"Wait. Are you serious?"
James was in his apartment back in England, his face filling the screen of the video call, his eyebrows halfway up his forehead.
He was Andrew's friend, a lawyer, the man Andrew had quietly been turning over in his head for weeks now as the person he wanted to bring on as Mateo's personal legal counsel.
On the other side of the call, Andrew was smiling.
That alone told James how big this was. Andrew King did not smile. Andrew was the stoic one, the one whose face gave you nothing across a negotiating table, the one who had once sat through an entire office Christmas party with the same expression he wore reading a contract. And here he was, on a video call, grinning like a boy.
"Yes. Serious." Andrew nodded. "That is why I need you here. Fast."
James was already moving.
"Okay. Okay, for sure. I will tender my leave now, I will put in for the break today."
He stood up from wherever he had been sitting, the camera swinging with him, his free hand already reaching for something off-screen, his whole body shifting into motion, the motion of a man who has just heard opportunity knock and does not intend to keep it waiting.
Andrew watched him bustle about, and a small smile stayed on his face.
"And George?"
James stopped.
"Oh." His face fell open. "Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I. Ehm."
He put a hand on the top of his head. His face scrunched up. He stood there in the middle of his own living room, thinking, the excitement of ten seconds ago colliding with the reality of the small person who depended on him.
Then something cleared.
"Okay. Okay, I can do this." An idea had arrived. "School year is over. I could just bring him along."
Andrew's brow creased.
"To here?"
"Yeah. I could."
"You are not coming here for a vacation." Andrew cut him off, his voice flattening. "I have a stack of contracts I need you to comb through with me line by line. Not to mention we need to start thinking about the tax exposure, how we structure his income so that the club salary, the image rights, and the commercial deals are not all being taxed as one lump in one jurisdiction. We will need to look at whether we route the endorsement income through a separate rights company, what he can legitimately defer, where he is liable and where he is not. This is not light reading, James."
James had gone quiet.
Andrew's voice got heavier.
"This role is going to require your full attention. If you cannot give it that."
He did not finish the sentence.
He did not need to. The meaning had gone across the line clean.
Andrew's voice had been harsh, and he knew it was harsh, and he did not enjoy it, but he knew he had to do it.
Because unlike his side of the family, Andrew was not a soft man. Mateo, his brother David, his beautiful sister-in-law Isabella, all of them lived their lives in a certain rose-coloured light, a warmth that Andrew loved about them, that he had loved his whole life, that was in fact one of the reasons he had always felt so at home around his brother's family. But he himself was not built that way. Andrew was pragmatic to the bone. And this was important. This did not just concern the next chapter of his own life and career. This concerned his nephew. And he needed it to be fully professional, start to finish, and he could not afford a single mistake. If being fully professional meant being hard on a friend, he would be hard on a friend. If it meant, one day, removing that friend entirely, he would not hesitate to do that either.
And James, who had known Andrew for years, knew that Andrew was not joking.
James also knew what this was. He knew what it could be. With Andrew leaving the firm, and with the possibility of becoming the personal legal counsel of what was very quickly shaping up to be one of the biggest superstars in world football, James knew this was his shot. This was the thing that made a man a partner. Handled right, this one client changed the entire trajectory of his career.
So really, he did not have a choice.
"I get it," James said.
He nodded to himself. Then, more firmly:
"I will find a way to handle George."
The words left a bitter taste in his mouth even as he said them. After months of fighting for it, tooth and nail, lawyer against lawyer, he had only just won extended custody of his son from his ex-wife. Leaving him now, so soon, felt wrong in his gut. But he told himself what men in his position always tell themselves. He told himself that even if his son resented him for it now, one day the boy would understand. One day, when the lifestyle James could give him had climbed by a massive notch, when partner money was coming in and doors were opening that had never been open before, the boy would look back and be grateful. That was what James told himself.
"I will handle everything here," he said. "Two days. In two days, you will see me there."
Andrew nodded.
"Okay. I will be expecting you."
James smiled then, and just like that, the tension of the last two minutes evaporated off his face as though it had never been there at all, the mark of a man who had spent his entire adult life switching registers on command.
"Okay then. Let me start getting ready." His grin widened. "The earlier I finish, the faster I get there for the goodies."
