Cagigao had used much the same approach with Bayern Munich, deploying the easy confidence of a man who had talked more talented people into more improbable decisions than he could easily count. He had framed Özil as a cornerstone: three domestic trophies in two seasons, proven at the highest level, the kind of player you build around. Bayern, stripped of Robben and Ribéry and facing a summer of uncomfortable questions, had actually listened. They said they'd think about it.
Some conversations plant their own seeds.
Back in the café, David had been turning something over in his mind.
"UEFA has rules about scouts approaching players directly," he said. "Are we not already in violation of that?"
Cagigao tilted his head with the patient expression of someone who had heard the question before. "If you genuinely believe that every transfer in top-level football begins with a formal bid submitted to a club's inbox, accepted in good faith, followed by fully transparent negotiations conducted under the watchful eye of the relevant football association, then I admire your optimism."
The logic was simple. No club would commit real resources to a pursuit without first knowing whether the player had any interest at all. That preliminary conversation had to happen somewhere. The rules existed, but so did the distance between the rules and what actually took place. FIFA had also, only that April, abolished the formal licensing requirements for intermediaries that had been in place for nearly twenty-five years, which meant that, technically, anyone could now act as a go-between. The grey area, always substantial, had just grown a little larger.
"Could I speak to Mr. Wenger directly?" David asked after a moment.
"He's been waiting." Cagigao reached for his phone and began to dial. "Let me count down: three, two—"
It rang twice. The line opened almost immediately, and the voice that came through was doing a poor job of suppressing its own energy.
"Francis — how did it go?"
"Sir, David would like to speak with you. I'm passing him the phone."
David took it. The first thing he heard was German, and he raised an eyebrow.
"Mr. Wenger speaks six languages," Cagigao said quietly. "French, German, English, Italian, Spanish and Japanese."
David nodded and settled in.
Wenger's English, when he switched to it, carried that familiar, unhurried musicality, a voice that had been in no particular rush for thirty years. "You know, I've been following your matches since Wolfsburg played Everton. I could recite a great deal back to you about what you've done this season, but I suspect you'd find that rather tedious. It's all there if you search for it."
"What I'd rather tell you is what we can offer. We'd build the attack around you. And if you're wondering whether that's genuine or just something I say, Thierry and Dennis are the better argument. From the first day I brought either of them to the club, I never hesitated to hand them the keys." A pause. "I believe you can give our football something it genuinely lacks right now."
Then, almost as an afterthought, Wenger said something that landed differently from everything before it.
"The most important thing in football isn't the sport itself. It's finding the conditions in which a player's deepest instincts can emerge. I believe, at Arsenal, your talent and your imagination would be pushed to their absolute limit."
David said nothing for a moment. The earlier part of the pitch had washed over him pleasantly enough, the kind of thing any ambitious manager would say. But that last sentence was different. It touched something real.
"Of course," Wenger continued, "I don't need an answer today. Take your time, speak to other clubs. But I suspect you won't find anyone with more honest intentions than we have."
He let a brief silence sit comfortably between them, and then, with the ease of a man who had seen everything and remained charmed by most of it, added: "I'll tell you a story. After Pep left Barcelona, he came to my house and said he wanted to work for Arsenal. I turned him down."
It was delivered with perfect stillness, not a boast, not quite a joke, but the kind of remark that reveals a man completely at ease with who he is.
After the call, David met with his agent Jonathan Barnett, who had cleared his diary weeks ago in anticipation of this summer.
"I've already had contact from more clubs than I can easily list," Barnett said. He was in excellent spirits, the kind of mood that only comes when you have represented someone who has just broken a European record at seventeen. He had been in this business long enough to have a sense of scale. Messi and Ronaldo at this age — had either of them done something like this? "Tell me what you want, and I'll find you the best possible destination."
Barnett's other major client, Gareth Bale, had been producing diminishing returns in Madrid, the Ballon d'Or felt progressively further away, and Barnett had begun quietly reallocating his energy. This summer had the feeling of something significant.
"I won't be staying at Wolfsburg," David said. "Arsenal is the preference in England. But keep the other options open."
It wasn't a negotiating position. It was plain common sense. Transfer deals involved salary structures, image rights, bonus clauses, and a hundred other variables that took time to resolve properly. Leaving yourself with only one option, before everything was agreed, was simply careless.
