Chapter 83: The Gods Arrive

"Ugh... my head." The morning after the Wigan match, following a proper celebration at Whitlock’s expense the night before, Saint wasn’t in much shape for anything early.

He wasn’t wrong to feel like the centre of it all, either. Before Saint took over, Villa had been one place off relegation. Fifteen matches later, he’d dragged them into the Premier League with a win rate north of eighty percent across that stretch.

It was hard not to wonder, watching the celebrations, how differently this season might have gone had Saint been in charge from the very first day rather than picking up the pieces midway through.

In the final round, the side that had spent most of the season top of the table suffered a genuinely shocking 3-0 collapse against a relegation-threatened side, handing the title away at the last possible moment. Their nearest rival snuck through to claim it instead.

Final standings: the new champions on sixty-six points, the collapsed leaders second on sixty-five, and Villa third with sixty-three, close enough in the numbers that the gap barely registered against the sheer scale of what Villa had actually achieved to get there.

Behind Villa, a cluster of clubs finished within a handful of points of each other, but with this season running straight promotion rather than a play-off round, none of that mattered anymore. Top four, straight up, no further hurdles. Villa were already, officially, a Premier League club again.

On the other end of the table, the same round confirmed the final relegation spot too, joining three sides already down.

"Ahh!" Saint let out a sudden yelp, jolted half-awake.

"Mm... love, what’s wrong?" That familiar voice beside him only deepened his embarrassment.

"Nothing... sorry, bad dream, that’s all," Saint said quickly.

"You weren’t dreaming about someone else, were you?" Grace read straight through his flustered expression without much effort at all.

"I’m having a shower," Saint said, dodging the question entirely.

Grace’s flight the previous afternoon had been delayed by weather, meaning she’d missed the match itself and only made it back to Birmingham late that night, by which point Saint had been thoroughly, comprehensively drunk.

"Aren’t you going to invite me to join you?" Grace followed him into the bathroom regardless, not bothering with a robe on the way.

What followed needs no further description. By the time the two of them emerged, it was well past lunchtime.

Hunger, more than anything, eventually got them moving, beyond the previous night’s drinking, Saint hadn’t eaten a proper meal since well before kickoff.

Old wisdom holds that an army marches on its stomach, and Saint, hungover and thoroughly worked over on two fronts now, needed feeding urgently.

Not long after, he emerged from the kitchen with two plates of pasta; genuine, properly made, a skill he’d picked up years back from an Italian chef and had quietly kept up ever since.

"How long are you actually staying this time?" There was real frustration in Saint’s voice, though it wasn’t entirely fair to Grace, ever since they’d made things official, his own schedule had barely left room for either of them.

"No work booked for the next fortnight, as it happens." Grace had, in fact, planned this trip specifically to be with him.

"Right... let’s go somewhere, then," Saint said immediately.

"You’re leaving straight after promotion? Genuinely?" Grace, who knew him well enough by now, wasn’t remotely surprised by the instinct even as she teased him for it.

"Er..." Saint didn’t have a great answer for that one.

Because in truth, somewhere between stirring the pasta and plating it, his mind had already drifted entirely toward the summer transfer window, running through everything he remembered about how this particular market would shape up.

Summer 2016 was about to leave its mark on English football history.

This was the summer José Mourinho finally walked through the doors at Old Trafford, taking the reins at Manchester United after his second Chelsea spell ended in acrimony. Across the city, Manchester City had pulled off the coup of the summer, bringing in Pep Guardiola to build something new entirely.

At Chelsea, Antonio Conte had arrived fresh off steering Italy through a respectable summer tournament, ready to rebuild a club that had fallen apart the season before. Liverpool, meanwhile, were already a full season into life under Jürgen Klopp, still finding their shape but unmistakably building toward something.

In the transfer market itself, records were about to fall, Manchester United’s pursuit of Paul Pogba would, by summer’s end, smash the world transfer fee entirely. Zlatan Ibrahimović, ageless as ever, was on his way to Old Trafford too, arriving on a free transfer that felt like a heist in its own right.

It was, in every sense, a genuinely seismic summer for English football, new managers at three of the league’s biggest clubs, record fees being broken, a genuine changing of the guard across the top of the table.

And standing right in the middle of it, about to make his own mark on that same summer, was a man who’d just broken a very different record entirely: the youngest permanent manager in the modern history of English football, having somehow dragged a club from the brink of relegation all the way into the Premier League in a single, improbable season.

"I’m working out where we should go," Saint said, a flicker of guilt crossing his face.

"I’ve gone along with every decision you’ve made for the past fortnight without complaint," Grace said, unbothered.

"Give me some good news soon, then." With that, Saint finished off the last of his pasta, kissed her, and turned to leave.

Stirring the pot, as a genuine variable in this particular season’s story, Saint had every intention of shaking things up properly. Once he’d said his goodbyes to Grace, he climbed straight back into the battered old Fiesta and drove to the club.

Players would be filing back in that afternoon to officially begin their summer break. Saint, though, had something considerably more pressing waiting for him, working out exactly how much of that promised transfer budget he’d actually be able to spend.