Chapter 90: Spending a Fortune

A day and a half in Barcelona, and Saint boarded his flight out thoroughly satisfied. Next stop: France, and the city of Rennes.

This trip had one target: a Czech goalkeeper by the name of Tomas Vacek, currently on the books at a mid-table Ligue 1 side, and, in the version of events Saint remembered, destined to become one of the finest shot-stoppers of his generation.

For a long stretch of the coming decade, mention of the world’s best goalkeepers would always circle back to three names.

Buffon, at Juventus. Casillas, at Real Madrid. And Vacek, wherever he ended up.

Buffon and Casillas were both locked into clubs Saint had no realistic hope of prying them loose from. Which left Vacek as the one genuinely achievable target of the three.

Even so, Saint hadn’t rushed into it, not because of any doubt in Vacek’s ability, but because of a genuinely awkward quirk of English football’s own foreign-player rules.

Premier League clubs faced no cap on foreign players actually appearing in matches, but non-EU signings still required a work permit, and those permits weren’t automatic, they depended on international caps and FIFA ranking thresholds that a young, uncapped goalkeeper from outside the EU simply wouldn’t clear yet.

Villa, though, already had a long list of targets this summer, and that particular complication wasn’t going to be the thing that derailed the plan, old habits from another life die hard, and Saint had never been shy about chasing more than one gamble at once.

Before committing fully to Vacek, Saint had actually floated an alternative, a highly rated young goalkeeper on West Ham’s books who’d lost his starting spot the previous season through little fault of his own, purely bad timing rather than poor form.

Villa had made an approach. West Ham turned it down flat, Sallow later learned through the player’s own agent that, given the choice between Villa and staying to fight for his place at a bigger club, the goalkeeper had opted to stay and compete rather than move.

With that route closed, Saint turned his full attention back to Vacek, still plying his trade quietly in Rennes. Sallow opened with an offer of three million. Rennes rejected it outright.

Saint didn’t back down. He pushed Sallow to go to four million instead. That single extra million shifted the tone of the conversation considerably, Rennes stopped treating their goalkeeper as untouchable and started genuinely entertaining the sale.

After several more rounds of back-and-forth, Villa’s final offer settled at five and a half million pounds.

A genuinely startling number for a player this unproven. Sallow had argued with Saint repeatedly over it, left to his own judgment, there was no version of Sallow spending that kind of money on a twenty-one-year-old goalkeeper with this little top-flight pedigree behind him.

Five and a half million pounds, out of a ten-million-pound summer budget. Villa had just committed more than half their entire transfer kitty to one signing.

"Tom, what do you make of Buffon?" Standing face to face, Saint had to tilt his head back slightly, Vacek stood six foot five, a full head taller than him.

Vacek, for his part, looked genuinely startled meeting Saint in person. He’d already been told the clubs had agreed terms, but nothing had prepared him for Villa’s manager showing up personally, let alone one who looked barely older than he was.

"Buffon’s the best goalkeeper in the world right now," Vacek said, without hesitation. Buffon’s transfer to Juventus a few years earlier had shattered every existing record for the position, and he’d spent every season since proving the fee hadn’t been a mistake, the best keeper in Italy one year, the best in the world the next.

"Maybe so. But Tom... in my eyes, you’ve got the ceiling to match him, if not surpass him eventually. Work hard enough, and in a few years, people won’t be debating Buffon and Casillas anymore. They’ll be debating you too." Vacek’s expression shifted again, genuinely thrown.

That flicker of shock didn’t last, though, underneath it, something else was already building. Hunger. Ambition. Whatever reservations he’d walked in with were clearly softening fast.

Vacek understood, somewhere underneath the disbelief, that Saint actually meant every word of it. There was nothing performative in his eyes, just genuine conviction, genuine belief, offered without hedging.

"Tom... come to England, and prove it. Prove to everyone watching that it isn’t just Buffon, isn’t just Casillas. It’s you too."

Was that manipulation, dressed up as motivation? Not really, for a player who’d spent his career quietly doubting whether he belonged at that level, it landed as something closer to permission.

"Boss, I’m in. I want to play for you." Vacek nodded, firm and immediate.

"Excellent. Tom, you’ll look back on today and know you made exactly the right call." Saint reached up to clap him on the shoulder, an awkward gesture, given how far he had to reach.

"Love, he’s really only twenty-one?" Grace couldn’t help asking once Vacek had gone.

Fair question, honestly. Standing next to Saint, the young goalkeeper who’d just left carried himself with a presence that made twenty-one feel like an understatement, not unlike how Saint himself had once struck people, before three months of results made his own age feel beside the point.

"You’re only now wondering whether I’m actually the age I say I am?" Saint said, already sliding an arm around her waist as they walked.

With Vacek’s deal confirmed, Villa had quietly completed nine separate signings that summer under Saint’s direction: Colley, Osei, Barzley, Gamble, Lindley, Pryce, Reyes, Vacek, and Teale.

Teale, specifically, had finally made his decision too, after weighing it properly, the former Chelsea captain had agreed to join Villa, determined to prove something to everyone who’d written him off.

Of those nine, Barzley, Pryce, Teale, and Reyes had cost the club absolutely nothing in fees. Osei had arrived as a makeweight in the Delgado deal. Of the remaining four, Vacek’s five and a half million dwarfed everything else combined, Colley at eight hundred fifty thousand, Gamble at three hundred thousand, and Lindley at five hundred thousand, barely two million pounds between the three of them.

All told, Saint had committed seven million, one hundred fifty thousand pounds, well over half of the original ten-million budget.

But money moves both ways in a transfer window. Before that seven-point-one-five million went out, Whitfield’s move home had already brought in one million, and Delgado’s sale had added another million and a half.

And Loach and Okoro, their departures had finally been confirmed too, after a full week of back-and-forth negotiation with Norwich. Norwich eventually agreed to pay six million for the pair outright.

Run the full ledger, and Villa’s transfer kitty hadn’t shrunk at all, it had actually grown by one million, three hundred fifty thousand pounds. Villa’s summer budget now sat at eleven million, three hundred fifty thousand pounds, even after everything spent so far.

Which meant Saint still had plenty of room left to work with. And there remained a considerable number of players still due to leave Villa’s books before the window closed, none of them likely to command a huge fee individually, but Saint had never needed much convincing that modest money, spent wisely enough times over, adds up to something considerably bigger in the end.