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The British journalist's mouth was still open.
Not speaking. Just open. Like a man who'd walked into a wall he hadn't seen coming and hadn't yet processed the physics of it.
Luca waited. He'd learned this in another life — the pause after a tactical dismantling was its own weapon. Let it breathe. Let the silence do the work you've already done.
A Spanish journalist two rows back filled the void first. "So you're saying Mourinho's high defensive line was the vulnerability you targeted from the beginning of the match?"
"From the film session on Tuesday," Luca said. "Not from the beginning of the match. From four days before it."
Murmuring. A French journalist near the aisle leaned toward her colleague and said something low and fast. Luca caught the word incroyable. He didn't react.
The British journalist found his voice. It came back smaller than it had left. "Right, but — look, tactically, fine. You got your draw. One result. But you're saying this approach, this geometry as you call it —" he made the word sound faintly ridiculous, the way English journalists sometimes weaponised italics, "— you're saying it'll hold up against Manchester City? Against Dortmund? These are different animals entirely."
Luca looked at him. Not through him. At him. The way you look at a problem you've already solved.
"Mourinho is the best defensive manager in the world," Luca said. Flat. No qualification. "And we found the hole in his system in eighty-five minutes." He let that land. "Mancini relies on individual brilliance. You put enough pressure on the spaces between his players, the brilliance has nowhere to go." He shifted slightly in his chair, forearms resting on the table. "Klopp relies on emotion. On energy. On the crowd and the sprint and the noise feeding back into his players' legs." A beat. "We don't play with emotion. We play with geometry."
The room was very quiet.
Not the quiet of boredom. The other kind.
A German journalist — Luca had clocked him earlier, Kicker or Bild, the notepad gave nothing away — leaned forward sharply. "You're saying Dortmund's press can be neutralised geometrically? That's an extraordinary claim from a sixteen-year-old."
"It's an ordinary observation from anyone who's watched their last six matches," Luca said. "Their press is triggered by the backpass. Specifically, the goalkeeper receiving under pressure. You don't give them that trigger, the press never launches. You're just playing against a 4-2-3-1 that's slightly tired in the second half."
"And you think Fiorentina can —"
"I think we did," Luca said. "Tonight. Against a harder test. So yes."
The German journalist sat back. He didn't argue. People rarely argued when you replaced their hypothetical with a completed fact.
The British journalist wasn't done. They never were, the ones who came in with an agenda. He shuffled his notes — unnecessary, performative, buying himself a second — and tried a different angle. "Your manager." He glanced toward Rossi at the far end of the table. "Does he share your confidence? Because from the touchline tonight, Fiorentina looked like a team that was holding on in the final twenty minutes, not a team executing a plan."
Rossi raised an eyebrow. He hadn't spoken in eleven minutes. He'd been sitting with his arms folded and the expression of a man watching a film he'd already seen, waiting for everyone else in the cinema to catch up.
"You want to answer that one?" Luca said to him.
Rossi opened his mouth.
"Actually," Luca said, turning back to the journalist, "I'll answer it. Holding on and executing a plan aren't mutually exclusive. The plan was to stay compact, absorb their pressure in the seventy-third to eighty-second minute window — which is historically when Mourinho's sides push highest — and hit them in the channel when they overcommitted." He paused. "We did exactly that. The fact that it looked like pressure means it worked. If it looked comfortable, they'd have adjusted."
Rossi made a sound. Not a word. Something between a laugh and an exhale.
The British journalist's pen was no longer moving.
A younger journalist — Italian, local press, probably La Gazzetta — raised her hand from the third row. "Luca, for the Italian supporters watching tonight — what do you say to them?"
He considered it for exactly one second. "Watch the next match."
"That's all?"
"That's enough."
He pushed his chair back. The legs scraped against the floor — a small, concrete sound in a room full of people holding their breath. He stood, straightened the collar of his club jacket, the purple dark under the press room lights.
He looked directly at the nearest camera. Not the journalist. The camera.
"Tell Manchester City," he said, "we are looking forward to next week."
He stepped away from the microphone.
No smile. No wave. Nothing that could be clipped and replayed as arrogance, because it wasn't arrogance — arrogance required uncertainty underneath it. He walked the length of the table, past the water glasses and the tangled microphone cables, past the PR officer who was already reaching for her phone, and through the side door without looking back.
Rossi remained at the table for a moment longer. A Spanish journalist called out something — a follow-up, another question, the room coming back to life. Rossi stood, buttoned his jacket, and looked at the assembled press corps of European football with the expression of a man who had just watched a sixteen-year-old dismantle a courtroom.
He shook his head. Once. Slowly.
Not in disbelief.
In the specific, private satisfaction of a man who'd known something before everyone else did.
Then he followed his player out the door.
Behind them, the room erupted.