The last two Bundesliga matches played themselves out the way dead rubbers did — with professionalism, with the proper commitment Schmidt demanded from every training session and every minute of every match regardless of context, and without the specific charge that meaningful fixtures carried.
Dortmund won them both.
3-1 against Bochum, which Richard missed the second half of because Schmidt took him off at the interval with the Champions League in mind and he sat on the bench in his tracksuit watching Jobe and Falk and the younger squad members get minutes they had earned. 2-0 against Augsburg on the final day, a clean comfortable result that the stadium acknowledged warmly and filed away as the appropriate ending to a league campaign that had exceeded every expectation set for it in August.
Second place. Done.
Europe was all that was left.
Twelve days now.
It was Jobe who suggested it.
Thursday evening, two days after the Augsburg match, the squad in a lighter training week with the Arsenal preparation building gradually in the background. Jobe appeared at Richard's shoulder in the car park after the session with the easy manner he always had — unhurried, direct, already decided.
"Food tonight," he said. "Few of us. Adeyemi knows a place."
Richard looked at him. "What kind of place?"
"The kind where they don't make a thing of it if footballers show up." He paused. "Adeyemi has been going there since October. The owner is Turkish, fifty-something, has no interest in football whatsoever. It's perfect."
Richard considered it for approximately two seconds.
"What time?" he said.
The restaurant was twenty minutes from the training ground on a street that had the specific character of a Dortmund side street — not the tourist-facing city, not the stadium district, just a row of functioning businesses serving the people who actually lived here. A kebab place. A pharmacy. A small supermarket. And between them, unmarked except for a handwritten sign above the door that Richard could now read well enough to understand said simply Yilmaz — Essen und Trinken. Food and drink.
Inside it was exactly what Jobe had described. Eight tables. Simple decor. The smell of something slow-cooked that had been going since morning. A television in the corner showing a Turkish news channel that nobody was watching.
Adeyemi was already there with Sabitzer and — to Richard's mild surprise — Emre Can, who was sitting with a glass of water and the expression of a man who had been dragged somewhere against his will and was finding it acceptable.
Jobe slid into the seat across from Can. "You came."
"Adeyemi said the food was worth it," Can said. "The food better be worth it."
"The food is worth it," Adeyemi said, with the confidence of a man who had been coming here for months.
The owner — a broad man in his fifties with a grey moustache and a complete indifference to the identity of his customers that was the most refreshing thing Richard had experienced in several weeks — appeared and took their order without comment. He did not recognize any of them. Or if he did he considered it irrelevant, which amounted to the same thing.
Richard ordered without looking at his phone for a translation, which felt like a small private achievement.
The food arrived quickly and was exactly as good as Adeyemi had promised.
The conversation moved the way conversations moved when a group of people who spent most of their time in a professional context found themselves somewhere that was not professional — awkwardly at first, then finding its rhythm, then flowing without effort.
Adeyemi talked about music. He had been producing his own tracks since he was seventeen — not seriously, he said, as a hobby — and then described a setup in his apartment that Jobe said did not sound like a hobby.
"It's a hobby," Adeyemi said firmly.
"You have three monitors," Jobe said.
"For clarity."
"You have acoustic panels on the walls."
"For the neighbors."
Sabitzer was watching this exchange with the expression of a man thoroughly entertained. Can was eating and saying nothing, which for Can in a non-football context was the equivalent of full participation.
Richard found himself laughing properly — not the polite laughter of a professional environment, the unguarded kind that arrived without permission.
"What about you," Adeyemi said, looking at Richard. "Outside football. What do you actually do?"
Richard considered the question. "Train. Watch film. Sleep."
The table looked at him.
"That's it?" Jobe said.
"I read sometimes."
"What do you read?"
"Tactics books mostly."
Jobe closed his eyes briefly. "Richard."
"What?"
"You are seventeen years old. In Germany. In the Champions League semifinal." He gestured at the restaurant around them. "This. This is what you do outside football. You come to places like this. You talk to people. You exist somewhere other than the pitch."
