Chapter 88: A Former Rival for Life

Plenty of unflattering headlines had circled Teale’s name in recent weeks, but none of it touched the deeper truth of the matter, anyone who’d followed English football for the past decade knew exactly what kind of player, and what kind of professional, Marcus Teale actually was.

Teale’s relationship with Chelsea’s new ownership hadn’t been smooth, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the club quietly engineering his exit rather than extending him one more year. Ownership groups with fresh money behind them rarely have much patience for sentiment.

Why had Chelsea actually let him go? Age played some part, certainly, but it wasn’t the whole story, not by a long way. Even on the downslope of his physical peak, Teale remained a genuinely excellent centre-back, still comfortably good enough for the Premier League’s top table.

The previous season’s Champions League exit; a really painful one, eliminated by a side nobody had expected to go that deep, had marked the turning point in how the press and ownership alike started talking about him.

The numbers told a different story, though. Teale had remained Chelsea’s first-choice centre-back the entire season. They’d missed out on Europe’s biggest prize, yes, but still finished the campaign with silverware in the cabinet regardless.

What Chelsea’s boardroom couldn’t have known, of course, was how long it would actually be before another trophy came their way after that.

What had really cost Teale his place wasn’t form, it was standing. Since arriving as a teenager, he’d given that club everything, including accepting a positional switch from midfield to centre-back without ever once complaining about it.

"Don’t you want one more chance to prove something, to the people who decided you were finished?" Teale wasn’t anything like Pryce in temperament.

Three league titles, two FA Cups, genuine silverware stacked up across a decorated career, Teale had nothing left to chase in terms of honours. If Saint wanted to actually move him, the only real lever available was pride: resentment toward how it had ended, and the itch to prove the people who’d pushed him out wrong.

"Villa, back in the Premier League, up against the very best this country has to offer. Prove to everyone watching that Marcus Teale, whatever his age says on paper, is still exactly the lion he’s always been." Saint’s pitch carried real conviction, and even a man who’d seen every kind of persuasion over a long, decorated career found something genuinely stirring in it.

"Saint, you’re a remarkable manager, I’ll give you that much." Teale sounded almost surprised at his own reaction.

Whatever Saint’s age suggested on paper, Teale had stopped reading him as simply "young" within the first few minutes of actually talking to him.

After Teale’s agent first fielded Villa’s interest, and after Saint’s own follow-up call, the veteran had done exactly what Pryce had, gone and properly researched the man and the club before agreeing to meet at all.

Going in, Teale had half-expected the whole approach to be some kind of publicity stunt, a thirty-one-year-old manager’s face alone made the whole proposition sound faintly absurd on paper.

But once he’d actually looked into Villa’s season properly, curiosity took over. That curiosity was exactly what had brought Saint to Madrid for this meeting in the first place.

"Fancy testing yourself under an amazing coach for a change?" Saint didn’t let the opening pass.

"Honestly... tempting, I’ll admit that much," Teale said, with real candour.

"But Saint, moving to a new country at this stage of my career isn’t a decision I can make lightly. I need a bit of time to think it over properly," he added, sincerity plain in his expression.

Outwardly, Teale was clearly drawn to the idea. But as a decorated veteran and former club captain, there were considerably more variables weighing on him than simple ambition alone.

"I’ll be waiting to hear good news." With Teale asking for time, there wasn’t much more Saint could do but respect it.

Business concluded for the day, Saint spent the rest of it properly with Grace, touring Madrid together. She’d only recently started working across Europe regularly, and her schedule rarely left room for anything resembling a proper day off.

Saint, for his part, had technically lived in England for the better part of two decades, but in that whole stretch, he could count on one hand the times he’d actually left the country for leisure, let alone made it to Spain.

So for one full day, the two of them did exactly what any ordinary couple visiting Madrid would do, the major sights, plenty of photographs, nothing remotely business-related.

That evening, though, they boarded a flight again, not home, but onward to Barcelona.

If Saint was honest with himself, some part of him genuinely wanted to detour through Barcelona’s famed academy setup. Everyone in football knew the stories about what that pipeline produced, including, somewhere in those age groups right now, a certain small Argentine kid whose name would eventually mean everything to the sport.

Nobody watching that academy today had any idea yet what that kid would grow into.

Saint talked himself out of the detour fairly quickly, though. Even with everything he knew about football’s future, there was no realistic version of pulling a player like that away from Barcelona’s own system, some academies simply don’t let their very best talent leave, whatever a rival club offers. The coming years would prove exactly that, as more than one future great got built entirely within that same pipeline rather than poached from outside it.

Besides, academy prodigies weren’t what Villa actually needed right now. Whatever Saint’s own ego told him, he wasn’t vain enough to believe his personal charisma alone could out-argue an institution with that kind of pull. And more practically; Villa needed proven, ready-now quality, not five-year development projects. The academy was overflowing with promise already; what Villa lacked was immediate output.

The actual target in Barcelona was someone else entirely: Marco Reyes, not the Coventry winger of the same surname Villa had faced earlier in the season, a different man altogether; a technically gifted holding midfielder who’d come up through Barcelona’s own academy as a teenager, once tipped as a genuine future captain in the making.

Injuries had derailed that early promise, though, and a move to Italy hadn’t gone the way anyone hoped either, a single, injury-ravaged season produced barely a handful of appearances.

The following year brought a fresh start elsewhere in Italy, only for that spell to collapse after six months when a mid-season transfer window move fell through entirely, sending him straight back to his original Italian club with his reputation further dented.

Worse still, that whole saga had been clouded by a positive doping test along the way, banned for the better part of a season, a stain that had followed him ever since, however murky the actual circumstances.

Saint, crucially, knew something nobody else in football did, that test result had been flatly wrong, a documented lab error that would only be formally acknowledged years down the line, long after the damage to Reyes’s reputation was already done.

Which was exactly why Villa were in Barcelona chasing him now. With Whitfield gone, Reyes was precisely the profile Villa’s midfield needed most.

And as for that doping ban hanging over his name, Saint already had a plan worked out for that too. There was no version of this trip where he’d have flown all the way to Barcelona otherwise.