The Football Agent System

(Garcia POV)

The clinic sat on a quiet street a few minutes from the club, and Jay was already outside it when Garcia arrived just before eight.

He had his passport in one hand and the printed medical-history forms in the other, and he was reading the top sheet again even though Garcia had watched him fill it in the night before.

"You’ve got everything?" Garcia asked.

"Yeah." Jay checked the passport photo page, closed it, then opened it again a second later without seeming to notice he’d done it.

He had a bottle of water in his jacket pocket that he kept sipping from and never finished, and he was quieter than Garcia had ever seen him.

Quieter than he’d been before any session at Egersund, because a training session could be fixed the next day and this could not.

"Have they changed anything?" Jay said. "In the contract. Overnight."

"Nothing changes without me seeing it, and nothing gets signed until you’ve passed in there." Garcia kept his voice level rather than warm, because warm would have made it feel bigger than it needed to. "I’ve got the final draft on my laptop. While you’re in with the doctor, I’ll go through it line by line against everything we agreed. That’s my morning. Yours is just the medical."

Jay nodded and looked at the door.

"Go on," Garcia said. "I’ll be here when you’re out."

Jay handed his details to the receptionist and went through, and Garcia did not follow him past the desk, because a player’s medical was the player’s, and an agent hovering over a heart screen helped nobody.

Inside, Jay worked through the consent form and gave the club doctor his history straight.

Old ankle knocks from his Southmere years, no surgeries, no long-term medication, no concussions on record, and the training load he’d carried across the summer with Rafi and the three weeks in Norway on top of it.

Dr. Timmermans took him through it in stages rather than all at once.

General examination first, height and weight and blood pressure, resting heart rate, a look at his eyes and ears and throat. Then the cardiac screening, the electrodes cold against his chest while the machine drew his heart onto a rolling line.

Bloods and urine after that, vials filled and labelled. A short set of neurological questions, balance and reflexes and memory.

Then the part that mattered most for a footballer, the joints and the muscles, each knee and each ankle moved through its range while she pressed and watched his face.

They finished with movement work and a controlled exercise test, Jay on a bike with a mask over his mouth while the numbers climbed and the doctor watched his heart hold its shape under load.

None of it was quick, but none of it was dramatic either, which was exactly what a clean medical was supposed to be.

While Jay was behind the closed door, Garcia sat in a small meeting room with Dirk Molenaar, the club’s football administrator, and Sanne de Wit from their legal side, the final employment contract open on the table between them.

He went through it the only way he knew how, against the amended draft they had fought over on the calls the week before, clause by clause.

The player status held. Jay was named as a member of the first-team squad, training primarily with the first team, with no vague development-structure wording anywhere on the page.

The commencement date was still the first of January, and the fourteen thousand a month still began then, not at today’s signing.

The loan protection was intact, six months where Jay could refuse outright and written consultation required after that. The registration clause still protected his salary from any delay the club caused.

The relocation support was listed in full, and the pre-commencement wording still let them send him a remote programme without asking him to do a real day’s work before January.

G11’s representation and service fee were recorded correctly, five percent of the fixed wages, no advance, exactly as the rules allowed.

The club had kept its word, and Garcia let himself register that for a second, because it did not always happen.

He found one thing, and only one.

On the first page Jay’s former club was entered as "Southmere FC" where every other document called it "Southmere Athletic," a small error, but the kind that could snag an international registration file weeks down the line.

"That’s the wrong name," Garcia said, turning the page toward Sanne. "It’s Athletic, not FC. It needs to match the registration paperwork or someone flags it in January."

She checked it against her own file, saw he was right, and had it corrected and the page regenerated inside a few minutes.

While they waited on the reprint, Dirk walked Garcia through what came after the signature.

The club would submit the work-authorisation application, build Jay’s international-registration file for January, arrange the relocation support closer to his reporting date, and send him a conditioning programme to follow through November and December.

Dirk was careful with his words, and Garcia respected it, because none of those things were approvals. They were only applications, and international moves ran through the transfer system on their own timetable rather than anyone’s promises.

"And the permit itself?" Garcia asked. "He’s British, he’s twenty-one, he’s coming out of semi-professional football. Under the old rules that’s a hard case."

"Under the rules that were in force twenty years ago, yes," Dirk said. "Not now. His employment qualifies under the 2075 professional-football authorisation framework, the one that replaced the salary and experience thresholds for young foreign signings to top-division clubs. Our legal team confirmed it before we ever sent you terms. The authorities still have to approve the application formally, but there’s nothing in his profile that stops it."

Garcia noted it and moved on, because he had not come to argue immigration law with people who did it every week.

The corrected contract came back through the printer before the medical was even finished, which told Garcia the morning was going the way he’d hoped.

Jay’s result came to Jay first, in the room, from the doctor, before it came to anyone else.

Then Jay authorised her to share the contractual outcome with the club and with Garcia, and the word that mattered came through Dirk’s tablet a moment later.

He had passed.

The examination had turned up ordinary things, a slight strength imbalance between his legs and a note that his full-time training base needed building after years of fitting football around shifts, but nothing that touched the contract.

Those went straight onto his remote programme as targets rather than problems.

When Jay came back into the meeting room, Garcia watched the morning leave his shoulders.

He did not cry and he did not shout. He sat down properly for the first time all day, back against the chair instead of perched on the edge of it, and let a long breath go.

"So that’s it?" Jay said. "It’s clear? We can actually do this now?"

"You’re clear," Garcia said. "Now we sign."

They moved into the signing meeting, and Peter Doevendans joined Dirk and Sanne at the table.

Peter confirmed the shape of it once, briefly, without walking back through every clause, because there was no need to relitigate what Garcia and Jay had already read three times over.

Jay joined officially in January, subject to work authorisation and international registration. He entered the first-team squad with no promise of appearances or a starting place.

He would go home to England after today, follow the club’s programme with their performance staff monitoring him, and report permanently in January once the clearances allowed it, with his relocation support beginning near that date.

Then they slid the execution copy across, and Jay read it himself.

Garcia sat beside him and stayed quiet, answering only when Jay tapped a line and asked what it meant, and twice Jay did exactly that, checking the salary start date and the loan clause with his own eyes rather than taking Garcia’s word for either.

When he reached the end, Jay signed, slowly and deliberately, his own hand and his own decision.

Garcia did not sign Jay’s employment contract, because that was never his to sign. He put his name only on the G11 documents that recorded the representation and the service arrangement, exactly where they required an agent’s acknowledgement and nowhere else.

Sanne countersigned for the club, and after that the confirmations came fast.

Executed copies landed in both Jay’s inbox and Garcia’s within minutes. The club opened the work-authorisation file the same afternoon.

A January registration checklist was created and shared. Jay’s performance contact emailed the outline of his November-to-December programme before they had even left the building.

Only then did the panel open at the edge of Garcia’s vision.

[SIDE MISSION COMPLETED]