The thud against the side of the house was less a pass and more an act of violence.
Thump. Thump. THWACK.
Leo stood in the narrow alley between their home and the fence, boots laced, kicking his worn football against the weathered brick with a rhythm of pure, simmering fury.
Every impact sent a jolt up his ankle. He didn't feel it. He felt the phantom sting of Arkady's words. Sub striker.
The back door creaked open. Clara stood in the doorway, a chipped mug of coffee steaming in her hand, her robe pulled tight against the evening chill.
Her eyes, sharp with a mother's radar, scanned his tense shoulders, the rigid line of his jaw.
"You'll wake the dead, Leo. Or at least Mrs. Gable next door."
He didn't answer. He trapped the rebounding ball, turned, and unleashed a vicious, misguided punt. It wasn't aimed. It was released.
The ball sailed over the low fence, bounced once on the empty street, and rolled to a stop at the feet of a kid on the opposite sidewalk from the apartment block down the road.
Leo raised a hand in a gesture of weary apology. "Sorry, Dylan! I'll get it."
He jogged across the street, his mind still a thousand miles away on a sun-drenched pitch under Arkady's icy gaze.
"Here! Catch!"
Leo turned, a reflexive "It's okay, I've got—" already on his lips. He was still three paces from the ball.
Dylan, eager to help, had already scooped it up and, from a few feet away, tossed it underarm towards him.
Time did a cruel, familiar stutter-step.
For a split second, he remembered watching Kevin's lazy, arcing shot become a brown blur growing too large, too fast and crashing into him.
His glasses—his father's glasses, the system's conduit—were upstairs on his desk. The world was a soft-focus painting.
Smack!
The ball kissed his forehead with a soft, solid sound. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough to snap his head back.
Off-balance, he stumbled, his heel catching on the curb, and landed on his backside on the gritty asphalt.
Dylan's eyes went wide with horror. He didn't wait for a scolding. He spun and bolted, the door to his apartment building slamming shut behind him like a gunshot.
Silence. Then the slow crunch of gravel under slippers.
Clara was there, offering a hand. "Up you get, lightning-foot." Her voice was gentle, but her eyes missed nothing.
He let her pull him up, dusted off his joggers, and followed her into the warm, quiet cave of their living room.
She sat him on the sofa, her fingers gently probing his forehead.
"No bump. Just a red mark. Your ego's more bruised than your skull." She sat back, studying him.
The forced focus of his training was gone. In its place was a raw, hollow sadness she hadn't seen since the weeks after David's death. "Alright. Out with it. What's really wrong?"
His shoulders slumped, the last of his defensive posture crumbling. "It's this guy. King Vance." The name tasted worse than rotten eggs.
"He's… he's everything. His physique, his football IQ, his skill… it's all just more. We followed Dad once, to a game back then. He wanted to be a midfielder. And now he is the striker. And I…"
He looked at his hands, calloused from a week of frantic drilling. "I couldn't catch up. So now I'm the substitute."
He stood abruptly, the confession hanging in the air between them, too heavy to leave sitting. "I have to go study," he mumbled, already heading for the stairs, a retreat into the only kingdom he still had some control over.
───────────
The knock on his door later that evening was hesitant, a soft contrast to his afternoon's violent percussion.
Leo was at his desk, his father's glasses on.
The pale blue glyphs of the G.O.A.L. System floated in his periphery, analyzing a frozen frame of Thierry Henry—a first touch so serene it seemed to absorb the ball's very momentum.
He paused the clip on his phone, the silence in the room suddenly deafening.
"Come in."
Clara entered, a mug of herbal tea in her hands. She placed it beside him, her gaze taking in the cathedral of obsession he'd built: the wall plastered with his father's frantic diagrams, the screen glowing with impossible genius.
"You're working very hard," she said, her voice a soft balm.
"I have to," he replied, the words automatic, hollow. "It's the only thing I can control."
Clara was quiet for a long moment. Then she pulled his desk chair around and sat, facing him, her knees almost touching his. "Can I tell you a story about your father?" she asked. "One I don't think I've ever told you."
Leo finally looked up from the screen, his eyes wary but curious.
"He wasn't always the Coach Reed," she began, her voice drifting into the past.
"When I met him, he was just David. A player. And a brilliant one. But he had a fire in him that burned everything it touched. A temper. He saw insults in every tackle, conspiracies in every referee's whistle. He was so busy fighting the world, he forgot he was supposed to be playing a game in it."
