winger after the break, a tighter, more physical body this time, someone clearly told to stop the Englishman turning at any cost.

The winger adjusted without losing anything.

He released the ball first time when the pressure arrived early instead of trying to hold it. He drifted inside when it suited the full-back’s overlap, then came back out wide the moment the new defender started following him narrow, reopening the space he’d just given up. When a straight dribble wasn’t on, he found another chance through a simple one-two rather than forcing the same move twice against a man who’d already adjusted to stop it.

Joost stopped thinking about the striker for long stretches of the second half. What held his attention now was not one goal or one assist. It was that the problem kept changing and the winger kept finding a different correct answer to it, over and over, without ever repeating a mistake the defence had already punished once.

The winger’s own goal came with twenty minutes left, and it did not look like a man doing it alone.

He started it wide, combined back inside with a one-two off the edge of the box, continued his run rather than stopping to watch the pass, and finished the return ball cleanly first time when it came back to him in the box.

Egersund’s players reacted the way a team reacts to something ordinary. A couple of pats on the back, a shout to reset, nothing that looked like surprise.

That told Joost more than the goal itself did. If a dressing room had already stopped being amazed by it, this had happened before.

By the time the match finished, his notebook had turned into something closer to an informal report than a set of match notes. Immediate tactical understanding. Effective from wide and from inside. A final action that stayed clean under pressure rather than only under comfort. A visibly strong response whenever possession was lost, tracking back without sulking about it. Genuine understanding with a central striker inside two weeks of actually knowing him. Decision quality that didn’t drop as his legs tired late in the game.

Two lines sat underneath the rest, the ones that actually mattered to a man who got paid to be careful. Limited recent professional record, needing real investigation before anyone got excited. Free-agent status, which meant whatever this turned into would not cost the earth to find out.

The winger did not fade at the end. No careless giveaway to balance the ledger, no late mistake that let Joost file the whole thing as a good day rather than a real one. Whatever had shown up in the first half was still there in the ninetieth minute.

Joost did not go anywhere near him after the final whistle. That was not how this worked, not properly, and he had seen enough careers get complicated by scouts who couldn’t wait for the right door. A player like this had a club holding his registration for the month and, somewhere behind that, a representative whose job it was to control exactly this conversation. Any approach went through them, not through a handshake on the touchline.

He found Sindre again instead and asked for the match footage, professional and unhurried about it, the same tone he’d have used asking about the striker. Then, almost as an afterthought, whether Egersund had already committed to signing the Englishman.

Sindre told him plainly that a decision would come after the third week, nothing signed yet, no terms drawn up. He said it the way a man says something he isn’t worried about anyone else caring about. As far as Egersund’s staff were concerned, Joost had flown in for one player, and his questions about the other one were simple curiosity, nothing worth flagging to anyone above them.

Back at his hotel that evening, Joost did not write up a recommendation straight away. He opened his laptop and started somewhere more useful.

He searched the winger’s name against every database his job gave him access to. What came back was thin, a scattering of youth football, a gap where a proper professional record should have sat, and then almost nothing until a representation filing a few months old.

G11 Sports Management. A single registered agent, a Gabriel Garcia, no other clients listed anywhere Joost could find, no international footprint at all. An agency that small getting a player into a club’s first-team evaluation, halfway across the continent from where the player was actually based, was not the normal shape of how these things happened.

That made the whole picture more interesting, not less. Whoever this Garcia was, he had either gotten lucky once, or he had found something before anyone bigger had bothered to look.

Joost wrote two reports before he went to bed.

The first was exactly what Deventer expected of him, an honest, measured assessment of the striker, good movement, competitive duels, a finishing touch that still needed sharpening, worth the second viewing at the weekend as planned.

The second was not on anyone’s list yet.

He laid out what he’d seen plainly, without exaggerating any of it. Immediate tactical understanding. Genuine end product from both flanks. A response to losing the ball that suggested discipline rather than talent alone. A thin professional history that needed proper digging before anyone committed to anything. A free-agent status that meant, whatever happened next, the financial risk of finding out more was close to nothing.

He recommended Go Ahead secure the full match footage, confirm the free-agent status directly with Garcia rather than through a third party, and send a second, more senior set of eyes before Egersund could finish whatever decision they were sitting on.

Before he left the ground that evening, Joost had watched the Englishman walk off toward the canteen with two of the Norwegian lads, laughing at something, completely at ease in a building that had belonged to strangers three weeks earlier.

Egersund’s staff looked relaxed around him too, the kind of relaxed that came from believing they still controlled every date on the calendar. Nobody there had any reason yet to think otherwise.

They did not know Joost had already sent a name to Deventer that had nothing to do with the striker they thought he’d come for.

He attached the second report to an email, checked the recipient list once, and sent it.

The player he had flown to Norway to watch stayed exactly where he’d started, one name on a shortlist among several others.

Jay Cole went above him.