"I exist at home," Richard said.
"Alone?"
"With Chidi."
"Chidi is your driver," Can said, without looking up from his food.
"He's also my friend."
"He is," Can agreed. "But you need more than one." He looked up. "This is not a criticism. It's an observation. You are young and you are serious and being serious is correct. But being only serious — " he paused, searching for the word — "calcifies. You become less rather than more."
The table was quiet for a moment.
Then Adeyemi said: "Did Emre Can just say calcifies?"
"I have a broad vocabulary," Can said.
The table laughed.
Richard looked around at them — Adeyemi, Jobe, Sabitzer, Can — and felt something that was not quite what he felt on the pitch and not quite what he felt at home and was its own separate thing. The warmth of being among people who knew the same world he knew and were willing to exist outside it for an evening.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay what?" Jobe said.
"Okay I'll come out more."
Jobe spread his hands. "That's all I'm saying."
They stayed for two and a half hours.
The owner brought dessert without being asked — a tray of something sweet that he set on the table and waved away any attempt to pay for. Not because he knew who they were. Richard was fairly sure he genuinely did not. Just because two and a half hours at one table was the kind of custom that warranted dessert.
Can ate two pieces of it, which felt significant.
Walking back to the car park afterward Jobe fell into step beside Richard. The Dortmund evening was warm — proper May warmth now, the city in the season that suited it best, the streets easy and yellow and alive.
"Better?" Jobe said.
"Yes," Richard said.
"Good." Jobe was quiet for a moment. "You know what Bellingham told me — the other one, my brother — when I first came here?"
Richard looked at him.
"He said the football is the easy part," Jobe said. "The easy part is always the football. Everything else — the life, the adjustment, the finding of yourself in a foreign city — that's the work nobody sees." He paused. "He was right."
Richard walked for a moment.
"Is it easier?" he asked. "Now. Than it was at the start."
Jobe thought about it genuinely. "Different," he said. "Not easier. You just get better at it. Same as football." A pause. "You're already better at it than you think."
They reached the car park.
Chidi was waiting by the car — he had been somewhere in the city for two and a half hours and had not complained once about this, which was friendship in its most practical form.
"Good?" Chidi said, when Richard got in.
"Good," Richard said.
Chidi looked at him for a moment — the specific assessment of someone who had known him since he was fourteen and could read the difference between the various qualities of good with complete accuracy.
"Yeah," Chidi said. Satisfied. "Good."
He started the engine.
Friday brought a different kind of social event — one Richard had not planned and which arrived in the form of a message from Adeyemi at ten in the morning:
Shooting a short video today for my label thing. Nothing serious. You want to come watch? Bring Jobe if he's free.
Richard stared at the message for a moment.
Then typed: Sure.
The studio — which was not a studio but Adeyemi's apartment with the three monitors and the acoustic panels — was in a building fifteen minutes from Richard's house. He and Jobe arrived at noon to find Adeyemi in a headset at his desk and a young woman sitting on the couch with a laptop who was introduced as Lena, his manager for the music side of things, and who looked at Richard and Jobe with the practical efficiency of someone cataloguing new variables.
"The footballer," she said, to Adeyemi.
"The footballer," Adeyemi confirmed, without looking up from his monitors.
"Two footballers," Jobe said.
"Two footballers," Lena said, making a note. Not a starstruck note. A logistical one. Richard immediately liked her.
The next three hours were the most unexpectedly enjoyable Richard had spent since arriving in Dortmund.
Adeyemi worked on a track — building it layer by layer, playing sections back, adjusting, discarding, rebuilding — with the same methodical focus he brought to football that Richard recognized and respected. Jobe had opinions about the percussion which were delivered with unearned confidence and occasionally turned out to be correct, which Adeyemi acknowledged with visible reluctance. Richard said very little but listened to everything and found in the architecture of the music — the way a track was built from small components into something that worked as a whole — something that rhymed unexpectedly with the way Schmidt built a tactical shape.
He said this out loud without fully meaning to.
Everyone looked at him.
