The heavy, relentless Manchester rain had mercifully stopped, but the sky remained a solid, oppressive sheet of dreary, slate grey.
The air at the City Football Academy was incredibly humid, hanging thickly over the immaculate, perfectly cut grass of the training pitches.
The Manchester City squad was spread out across the pitch, engaging in their mandatory, rigorous physical warmups.
The atmosphere was slightly subdued.
The sheer physical toll of traveling to Romania, playing a high-intensity Champions League qualifier, and flying immediately back to England had left the players looking visibly sluggish.
Natán Comas was currently engaged in his usual, highly specialized routine of doing the absolute bare minimum required to avoid getting yelled at.
The fitness coaches had the squad lying on the wet grass, executing a grueling series of core exercises.
Crunches, Russian twists, and agonizingly long planks.
Natán, utterly exhausted because he had stayed up far too late passionately explaining the offside rule to the most beautiful women he’s ever seen, was cheating.
When the coach looked in his direction, Natán would forcefully engage his core, straining his neck to simulate the pain of a perfect plank.
But the absolute millisecond the coach turned his back to correct John Stones’ posture, Natán immediately dropped his knees to the wet grass, letting his stomach sag entirely, breathing a massive sigh of relief.
“Thirty seconds left! Keep those hips down! Push through it!” the head fitness coach barked, checking his stopwatch.
Natán gritted his teeth, briefly popping his knees back off the grass to maintain appearances, his arms shaking slightly from the sheer lack of sleep.
Suddenly, a pair of pristine, black Adidas training boots stepped into his peripheral vision, stopping just inches from his face.
Natán looked up, squinting against the grey glare of the sky.
It was Mikel Arteta, the primary assistant coach and Pep Guardiola’s most trusted tactical lieutenant.
“Natán,” Arteta said quietly, his voice calm but firm.
“Mikel,” Natán replied, straining his neck upward, still attempting to hold the plank.
“Pep needs to see you real quick,” Arteta instructed, pointing a thumb over his shoulder toward the massive, glass-fronted coaching offices that overlooked the training pitches.
Natán frowned, his arms beginning to burn.
“I’m kind of warming up.”
Arteta let out a short, highly amused snort, crossing his arms over his chest.
“We both know you’re not doing it. You dropped your knees the second Lorenzo turned his back. Come on. It’s real quick.”
Natán sighed heavily, abandoning the pretense of the plank entirely and collapsing onto his stomach in the wet grass.
He scrambled slowly to his feet, wiping the mud off the knees of his dark track pants.
He fell into step beside Arteta as they walked away from the squad toward the facility.
“¿Qué quiere ahora?” Natán asked, his voice laced with exhausted paranoia.
(What does he want now?) “Did I do something wrong in the game? I scored three goals, Mikel. Three. What is there to scream at me for?”
Arteta chuckled softly, shaking his head.
“Relájate, niño. Nobody is screaming. He just wants to talk tactics for the Stoke game.” (Relax, kid.)
As they walked past the central circle, Sergio Aguero, currently halfway through a set of grueling Russian twists, looked up and flashed a massive, teasing grin.
“Someone got called to the principal’s office,” Aguero jeered loudly in Spanish, earning a chorus of low chuckles from the surrounding players.
Natán just rolled his eyes, ignoring the Argentine striker as he followed Arteta through the heavy sliding glass doors of the facility.
He walked down the quiet, sterile, brightly lit hallway, his studs clicking softly against the linoleum floor.
He approached the large, frosted-glass door bearing a small, unassuming silver plaque that simply read: MANAGER.
He knocked twice, sharply.
“Endavant,” Pep’s muffled voice called out from the other side.
(Come in).
Natán pushed the heavy door open and stepped inside.
Pep Guardiola’s office was a massive, pristine sanctuary of obsessive footballing logic.
The walls were almost entirely covered in massive, interactive tactical whiteboards, filled with chaotic, overlapping neon lines, complex passing networks, and detailed opposition scouting reports.
Pep didn’t look up from the screen as Natán entered the room.
“You wanted to see me?” Natán asked cautiously, standing awkwardly in front of the massive desk, his hands clasped behind his back.
Pep finally tore his eyes away from the screen, resting his hands on the desk.
He looked at the teenager for a long, silent moment, his dark eyes calculating, analytical, and intensely focused.
“I want you on the left,” Pep stated simply, without any preamble or explanation.
Natán froze.
He blinked rapidly, entirely convinced he had misheard the manager’s Catalan.
“Are you messing with me?” Natán asked, his voice cracking slightly with genuine, profound disbelief.
“I’m serious,” Pep replied, leaning back in his ergonomic chair, his expression completely rigid and unyielding.
“I want to play Jesus Navas on the right this Saturday against Stoke.”
Natán stared at the manager, his brain violently rejecting the information.
“But… I never play on the left. Never. I am an inverted right-winger. My entire game is built on cutting inside onto my left foot. If I play on the left, I have to go outside. I have to cross it with my left foot, or cut inside onto my right foot. My right foot is terrible.”
Pep raised an eyebrow, picking up a pen and tapping it rhythmically against the desk.
“You played on the left in the youth games for Spain two years ago. I watched the tape.”
“But that was because the youth coach wanted to see something!” Natán argued, his voice rising in panicked frustration.