"Leave the professional side entirely to me," Barnett said. "My team has been preparing for this since May." He checked his schedule. "The Marc O'Polo shoot — their team has come in from Sweden and they're already in Wolfsburg. The day after the celebration, we'll go over and get it done. Shouldn't take long."
David nodded and walked back to the villa that had been his home for a year. He moved through the rooms slowly, taking in the small accumulated evidence of a life lived here, the arrangement of things on surfaces, the particular quality of light through particular windows in the late afternoon. It was strange, the way familiarity crept up on you without asking permission.
His phone buzzed.
Kicker: Pep Guardiola set to leave Bayern Munich at the end of the season. His next destination is widely expected to be the Premier League. Manchester City have made contact, with Pellegrini's departure now confirmed.
David stared at the notification for a moment.
"Well," he said, "that happened."
He felt a twinge of something, not quite guilt, but an awareness that the season had been unkind to Bayern, and that he had contributed to that unkindness in ways that still felt vivid. A Bundesliga title lost on goal difference. A Champions League semi-final. And now the manager was leaving.
"It makes sense," De Bruyne said from across the room. "The board wanted trophies, they got none, so they make a change. That's how it works."
"Kevin." David looked at him. "City have contacted you, haven't they."
It wasn't quite a question. De Bruyne was still for a moment, then looked down.
"They spoke to Patrick, yes. And David, I could — I mean, if you wanted, I could potentially—"
"Kevin."
David held up one hand and spoke quietly. "Leonardo da Vinci once said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. For you, the simplest thing, the purest thing, is creating goals. For me, it's more than just scoring them. And when either of us has the ball at his feet, the world has to pay attention." He paused. "Do you understand what I mean?"
He knew exactly what De Bruyne had been about to offer, to accept a lesser deal, to follow him to the same club, to keep what they had built together in Wolfsburg. And the impulse was generous and entirely like him. But De Bruyne was a player who had been undervalued once, who had fought for his place and his dignity in ways that had left marks. He deserved a club that came to him on his own terms, not as an attachment to someone else's transfer.
"Maybe we end up on opposite sides of a pitch," David said. "And maybe when that happens, we'll both be better than we are now."
The certainty behind it wasn't performance. It was simply true, and they both knew it.
De Bruyne smiled, and underneath the smile was something genuinely sad, because he was also old enough to understand that this was how growing up worked. Banquets always ended. The table always eventually cleared.
But then something shifted in him. The thought of David Qin as an opponent, fully released, playing against him rather than alongside him, stirred something competitive and alive that he hadn't felt since he was a teenager playing for everything he had in a small Belgian town.
He extended his hand.
"The friendship doesn't change," he said. "That's not part of the negotiation."
David slapped his palm against it, his expression bright. "Obviously. We're the Wolfsburg Twin Stars. You don't just forget something like that."
The following day, the city came alive.
The club anthem rang from every street corner. Green and white was everywhere, worn, hung from windows, draped over shoulders. Car horns had been going since early morning without sign of stopping. A double-decker bus carrying the squad moved slowly from the VFL training ground toward the city centre, the Wolfsburg crest visible on both sides, moving through a crowd so dense it seemed like the entire city had simply decided to stand in the road.
David let the transfer questions fall away entirely. He didn't think about wages or image rights or what the next manager might ask of him. He just stood on the bus with the Europa League trophy in both arms and felt the city.
"David! Hold it tighter — don't drop it!"
Lokhoff, beside him, looked genuinely alarmed.
"Torn," David shouted over the noise. "You know that 1999 Europa League trophy, the one Parma put up for auction?"
"What about it?"
"I bought it."
Lokhoff's face went through several stages. "How much?"
"Three hundred and thirty thousand euros."
The silence on that side of the bus was total. Then it filled with noise.
It was the largest single purchase David had made since arriving in Germany, and he felt no hesitation about it. The Europa League Golden Boot was enough to remember the goals. But he wanted something heavier in the trophy room, something that carried real weight in the hand and reminded you, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, of what certain seasons had meant.
"You're unbelievable," Malanda said, the envy audible in every syllable. "But at your rate, you'll earn that back in a fortnight."