He laughed.
Andrew allowed himself a small chuckle.
"Okay. Let me leave you to get to it."
"Okay then."
They ended the call.
Andrew set the phone down.
"Sigh."
The breath came out of him long and slow, his shoulders dropping with it.
Then his eyes moved to his desk.
There, stacked on top of the dark wood, was a pile of documents. He looked at them.
And the smile came back to his face.
This was it. This was why he was happy. This was why he had told James to get on a plane from England.
Because after Mateo won the league, his standing had not only changed in the eyes of professionals and players and pundits. His value had changed somewhere else entirely too. It had changed in the eyes of the biggest sponsors in the world.
And the pile on the desk was the proof of it.
It was not that Mateo had not been getting deals before. He had been getting plenty. At the start, most of them had been local, Spanish companies, regional sponsors, the kind of thing Andrew did not consider worth a second glance. A semi-famous sporting goods store in Barcelona. A mid-tier clothing label. Low to mid level companies, eager to cash in early on the rising fame of a local boy before anyone bigger got there. There had been a flood of them. Genuinely, more than forty separate proposals had crossed his desk. And Andrew had blocked every single one.
He was going to tell Mateo about them, of course. But he genuinely believed, at least at the beginning of a career, that it was far better to latch on to a massive company first. You build your foundation on the giants. It is only once that foundation is rock solid, once your name carries weight on its own, that you start thinking about the smaller, lesser known brands, the ones where you can negotiate more control, more equity, more say. That was the order of things. Foundation first.
After that first flood came the next tier. These were the ones Andrew had started keeping. The ones he set aside and let sit, waiting either for the season to end or for the right moment to have a proper conversation with Mateo about them. These were the ones he actually considered.
Brands like Mango. CaixaBank. Rakuten. Gymshark. Xiaomi. Names like that. Most of them had come through the Barcelona connection, large Spanish companies with an existing relationship to the club, with the occasional giant from outside Spain who wanted to sign Mateo early. And that was the clever part, the thing Andrew respected about the outside offers. Getting a player like Mateo early, before the whole world had fully caught on, was one of the smartest moves a brand could make. You sign him now, on a relatively modest deal, and you lock him in before your competitors even realise what he is going to become. By the time he is the most famous footballer on the planet, you are already on his shirt, already in his adverts, already the brand people associate with him, and you got it all for a fraction of what it would cost you in two years. You put him on your bandwagon before anyone knows the bandwagon is leaving. The deals in this tier ranged from around 750 thousand euros to 1.5 million annually. They were substantial. They were serious money.
The biggest one in that group had come from Cupra, the car brand that also sponsored the club, and they had sent through a base annual deal of 2.15 million pounds a year. The car brand associated with Barcelona had gone all out, and Andrew understood exactly why. Car brands did not like sharing. It was a matter of image. They knew precisely how it would look if a rising star from a team they sponsored went and signed a personal car deal with a rival manufacturer. They had already lived through it once with Piqué, who had held a personal arrangement with Audi for years. They were not about to let it happen again with Mateo, a player whose star power they believed would climb well past Piqué's own. So they had moved early and moved hard, determined to have him tied to Cupra before anyone else could get near him.
For a long time, that Cupra offer had been the biggest deal Andrew had received.
That was, until the past few days.
Because since the day Mateo lifted the league title, three deals had come in, and each one was comparable to the Cupra offer, or bigger.
Prada had been the first big name, arriving with an initial offer of 2 million euros. Then, that same day, an offer had come from Gatorade at 2.5 million euros. And then, just a few minutes ago, the very reason he had called James in the first place, an email had landed from PepsiCo with a 3 million euro deal attached.
The fact that each offer had climbed by a clean 500 thousand from the last was, on its own, almost too much for Andrew to sit still through. These were the kinds of numbers only top players saw. And the truly staggering part was that these were just the opening offers. Nobody had sat down yet. Nobody had negotiated. There had been no conversation about bonuses, about performance clauses, about image rights or appearance benefits or any of the things that made a deal grow past its base. These were nothing but the base salaries. This was the floor.
He had gone through every one of them himself, carefully, more than once. But he was going to make sure he got a second set of eyes on each of them, and with the thought of introducing James to Mateo as his official counsel already forming in his head, it had felt like exactly the right moment to finally get his friend over here.
