The Football Agent System

Jay had played senior football there for two seasons, often their most dangerous attacker on his day, sharp enough that half the dressing room had assumed he’d end up somewhere bigger eventually. He’d left in August because work and training and everything going on at home had made it impossible to keep doing both properly, not because of any falling out.

Gary was just as honest about the limit of it. Jay had clearly been better than the level around him. That was not the same as saying he’d already proved himself in full-time professional football, and Gary wasn’t going to pretend otherwise to help a call along.

Garcia thanked him and hung up thinking about that exact gap.

Go Ahead were not looking at a player who had vanished off the map for years and resurfaced from nowhere. They were looking at someone recently active at a level below theirs, who had then walked into full-time training in Norway and adjusted to it faster than any of them had budgeted for.

That was a very different story to sell, and a far more believable one.

While Garcia worked through all of it, Egersund’s scheduled Week Three update landed from Sindre, and it read differently to every update before it.

Jay had held his Week Two level all the way through the week. The controlled match had confirmed, in the club’s own words, that the improvement was not a fluke of one good fortnight.

He had settled properly into the group, formed real relationships with the players, and the coaching staff now saw him as someone who could genuinely strengthen their attacking options rather than merely fill a training session.

Sindre wanted Garcia available for a meeting after Jay’s final Week Three session. The sporting director would be there, along with the head coach and the club’s finance representative, a man named Vidar Aune whose title told Garcia everything the message hadn’t spelled out.

They asked him to resend his representation details and Jay’s free-agent confirmation, the exact documents a club gathered before it put terms on a table.

Nobody at Egersund had used the word contract. Garcia did not need them to.

He weighed whether to tell them about Go Ahead and decided against it, at least for now.

There was still no offer from anywhere, and dangling a vague rival interest at a club that had genuinely given Jay his chance would look like manufactured leverage the moment it landed, which was exactly the kind of move that damaged an agency’s name faster than it ever helped a client.

But he also did not write back promising Jay would sit and wait for Egersund indefinitely. Jay was still a free agent, and he would stay one until somebody actually put real terms in front of him.

Go Ahead’s process kept moving on its own track.

Their staff reviewed the Southmere details Garcia had sent and revised their internal read on him accordingly. Not a player with no recent football, but a recently active semi-professional, released in August and already preparing for a professional route before anyone in Deventer had ever heard his name.

Producing at a high level inside a genuine first-team evaluation in Norway. No full-time professional record yet, which still meant further checking, but available without a transfer fee, and young enough that even a modest bet on him carried the kind of upside a smaller club liked to find cheaply.

Their administration department flagged his British nationality and quietly checked what it would take to get him authorised to work and register in the Netherlands.

Garcia heard back only the shape of it, not the detail. Nothing in the review gave them a reason to drop the interest, but any move in January would still need the right work authorisation and international clearance sorted properly first, and the club’s own winter registration window was the realistic point to complete any of it.

Bram called again two days later, and this time it was Peter Doevendans, the head of recruitment, who got on the line as well.

Peter was polite and entirely unhurried about it. Go Ahead wanted to move quickly enough to get a proper look at Jay before Egersund secured him, he said plainly, but they were not about to offer a contract off the back of one scout’s report, however good it read.

They wanted a video meeting with Garcia first. Permission to speak with Jay directly after that. A formal review from Peter’s own desk before anything advanced further.

A second assessment, live if possible, full video if not, during Jay’s fourth week. And notice, straight away, if Egersund put written terms in front of Jay before Go Ahead had finished their own process.

Garcia agreed to the meeting and the assessment. He did not agree to anything that read like an open-ended delay, and he did not promise them Jay would turn Egersund down to wait on a maybe.

If Go Ahead wanted first refusal on his client’s future, they would need to earn it the same way Egersund had, by moving.

The system opened while he was still typing his reply.

[COMPETING CLUB INTEREST DETECTED]

Client: Jay Cole

Current Evaluation Club: Egersunds IK

Interested Club: Go Ahead Eagles

Competition Level: Eredivisie

Interest Status: Formal assessment initiated

Contract Offers: 0

Client Market Position: Rising

No mission. No reward line waiting underneath it.

Nobody had offered Jay a single day of employment yet, and the system, for once, seemed content to simply say what was true and leave the rest alone.

Garcia read it twice and understood it was not telling him what to choose.

Egersund had given Jay the door nobody else would open and were close to walking through it themselves. Go Ahead sat a level above them and had started paying real attention, but their interest was still a process, not a promise, unfinished in every way that mattered.

He spent the rest of the evening doing the part of the job that never showed up in a panel.

He put the Go Ahead meeting in his calendar. He sent Jay an update that told him the truth of where things stood without promising him anything that wasn’t there yet. He confirmed his attendance at Egersund’s Week Three meeting.

He wrote out separate lists of questions for each club, kept deliberately apart so neither conversation bled into the other. He checked, twice, that nothing on either side committed Jay to accepting terms he hadn’t seen.

He logged every document he’d sent to either club in a folder split cleanly down the middle, because the day this got messy would be the day he’d stopped keeping the two files separate.

Jay’s own update that night was short, and Garcia read the shape of it more than the words.

He hadn’t told any of his teammates. His level through the week had held. He was trying, without much success by the sound of it, not to spend every quiet hour turning both clubs over in his head, waiting for Garcia to hand him something solid enough to actually think about.

The friendships he’d built at Egersund made all of it heavier than a straightforward business decision should have been.

Garcia understood that better than most people would have given him credit for. Gratitude was real, and it mattered, and it still could not be the reason a man chose the smaller of two doors when a bigger one had just opened down the same corridor.

Two meeting requests landed within an hour of each other the next morning.

Peter Doevendans wanted to speak with Garcia first thing, ready to begin Go Ahead’s final assessment before Egersund could act. Egersund wanted him present the moment Jay’s last Week Three session finished, to talk about the player’s future in terms nobody there had bothered dressing up anymore.

Garcia put both in the calendar. Go Ahead first, then Egersund straight after.

Egersund still had no idea another club had entered the room at all.