Chapter 87: The Veteran and the Prodigies

"Derek, barring something unforeseen, Danny’s ours." The moment Saint and Pryce parted ways, he was already on the phone to Sallow.

The conversation had gone smoothly in the end. Once Saint raised the idea of folding Pryce into the coaching staff once his playing days wound down, something had visibly shifted behind Pryce’s eyes, genuine interest, even if the old pro’s natural caution had kept him from committing on the spot.

"We’re off to Spain tomorrow?" Grace asked, head resting on Saint’s chest in the hotel room, the night’s earlier activity having finally burned itself out.

"Mm... we’ll spend a day in Madrid, then on to Barcelona," Saint said. Business trip or not, he still made a point of carving out proper time for her along the way.

Grace, with a genuinely demanding career of her own, had never minded watching Saint work either, there was something she found quietly appealing in a man fully absorbed in what he did. Tonight had made that plain enough; whatever composure she’d walked in with hadn’t lasted long.

Madrid. Say the word, and football fans the world over think of one club first. At the turn of the millennium, Real Madrid, already hailed by some as the club of the century, had welcomed one of the most polarising chairmen the modern game had seen.

Florentino Pérez, a hugely successful construction magnate, had taken the club presidency a few years earlier and promptly reshaped it around a single idea: buy the single best player available, every single year, regardless of system or need.

Figo. Zidane. Ronaldo. Nearly every name considered the finest in world football had ended up wearing white inside a few short seasons, and the club had earned itself a new nickname in the process, the Galácticos.

Pérez’s eye for squad-building left plenty to be desired, by most honest accounts, a collection of the best individual talent on the planet, with precious little thought given to how it actually fit together. But as a businessman, his instincts were close to unmatched; few presidents in the sport’s history had grown a club’s global commercial reach quite so dramatically.

Real Madrid’s history had always carried weight, even before Pérez. But their reach beyond Spain, beyond football’s own hardcore following, had never approached what it had become under his presidency, a name recognised even by people who couldn’t tell you the offside rule.

"Will you end up managing them one day?" Grace couldn’t help asking as their car passed through the Puerta de Alcalá.

"Real Madrid?" Saint found himself genuinely turning the question over.

Whatever a manager’s ambitions, it’s hard to imagine any of them truly saying no to that call, should it ever come. The job itself is widely considered the single most pressurised seat in club football, but the rewards sitting on the other side of that pressure are matched by almost nothing else the sport can offer.

Managing the most talented collection of players on the planet, becoming the single most scrutinised figure in European football, the fame and fortune attached to all of it, reaching that chair means, in a very real sense, having arrived at the absolute summit of this profession.

"No idea whether I’ll ever manage them. But I can promise you this, one day, I’ll be standing in the away dugout at the Bernabéu as somebody’s opponent. And that day isn’t as far off as you’d think."

As it happened, this particular trip to Madrid had nothing to do with Real Madrid themselves, Saint had his eye on a different target, a veteran centre-back whose own Premier League career had just quietly wound down.

Marcus Teale. Thirty-six years old, a genuine Chelsea great in his day; multiple titles, a European Cup, captain’s armband worn for the better part of a decade, and now, with his contract expired and the club in the middle of a managerial reshuffle, quietly surplus to requirements.

Word in the game suggested the relationship between Teale and Chelsea’s hierarchy had soured somewhere along the way, the specifics never made fully public, but enough had leaked for most of the football press to understand a parting of ways had become inevitable regardless of form.

Whatever had actually happened behind closed doors, nobody questioned Teale’s professionalism. He’d never once given anyone cause to.

Age had caught up with him, undeniably, but even at thirty-six, there was real value left in those legs, and he remained exactly the kind of experienced head Villa’s back line badly needed right now.

With Loach’s old position reshuffled and the defensive line still short on genuine experience, Rami; for all his promise, was still only a handful of months into senior football, brilliant in flashes but still learning the rhythms of a full campaign.

Barzley had been rock solid at Championship level but had never once played above it, and while genuinely talented, he wasn’t the finished article yet either.

On top of that, with Loach’s old partnership breaking up, Saint had asked Sallow to bring in two further young centre-backs: a promising English teenager named George Lindley, and a quietly rated prospect out of a lower-division academy named Alex Gamble.

Gamble had actually been Saint’s first real target of the two, and, fittingly, he too fell under Jasper’s growing client list. His current club hadn’t shown much urgency about tying him down, and with Jasper working the deal personally, Villa landed him for a modest three hundred thousand pounds, barely contested.

Lindley’s situation had involved a bit more confusion, or rather, Saint himself had walked into the confusion first.

There was no real argument that Lindley was shaping up to be one of the finest English defensive prospects of his generation. He’d first made his name playing for a mid-table Championship side, but by the time Saint actually went looking, he’d already quietly signed for a bigger club on a development deal, loaned straight back to the club that raised him, a quirk not uncommon in the English pyramid when a promising teenager needs senior minutes more than first-team competition.

So Saint’s first move had been asking around at the bigger club directly, only to be told, politely, that there was no realistic path to a deal. It was Jasper, working his own channels, who eventually tracked down the actual route in, going directly to the smaller club holding his registration instead.

Ipswich, as it turned out, still technically owned Lindley’s registration outright at this stage, his move to the bigger club wouldn’t be finalised for another year yet. Which meant dealing with Ipswich directly was considerably simpler than untangling anything with the bigger club in between.

Despite being pushed into the first team picture at sixteen, Lindley had barely featured for Ipswich in any real capacity, not for lack of ability, but because of where he’d been asked to play.

He’d started out as a makeshift striker before being pushed back into defence, and the conversion to his current, far more natural role hadn’t properly taken hold until the following season, which went a long way toward explaining why he’d barely registered on anyone’s radar at Ipswich itself.

Rami, Barzley, Gamble, and Lindley, a back line brimming with genuine long-term potential, but potential, by its nature, takes time to mature into anything reliable.

Which was exactly why Saint had spent so long weighing this decision, before finally settling on his actual target: former Chelsea captain Marcus Teale.