Chapter 207: The One Up North I

The Kanté paperwork went into its slow grind on the Monday, 2 federations and a stack of forms as thick as a hymn book, and I left Priya to chase every page of it and turned my mind to the signing that was going to cost me blood.

tick of the office clock, loud the way it only gets once the corridor outside has emptied for the night.

The winger I had found. The ball-winner I had talked off a wet French terrace with a handshake and a fair price. Neither had been simple, but neither club had wanted to keep its man the way a man wants to keep his own right hand.

The centre-half was another thing entirely. The centre-half was not for sale at any figure, and the club that owned him would sooner watch him grow old in their shirt than hand him across to the likes of us.

He was 19. He played in the red half of Sheffield, a first-teamer at that age in this very division, for a side lately dropped out of the Championship and set on climbing straight back into it.

And I knew, the way I know the turn of the tide, that inside 7 years he would cost £80,000,000 and wear his country’s armband on the biggest nights the game can put on.

Nobody at Sheffield United knew that. They knew they owned a very good young defender, and that they had no reason on this earth to sell him to a club that had been in the Conference 2 summers before.

Wilf had watched him twice, once live and once off a tape Priya begged from a contact, and he came into my office and sat down heavy in the chair that has held every scout this club ever had. creak of it under him.

He did not reach for his flask, which is how I knew the boy had gone past even Wilf’s words for a player.

"Best 19-year-old defender in the country, and it is not close," he said. "Reads the game like a man 10 years older than him. Heads everything that comes into the box. Brings it out from the back like a midfielder when the moment asks him to."

He shook his head slowly. "And he sits at a club just dropped into our division that wants promoting straight back out of it. They will not sell. Not to us, not to anybody, not this side of Christmas."

"Everyone sells, Wilf. At the right price."

"Not a rival. Not their crown jewel, to a club they will be scrapping to finish above come May." rasp of the flask cap at last, the tell that he needed a minute in his hands.

"You want to strengthen the very side you are fighting, with your own money, and let them stand and watch you do it. They will laugh you clean off the telephone."

"Then let them laugh," I said. "And when they are done laughing, let them name a number big enough to make me disappear. That is the number I have come all this way for."

Priya lodged the first bid on the Tuesday, a proper one, more than a newly-promoted club had any business offering for a teenager. buzz of her phone on my desk barely an hour later, face up, the reply already glowing on the glass of it.

"Not for sale," she read, her voice gone flat. "3 sentences. The last one says, and I am reading it to you word for word, that they are not in the habit of selling to clubs who were non-league when their lad was sitting his GCSEs."

"Charming."

"There is a smiley face after it, Sam. Their director of football has put an actual smiley face on the bottom of a rejection."

I sat with that a moment. tap of my pen against the blotter. It should have stung, and a younger version of me would have let it land, the boy who grew up watching his old man count coins onto the kitchen table while bigger men laughed further up it.

But I was not buying a defender to be thought well of by Sheffield United. I was buying a bone of a spine that did not exist yet, and this one sat in a steel city, guarded by men who were certain they held all the power in the room.

"Bid again Thursday," I said. "More. And no smiley face back, Priya. We are the serious people in this conversation. They have simply not worked it out yet."

THE FILE // Sheffield United, their number 5 Bid lodged Tuesday: a promoted club’s whole idea of brave. Their reply, inside the hour: not for sale, with a smiley face on the end of it. Bid going in Thursday: more again. Their answer already written, somewhere, and it will not be a yes. What the cap lets me pay the boy, once fresh equity lands: enough. What his fee does to the treasury: empties it, out of a pot only I know is filling. What he is worth, the year the game troubles itself to look: £80,000,000 and his country’s armband. The one figure in this whole business that no file of ours will ever carry, and the only one I have ever learned to read.

Sadler caught me on the training pitch that afternoon. The new winger was making a fool of Rowe in a bit of small-sided, thwack of the ball and a bark of laughter off the lads every time the boy nutmegged him.

The ball-winner was still only a set of initials on a form in France.

"I hear we bid for the Sheffield lad." He did not look at me. He never does when it matters. He watched his players. "I hear they told us to sit down."

"They did. We go again Thursday."

"I asked you for a centre-half in June, Sam. On this grass. Stood about where you are stood now." peep of his whistle, sharp, and he killed a drill, walked in, shifted one man 5 yards to his left, and set it running again before he turned back to me.

"It is nearly the middle of August. My back 4 is a 34-year-old who was a hero 2 seasons ago and is half a yard slow now, a lad with a rebuilt knee, and Prentice, who I would trust with my life and who cannot stand in 2 places at the same time."

"You will have your defender."

"When, Sam. The season is a fortnight off. I cannot coach a shape around a hole and tell the players the hole is not there. The good sides in this league will find it inside 20 minutes and come through it every single week until the spring."

"You will have him. The best one in the country for his age, or you get none at all. I am not spending my August being told no by Sheffield United to sign a lad who was ever anybody’s second choice."

He looked at me then, which he manages perhaps twice in a year, sideways and hard. "You are awful sure of yourself, for a man they have laughed at the once and are about to laugh at twice."

"I am always awful sure. You will have noticed by now."

"I have noticed you are right a good deal more often than you have any right to be." He turned back to his pitch.

"Get him. I do not much care how it gets done. That is your half of the job, and you have not once made me sorry I left it in your hands."

It is as near to a thank you as Craig Sadler comes, and we both let it stand there as one and neither of us touched it.

The trouble with the price came home to me that same evening, through the door on Maureen’s reading glasses and the green book, with Margaret a step behind her and the rulebook under her arm.

The 2 of them had talked before they came up. That is always how I know it is going to be a hard hour.

"Say it," I told them.

"You cannot afford him." Maureen has never once dressed a figure up for my benefit. thud of the green book onto the desk, open to the page she had carried up.

"Not the way this is headed. They will not sell for a fair fee out of pure spite, so the only fee that shifts them is an unfair one, and an unfair fee for a 19-year-old is money we do not have in any account I keep for this club."

"And the wage sitting on top of the fee." scrape of Margaret’s chair as she settled into it.

"A defender that good, taken off a rival against their will, will want paying like the asset he is. Your ceiling has a little room. It does not have that much, not with the winger’s wage already in it and the Frenchman’s about to land on top."

"Then we lift the ceiling," I said. "The same road as June. More owner money in, given as equity, not lent. The room appears inside the rule, legal, in ink."