After returning from St Andrew’s, Zayn lay on his bed, staring blankly at the system panel glowing faintly gold.
The system had changed while he was watching the derby, but he had been too absorbed in the match to notice.
[Main Quest 2: Setting Out]
[Objective: Sign your first commercial contract.
Limited to personal sponsorship agreements, endorsement contracts, and commercial activities unrelated to the club.]
[Reward: Realization Rate +15%, random B-rank Skill x1]
A commercial contract?
He was an Aston Villa U18 player who had signed his first professional contract less than forty-eight hours ago.
He had not even come close to the first team yet.
Who would offer him a sponsorship or endorsement deal?
He was nobody.
A highly rated prospect from Arsenal, Manchester City, or Chelsea might at least benefit from the prestige of coming through a major club’s academy.
But Aston Villa’s academy?
It belonged to a fallen giant languishing in the Championship.
Things might have been easier if he still had his former identity.
With the vast Far Eastern market behind him and the label of a “rising star playing abroad,” even a mediocre player could probably land a few endorsement deals.
But now he was Zayn Ryder, a fair-skinned, blond-haired Birmingham native.
On an island where millions of children played football, no one would give him a second glance because of his background.
Zayn shifted his gaze lower on the screen.
[Side Quest: First Victory]
[Objective: Win the first official match of your career.]
[Reward: Realization Rate +5%]
He was left speechless.
Was this a football system or a business system?
Signing a commercial contract was a main quest, while winning a match was only a side quest.
It had everything backwards.
Still, complaining would not complete the quests.
The side quest should not be difficult.
Now that he had joined the U18s, there would be plenty of competitive matches.
Under the English academy schedule, Aston Villa U18 would compete on three fronts that season: the U18 Premier League, the U18 Premier League Cup, and the FA Youth Cup.
The league ran throughout the season, with cup matches scattered between fixtures.
There were matches almost every weekend and often during the week as well.
He only needed one victory. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
Villa were not among the strongest sides in the southern division of the U18 Premier League, but they were not pushovers either.
An opportunity would come.
The main quest was the real problem.
At present, Aston Villa simply did not have much commercial appeal.
Their academy was not poor.
The club had a proud history and a strong foundation, but it had produced very few outstanding prospects in recent years.
The only recent player they could truly point to was Jack Grealish.
Grealish had broken into Villa’s U21s at fifteen, moved up to the U23s at sixteen, and made his first-team debut at eighteen.
Since Gordon Cowans, he was the only player to emerge from Villa’s academy who truly deserved to be called a prodigy.
The academy’s struggles were closely tied to the club’s current situation.
In 2016, a businessman Tony, chairman of the Recon Group, bought Aston Villa outright from American owner Randy Lerner for £76 million, shortly after the club’s relegation from the Premier League
Seventy-six million pounds for a historic club with 142 years of history and a European Cup to its name.
Tony’s plan was straightforward.
Buy a fallen traditional powerhouse at a low price, invest heavily in promotion, then sell it for several times the amount once the club returned to the Premier League and its value soared.
After completing the takeover, he made grand promises to Villa supporters.
The club would return to the Premier League within three years and eventually become one of Europe’s top ten teams.
The promises were ambitious, and Tony did spend heavily.
The Championship’s most high-profile signing that season was John Terry, Chelsea’s former captain, who joined Villa on a free transfer.
At thirty-six, Terry earned £60,000 a week, roughly six times the Championship average.
Tony had invested real money in the push for promotion.
But Zayn remembered that he ultimately failed to take Villa back to the Premier League.
After the expensive promotion push failed, his finances collapsed.
He faced multiple lawsuits, while the club fell into a financial crisis and was left to deal with the consequences.
At the same time, pouring so much money into the first team had severely reduced the academy’s budget.
Scouting funds, facility maintenance, and academy coaching salaries all had to make way for the first team’s transfer spending.
Even so, a few promising players remained in the older age groups.
Most of them had grown up in Villa’s academy from a young age and had joined before the club’s relegation to the Championship.
But compared with the overall standard of youth development in England, that foundation was no longer enough to stand out.
Across England, 2017 had become a historic golden year for academy football.
The Premier League’s youth systems were collectively enjoying the rewards of years of development.
In 2017, England’s youth teams from U17 to U21 finished six major international tournaments with four titles and two runner-up finishes.
In June, England won the U20 World Cup.
It was the country’s first world title in fifty-one years and the first U20 World Cup in the team’s history.
In July, the U19s defeated Portugal 2-1 in the European Championship final to become champions of Europe.
In May, the U17s narrowly lost to Spain on penalties in the European Championship final.
Five months later, they met Spain again in the U17 World Cup final in India.
After falling 2-0 behind in the first half, England scored five unanswered goals after the break to complete a stunning 5-2 comeback.
Manchester City’s Phil Foden won the Golden Ball at that tournament, while Liverpool’s Rhian Brewster claimed the Golden Boot.
Four titles and two runner-up finishes.
Through a full year of dominant performances, England’s Young Lions showed the world the results of the academy reforms introduced under the Elite Player Performance Plan in 2012.
That was the environment Villa’s academy had to survive in.
Villa’s academy was not bad.
English youth development as a whole was simply too strong.
It was so strong that an academy as merely “good” as Villa’s could still be pushed toward the margins by the constant competition.
England’s academy system produced thousands of well-trained young players every year.
As the standards at elite clubs continued to rise, countless talented prospects were filtered out by the fierce competition.
Zayn lay on his back and stared at the ceiling.
Foden, Brewster, Sancho, Hudson-Odoi.
Those names would echo across European football within a few years, and they were already climbing from starting points he could not yet reach.
Those prodigies had already stepped onto the world stage.
Meanwhile, he was still building toward a chance to play for the U18s and worrying about how to secure a commercial contract.
But Zayn was not discouraged.
He closed the system interface and switched off the bedside lamp, plunging the room into darkness.
Outside the window, the Birmingham night was quiet and deep.
In the distance, he could faintly hear one or two train whistles as the London-to-Liverpool line passed through the heart of the city.
He closed his eyes.
Tomorrow would be a new day.
Geniuses had their own path.
Those with cheats had theirs.
The commercial contract could wait.
There was no point trying to rush it.
One step at a time.
First, get onto the pitch.
First, win.