Andrew was, by no measure, a poor man.
As a senior associate at a major firm in England, his annual salary already sat at around 200 thousand pounds. Add to that the fact that he was unmarried, had no children, lived alone, had no family drawing on him, since the only family he had was a brother who had never taken a penny off him, and add on top of that the fact that Andrew believed in capitalism the way some men believe in God, that he had always kept a healthy portion of his wealth in the market through steady, safe positions managed by one of the big investment houses. His portfolio returned somewhere around 8 percent a year on average. On its own, that portfolio pushed his net worth up by another 30 thousand pounds annually without him lifting a finger. There was a reason Mateo had called him "the rich uncle" since he was small.
But even Andrew was shaken by what he was looking at now.
Coupled with the 10 million annual salary from the club, his nephew was, right now, in the space of a few weeks, about to surpass everything Andrew had ever built.
Everything. All the years in law school, the ones he had scraped through on instant noodles and library hours and a part-time job he had hidden from his tutors because they said it would drag his grades down. The all-nighters. The mock exams he had failed and sat again. The bar exam that had nearly broken him, that he had watched two of his brightest classmates fail outright and never recover from. The relief and the terror of getting picked up by a top firm. The decade of saving, of denying himself, of watching colleagues buy flashy cars while he quietly moved his money into positions that would still be there in thirty years.
All of it. Every year of it. About to be overshadowed by a single deal signed by his 17-year-old nephew.
And that thought, strangely, did not make Andrew bitter in the slightest.
It made him
EXCITED.
Just the thought of it now was pulling the full smile back across his face as he stared down at the deals on his desk. He genuinely could not contain himself. Maybe it was because he had no children of his own. Maybe it was because he had never forgotten a single thing his brother had done for him over the years. But Andrew truly, in his bones, considered Mateo his own. And the thought that Mateo was going to be somebody, somebody enormous, somebody the whole world would know, filled him with a kind of joy that had nothing to do with contracts at all.
Plus, and he would not lie to himself about this, Andrew was starting to genuinely love being an agent.
Maybe some of that was the money. He would not deny it. As a man who had grown up poor, it was no surprise that Andrew had always carried a certain deep love of money, even though his brother had turned out the exact opposite. But it was more than that. He had genuinely started to love the work itself. The calls. The offers landing on his desk. The chess of it, the reading of the other side, the knowing when to hold and when to move. It reminded him, more than he had expected, of his years as a contract lawyer, the same thrill, the same maneuvering, the same quiet satisfaction of closing something clean. He had walked into this thinking he was only doing it for his nephew, as a favour, as family. He had not expected to stand in his own office and realise he was actually enjoying it, the way he had once enjoyed the law.
He had even, in an idle moment, started thinking about that boy. That kid the man he had met at the Barcelona intra high had been going on about. A prospect, apparently. Something special.
But not yet. Not now. Not until Mateo's team was fully secured, not until Mateo had a full season behind him, not until everything was stable and running smooth. Only then would he even let himself think about it properly. Still. He could not lie. The pull of becoming a true sports agent, a real one, with a real stable of talent, was growing on him by the day.
He was still smiling, still turning over the initial drafts, when his phone rang.
It caught him slightly off guard. He looked to the side, and he saw it was the other phone, the one he had bought for business, the one holding the number he was slowly trying to turn into his "agent" number.
His brow furrowed a little.
As a new agent, his number was not yet well known. His email had made its way around, passed desk to desk, but not the number, not yet, and he had not gotten used to the sound of that particular phone ringing.
He picked up the iPhone 13 Pro Max and answered it, straightening in his chair, his voice sliding into something clean and even and professional.
"Andrew King here."
Then he heard it. A voice on the other end, mature, smooth, unhurried. And he heard something that reached straight through the last of his already crumbling composure and shattered the wall behind it.
"Good afternoon. This is Javier Morales from Nike Football Spain. I'm calling regarding Mateo King. We'd like to arrange a meeting to discuss a potential long-term partnership with Nike."
The peak of footballing sponsors had started appearing.
...
Andrew was not the only one in Mateo's family talking business and money now.
