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After the trophy presentation, there was one final piece of ceremony: the award for the final's Most Valuable Player. The Europa League Golden Boot itself would be presented at next season's draw. David collected the MVP trophy from Platini's hands and was immediately pulled away by Hecking for a round of post-match interviews, barely keeping his feet on the ground.
"I want to thank my teammates, the coaching staff, everyone behind the scenes," he said, composed and unhurried. "Thank my parents for giving me the chance to play. And thank the supporters for everything they've given us this season." He paused for just a moment. "I've still got a long way to go. I hope we can keep going forward together."
No theatrics. No tears. A clean, honest thank-you, and then he was done.
He arranged for an assistant to take his parents to the airport. They were flying back to China, while he remained in Germany for a few more days. The title celebration was coming, and there were other matters to attend to. The summer transfer window was almost upon them, and that fact sat beneath everything like a quiet, unavoidable tide.
David knew he wouldn't be staying at Wolfsburg. De Bruyne, in all likelihood, wouldn't be staying either. They had never discussed it directly. There had been no need. Players of their level were simply too large for the frame that had produced them, and the market would come for them whether they welcomed it or not.
Up in the stands, while the Wolfsburg faithful were still lost in celebration, certain figures moved with quiet purpose. Among them was Francis Cagigao, Arsenal's chief scout, the man responsible for more of the club's best signings than most supporters would ever know.
He clicked the cap back onto a ballpoint pen, a LAMY engraved with the Arsenal crest, one of just over thirty made as a private commemorative piece to mark the Invincibles season of 2003-04. Then he closed his notebook.
Cagigao's story was, in its own way, as interesting as the players he found. Born in London to Spanish parents, a lifelong Chelsea supporter by inclination, he had played in the Arsenal youth system in the eighties before accepting, at twenty-eight, that talent had not been equally distributed in his direction. He became a scout instead, and over the years had quietly assembled a record that read like a highlights reel of modern Arsenal history: negotiating Fàbregas's contract on a hotel sofa, persuading Wenger to pass on Keyman and sign Van Persie instead, identifying Arshavin when it was far from obvious, bringing in Reyes, recommending Cazorla and Monreal, brokering the arrival of Alexis Sánchez.
None of it with any fanfare. In the Wenger era, when the manager controlled everything, Cagigao appeared in no photographs with players and gave no interviews. His work ran directly to Arsène, and that was that.
"Arsène was right," he said to his assistant, his eyes still following David across the pitch below.
It had been after the Asian Cup that Wenger had first mentioned the name. There is a player, he had said. I want you to see him.
Cagigao was not a man who operated on reputation. He needed to see things for himself. So he had attended seventeen Wolfsburg matches across the season, league, Europa League, DFB-Pokal, and by the end, he had seen enough.
He thought back to the day Wenger had first brought him in, all those years ago. The tidy office, the careful introduction to Steve Rowley, the chief scout. We need to change how we play, Wenger had told him. And we need to change how we find players. Not to sell them. To build with them.
That conversation had been sixteen years ago.
"I need to speak with him," Cagigao said.
The question of access was already solved. The China national team manager, Alain Perrin, provided a connection that bypassed the usual channels, a personal introduction that would put Arsenal a step ahead of the crowd now gathering to circle Wolfsburg's players. Sentiment and loyalty had their limits in football, but relationships still opened doors that money alone couldn't.
Cagigao glanced across the stands. He recognised faces, other scouts, other clubs. The old days, before the internet had flattened everything, had been wilder. You didn't just file a report; you cultivated informants, built relationships with academy coaches, moved fast and quietly, because if you hesitated, the player was gone. Some things hadn't changed as much as people thought.
David and his teammates left Warsaw early, returning to Wolfsburg ahead of the double-winning celebration scheduled two days hence.
That night, in a room where the moonlight barely reached the floor, David sat with his eyes open in the dark and listened to the system's voice fill the silence.
Phase Task: 2014-15 UEFA Europa League — Complete.
