Chapter 157: The Ceiling

Mateo went straight up to his room the moment they got through the front door.

Down the hallway, Jamie Vardy was already pacing with his phone on speaker, locked in a loud video call with Jimmy. Both of them were practically shouting over each other with enough volume that neither could possibly be listening. Mateo closed his bedroom door, sat down on the edge of the mattress, and pulled up the system panel.

He had poured every single training point earned since the group stage directly into his shooting attribute. It had climbed to 85, a figure that still caught his eye whenever he looked at the screen. That chipped finish at the Mestalla, floating cleanly over the goalkeeper into the far corner, was something he would never have had the confidence to pull off six months ago. With the stat sitting at 85, the execution had felt remarkably natural.

He scrolled through the rest of his profile.

Offense: 74

Ball Control: 85

Passing: 100

Shooting: 85

Heading: 68

Set pieces: 70

Curve: 66

Speed: 85

Kicking Power: 80

Jumping: 74

Physical Contact: 80

Stamina: 85

Defence: 80

Tackling: 65

Overall: 84

He looked at the Overall rating for a while.

Eighty-four. One short of eighty-five, and until his overall crossed that line, his primary attributes would stay locked. Ball control had been capped at 85 for weeks. Everything was jammed against the same invisible ceiling, and the thing holding the whole structure down was the lowest number on the board: Offense, sitting at 74, dragging the average.

He'd always treated Offense as the throwaway stat. Passing was maxed, his control was sharp, and his main focus had always been setting up teammates; what did he need offensive positioning for? But sitting there looking at the panel, he finally understood what it had been doing to him.

The system's passing overlay was directly linked to his Offense rating. Low Offense meant the overlay defaulted to finding the pass. It was why, all season, he'd felt a faint wrongness whenever he tried to shoot instead of lay the ball off. The system had been quietly steering him toward the assist, that was what an offensive profile of 74 was built to handle.

Pushing Offense up to 85 would solve two structural problems at once. The overall rating would clear the ceiling to unlock higher stat caps, and the in-game overlay would stop funneling his decisions toward passing. It would encourage him to attack space aggressively and drift into scoring pockets rather than lingering around the perimeter.

He'd been so focused on being the best passer on the pitch that he'd never noticed the system was capable of making him something else entirely.

Mateo selected Offense for his active training regime and dropped down to start the initial conditioning set. He began cranking out crunches on the floorboards, his core muscles still stiff from the heavy shift at the Mestalla, every single rep burning against his ribs.

Vardy's voice came knocking through the thin wall. "Mateo? You alright in there, mate? Sounds like you're wrestling a wardrobe."

Mateo paused mid-rep, dropping his shoulders flat against the wooden floor and staring up at the ceiling fan. "Just knocking out some core work, Jamie."

"Right. Sounded like something else."

"Just sit-ups," Mateo called back with a chuckle, resetting his breathing and getting back to work.

Two days later, Carvajal pulled up outside the house at nine in the morning, giving a quick tap on the car horn.

Mateo climbed into the passenger seat and fastened his seatbelt. "We need to head up toward Düsseldorf."

Carvajal glanced over as he shifted into gear. "Who are we picking up?"

"Farfán," Mateo said. "His flight from Lima lands around ten-thirty. I told him we'd meet him at the terminal."

The drive down the A52 took forty minutes under a low, drizzling grey sky, the kind of dreary German winter morning that usually had the South American players wrapping scarves up to their noses. They parked in the main lot and waited near the international arrivals gate. When Farfán finally walked through the sliding doors, he looked completely refreshed, carrying a bronze tan from the Peruvian sun.

Farfán spotted them immediately, breaking into a huge grin and dropping his rolling bag to pull Mateo into a hearty embrace.

"Look at the big star himself," Farfán laughed, clapping Mateo across the shoulder. "Coming all the way out to handle my luggage."

"Carvajal is on luggage duty today," Mateo joked back. "I just came along for company."

"Hey, don't look at me, I'm just the driver," Carvajal said with a grin, picking up the smaller duffel bag anyway.

Farfán kept the conversation lively all the way back to Gelsenkirchen. He had streamed the entire Valencia match from his hotel room in Lima, yelling at the screen so loudly in the middle of the night that hotel security had phoned the room to check on him. He had watched all three goals, though he seemed far more fascinated by the build-up play.

"That pass you made for Vardy was absolute class," Farfán said, gesturing with his hands from the back seat. "You pulled three defenders toward you in a split second. Costa, Mathieu, and Albelda all collapsed on you before you even looked up. Three experienced players completely panicking over one pass. That level of attention is what opened the whole box up."