Right now, over at Aina's father's farm, in a small room off the side of the house, Mateo's dad David was sitting across from Aina's father, Oriol. David had come out to the farm specifically to meet him.
"Oh. Thank you."
David took the tray from Nora with both hands, thanking her warmly. She had brought in snacks and a jug of orange juice, setting it all down on the low table between the two men, fussing over the arrangement, sweet as ever.
She turned to Oriol and offered him a glass.
Oriol turned his face away.
"Hmph."
Nora's smile faltered. Just a little. A small drop at the corner of her mouth that she tried to cover.
David watched the whole thing over the rim of his own glass.
Nora gathered herself and straightened up.
"Okay then. Let me leave you two to your talk."
She started for the door. But as she went, she kept stealing little glances back at Oriol, one after another, her face soft and worried and searching, waiting for him to look at her.
He did not.
"Okay," she said quietly.
She let out a small sigh and slipped out of the room.
David sat there with a confused look spreading slowly across his face.
He turned to his brother-in-law, and there was a laugh already forming in his voice.
"Okay. What is going on there?" He leaned in closer to Oriol. "That is the first time in my entire life I have ever seen Nora act like that. How did you do it? And, more importantly, how can I recreate it?"
Oriol opened his eyes.
He looked at David. He opened his mouth to speak.
Then he paused.
"Wait."
He stood up.
He crossed the room, quietly, and went to the door. He eased it open a crack and checked the hallway, left and right, looking for his wife. She was gone, off down the corridor somewhere. He smiled to himself, shut the door softly, and came back to his seat. He sat down. He shifted forward to the edge of the chair. He glanced around the room one final time, as though the walls themselves might report back to Nora.
Then he leaned in toward David and dropped his voice to a whisper.
"It all started after the game."
David frowned.
"The game?"
Oriol's smile widened.
"Yes. The game." He nodded. "You know how I missed out on getting onto the pitch, because I did not sit with the family?"
David nodded. He remembered. He remembered it well, actually. It had not been until they were all heading back afterward that they had spotted Oriol sulking by the car, and only then that any of them had realised he had never joined them out on the pitch during the celebrations at all.
"Well." Oriol settled in. "I was very angry. Especially at Nora. I mean, how could she not notice that I was not around? Eh? I am her husband." He scoffed. "I was furious. My one chance to celebrate on the pitch with the players, at the Wanda Metropolitano, of all places. I mean, that is just."
He drifted off for a second, staring into the middle distance, still mourning it.
David, who was feeling a fresh stab of his own guilt now, because he had forgotten too, cleared his throat.
"Yeah. About that. I am also sorry, I."
"Oh, no, no." Oriol waved him off. "It is fine. I am not even angry anymore."
David blinked, confused.
"I mean," Oriol went on, "I was the one who chose to stay up with the fans during the match. It is not anyone's fault I missed it. Not really."
"Oh," David said.
Then his face creased again.
"Wait. So then why is she still."
Oriol smiled.
It was the smile of a man who believed he had cracked open the deepest secret in the universe.
"Because I have not told her that."
"What?"
Oriol leaned in further, delighted with himself.
"I am still pretending to be angry."
David's mouth fell open.
Oriol beamed at his reaction.
"It is so good, David. It is so good. I can stay up all night now watching games. And instead of shouting at me to come to bed, she brings me snacks. She brings me juice. She tiptoes around me." He spread his hands out, gloating, a king surveying his new kingdom. "I have never had this kind of authority in twenty years of marriage."
David stared at him, genuinely stunned, watching this man grin from ear to ear.
"But that is." David started, then stopped, then said it fast. "Wait. Does that actually work?"
"Trust me." Oriol nodded gravely. "If I had known this years ago. Oh, the things I could have gotten away with."
He took a small, satisfied sip of his orange juice.
David just kept looking at him, slowly shaking his head.
"You can use it too, you know," Oriol offered generously. "On my stubborn sister. You are married as well. I could teach you."
David was already shaking his head, fast and firm.
"Oh, no, no, no. No. I cannot do that. I still love my life very much, thank you. Happy wife, happy life."
He laughed.
Oriol tutted.
"You are too afraid."
"Thank you." David dipped his head. "I will take that as a compliment."
Oriol laughed at that, a real one.
