“Mentality.”
Lúcio leaned back against the office wall, crossing his massive arms.
He let the word hang in the cool air.
Ramalho waited behind his desk.
“What stops Brazilian players from making it isn’t a lack of talent,” Lúcio said.
“We have too much talent.
It’s the mentality filter that separates them.
It’s what happens after the money arrives.
The attention.
The women, the friends who were never around before.
Suddenly everyone is very interested in your time.
You see it here every single generation.
A kid who was exceptional at seventeen turns into a twenty-two-year-old with a fast car and a slow career.”
Ramalho nodded slowly.
He had seen it too many times to argue.
“What about Léo?”
Lúcio considered the question, staring down at the floor tiles.
“I think he’ll be fine.
The two years he spent—wherever he was, whatever he was doing—I don’t think it was easy.
You can see it in how he absorbs a hit.
He already knows what this life costs.” Lúcio looked up.
“I’m not worried about the talent, and I’m not worried about the mentality.”
“Good.” Ramalho picked up his clipboard and pushed his chair back.
“Then I’ll just offer a piece of advice.
Be careful walking to your car in the dark for a while.”
Lúcio blinked.
He dropped his arms.
“What?”
“You were fairly rough with him today,” Ramalho said, holding a perfectly straight face.
“I’d hate for something unfortunate to happen to you in an empty parking lot.”
“Porra—” Lúcio scowled.
“That was your idea.”
“I have no memory of this conversation,” Ramalho said, and walked out.
Léo’s phone buzzed against the cheap nightstand just as he walked through the dormitory door.
He dropped his training bag on the floor and picked it up.
“Uncle Shawn.”
“Léo.” The line cracked with static.
Shawn cleared his throat.
“I got—there’s money in my bank account.
A lot of money.
Did you—”
“I sent it.”
“You—no, listen to me, you’re over there by yourself.
You need that for—”
“Uncle Shawn.” Léo sat on the edge of the stiff mattress.
“My salary is a hundred and fifty thousand reais a month.
I’m living in the club dormitory.
My meals are covered, my travel is covered.
I have literally nothing to spend money on.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
“I know what you paid out of your own pocket over the last two years.
The registration fees, the travel, the lawyer.
You never touched my inheritance.
All of it came from the store.”
A long silence stretched across five thousand miles.
“You didn’t have to,” Shawn murmured.
“I know I didn’t.
You’re my family.
You did it anyway.
Let me do this.”
Through the receiver, Léo heard the familiar, ambient noise of the house in the late afternoon.
A cabinet closing.
The squeak of the wooden chair Shawn always sat in after a double shift at the neighborhood store.
“Okay,” Shawn said finally.
The resistance bled out of his voice, leaving behind a quiet dignity.
“Okay, Léo.
But you tell me if you need anything.”
“I will.
And listen, Mary’s been talking about moving closer to Jake’s school district.
The good high school.
Go do that.
I’ll send something every month to cover it.”
Another short silence.
“She’ll say it’s too much.”
“She’s not on the phone right now.”
A muffled shout echoed from somewhere in the background, proving that Mary was, in fact, well within earshot.
“I’m talking to Léo!” Shawn yelled back.
“Don’t—”
“Tell him he needs to eat protein and stop spending all his money!” Mary shouted.
Shawn sighed heavily into the receiver.
“She says eat your vegetables.”
“Tell her I will.”
Shawn relayed the message.
A brief domestic negotiation took place on the other end.
Mary hid her love behind relentless nagging, and Shawn usually bore the brunt of it.
Shawn came back on the line with the slightly ruffled composure of a man who had just had his ear flicked.
“Anyway,” Shawn said, sobering.
“I know I don’t know football the way your father did.
But I read online that it’s a dangerous sport.
Injuries and all that.
You’re over there alone, so you’ve got to take care of yourself.”
“I know.
I will.”
“Good.” Shawn paused.
The cadence of his voice shifted, dropping low.
“One more thing.
The recording.
Jake’s recording that he leaked.
You know it turned into a massive scandal.”
“I heard.”
“The USSF suspended a dozen people.
Launched a whole federal investigation.” Shawn took a slow breath.