David smiled and didn't say anything. At the wages Arsenal had proposed, it would actually be closer to ten days.
The celebration ran until evening, and then the fireworks began.
In June, rather than returning to China immediately, David and De Bruyne drove to Berlin.
The Champions League final was at the Olympiastadion: Barcelona against Juventus.
MSN against a Juventus side that had won four consecutive Serie A titles. It had every reason to be memorable. What nobody had quite anticipated was the pace of it. In the fourth minute, Messi split the Juventus defence with a diagonal that seemed to arrive from a different angle than expected, Iniesta arrived late into the space, and Rakitić converted.
Juventus responded well. They pressed high and pinned Barcelona back, and the equaliser came through that pressure, but their average age was thirty-one, and you could only sustain that kind of intensity for so long. Ten minutes later, Messi found another pocket of space. Buffon, usually implacable, let the shot slip through, and Suárez was there to finish. Two-one. After that, the energy Juventus had spent pressing was gone, and Barcelona simply moved the ball until there was nowhere left to run. In stoppage time, Messi played Neymar through, and the final score read three-one.
The Barça end of the Olympiastadion became something close to delirium. Their first Champions League in four years.
From his seat in the stands, David looked down at the pitch. Buffon walked in circles, processing what had just happened. Pirlo, with his beard, moved slowly toward the tunnel with the quiet dignity of a man who knew what he was carrying. Xavi jogged his last lap of a Champions League final, that low, efficient stride that had covered more of the pitch across more seasons than seemed physically possible, and David watched him with something that felt very much like respect.
They were getting older, this generation. Slowly, unavoidably. The names that would fill the next decade were already circling, the MSN at their peak, the BBC at Wolfsburg and Madrid and Barcelona, Pogba with his hair, Hazard at Chelsea. The generation that would define the next chapter.
David looked sideways at De Bruyne. Added a footnote that he kept to himself.
And us.
The river ran on. The heroes were carried by it, each in their time. The question of who would be standing at the end was not a question anyone could answer tonight.
It would be answered on the pitch.
In early June, after a brief trip through Italy, David returned home to Shenzhen. He trained with the national squad for a few days and then travelled with the squad to the World Cup qualifier against Bhutan.
China won nine-nil. David scored a hat-trick and was substituted off before the final whistle, not because he was tired, but because the score was already embarrassing enough, and running it up further on foreign soil served nobody's interests.
Back home, the endorsement requests that Barnett's team had been fielding all arrived at once. David had underestimated, somewhat, what a Bundesliga title and a Europa League record together would do to his profile in China. The Volkswagen Group data was extraordinary, Wolfsburg's global broadcast numbers had risen by over two thousand percent in a single season, and brand managers across multiple sectors had drawn their own conclusions.
After filtering, Barnett's team settled on three partnerships: Jianlibao in the food and beverage category, JD.com for e-commerce, and a renewal of the long-standing Volkswagen agreement. Shooting the campaigns was straightforward, athletic figures in clean spaces, the message essentially being he exists and is remarkable, and the entire thing was finished in just over a week.
What those ten days produced financially exceeded a full season's wages at Wolfsburg, where David had already been on the club's highest rate.
"Modern football," he said to no one in particular, looking at the numbers. "It's something else."
He was not complaining. He put a portion through the property contact that Gao Lin had recommended, apartments in Shenzhen, Shanghai, a few other cities where the trajectory seemed clear, and set aside a sum for his parents. Then he thought about how rarely he actually saw them, and decided that the money wasn't really the point. He invited them to England instead, to travel with him while the transfer worked itself out. He could maintain his training schedule around their presence, and at least they'd be in the same country.
The boardroom at Arsenal's offices was quiet and well-lit.
Wenger set his reading glasses on the table in front of him, the thin gold-framed pair that had become, across two decades, almost as recognisable as his face, and spoke with the measured composure of someone who had decided in advance exactly where he was going.
"Last season, the world considered us genuine title contenders. They thought we were ready." He paused. "Were we?"
He looked across the table. Stan Kroenke sat opposite, angular features, neat grey beard, the considered stillness of an American businessman in a room where most of the cultural references were outside his frame. He had acquired ten percent of the club eight years ago from ITV and had been buying ever since. His current holding stood at sixty-six point six percent. He was the majority shareholder, and he had the patience and the distance from the game itself that came with it.