Then David's face settled a little, and he pointed a friendly finger at his brother-in-law.
"Just one piece of advice, though. I would not drag this out too long if I were you. You know how women are. They have a way of quietly changing the argument on you. Keep this up long enough and, well, let us just say the fight stops being about how she forgot you on the pitch, and it becomes about how you have been giving her the cold shoulder for a week for no reason. And then, my friend, you are the one who ends up losing."
Oriol looked at him for a second, a flicker of confusion crossing his face. Then he shook it off and waved a dismissive hand.
"Oh, do not worry. I have this completely figured out."
He did not.
That very evening, he would still be sitting there pretending to be angry, refusing to talk to her, milking the guilt just long enough to get her blessing to watch a five-hour Movistar recap broadcast of the whole 2020/21 season. And exactly what David had warned him about was exactly what happened. Nora, who was not used to being the one doing the apologising, lasted about three days before she got completely fed up with it, and then she turned around and started a fight of her own, about how he had been ignoring her, taking it all too far, sulking around the house like a child. And she got genuinely upset with him. And Oriol would then spend the following few days apologising and consoling and coaxing her back into a good mood, his grand master plan having blown up spectacularly in his own face.
But that was still to come.
Right now, in the present, sitting in that room, Oriol still fully believed he had unlocked the secret to a happy marriage.
He smiled and picked up a snack and popped it in his mouth.
"So." He chewed. "What brings you out here today anyway? It is rare to see you away from that restaurant of yours."
David reached over and took a snack of his own.
"Well." He smiled. "That is exactly why I am here."
Oriol paused mid-chew, looking a touch confused.
David leaned forward.
"I have a business proposal."
Oriol's brow furrowed.
"Business?"
"Yes."
David was smiling now, leaning in, clearly pleased with whatever he was about to say, practically buzzing with it.
"I am thinking of opening a new restaurant."
Oriol's eyebrows went up.
"Seriously?"
"Yes." David beamed. "Seriously."
And the truth was, the restaurant business had been insane lately. The money David had brought in over the last month alone had already passed what he would normally clear in eight. Ever since that streamer had wandered into King's Palace and filmed his meal, the foot traffic had not stopped. It was relentless, especially on match days, when he could take in half a normal week's earnings in a single afternoon.
David was not a stupid man, and he was not a delusional one either. He knew perfectly well the stream had lit the fuse. He knew that being a genuinely good cook helped keep people coming back. He knew his wife's idea to bring in a proper local Spanish cuisine menu had helped enormously. He gave all of that its due. But he was also clear-eyed about the real reason his dream was finally coming true, and the real reason was the name over the door.
King's Palace.
King.
The same name as the new star player at FC Barcelona. And not by coincidence, because this was, quite literally, Mateo King's family restaurant.
David knew, with total clarity, that his son was the reason all of this was happening. But he could not bring himself to feel bad about it. He was simply, quietly, overjoyed to finally be running a properly successful restaurant after all these years. And as for the name, well. Mateo was his only son. The restaurant would be his one day regardless, sooner or later, it would all pass to him. So David did not feel one shred of guilt about leaning on the King name and a little of Mateo's shine to carry the place forward.
In fact, among his staff, there was a young man who had studied business, and the fellow had been full of good ideas. He had suggested putting up more televisions around the dining room so people could always catch a match. He had suggested framing photographs of Mateo and the family and hanging them at the entrance and around the walls, small candid ones, training ground shots, childhood pictures, the kind of thing that made the place feel personal and real. And every single one of those ideas had paid off. Spain was already a huge tourist hub, and King's Palace had quietly started to become a small destination in its own right, almost a mini landmark for visiting football fans, which only pushed the numbers higher and higher.
And it was that same employee who had said the obvious next thing. That David should capitalise on all of this while the iron was hot. That he should open a second restaurant. And that maybe, down the line, he could turn the whole thing into a small franchise.
For David, whose entire life's dream this was, hearing those words out loud had been almost too much. He could barely contain himself.
But before he could start seriously planning any of it, there was one major problem standing in his way. A real one. The restaurant was facing a particular issue right now that he could not solve on his own.
And that was exactly what had brought him all the way out here to his brother-in-law's farm.
A/N
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