The Football Agent System

(Garcia POV)

The email was waiting when Garcia sat down the morning after Deventer, and it was not from anyone he’d expected to hear from first.

Not Peter, not Bram. Go Ahead’s finance and administration department, a name he didn’t recognise, asking G11 for the documents they’d need before any agency fee could ever be paid.

Company details. Registered address. Tax information. Banking instructions. The representation agreement reference. A named invoice contact.

Garcia knew exactly why they wanted every line of it. He’d sat on the other side of requests like this at Vantage, watching a finance team refuse to release a penny until a supplier’s paperwork was clean.

The problem wasn’t that he didn’t understand the process.

The problem was that G11, the thing they were asking to register as an approved service provider, didn’t have half of what a proper service provider was supposed to have.

No invoice template. No payment-tracking system. No organised financial record tying the agency’s expenses, its liabilities, and its future income into one honest picture.

He started going through what he actually had, and it was worse laid out than it had felt in his head.

Some of it was saved properly, the representation agreements, the executed contract. Plenty of it wasn’t. Half of it lived in email attachments, the rest in physical folders and temporary files he’d created on the desktop during the rush to get Jay across the line.

Jamie’s paperwork was one kind of mess, guardian information, education records, club correspondence, scattered across three places.

Jay’s was another kind entirely now, an international employment contract, passport records, medical permissions, registration documents, work-authorisation material, all of it far too sensitive to be sitting in a folder beside a childhood bed.

The agency had grown past the point where Garcia could run it out of memory and loose paper, and the desk in front of him was the proof of it.

Before he built anything, he opened his own status.

[HOST STATUS]

Name: Gabriel Garcia Agency: G11 Sports Management Ltd Agency Level: 1 Represented Players: 2

Skill Points: 5,000

Agent Stats:

Scouting: D — 496 / 1,500 SP Negotiation: D — 716 / 1,500 SP Contract Knowledge: D — 731 / 1,500 SP Client Management: C- — 1,336 / 2,000 SP Network: Rebuilding — 121 / 250 Reputation: Ruined — 46 / 100 Influence: 1

Owned Skills:

— Golden Eye: Prospect Appraisal — E — Contract Red Flag — E — Training Manual: Development Pathway — E

He didn’t stop on any single number. He read the shape of it instead.

Negotiation, Contract Knowledge and Client Management had all climbed hard, because the Jay route had demanded exactly those things of him, the representation paperwork, the two clubs pulling in different directions, the contract correction, an international employment deal built from nothing.

Scouting had barely moved. He hadn’t been finding players. He’d been managing the two he already had, and the numbers told that story without him having to.

Then the system marked the thing the desk had already told him.

[AGENCY MILESTONE ACHIEVED]

G11 Sports Management Ltd

Agency Level: 0 → 1

Milestone Requirements Completed:

— Two represented clients — One recognised youth pathway — One senior professional employment contract — One international club transaction — Recurring service-fee agreement secured

New Function Unlocked:

AGENCY OPERATIONS

He opened it, and it sat apart from his scouting and his agent skills, which was right, because it wasn’t about how well Garcia did his own job.

It was about the fact that G11 now had clients, obligations and contracts that outlived any single thing he did in a day.

[AGENCY OPERATIONS SKILL AVAILABLE]

Agency Audit — 1,200 Skill Points

Rank: E

Effect:

Conducts one operational assessment of G11 Sports Management every thirty days.

E-Rank Assessment Includes:

— Current operating position — Confirmed and projected revenue — Outstanding liabilities — Client workload — Compliance weaknesses — Staffing and contractor risks — Highest-priority operational action

Restrictions:

— Does not create revenue — Does not identify new players — Does not replace an accountant, lawyer or compliance professional — Does not guarantee business success — Assessment accuracy is limited at E-Rank

Garcia understood why this had come up instead of another scouting skill.

G11 already had two careers that needed daily attention. Another prospect wouldn’t have been a gift, it would only have been one more thing the agency wasn’t yet built to carry.

He bought it.

[SKILL PURCHASED]

Agency Audit — E

Cost: 1,200 Skill Points

Skill Points: 5,000 → 3,800

He ran it there and then, at the same desk where he’d registered G11 back in the summer.

[AGENCY AUDIT ACTIVATED]

Agency: G11 Sports Management Ltd

Represented Clients: 2

Revenue Position: Contracted revenue stream secured. Payment administration incomplete.

