February arrived in Dortmund the way it always did — grey, stubborn, the cold settled in like a tenant who had stopped paying rent but refused to leave.
Richard had stopped noticing the weather after the first three weeks. Belgium had prepared him for that much at least. You trained in it, you drove through it, you ate breakfast looking at it through the window, and eventually it became simply the color of the background rather than a thing worth remarking on.
What he noticed instead was the table.
Fourth. Thirty-seven points.
Dortmund had won two of the three Bundesliga matches since Bochum — a hard-fought 2-1 away at Wolfsburg where Richard had set up the winner with a late corner that Guirassy attacked with the kind of violence that made goalkeepers reconsider their career choices, and a 3-0 home result against Mainz that was more comfortable than the scoreline suggested because Mainz had made it difficult for sixty minutes before the game finally broke open.
The loss had been at Freiburg — a cold Tuesday night, a pitch that played heavy, a game where nothing clicked and Dortmund's shape dissolved under a press they had prepared for but couldn't execute against on the night. Richard had been substituted on sixty-eight minutes, which was Schmidt's way of saying: not your fault, not anyone's fault, we need something different and there is nothing different available tonight.
He had sat on the bench and watched the last twenty minutes with his jaw set and said nothing in the dressing room afterward that wasn't directly asked of him.
Schmidt had noticed. He said nothing about it, which meant he approved.
The climb was not clean. That was the thing nobody outside a dressing room fully understood about a season. It was not a straight line upward. It was two steps forward and one back and then a sideways step that felt like neither progress nor regression and then suddenly three steps forward in a week that changed the feel of everything.
Stuttgart were wobbling. Leipzig had dropped points in three of their last six. The top four was not closed — it was a conversation that Dortmund were now part of rather than watching from outside.
Schmidt addressed it directly on the Friday before the Wolfsburg match, which was unusual. He normally kept the table out of his team talks, preferring to focus only on the next opponent. But that Friday he stood at the board and looked around the room with the measured calm of a man who had decided honesty was the correct tool for the moment.
"You can see the table," he said. "I know you look at it. I look at it. Fourth place is real. Third is possible. But neither of those things happens if we treat them as destinations rather than consequences." He paused. "We do not chase the table. We chase the performance. The table follows. That is the only way."
He moved on immediately to Wolfsburg's defensive shape.
But the room had shifted slightly. Not with excitement — with something more useful than excitement. With clarity.
Richard's Bundesliga numbers after the Wolfsburg win stood at three goals and three assists in four appearances.
He knew this because Chidi told him every time the tally changed, delivered with the energy of a man personally invested in the statistics, which Chidi essentially was. But he also knew it because it had started appearing in places that had nothing to do with Chidi.
The Brackel analysis team had a screen in the corridor outside the main meeting room that displayed squad statistics — a practical tool for coaches and players to track output across the season. Richard had walked past it a hundred times without stopping. One Thursday morning after training he was passing it with Lukas when Lukas slowed almost imperceptibly.
Richard looked at the screen.
His name sat near the top of the goals-plus-assists column for the second half of the season. Not at the top — Guirassy's goal tally made that impossible — but near it, with the additional notation in smaller text that caught the eye if you were looking:
4 apps — most G/A contributions per 90 mins, squad, second half season.
Lukas said nothing. Just kept walking.
Richard kept walking too.
He didn't mention it to anyone.
It was Jobe Bellingham who mentioned the other thing first.
They had been doing a finishing drill after the main session had ended — voluntary, just three or four players staying behind to work on specific movements, the kind of extra time that didn't need to be organized because it organized itself among players who thought that way. Richard, Jobe, Adeyemi, and a young academy midfielder named Falk who had been training with the first team for three weeks and was so visibly terrified of making mistakes that Richard had started making a quiet point of passing to him in small-sided games.
Jobe was taking a water break when he said it, almost casually, the way he said most things — with a lightness that didn't fully conceal the intelligence underneath.
"You know Moukoko's record," he said.
Richard looked at him.
"Youngest scorer in Bundesliga history," Jobe continued, spinning the ball in his hands. "Sixteen and twenty-eight days." He paused. "You didn't break it."
"I know," Richard said.
