Greatest Of All Legends - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: A Hard to Impress Scout
The drills that everyone was subjected to included speed drills where they had to run individual hundred-meter dashes, stamina drills where they had to run five kilometers, and agility drills where they had to make their way through arranged cones and obstacles with the ball.

They also did shooting drills where the players that weren’t goalkeepers shot long and short-distance balls at the players that were goalkeepers, as well as a two-touch and one-touch rondo as passing and defending drills.

At the end of the exhausting drills, a few things could be determined and there were already some teenagers that had caught the eyes of the scouts.

Jason of course, exceeded everybody else’s performance on the pitch by a fair bit and a lot of the scouts already had their eyes on him.

They had begun sending messages and making calls to get his information to be able to check his background to facilitate negotiations as soon as possible.

Despite being a source of interest for the scouts, Jason was already walking off the field after it was determined that the drills were over and that they should come back the next day for the trial matches.

He was raring to go, but even for him, the high-intensity drills were slightly exhausting, especially as he had done his best and not held back the slightest, after all, this wasn’t some fantasy book where he was a protagonist playing pig to eat a tiger.

This was real life and if he failed to impress the scouts, he wouldn’t be able to be scouted into a good team and be able to kickstart the kind of career he wanted, thus he had put in his best during the drills.

All that was left was for him to perform well at the trial match on the coming day, impress the scouts even further and hopefully get signed by a good team so he could begin playing football in Europe.

‘I wonder which team scouts those guys are,’ he wondered while glancing at the spectators of their drills, but he couldn’t garner any information from looking at them as they didn’t exactly have billboards above their heads that had the name of the teams they worked for on them.

He laughed at the funny image that thought had appeared in his mind and turned away as he continued into the stadium’s inner areas.

There were over fifty people that had participated in the trials and they would soon be looking for somewhere to shower and freshen up.

Jason doubted that the Jesse Owens stadium had that many showers and since he wasn’t planning to share a bathroom with any other human being that had a p*nis between their legs.

So he wanted to quickly wash up before the other guys started rushing towards the showers.

With his sports bag that held his things, he quickly found a shower room and got in to quickly wash up.

**********

Meanwhile, back on the field among the stands, a fifty-something-year-old-looking man scrolled and swiped on his iPad, his eyes slightly squinted as he looked at the information that he had requested.

The man’s name was Rafael Fernandez, and he was a well-known football scout for FC Porto, a top-flight Portuguese team.

He had been sent on a scouting mission to various countries around the world, but among those countries, he didn’t have any hopes for the USA, as the country was not among any of the countries that produced top talents.

One only had to look at their national team to know that the USA was among the lowest-producing countries of football talents in the football world. Their football talent pool was so shallow that it was on par with unknown European countries like Lichtenstein, Malta, and others.

Due to this thinking, he had taken the period that he was supposed to be in the country as a holiday period and would not have even come for the football trial if not because he hadn’t yet decided on what he would do during this self-decided holiday.

But now, his interest had been slightly aroused by the young African-American boy with a full head of curly hair.

Rafael remembered noticing him earlier as he was the last one to arrive and he had been wondering if he had mistaken this place for an audition as his face didn’t lose out to that of an entertainment star’s, but Rafael’s wanton thoughts had dissipated as soon as he had seen him move.

He watched with rapt attention as Jason completed the drills with pinpoint accuracy and ease of movement at paces that were only possible to be recreated by professional footballers.

Even though Rafael had not seen Jason in an actual match, he already had high hopes for him and had quickly requested for Jason’s file, but now that he had gotten it, he couldn’t exactly believe what he was seeing.

‘He’s a little older than I expected,’ he first thought as he saw Jason’s age of eighteen that made him eligible to play for a professional senior team already.

“Dropped out of Lion Soccer Academy at age seven… No further records of being in a football academy,” Rafael read aloud in a low voice, but he couldn’t believe what he was reading.

‘That kid wasn’t in a football academy?’ he wondered to himself.

‘… then how did he learn to move like that?’

‘What kind of training has he been doing to keep himself in tip-top shape for football?’ the questions kept popping up in Rafael’s head, but no answers were forthcoming.

‘No… in the first place, how was he allowed to drop off an academy with this level of talent?’ another question popped up in his head, reinforcing his bias toward the football system in this country.

‘If the talent pool wasn’t very deep in the first place, yet the few talents that popped up weren’t being trained, how was the football industry supposed to develop in the first place,’ Rafael wondered stupendously as he put his iPad to the side, no longer looking at the information that had been sent to him concerning Jason.

‘The kid probably has low game intelligence due to non-systematic training,’ he concurred, not giving up hope on Jason and now eager to see him play in the trial match that was to be held the next day, having already decided that as long as Jason didn’t play too badly, he would scout him.

Game intelligence could be developed over time, but the main issue was whether a player had talent or not.