It didn’t take long.
The moment manager Nigel Pearson stepped into the dressing room, the first thing out of his mouth was a swear.
“Lads, that was bloody brilliant!” “Beautiful comeback!” “I’m proud of the fight and unity you showed out there!” Clap, clap, clap.
After a round of emphatic applause, Pearson swept his gaze across the room.
It lingered on Leo and Mahrez for just a beat, and then a smile broke across his face.
“Lads, you’ve earned yourselves a day off with that performance!” The away dressing room erupted.
Leo just stood there, baffled.
More than the comeback win, he got the feeling his teammates were way more excited about the day off.
Then again, as a single guy, he had no idea why a day off was such a big deal.
That same evening, the Leicester City squad boarded the team bus and headed back to Leicester.
Back at Belvoir Drive, after saying goodbye to the other first-team players, Leo returned to the youth team dorm.
Leo’s family home was in the Leicester suburbs.
Not far.
Half an hour by car.
But an hour of commuting every day still felt like a waste to a kid dead set on becoming a professional footballer.
So on his seventeenth birthday, the day he signed his first professional contract with the club, Leo moved out of the house and into the youth team dorm.
That way, he could pour that hour of travel time straight into training.
It made Leo marvel at the thought: maybe landing in the body of this hardworking kid was fate.
A soul from another world, carrying a cheat system, sent here to help him chase his football dream.
No.
To be precise, to chase their shared dream.
Because both the Leo of this world and the Leo from ten years in the future had the same simple, pure dream: football.
The youth team dorm was a tiny single room.
A bed.
A desk and chair.
That was it.
If you wanted a shower or the toilet, you had to use the communal ones down the hall.
The one upside of that cramped little room was the view.
Outside the window lay the youth training pitch at Belvoir Drive.
Green grass, always in sight.
Free accommodation, close to everything.
No reason to move out.
Besides, on his hundred-pound weekly wage, he couldn’t afford rent anyway.
Leo sat down on the soft bed and finally found a moment to check his player interface.
A thought, and a translucent panel flickered into existence, like a character screen from a video game.
[Player Name: Leo Hale] [Age: 18] [Height: 178 cm] [Weight: 65 kg] [Preferred Foot: Right] [Club: Leicester City] [Talent: God’s Eye View] [Attributes: Ball Control C, Shooting D, Passing S, Defending D, Physical C, Mental B] [Overall Rating: 73] Leo studied the panel and clicked his tongue.
Aside from Passing and Mental, none of his other four attributes had even reached a B.
If he hadn’t just acquired peak Kevin De Bruyne’s passing ability to boost his overall rating, Leo’s real football level would have been somewhere in the fifties or sixties.
By the rating system of most football games, a fifty or sixty overall meant you could maybe hang around a top-five league’s youth setup, or ride the bench in a lower division.
In sports, a lot of things decide who wins and who loses.
But when you measure how good a professional athlete really is, it comes down to four things: speed, strength, skill, and intelligence.
In professional football, that’s speed versus strength, technique versus football IQ.
Leo didn’t know whether having a system meant he could still improve his physical attributes and skills through normal training, or if from now on he could only boost them by completing system missions and earning free attribute points.
He’d find out soon enough.
Train for a while, see if the numbers moved.
But right now, the immediate question was where to put those two free attribute points.
One thing worth noting: the six main attribute categories weren’t simple labels.
Each one broke down into smaller sub-attributes.
And those sub-attributes weren’t graded with letters.
They used raw numbers, which made things a lot clearer.
For example, his S-grade Passing broke down into four sub-attributes: Short Passing, Long Passing, Crossing, and Curve.
Thanks to inheriting peak Kevin De Bruyne’s passing, Leo’s numbers in all four were absurdly high.
Short Passing: 95.
Long Passing: 97.
Crossing: 97.
Curve: 98.
And with his S-grade talent God’s Eye View, one sub-attribute under Mental, Vision, had hit a terrifying 99.
Leo stared at the translucent panel.
It didn’t take him long to decide.
As the saying goes: in martial arts, nothing beats speed.
In professional football, speed is one of the most important metrics for measuring a player.
The higher your speed attribute, the faster you run on the pitch.
You get to every attacking or defensive decision a step ahead of your opponent.
Whether you’re dribbling past someone or tracking back, the faster player always has the edge.
The Physical category covered a whole cluster of sub-attributes: Acceleration, Sprint Speed, Balance, Jumping, Strength, Reactions, Stamina, Natural Fitness.
The ones directly tied to speed were Acceleration, Sprint Speed, and Reactions.
Leo’s Acceleration sat at 70.
Sprint Speed at 70.
Reactions at 72.
In plain terms, Acceleration governed his explosiveness, how fast he could hit top speed.
Sprint Speed was his maximum velocity.
And Reactions measured how quickly he could respond.
The higher the number, the faster he’d react on the pitch.
If 99 was the ceiling, then Leo’s Acceleration, Sprint Speed, and Reactions all hovering around 70 put him right in the middle of the pack among professionals.
Not fast, not slow.
For a midfielder, that was perfectly usable.
Of course, depending on a midfielder’s specific role and function, the attributes you needed changed.
A number ten, the creative hub linking midfield and attack, leaned more on passing, vision, and dribbling technique.
A holding midfielder, the shield in front of the back line, needed more stamina, strength, and tackling.
Leo was dead certain that after his FA Cup performance, he’d be called up to the first team.
But if he wanted to stay there, to survive the brutal physical battles of the Championship, he had to improve his ability to handle contact.
Play to his strengths, hide his weaknesses, and let his passing do the talking.
The problem was, you couldn’t build that kind of physicality overnight.
Still, through bulking up, adding muscle, and training, he could improve his ability to hold his own.
No need to waste precious free attribute points on that.
And better explosiveness could also reduce how often he got caught in physical duels in the first place.
So without a second thought, he dropped both free attribute points into Acceleration, bumping it from 70 to 72.
“Don’t really feel any different…” No golden glow.
No flashy game effect.
Nothing that felt like a noticeable change.
“Probably only notice it when I’m actually running.” He was muttering to himself when the iPhone 5S on his desk let out a sharp ring.
Mom!