"The bassline," he said, slightly defensively. "It's like the defensive structure. Everything else builds on top of it."
Adeyemi took his headset off. Looked at Richard for a long moment.
"That's actually not wrong," he said.
"I told you he was interesting," Jobe said.
"You said he was quiet," Lena said.
"Quiet and interesting," Jobe said. "Not mutually exclusive."
They ordered food at three o'clock. Ate it in Adeyemi's living room — which had considerably better furniture than its acoustic panel situation suggested, Richard noted — and talked about things that were not football for ninety minutes, which was the longest Richard had gone without thinking about football since the Bundesliga season started in August.
At some point Lena looked at Richard across the food containers and said: "You should do something. Content-wise. Not a lot. Just — something. You're everywhere in the press but you don't control any of the narrative."
"Evan handles that," Richard said.
"Evan handles the commercial side," Lena said. "That's different. I mean — your voice. The way you talk about the game. The press quote from the TV interview." She paused. "Pressure is information. That went everywhere. People want more of that."
Richard looked at her. "I don't want to be a content person."
"You wouldn't be," she said. "One video. Properly made. You talk about football the way you actually think about it. Not a press conference. Not a brand thing. Just — real." She glanced at Adeyemi. "Like how Karim talks about music. Specific. From the inside."
Adeyemi was looking at Richard with the expression of someone who had not put Lena up to this but was very interested in the answer.
Richard was quiet for a moment.
"I'll think about it," he said.
Which was not a no.
Lena made another note.
He got home at six.
Chidi was in the living room watching television, which meant he had been in the house all afternoon without mentioning it, which was something Chidi occasionally did — appearing in Richard's spaces with the ease of someone who had decided the spaces were partly his, which Richard had never objected to.
"Good day?" Chidi said.
"Different," Richard said.
"Different good or different strange?"
Richard sat on the couch. "Good. Adeyemi makes music."
"I know," Chidi said.
"You knew?"
"Everyone knows. He's been posting clips for two years. He's actually good." A pause. "Did you know?"
"I didn't," Richard admitted.
Chidi looked at him with the expression he used when Richard's awareness of anything outside football was revealed to be limited. "You live in a large world," he said. "You just don't always look at all of it."
Richard leaned back on the couch.
Outside the May evening was doing its warm, yellow thing — the city present and breathing beyond the window, the Arsenal preparation sitting somewhere in the background of everything, twelve days away and getting closer with the patience of things that did not need to hurry because they were coming regardless.
He looked at the ceiling.
Thought about the restaurant and Can saying calcifies and Jobe's brother's advice and Adeyemi's bassline and Lena's note and the three hours in a room that had nothing to do with football that had somehow felt connected to everything he understood about it.
"Chidi," he said.
"Yeah."
"Am I boring?"
Chidi turned from the television very slowly. Looked at Richard. Then looked back at the television. Then looked at Richard again.
"Who said that?" he said.
"Nobody said it. I'm asking."
"You scored a Champions League hat trick at seventeen," Chidi said. "You are many things. Boring is not one of them." A pause. "You are however extremely one-dimensional in your leisure activities."
"That's what I mean," Richard said.
"Okay," Chidi said. "So we fix it." He turned back to the television. "Starting with you learning what Adeyemi's music sounds like. Which I cannot believe I had to tell a seventeen-year-old who lives in the same city."
Richard laughed.
"Tomorrow," Chidi said, "I'm taking you somewhere."
"Where?"
"Somewhere that is not a training ground, a stadium, or a Nigerian restaurant." He said it with the finality of a plan already made. "Wear normal clothes."
Richard looked at him.
"You own normal clothes," Chidi said. "The stuff that isn't training gear or match-day smart. The middle section of your wardrobe that has never been used."
"I use it."
"Name one occasion."
Richard opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"Tomorrow," Chidi said. "Normal clothes. Ten o'clock."
Richard looked at the ceiling.
Twelve days to Arsenal.
One day to wherever Chidi was taking him.
He was, he realized, looking forward to both in equal measure.
That felt like progress.