Task Rating: S.
Task Reward: Select one of the following three talents.
Dennis Bergkamp's First Touch.
Thierry Henry's Ball Retention.
Davor Šuker's Golden Left Foot.
He didn't reach for an answer immediately. He lay still and thought it through properly.
The S rating made sense when he considered it honestly. Not just a winner's medal, but the Golden Boot and a broken all-time record. The system had responded in kind.
The three options were distinct enough to require real consideration. He was a left winger who needed to break quickly and effectively. His next destination, if the plans held, was the Premier League, a physical environment where the ability to hold the ball under pressure genuinely mattered. But his ball retention was already strong, and Henry's gift, formidable as it was, would be adding depth to something he already possessed. He set it aside.
Bergkamp's first touch was arguably the most refined the game had ever seen, that quiet, impossible exactness with which the Dutchman could receive any ball at any pace and immediately be in control of the next moment. But David's own first touch, sharpened by the Fairy Touch and the Three-Dimensional Awareness running through everything he did, had developed its own character. Not Bergkamp's precision, perhaps, but something stranger and harder to prepare for. He wasn't sure he wanted to replace it.
Which left the third option.
He had first become aware of Davor Šuker in the summer of 1998, when the Croatian forward had done something that seemed almost mathematically impossible: outscoring Ronaldo, Batistuta, Vieri, Bergkamp, and Shearer to claim the World Cup Golden Boot. He had done it with a left foot that appeared to have been designed for the purpose, unhurried, varied, instinctive in a way that felt less like a physical attribute and more like a form of music.
"The third one," David said quietly.
The sensation arrived almost immediately, a tingling in his left foot that moved upward through the leg, as if something neural was rearranging itself along a faster path. He'd felt something like this before, at the moment a new template had bonded. Unfamiliar at first, then settling into what felt, within minutes, like it had always been there.
He thought about what that meant. Pavel Nedvěd, they said, could run for ninety minutes on fumes because he had been born with three kneecaps rather than two, a structural detail that changed his entire relationship with physical effort. Dennis Smith Jr. had five knee ligaments instead of the usual four. Mike Tyson's skeletal structure was subtly different from most humans'. The margin between a good player and a legendary one sometimes resided not in training or desire but in a single quiet fact of biology that nobody had chosen and nobody could replicate.
He reached for the ball on the shelf beside the bed, the one he'd kept from the hat-trick against Leverkusen, and tapped it with his left foot in the dark.
Tap. Tap.
Through the wall, De Bruyne heard it and lay back on his pillow, somewhere between exasperated and genuinely moved.
Won the Europa League tonight. Still practising at midnight.
He stared at the ceiling for a long moment.
I'm going to have to work much harder than I thought.
The football world, meanwhile, was doing what it always did in the immediate aftermath of something extraordinary: talking.
Kicker: "Wolfsburg 4-1 Sevilla — Europa League Champions. David Qin, 17, becomes the competition's all-time single-season top scorer with 19 goals. De Bruyne claims the European assist title with 36. The Wolfsburg Twin Engines have shaken the entire continent."
BBC Sport: "The summer window opens July 1st. Premier League clubs are already positioning themselves in pursuit of Wolfsburg's two most valuable assets."
The Sun: "Wenger, whose judgement has been questioned after years of near-misses, is reportedly planning to move on Özil, signed two seasons ago for a then-club record £42.5 million, with scouts spotted near Arsenal's training facilities ahead of what looks set to be a dramatic summer overhaul."
AS: "The most likely candidates to set a new transfer record this summer are Qin and De Bruyne of Wolfsburg. Even last year's Golden Boy award winner Raheem Sterling cannot compete with their market value at this moment."
China Sports Daily: "Bundesliga champions and Europa League champions. David Qin has won his first and second major honours abroad. He has written a Chinese name onto two of European football's most coveted trophies. For that, we congratulate him, and we thank him."