"You really analyzed the footage, didn't you?" Mateo said, glancing over his shoulder.

"I watched the replay about five times," Farfán replied cheerfully. "There wasn't much else to do at three in the morning. When I get back on that right flank next week, you don't even need to wait for me to check to your feet. Just hit the open channel behind their left-back. I'll beat him to the spot every single time. Just whip the ball into space and trust my run."

Mateo turned around with a smirk. "Oh, so you weren't just watching the game for fun. You were already planning your own stat sheet, huh?"

"I've spent half the season watching you feed crosses to everyone else, and it looks like you're doing all the thinking for them. But now I've decided to make it easy for you. Just hit the channel, and I'll do the rest."

He wasn't playing that weekend, though. Neither of them was.

Magath decided to rest the core of his first-choice eleven for the Bundesliga fixture against St. Pauli, prioritizing their physical condition with the second leg against Valencia only four days away. Mateo watched the match from the dugout wrapped in a heavy winter parka, sitting alongside Farfán while a rotated Schalke lineup tried to grind down the league's bottom-placed side.

Bujerab handed his first league start in months in the central attacking role.

During the opening half, Bujerab looked sharp and confident. With Mateo resting, the entire tempo of Schalke's attack flowed through the playmaker, and he responded with the calm, methodical distribution that had defined his earlier campaigns. He threaded tidy balls into the wide channels, floated an incisive ball over the defensive line that nearly led to a goal, and controlled possession through the middle third.

"He looks sharp today," Farfán noted, rubbing his gloved hands together against the chill.

"He's moving the ball well," Mateo agreed, watching the sequences develop.

"The build-up still feels slightly sluggish, though, don't you think?"

Mateo took a moment to reply because Farfán had identified the subtle flaw in their possession. Bujerab was executing his passes cleanly, but the overall attack lacked sharpness. The deliveries were accurate, yet they consistently arrived a fraction of a second too late. The tempo never caught fire, allowing St. Pauli's compact defensive block to shift across and close down space without feeling overwhelmed.

"He takes an extra touch before releasing," Mateo said quietly. "It's just long enough for their defensive line to reset their shape."

The match remained locked at zero-zero. Then in 87th minute, Jurado collected the ball wide on the left and whipped a dipping cross into the six-yard box. The St. Pauli keeper managed to parry the initial delivery, but the ball spilled directly into the path of Vardy, who reacted instantly, smashing a rebound in off the underside of the crossbar before sprinting toward the corner flag in celebration.

Schalke held a 1-0 advantage. However, in the 92nd minute, St. Pauli caught them completely off guard on a rapid counter-attack, sliding a scruffy near-post finish past the backup keeper to level the match.

The home bench went quiet. Dropping points at home against the bottom side in the league, just four days before a massive European fixture, threatened to sour the positive mood around the club.

In the final seconds of stoppage time, Bujerab pressed high to force a turnover in midfield. For once, he did not hesitate on the ball, driving directly into open turf before slipping a crisp through-ball to Huntelaar, who buried a low first-time strike into the bottom corner.

2-1.

The referee blew the final whistle almost immediately after the restart. A collective roar of relief echoed around the Veltins-Arena as the home supporters celebrated the dramatic finish in the freezing weather.

On the bench, Farfán let out a long breath and joined the applause. "That was entirely too close for comfort. Huntelaar saved the weekend right at the death."

"Definitely kept everyone on edge," Mateo said with a slight nod.

"Still, three points in the bag."

"Three very important points," Mateo agreed. Even so, his mind lingered on the eighty-nine minutes that preceded the winning goal, the sluggish ball progression, the passing windows that disappeared because deliveries were delayed by half a second, and a talented squad that occasionally lost its cohesion when the tempo dropped.

The roster had quality and relentless work rate. Vardy would chase every loose ball down, Huntelaar was lethal inside the eighteen-yard box, and Bujerab possessed great technical touch. What the group sometimes lacked when Mateo was off the field was that precise rhythm that transformed eleven capable individuals into a fluid, unified unit.

It was an unusual realization to process at eighteen, recognizing that your presence on the pitch was the primary catalyst elevating a solid domestic side into a team capable of reaching the quarter-finals of Europe. He kept that thought entirely to himself, though the coaching staff and his teammates clearly recognized the dynamic.

"Come on," Farfán said, getting up from the bench and pulling his coat collar up high. "It is freezing out here and my body still thinks it is in Peru. Buy me a warm coffee and tell me what I need to know about this Valencia backline before Tuesday."

Mateo chuckled, zipped up his winter jacket, and followed him down the tunnel into the warmth of the locker room.

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