She took a slow sip from her own mug, the memory playing out behind her eyes. "Then he broke his ankle. A nasty, ugly tackle. Six months in a cast. While he was healing, his coach—a gruff old man named MacReady with a face like a clenched fist—made him do something strange. He made him sit in the stands. Not to watch the match. To watch… everything else."
"The assistant coach, pacing like a caged animal. The substitute on the bench, trying to keep his legs warm, his hope a visible, fading thing. The fan in the third row who screamed the same curse every time the left-back touched the ball. The ball boy in the 89th minute, slumped against the advertising hoarding, utterly spent."
A soft, sorrowful smile touched her lips. "David told me it was the most brutal, humbling education of his life. He realized he'd been seeing the game on a postage stamp. The real game was the whole stadium. The fear, the economics, the fatigue, the tiny, desperate hopes of twenty-two men and everyone orbiting them. When he finally got fit again… he couldn't do it. The fire to play was gone. But the sight… the sight he gained from the sidelines was forever."
She reached out, her fingers gently brushing the sturdy temple of his glasses. "He started wearing these not long after. He said they helped him focus on the bigger picture. He wasn't just seeing passing lanes anymore. He was seeing people. Their limits. Their hearts."
She looked directly into Leo's eyes, her own shimmering with unshed tears and fierce love. "That's what made him a great coach, Leo. Not the geometry. The empathy. He started wearing these not long after," she said.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. "He called them his 'sideline lenses.' He said they helped him focus on the bigger picture. He wasn't just seeing passing lanes anymore. He was seeing people. Their limits. Their hearts. The… the understanding in them… that came from the boy who was forced to stop playing, and learned to finally see."
Leo sat utterly still, his mother's words rewriting his entire understanding of the legacy he carried. The G.O.A.L. System wasn't a cheat code for glory. It was a tool of perspective, forged in failure.
Clara stood, leaning down to press a kiss to the top of his head. "The best players," she whispered, her voice thick with emotion, "aren't the ones who never get benched. They're the ones who learn what the game looks like from the sidelines. Remember that."
From her pocket, she pulled a small, worn, leather-bound notebook—the kind that fits in a coat pocket. "He filled this during those months. Not with plays. With observations. 'Minute 63: left-back's right shoulder drops when exhausted.' 'Their number 10 scratches his nose before a dummy pass.' It's not a playbook. It's a… a keyhole into the game's soul."
She placed it on the desk beside the tea. "I think he'd want you to have it. Maybe whatever is in the glasses can show you the geometry. This… this can show you the heartbeat."
She left, closing the door with a soft, final click.
Leo sat in the quiet glow of his desk lamp, the ghost of his mother's kiss still warm on his hair.
The weight of her story settled over him, recalibrating everything. The G.O.A.L. System wasn't just his father's tactical brain. It was born from a wound. From the best seat in the house for watching dreams deferred.
As if sensing this shift in his understanding, a new, soft chime sounded in his mind. Different from the urgent match-alerts or the clinical stat updates. This was a calm, pulsing tone.
[PARADIGM SHIFT DETECTED: USER CONTEXT UPDATED. LEGACY MODULE SYNCHRONIZED.]
[NEW MODULE UNLOCKED: 'SIDELINE PERSPECTIVE' (LEGACY/BETA).]
[DESCRIPTION: ANALYTICAL OVERLAY OPTIMIZED FOR OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING ENHANCES PATTERN RECOGNITION IN TEAM DYNAMICS, FATIGUE CYCLES, AND TACTICAL ADJUSTMENTS.]
[UTILITY: MAXIMIZE LEARNING EFFICIENCY DURING NON-PLAYING PERIODS.]
Leo's breath caught. The system wasn't abandoning him for failing to start. It was adapting. Evolving, just as his father had. It was giving him the tool to do what David Reed had done—to turn the bench from a prison into an observatory.
He was the sub striker. But perhaps, from the sidelines, he could learn to see what King Vance, staring down the tunnel at his own glory, never could.
He looked at the diagrams, the notebook, the system's new prompt. The crushing weight of 'sub' was still there, but it was now fused with a strange, quiet purpose.
Monday wasn't just the English final. It was the next team training. King would be the sun at the center of Arkady's drills.
And for the first time, Leo wouldn't just be a failed competitor watching him. He would be a student, with a new lens. His father's lens.
He minimized Thierry Henry. He pulled up a fresh file. The label glowed at the top of his screen:
OBSERVATION PROTOCOL: KING VANCE.