To Kroenke's left sat Alişer Usmanov, the Russian billionaire whose round, perpetually cheerful face concealed a sharpness that you only noticed if you watched his eyes while someone else was talking. He held thirty point four percent of the club. His portfolio included early Facebook, Alibaba, Xiaomi. His recent earnings had eclipsed even Abramovich's. He was in this room because he chose to be, and everyone at the table understood what that meant.
Wenger let the silence answer his own question.
"We were not. We fell away in the second half of the season as we always do, and the reasons are not mysterious." He reached for his glasses and put them back on with the deliberation of a man making a point through his gestures. "Our average possession this season was sixty-five point one percent. Our number of high-quality chances created was lower than Everton's." He let that land properly before continuing. "We are playing beautiful football that leads nowhere. The reason is that every other top side has a fixed point, a player who gives the whole structure a direction. A spearhead. We don't have one."
His index finger traced a clean line in the air above the table, a simple arrow, pointing forward.
The applause from the far end of the room came from Usmanov. "Arsène is absolutely right." His voice was warm and carried a hint of pleasure, the pleasure of a man who had come prepared to agree. "I am already convinced. I would suggest that we commit to real investment this summer. You cannot run a football club by saving money. Return requires investment. I think we all know that."
He looked around the room with the benevolent expression of someone who has just said something obvious and is very interested in who will argue with it.
Usmanov's interest in David Qin was not limited to football. His portfolio had been shifting toward Chinese companies for reasons connected to the broader economic pressures on offshore holdings. The prospect of an iconic Chinese player at Arsenal, with everything that implied for brand reach in China, was entirely consistent with a strategy he was already pursuing. He would have pushed for the signing regardless, but the alignment made it cleaner.
He had no intention of spending his own money, of course. He intended to spend Kroenke's.
Kroenke said nothing for a long time. The silence was his tool, calibrated, deliberate, a way of making the room feel the weight of what was being asked. Usmanov's thirty point four percent was not a controlling stake, but it was enough to complicate life considerably if used with patience and intelligence. The stalemate between them over recent years had been real, and the austerity that had drawn so much supporter fury was largely its product.
"You want to spend a hundred million pounds on a seventeen-year-old," Kroenke said finally.
"He is the all-time Europa League top scorer in a single season," Wenger replied. "He finished four goals short of the Bundesliga Golden Boot. Wolfsburg's broadcast viewership increased by over two thousand percent this season. And beyond all of that, he is the player who makes the thing we already have actually work." He was patient. He had explained football to people who didn't understand it before. "The most important thing is not the statistics. It is that he solves a problem we have not been able to solve any other way."
Usmanov added his voice in support, not, Wenger knew, entirely out of footballing conviction, but the effect was the same. The room tilted.
What Kroenke did not know, and could not fully appreciate, was that Wenger's authority at Arsenal, though tested and eroded at the edges, still ran very deep. He had built too much, left too many marks on the institution, for the board to override him when he spoke with this kind of settled conviction. The "Wenger Out" banners that appeared in the stands were real, and they stung, but they were the product of the same frustration that Wenger himself was trying to address.
The silence stretched for long enough that two or three people around the table had privately concluded that today would end in stalemate.
Then Kroenke spoke.
"Fine. We increase investment. But I want to see results."
Wenger exhaled slowly and said nothing.
After the room had emptied, he sat alone at the long table. The building was quiet around him. He thought about 2004, the extraordinary, unlikely season when Manchester United's transitional uncertainty had given him the opening he needed, and he had walked through it without flinching. Then Abramovich had arrived with resources that simply couldn't be matched, and the window had closed as suddenly as it had opened.
He wondered, occasionally and without bitterness, whether things would have been different if Usmanov had become the majority shareholder instead.
We always imagine the road we didn't take was smoother, he thought.
He stood, fastened the top button of his jacket with the neat efficiency of long habit, and walked out of the room.
The hardest part was done. What came next would be complicated and tiring and would require everything he had.
Whether it would be enough, that was a question for a future that hadn't arrived yet. But he had faced questions like that before, and he had generally found that time, given sufficient patience, was willing to answer them.
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