"But Wirtz's record. Seventeen and thirty-four days." Jobe looked at him directly. "You scored your first at seventeen and — what, thirteen days?"
Richard said nothing.
"Twenty-one days younger than Wirtz," Jobe said. He wasn't making a big thing of it. He was just saying the number clearly, the way you state a fact that has been sitting in the room unacknowledged for long enough. "Second youngest in Bundesliga history."
Richard picked up his ball. "You ready to go again?"
Jobe smiled — a quick, genuine smile that reminded Richard briefly of someone, though he couldn't place who. "Yeah," he said. "Just thought you should know someone noticed."
"Someone always notices," Richard said.
"True," Jobe said. "Doesn't mean it's not worth knowing."
They went back to the drill.
Adeyemi mentioned it differently.
Not in words. Three days after the conversation with Jobe, a graphic appeared on Adeyemi's Instagram story — no caption, no comment, just a clean statistical infographic from a Bundesliga data account. White background, black text, the Bundesliga logo in the corner.
Second youngest goalscorer in Bundesliga history.
Youngest Nigerian ever to score in the Bundesliga.
Youngest non-German scorer in Dortmund's Bundesliga history.
Richard's name. His photo. His age.
It was up for twenty-four hours. Adeyemi never mentioned it directly. Richard never thanked him for it directly.
Some things communicated themselves.
Chidi called that evening.
"You saw it," he said.
"Yes."
"And?"
"And nothing. It's a graphic."
A long pause. "Richard."
"Chidi."
"It's a Bundesliga record. Multiple records. You are seventeen years old and you hold Bundesliga records."
"Second youngest," Richard said. "Moukoko is still first."
"SECOND YOUNGEST IN HISTORY," Chidi said, with the volume of a man addressing a stadium rather than a phone call. "Do you understand how many players have played in the Bundesliga since it started in 1963? Do you want me to tell you the number?"
"Please don't."
"Thousands, Richard. Thousands of players across sixty years and you are the second youngest to ever — "
"I have training tomorrow."
The line went quiet.
Then Chidi made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh and said: "You are the most exhausting talented person I have ever known in my life."
"Thank you."
"It wasn't a compliment."
"I know. Goodnight Chidi."
"Goodnight. Second youngest in history."
Richard hung up.
He sat in the quiet of the living room for a moment. The house was settled around him the way it had begun to feel recently — not like something new he was adjusting to but like something that had always been there, waiting.
He thought about the numbers on that graphic for exactly as long as it took him to acknowledge them properly.
Then he thought about Real Madrid.
The draw had been sitting in the back of his mind since the night Chidi had sent those three words in capitals. He had looked at the fixture dates. First leg at the Bernabéu in late February. Second leg at Signal Iduna Park three weeks later.
He had watched twenty minutes of a recent Madrid match on his laptop before bed one night without telling anyone — not for deep analysis, that would come later through the proper channels, just to look. Just to see.
What he saw was exactly what he expected and somehow still more than he expected. The movement. The speed of decision. The way they pressed without appearing to press, their shape adjusting like something breathing rather than something organized. Players who had won this competition multiple times doing things that looked casual and were anything but.
He had closed the laptop after twenty minutes and gone to sleep.
There was still time before that.
First there was the league. First there was the climb.
The Mainz match was the clearest indication yet of how far Dortmund had come since January.
They were two goals up by the thirty-fifth minute, the second coming from a combination that had been worked on in training for two weeks — a switch of play from Can to Couto on the left, overlapping run from Couto, early ball cut back, Richard arriving from deep to finish first time across the goalkeeper with the outside of his right foot.
The stadium recognized it as a trained move executed to perfection. The applause had a specific quality — not just loud but knowledgeable, the sound of people who understood what they were watching.
Mainz pulled one back on fifty-five minutes through a set piece that Dortmund defended poorly, a lapse of concentration that Schmidt addressed immediately from the touchline, his voice carrying across the technical area with the contained intensity of someone who did not raise his voice because he did not need to.
Dortmund held. Then Guirassy added a third on seventy minutes, converting a penalty with the calm of a man posting a letter, and the match was done.
Three-one.