Outstanding Liabilities:

— Family business funding not formally recorded — Rafi’s coaching and assessment work unsettled — Agent travel and administrative expenses not fully reconciled — Tax reserve not established

Operational Structure:

— Full-time employees: 0 — External contractors: 1 — Accountant or bookkeeper: none — Formal invoicing system: none — Monthly client-review process: none — Secure client-data structure: inadequate — Emergency operating reserve: none

Operational Risk: HIGH

Highest-Priority Action:

Build the structure required to manage the agency’s existing clients.

Garcia sat back and looked around the room afterward.

It hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know. It had simply taken every weakness he’d been aware of and stacked them into one list he could no longer step around.

He wasn’t angry at it, and he wasn’t shocked that a business needed records. He’d spent six years inside a real agency. He knew which departments handled every one of those lines, finance, legal, compliance, player care, and he was looking at a list of all of them landing on one desk in a bedroom.

The system gave him the mission that went with it.

[AGENCY MISSION GENERATED]

Mission: Build G11’s Operating Base

Objective: Make G11 operationally capable of managing its two existing clients before January.

Requirements:

— Reconcile company and personal expenditure — Record family funding and outstanding liabilities properly — Formalise Rafi’s contractor and payment terms — Establish bookkeeping and tax support — Create an invoicing and payment-tracking system — Secure physical and digital client records — Create monthly career-review schedules for Jamie and Jay

Reward:

— Skill Points +500 — Agency Management SP +100 — Network SP +20 — Agency Stability increase

Failure Penalty:

— Compliance risk increases — Client-management efficiency decreases

He started with the money, because everything else sat on top of it.

He pulled together receipts, transfers, travel confirmations, pitch invoices, trial fees, legal costs and the equipment he’d bought across the summer for both players, and spread them out until the table disappeared under them.

The problem underneath all of it was simple and embarrassing. Some costs had gone through the G11 account. Others had come off his own personal card. And several times, when the agency had nothing at all, his parents had just covered a bill directly.

He knew the total the family had put in. He’d carried the number in his head for months. But it had never once been written down as what it actually was, a loan to a company, rather than a figure scribbled on a debt page in a notebook.

His father came in while he was in the middle of it, saw the spread of bank statements, and understood at a glance what Garcia was doing.

He didn’t ask whether Garcia understood Jay’s contract. He didn’t ask what the commission worked out to, or treat any of it like a boy playing at business. He knew what his son had been for six years.

"You’re squaring the money away properly," his father said. It wasn’t a question.

"Trying to. Half of it went through the company, half through my own account, and then there’s everything you and Mum just paid straight out." Garcia gestured at the mess. "It needs to be one clean record. A proper loan from you to G11, not a number I’m keeping in my head."

"I’ve still got every transfer. Dates, amounts, all of it." His father was already reaching for his phone. "I’ll send you the lot."

"Once I’ve seen the accountant I’ll know the exact wording they want on it," Garcia said. "Then I’ll draw it up properly, and we both sign it. So it’s real, and it’s fair to both of us."

"Fine by me." His father sent the statements over without a hint of doubt in it, one adult handing another the paperwork he’d asked for. "Whatever the accountant needs, tell me."

His mother appeared a minute later, took one look at the folders creeping off the table onto a second chair, and raised an eyebrow.

"Is the agency taking the whole house now," she said, "or is it going to wait until it can afford an office first?"

"It already runs on more rooms than he admits to," his father said mildly.

"I’m buying a filing cabinet," Garcia said, "not renting an office. Secure storage. That’s all."

His mother made a noise that suggested she’d believe it when the folders left the dining chair, and went to put the kettle on.

He went to Rafi’s pitch later that day, once Jay’s voluntary session had finished.

Jay’s conditioning wasn’t the point of the visit, so Garcia said little while it was going on, and waited until the boy had packed up and gone before he brought out what he’d actually come for.

He put a full record on the bonnet of the car, every session Rafi had run for Jamie and every one he’d run for Jay, dated, going back to the summer.

Rafi glanced at it and clearly expected the usual, another loose promise, an IOU, the kind of thing their whole arrangement had been built on back when G11 had no money and barely a name.

"Not this time," Garcia said. "The informal thing stops here. Both lads are properly represented now. That means you get paid like a professional, not like a mate doing me a favour."

Rafi looked at him for a second. "Go on, then."

"One consolidated invoice for everything you’ve already done that hasn’t been paid. Anything I can settle straight away, the documented pitch hire, the travel, the kit, that comes off the top and I pay it now." Garcia laid it out plainly. "The rest, the coaching balance, goes on a written instalment schedule so you know exactly when you’re getting each part of it."

"And going forward?"