In China itself, the reaction was something different from the measured tone of the sports press. The supporters who had been waiting for this moment, waiting for years, in some cases for most of their lives, simply let it go.
The forums and social media threads ran for thousands of posts, almost none of them coherent and almost all of them exactly right.
@GreenTerraceGhost: No culture, just vibes — but what incredible vibes.
@WuhanWolfpack88: We share in this glory.
@TransferOracle_12: Two major titles and a Golden Boot — minimum €80 million market value.
@FootballMathGuy: That was a month ago. Add another ten.
@HomesickInHeilongjiang: Anyone know if he's doing anything in China during the break? Going abroad to watch him is killing my wallet.
@ShanghaiSoccerNerd: If he joins an English club, isn't the Premier League Asia Trophy being held in China this summer?
@HomesickInHeilongjiang: Now we're talking.
@RealistFC_CN: Barcelona and Real Madrid aren't going to open up a spot for him. In England, who can actually afford this?
@BudgetAnalystFC: City have around €130 million. PSG about €90 million. United about €70 million. Arsenal, if they sell Özil, could get close to €90 million.
@NorthBankObserver: It's not just Özil. Podolski, Diaby, others — Arsenal look like they're clearing house completely.
@SkepticalSupporterCN: Is he actually worth it though?
@BayernMunichCorner: Go ask Bayern. See if they'd pay €90 million for him now.
@TacticalDreamerCN: Qin, Sánchez, Cazorla, Oxlade-Chamberlain in the same midfield. I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm saying I'd watch every single minute of it.
@GoalMachineObsessed: World Cup qualifying in June — Qin might come back to China.
@RealistFC_CN: We're playing Bhutan and the Maldives. He doesn't need to be there. Let him play in a league that challenges him.
[Thread continues for 847 more replies.]
Late May in Wolfsburg felt warm in a way that had two temperatures running through it simultaneously, the heat of celebration and the cooler note beneath it, the one that comes when you understand that something good is ending. Every champion's parade carries that within it, if you know how to look.
The players' agents had started their work the morning after Warsaw. Contract talks, transfer enquiries, the professional dismantling that follows any season of exceptional success. It was how the game worked. It didn't make it easier.
David met Francis Cagigao at the café he visited most mornings, a quiet corner table, two coffees, no entourage. Cagigao had done his preparation carefully enough to know that elaborate pitches and tales of institutional glory were not what this particular young man wanted to hear. David Qin was calm in a way that was rare for his age, and calm people resented being sold to.
So Cagigao simply laid out terms. Signing fee. Weekly wage. Image rights. Everything at the upper end of what the club was willing to offer, and the weekly wage was £200,000, a figure that would have been unthinkable at Arsenal three years earlier, when the unofficial cap of £100,000 had been treated almost as a moral position.
Cagigao thought briefly of the phone call from Wenger the previous evening. Özil was asking for £180,000 a week or he'd start thinking seriously about extending his current deal; with two years remaining on his contract, the prospect of losing him on a free was a genuine concern. The FA Cup and Community Shield felt thin justification for that number when set against what David Qin had just produced: a Bundesliga title, a European trophy, and a record that had stood for five years.
Wenger had also mentioned, almost in passing, that he'd been asked to open talks with Bayern Munich about Özil's availability. With Robben and Ribéry both injured, Bayern had lost much of their attacking edge and ended the season with nothing, most recently a 3-2 defeat to Dortmund in the DFB-Pokal final, a performance so poor that Karl-Heinz Rummenigge had gone to the press with hints about managerial change and the possible return of the club's legendary fitness doctor Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt.
Which meant Arsenal held a reasonable hand. And Cagigao intended to play it.
"Look at our man," he rehearsed mentally, running through the argument he'd make to the Bayern representative. "Özil helped us win the FA Cup again. Three domestic trophies in two seasons. The man is invaluable to us. You want him? You'll need to pay for him properly."
"Five hundred and fifty million euros? Easily worth it. No regrets guaranteed."
He permitted himself a small, private smile and took a sip of his coffee.
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