In the dressing room afterward Schmidt was brief. He acknowledged the win, noted the defensive lapse as something that would be addressed on Monday, and then said: "Fourth place. We are there. Now we hold it and we push."
That was all.
But the room felt different. Not louder. Fuller somehow.
On the Friday before the Freiburg match, Evan called with the Adidas update.
The introductory conversation had become two conversations. The second had been more specific — numbers, timelines, the shape of what a partnership might look like. Evan had listened more than he spoke, which was always his method in early negotiations, and had come away with a clear picture.
"They are serious," Evan said. "This is not exploratory anymore. They want to move before the summer because they expect the summer market to be extremely loud around you and they want to be in position before that noise starts."
Richard was quiet for a moment. "What are they proposing?"
"A full boot deal to start. Transition to a signature boot within eighteen months if your trajectory continues. Campaign involvement — global, not regional. The numbers are significant, Richard. Significant in a way that changes the shape of your financial picture entirely."
Richard thought about what Amara had said in that first meeting — numbers decide whether your career success turns into lifelong stability or disappears the moment an injury hits.
"What's your recommendation?" he asked Evan.
"I think we let them wait until May. Not to be difficult — to be correct. By May we know what this season has produced. Your negotiating position in May is considerably stronger than it is now, and they know that, which is precisely why they want to move now." A pause. "I will keep the conversation warm. I will make sure they understand you are interested and serious. But we do not rush."
"Okay," Richard said.
"One more thing," Evan said. "The Nigerian FA have been in touch. Under-20 call-up for the African qualifiers in March. It conflicts with two Bundesliga matches and potentially the second leg against Madrid."
The line between them was quiet for a moment.
"That's a problem," Richard said.
"It is a significant problem," Evan said carefully. "I am handling it. Dortmund's position is clear — they need you available for the Madrid second leg. The FA understands the situation but they are also building toward a tournament and they want their best players." He paused. "This is a conversation that will require careful management. I want you to know it's happening but I don't want you distracted by it. Leave it with me."
"Alright," Richard said.
After he hung up he sat at the kitchen table and thought about the Nigerian FA call-up for a long time. Not as a problem. As something else — as a weight he was glad to carry even when it complicated things. The idea of wearing that shirt. Of representing something that large.
He thought about Tunde from the Düsseldorf shoot. You're the reason my younger brother started taking football seriously again.
He thought about his mother's voice on the phone.
He thought about a boy from Lagos sitting in a house in Dortmund being asked to choose between his club and his country and understanding that this was not a burden but a privilege that most people never got close enough to feel.
He didn't resolve it that night.
He left it with Evan the way Evan had asked.
And went to training.
The Freiburg loss was the kind that stays with you not because of the result but because of the feeling. The feeling that on a different night, with a different surface, with one moment going differently in the first half when Richard's shot had hit the post and rolled across the face of goal without going in, it might have been completely different.
That was football's most honest cruelty. The millimetres.
He sat in the away dressing room at Freiburg afterward and said very little. Around him the silence had different textures — Can's jaw set, staring at the floor. Kobel with his gloves already off, methodical, processing privately. Brandt with his head back against the wall and his eyes closed.
Schmidt came in and spoke for four minutes. Acknowledged the loss, identified two specific tactical failures without attributing blame, and then said: "We respond on Saturday. That is the only thing that matters now."
Four minutes. Then he left.
Richard changed in silence. On the bus back he put his headphones in and watched the darkness of the German motorway moving past the window and thought about nothing specific, which was its own kind of processing.
Chidi drove him home from the team facility without saying much. Which was how Richard knew Chidi had been watching and understood.
At the door of the house Richard stopped.
"Thanks," he said.
Chidi nodded. "Saturday," he said simply.
"Saturday," Richard agreed.
He went inside.
Saturday was Hoffenheim at home and Dortmund won 2-0 and Richard assisted both goals and the table moved again and fourth became solid and third became closer and the season kept turning the way seasons do — without sentiment, without pause, without any interest in how anyone felt about it.
Which was exactly right.
Because somewhere in the distance, getting closer with every passing week, was the Bernabéu.
And Richard Blake, seventeen years old, second youngest scorer in Bundesliga history, was already ready for it in ways he hadn't finished understanding yet.