CHAPTER ONE: I GET SUBBED OUT PERMANENTLY
If you're looking for a story about a guy who worked hard, caught a lucky break, and ended up lifting a trophy while confetti rained down on his head, you've got the wrong book. You should probably head over to the sports biography section. Look for the guys with the bleached teeth and the multimillion-dollar underwear campaigns.
My name is Leo Vance, and I am the greatest footballer you've never heard of.
I'm not being cocky. It's just a statistical fact. At seventeen, I had a touch that could make a marble stop dead on a sheet of ice. I could read a pitch like it was a giant, green map with "GOAL" written in glowing neon letters. My PE teacher used to say I had "the gift." My dad used to say I was going to buy him a house in Spain with my first signing bonus.
But here's the thing about "the gift": it doesn't mean squat if the guy holding the clipboard is looking for a bribe.
I remember the day it all went south—the "Trial of the Century," as my dad called it. I was at a top-flight Academy. I'd spent ninety minutes turning their prized defensive recruits into human traffic cones. I scored four goals, one of them a bicycle kick so clean I thought I might actually spontaneously combust from pure joy.
After the match, the head scout, a man who smelled exclusively of expensive cigars and disappointment, didn't look at my stats. He looked at the kid next to me—a striker who couldn't hit a barn door with a banjo, but whose father happened to be the CEO of a major logistics firm.
"Great hustle, Vance," the scout had said, not even looking up from his notepad. "But you're just not a 'tactical fit' for the vision of this club."
That was the first time I realized the game was rigged. Not the ninety minutes on the grass—that part was honest. It was everything else. The handshakes in the back rooms, the "donations" to the youth fund, the agents who looked like they sold used cars in purgatory.
By twenty-nine, my "vision" was mostly limited to how many crates of sugar-free energy drinks I could stack in a warehouse before my lunch break.
The talent was still there, buried under a layer of cynicism and a knee that clicked like a metronome every time I walked up a flight of stairs. But the "Luck" had taken over. If there was a puddle on the pitch, I'd be the one to slide into it. If there was a one-in-a-million chance of a freak hamstring tear, I'd beat the odds.
Eventually, the depression doesn't even feel like sadness anymore. It just feels like a very long, very boring rain delay. You're just sitting in the locker room of your own head, waiting for a game that's never going to start.
The night it ended was a Tuesday. Tuesday is the worst day to die. It's too far from the weekend to be a tragedy and too deep into the week to be a surprise.
I was taking the shortcut through the industrial estate in South London, the kind of place where the shadows seem to have teeth. My shift had been ten hours of manual labor, and my legs felt like they were made of overcooked spaghetti.
"Oi! Empty the pockets!"
I stopped. The kid standing in front of me couldn't have been more than nineteen. He was wearing a tracksuit that cost more than my monthly rent and holding a snub-nosed revolver with a shaking hand. He wasn't a professional; he was just a kid who had decided that my Tuesday was going to be worse than his.
"Seriously?" I asked, looking at the gun. "Look at me, man. Do I look like I'm carrying anything besides a half-eaten sandwich and a deep sense of existential dread?"
"The watch! Give it over!"
I looked at my wrist. It was a plastic Casio. The strap was held together by scotch tape.
I should have just handed it over. I should have been the "tactical fit" for a victim. But ten years of being the best guy on the pitch and the last guy on the list finally snapped something inside me. I didn't see a mugger. I saw the scout with the cigar. I saw the kid with the rich dad. I saw every "bad bounce" I'd ever taken.
"No," I said.
I dropped my shoulder. I feinted a lunge to the left, a move that had sent professional defenders sprawling in my youth. For a split second, the warehouse worker disappeared. I was the Golden Boy again. I was fast. I was precise. I was—
Crack.
My bad knee chose that exact moment to give up the ghost. It buckled outward, sending me into a clumsy, lurching stumble.
The kid panicked. He didn't even aim. He just pulled the trigger.
The sound was like a heavy book slamming shut. I didn't feel pain, not at first. I just felt a sudden, intense heat in my chest, followed by a coldness that started in my toes and raced toward my heart.
I hit the wet pavement. I looked up at the orange glow of the streetlamps, blurred by the drizzling rain. The kid was gone. The world was quiet.
I thought about that bicycle kick when I was seventeen. I thought about the way the ball felt when it hit the back of the net—that perfect, silent thwack.
Well, I thought, as the referee in my head finally blew the long whistle. At least the VAR can't overturn this one.
The lights went out, and for the first time in twelve years, I wasn't worried about the next match.