“He wanted to experiment in a meaningless friendly! This is the Premier League! We are playing away at Stoke City! It is physical, it is brutal! Why would you move me away from my best position?”
Pep stopped tapping the pen.
He leaned forward, locking his intense, terrifying gaze directly onto Natán’s dark eyes.
“Well,” Pep said quietly, the undeniable weight of absolute managerial authority vibrating in his voice.
“I want to see something.”
Natán stood completely still, his heart hammering against his ribs.
He desperately wanted to argue.
He wanted to scream that he had just scored a Champions League hat-trick from the right wing, that he was the most dangerous player in the squad in that specific position, and that moving him was a tactical suicide mission.
But he looked into Pep’s eyes, and he remembered the conversation on the touchline against Sunderland.
He remembered that this madman possessed a grand, terrifyingly complex vision that Natán couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
Pep wasn’t moving him to punish him.
Pep was moving him to challenge him.
Natán swallowed hard, his jaw clenching as he suppressed his massive, perfectionist ego.
“Okay, I guess,” Natán sighed heavily, dropping his gaze to the floor.
“I’ll play on the left wing.”
Pep smiled, a small, highly satisfied expression crossing his features.
“Good. Get back out there. We start tactical walkthroughs in ten minutes.”
The rest of the training session was an absolute, unmitigated nightmare for Natán.
When the squad finally broke into the high-intensity, eleven-versus-eleven scrimmage on the full-sized training pitch, Natán was officially deployed on the left flank.
He was wearing the neon-orange bib of the starting eleven, while Jesus Navas occupied his beloved, comfortable territory on the right side.
From the very first whistle, it was glaringly, painfully obvious that Natán was entirely out of his element.
Playing on the left wing as a left-footed player completely inverted the geometry of the pitch he had spent his entire life mastering.
When he received the ball out wide, his natural, deeply ingrained instinct was to drop his shoulder and chop the ball inside toward the center of the pitch.
But when he did that on the left side, he was forced directly onto his weaker right foot.
He was considered ‘both-footed’ by the media because he could reliably pass and shoot with his right, but it was nowhere near the terrifying, world-class standard of his magical left foot.
In the fifteenth minute of the scrimmage, Kevin De Bruyne played a beautiful, sweeping diagonal pass out to the left flank.
Natán controlled the ball instantly with his left foot.
Natán tried to execute his trademark move.
He did a rapid step-over and chopped the ball inside.
But as he opened his body to strike the ball with his right foot, the mechanics felt entirely wrong.
His hips were too stiff, his angle was too tight.
He scuffed the shot terribly, driving the ball weakly along the wet grass, directly into the legs of Nicolas Otamendi.
“No, Natán!” Pep screamed from the touchline, immediately blowing his whistle to stop the play.
“If you cut inside on the left, you must play the pass! If you want to shoot, use your right! If not, you must go outside and cross it with your strong foot!”
Natán gritted his teeth, jogging back into position, a dark cloud of profound frustration settling heavily over his head.
Five minutes later, David Silva slipped a perfectly weighted through-ball down the left channel.
Natán engaged his explosive speed, burning past Zabaleta effortlessly.
He reached the byline, looking up to see Sergio Aguero making a darting run toward the near post.
Natán didn’t need to cut inside this time.
He was on his strong foot.
He whipped a vicious, low cross directly into the danger zone.
The cross was an absolute masterpiece of speed and trajectory.
It bypassed the entire defensive line, perfectly finding the boots of Aguero, who easily tapped it into the back of the net.
Goal.
“Yes! Exactly!” Pep roared from the touchline, clapping his hands furiously.
“Keep the width! Deliver the ball!”
But despite the successful assist, Natán felt entirely miserable.
Crossing the ball from the outside line was not fun.
He felt like a traditional, old-school winger from the 1990s, completely stripped of his goal-scoring threat.
For the remainder of the ninety-minute session, Natán struggled massively to adapt.
He constantly found himself caught in two minds.
If he went outside, he was a lethal crosser, but he was completely predictable.
If he cut inside, he was forced onto his right foot, drastically reducing his ability to unleash a powerful shot or play a complex, defense-splitting pass.
His timing was off.
His positional awareness was inverted.
He constantly bumped into the overlapping left-back, Aleksandar Kolarov, completely congesting the space on the flank.
Every time he made a mistake, Pep Guardiola was right there pausing the scrimmage, and physically repositioning him on the pitch.
When the final whistle blew, signaling the end of the grueling session, Natán was completely physically and mentally drained.
He walked off the pitch with his head hung low, his neon-green boots dragging heavily through the wet Manchester mud.
He was starting to realize exactly why Pep was moving him.
The manager didn’t just want him to be an elite inverted winger.
Pep wanted him to be completely, terrifyingly versatile.
Pep wanted him to master both sides of the pitch, to understand the geometry of every single attacking angle, making him entirely impossible for opposition managers to tactically prepare for.
It was a brilliant, highly ambitious plan.
But as Natán trudged toward the locker room, his right foot throbbing from the countless scuffed passes, he couldn’t help but feel a deep, lingering sense of dread about the upcoming Saturday fixture.
Playing on the left wing in training was one thing.
Playing on the left wing against the brutal, physical, unforgiving reality of Stoke City away was an entirely different, terrifying nightmare.