“Thorne was arrested.
Last month.
He’s been formally charged.”
Léo stared at the blank white wall of the dormitory.
He thought about the mahogany desk.
The heavy, polished door.
The conversation through the drywall that Léo had stood listening to, his back pressed against the plaster, forcing himself to breathe quietly.
“Good,” Léo said.
“Yeah,” Shawn agreed.
They talked for a few more minutes about nothing in particular—Jake’s grades, the store inventory, the neighbor’s dog.
Then they hung up.
Léo set the phone down and sat in the quiet room.
He thought about the training session.
He thought about Lúcio.
It took him longer than he would have liked to strip the anger away and analyze the mechanics of it, but he finally got there.
Every elbow, every shoulder barge, every perfectly timed collision that knocked him into the dirt had been deliberately calibrated.
Lúcio hadn’t been trying to injure him.
He had been showing Léo what a professional match looked like from the inside.
He was teaching him the dark arts a referee never whistles, the angles defenders exploit, and the cumulative physical toll of ninety minutes.
A real opponent would have been significantly less precise and entirely uninterested in whether Léo survived the lesson.
Léo turned off the lamp.
He fell asleep thinking about the bruises.
Lúcio was already on the pitch when Léo walked out the next morning.
The veteran center-back watched Léo approach.
He shifted his weight, gripping his plastic water bottle tightly, bracing himself.
He looked exactly like a man who fully expected a seventeen-year-old to attempt some form of violent, reckless retribution for yesterday’s beating.
“Cara,” Lúcio warned, his voice low.
“We’re professionals.
Whatever happened yesterday—we settle it on the grass, yes?
No cheap—”
Léo extended his hand.
Lúcio stopped talking.
He stared at the outstretched hand.
“I know what you were doing yesterday,” Léo said.
“Thank you.”
A beat passed.
Lúcio took the hand, shook it once, and let go.
The tension bled out of his massive shoulders.
He looked mildly disappointed that he didn’t get to defend a siege.
“You’re smarter than you look,” Lúcio muttered.
“You weren’t actually that hard to read.”
“Don’t push it.” A dark, genuine amusement touched Lúcio’s eyes.
“Today I’ll actually crush you.
Since you’re asking for it.”
“Vamos,” Léo said.
April bled into May.
Léo trained.
The São Paulo State Championship ran its final rounds without him.
Unable to register, Léo watched the broadcasts from the facility monitors.
The squad dropped a meaningless 0-1 loss away to Mogi Mirim in their final group match.
They bounced back in the quarter-finals, grinding out a tight, functional 1-0 win over Penapolense.
Then came the state semi-final against Corinthians.
It was a brutal, airless 0-0 draw at the end of ninety minutes.
The match went to penalties.
São Paulo lost the shootout 3-4, and Corinthians advanced.
The Copa Libertadores resumed that same week.
The draw was a nightmare.
São Paulo was matched against Atlético Mineiro in the Round of 16—the exact same squad that had casually dismantled them in the group stage.
Léo sat in the stands behind the technical area for the first leg at the Morumbi.
Atlético was simply better.
Not in a flashy, humiliating way, but with the suffocating inevitability of a superior team executing its game plan.
Ronaldinho drifted off the left wing in the forty-second minute, took a flawless touch, and slipped a violently angled pass through the backline for Diego Tardelli to finish.
The first leg ended 1-2 to Atlético Mineiro.
Ronaldinho walked off the pitch with a goal and an assist.
Six days later, the squad traveled to Belo Horizonte for the second leg.
They needed to overturn a deficit inside the Estádio Independência, a steep, hostile cauldron packed with screaming Atlético supporters.
They were slaughtered 1-4.
The aggregate score read 2-6.
São Paulo was out of the Copa Libertadores.
The only continental football left to them was the Copa Sudamericana.
As defending champions of that tournament, São Paulo retained an automatic berth in the knockout stages later that year.
It was a back door.
A consolation prize.
It wasn’t what anyone at the club had planned for, but it wasn’t nothing.
Léo sat with the results for a day.
Then he laced up his boots and went back to the training pitch.
The Serie A season started in three weeks.