Chapter 93: Europe’s Lost Son

Saint boarded another flight out of Birmingham, Grace beside him once more, though her own holiday window was running short by this point.

Prague. Saint had been to the Czech Republic before on this trip, but this time he wasn’t here for Vacek. A different player entirely, one whose career had broken the hearts of an entire generation of fans who’d once been certain he was destined for greatness.

Marek Jurek. In his prime, genuinely one of the most exciting wide players Europe had produced, intelligent movement, sharp acceleration, pinpoint delivery. The kind of talent that gets compared to the greats before he’s even turned twenty-three.

One transfer nearly destroyed all of it. A brilliant tournament performance had caught Manchester United’s eye, and Ferguson brought him to Old Trafford on the back of it, a move that should have crowned a career, and instead became the start of its unravelling.

Nobody saw the injuries coming. Across two seasons at United, Jurek barely managed thirty senior appearances combined, his body betraying him again and again just as he tried to find his feet in a new country.

Eventually, with his form and confidence both shattered, he left for Portugal instead. The injuries followed him there too, bleeding straight into the new decade without any real sign of stopping.

A move to Lazio finally broke that cycle, the fitness problems eased, and for a stretch, Jurek looked something close to his old self again. Lazio, at the time, were genuinely one of the glamour clubs of European football.

Behind that glamour, though, sat a club in genuine financial freefall. Once Lazio’s finances caught up with the ambition that built them, Jurek found himself heading home instead, back to the Czech Republic, signing for Sparta Prague.

And there, against most expectations, he’d found something like a second life. The flowing hair was gone, a few visible miles on the clock now, but the sharpness in his dribbling hadn’t dulled, and his passing remained exactly as precise as it had ever been, close to the player he’d been before United ever came calling.

Saint had nearly missed this opportunity entirely, chasing the wrong problem. He’d spent weeks worrying purely about non-EU work-permit eligibility, when the real solution had been sitting right in front of him: Jurek, as a genuine EU national with a settled Czech and Portuguese career behind him, carried no such complication at all.

That particular realisation hadn’t even been Saint’s own, Sallow had pointed it out to him directly, not without a bit of gentle teasing about how a man normally several steps ahead of everyone else had somehow missed something this obvious.

"Marek, are you willing?" Prague is a genuinely beautiful city, but in that moment, nothing in it held Saint’s attention the way the man sitting across from him did.

"Am I willing?" Jurek turned the question over silently before answering.

Of course he was willing. Since the day he’d signed for United, injury had never once let him go, he’d never gotten the stretch of fitness needed to actually show the world what he could do on that stage.

He’d fled the club every ambitious player dreams of, chased out by a body that simply wouldn’t cooperate, and spent the better part of seven years with that same shadow trailing him through Portugal and beyond.

Seven years. For a footballer, that’s not a setback, that’s most of a career’s prime years, gone.

The young man who’d once genuinely believed he could be one of the game’s great wide players had grown considerably older in the meantime, and with every passing season, that old ambition had quietly dimmed.

Dimmed, but never fully extinguished. There was still something unresolved sitting underneath it, a conviction that, injuries aside, he’d never been genuinely inferior to anyone. Without the physical setbacks, there’s a version of this career where Jurek становится one of the defining wingers of his generation, not a cautionary tale.

"Marek, you’re healthy again now. Thirty-one isn’t old, not for a player with your legs still intact. Come to Villa, and let’s go shake up the Premier League together." For the first time in this whole courtship, Saint let a flash of his real ambition show through.

Survival wasn’t ever the actual target. Saint’s real goal was pushing Villa, within three years, to the very top of English football, rattling the established order enough that every major club in the country had to sit up and take notice.

Saying that out loud, this early, this openly, would have gotten him laughed straight out of the room. So Saint kept the full scope of it to himself; publicly, for now, he was still only promising to be a nuisance to the established order, not a genuine challenger to it.

But this world rewards exactly the kind of person willing to believe something seems impossible right up until it isn’t. Saint, more than anyone, understood that from lived experience, nothing about his own career made conventional sense either.

While Saint worked on Jurek, back at Villa, another deal had already quietly closed, three million pounds, for the finest attacking right-back South American football currently had to offer.

Bruno Alencar, out of Cruzeiro in Brazil.

Before settling on Alencar, Saint had genuinely weighed him against Vacek for a long stretch, in the end, the goalkeeper had won out, purely on urgency. There’s an old football truth in exactly that calculation: a genuinely excellent goalkeeper alone can carry half a team’s defensive structure.

And waiting on Vacek wasn’t really an option, leave that deal another year, and no amount of money Villa could offer would have matched whatever a bigger club eventually put on the table.

Alencar’s situation was different. His current contract at Cruzeiro ran another full year, and his value, three million pounds right now, wasn’t likely to move drastically in the short term either way.

Bringing him in now gave Villa’s right flank genuine strength in depth. Colley already brought real attacking quality from full-back in his own right, which meant pairing him with Alencar gave both players time to properly settle into the system without either one being rushed.

The left side, meanwhile, had Rocher’s presence alone doing most of the heavy lifting offensively, with Faraday and young Crist providing the defensive cover behind him, a configuration that, between the two flanks, now looked genuinely complete.

Land Jurek on top of all that, and Villa’s two wings next season would be strong enough to go toe-to-toe with any club in the country, genuine European heavyweights included.

And that was without even accounting for the firepower waiting up top, Tomlin and Salerno both, two genuinely dangerous focal points inside the box.

Nobody outside Villa’s own boardroom fully appreciated yet just how strong this squad was quietly becoming. Give it a few seasons, though, and people would look back at this particular summer and realise exactly what had been built, piece by piece, while the rest of the league wasn’t paying close enough attention.

Only one person currently understood the true ceiling of every single name on that list. What would that even feel like, a secret the size of an entire footballing era, known to exactly one man in the world?

Jurek didn’t commit immediately. Over the following two days, Saint made good use of the time with Grace instead, the two of them slipping back into something resembling an ordinary holiday rather than a business trip.

After those two days in Prague, Saint and Grace finally went their separate ways, Grace back to work, Saint preparing for the trip home, with a little more of his own break still left to enjoy.

Jasper, as it happened, had been calling repeatedly, half-joking that if Saint didn’t come back soon, he’d fly out to Birmingham, no, to Prague, and drag him back personally.

And right before Saint boarded his own flight home, the news he’d been waiting for finally came through. After two days of genuine deliberation, Jurek had made his decision, not chasing ambition exactly, but chasing something more personal: one more chance to prove, even at thirty-one, that the player he’d always believed himself to be had never actually gone anywhere.