Football: Salary System - Chapter 144: The Iron Lady (Patreon)

Zayn had no idea he had already booked himself a place on the trending lists for the next few days.

Even if he had known, he probably wouldn’t have cared. He had always regarded England’s major media outlets as little more than toilet paper, and The Sun even less so.

Rather than linger in Manchester, Zayn drove straight back to Birmingham.

The two cities were only about 140 kilometers apart, so he could be home in roughly an hour and a half.

That was one good thing about this tiny island. It wasn’t very big, so getting anywhere was convenient.

Of course, that “convenience” depended on ignoring the lousy trains that canceled nearly six hundred services a day on average while ticket prices kept climbing, not to mention the various subway systems plagued by frequent strikes and constant breakdowns.

By the time he got home, it was just past midnight.

His family was already asleep. Only the three Golden Retrievers, one large and two small, heard him come in and crowded around his feet.

As usual, Zayn gave them each a rub on the head before heading upstairs to wash up and go to bed.

His flight back to Dortmund was the next morning. His family had already packed his luggage for him, so there was nothing else he needed to worry about.

...

By the time Zayn boarded his return flight the next day, the internet was already in an uproar over him.

The cause, naturally, was the fabricated story claiming that he had traveled alone to Manchester for a “secret meeting with executives from a certain club.”

The photos of Zayn arriving in West Gorton, in particular, sent Manchester City fans into a frenzy.

The Sun might have a long and infamous history of making things up, but this time was different.

This time, there were pictures!

Pictures didn’t lie. Zayn really had shown up in West Gorton. How could that possibly be fake?

Some people began seriously analyzing the report, claiming Zayn had most likely used the tail end of the international break to negotiate personal terms.

They sounded so certain that anyone reading their posts might have thought the transfer was already done and an official announcement was coming the next day.

Manchester City fans had even sent a thread titled “Zayn the Emperor + De Bruyne = Game Over for the Premier League” soaring to the top of the discussion boards.

Manchester United fans, meanwhile, had much more complicated feelings about the whole thing.

Throughout the previous summer, with Raiola driving the speculation, reports linking Zayn with a move to Old Trafford had sounded remarkably convincing.

There had been stories about Mourinho personally calling him, and about the club’s CEO, Ed Woodward, submitting an offer worth more than £100 million...

At the time, plenty of Red Devils supporters had practically begun treating Zayn as one of their own.

It was bad enough that he hadn’t arrived during the summer window. Now he had gone straight into the territory of their “noisy neighbors.” Naturally, that left a sour taste.

Outside the two Manchester fanbases, however, most people barely reacted.

Did anyone in England not know what kind of newspaper The Sun was?

As the “GOAT of the tabloid world,” nine out of ten of its supposed football “exclusives” were made up.

Take Neymar, for example. The Sun had repeatedly linked him with a blockbuster move to Manchester United, at one point making it sound as though the Red Devils were ready to trigger his enormous release clause and bring him to Old Trafford.

Nothing ever came of it. Neymar stayed at Barcelona before eventually moving to Paris Saint-Germain instead.

That was hardly an isolated case. Whenever the transfer window came around, The Sun churned out sensational stories about superstars supposedly being on the verge of huge moves to Premier League clubs, only for most of them to disappear without a trace once the window closed.

That was why level-headed fans scoffed at The Sun’s transfer stories. A single photo of Zayn in West Gorton proved what, exactly?

Then Tom, the paparazzo dropped his conspiracy-theory article, complete with the photos of Zayn apparently meeting with the “Mafia.”

Unfortunately for him, Peaky Blinders had an enormous audience in the UK. The first four seasons were already among the five most-watched on-demand series in England that year.

The distinctive newsboy caps and overcoats in the photos were immediately recognized by sharp-eyed fans of the show.

Tom’s hoped-for conspiracy theory fell apart in less than five minutes.

The attention, however, didn’t die down at all. Zayn making a cameo in the show was already newsworthy enough on its own.

Fans of the series were thrilled and had already started imagining what kind of role Zayn might play.

Not everyone was treating the news with the same good humor, though.

A group of football fans and commentators began attacking him on social media, questioning whether Zayn was losing sight of his real job.

He was a footballer. All his energy should be focused on the pitch.

Running off to make a cameo in a TV series?

Was that really something an eighteen-year-old should be doing?

Was that something a British football star should be doing?

Well... Beckham had certainly done plenty of similar things when he was young. After retiring, he had even seemed interested in moving into the entertainment industry for a while...

But that was different!

“The next Gascoigne? Or the next Best? This kid’s really starting to believe his own hype.”

“He’s only been playing well for a few months, and he already thinks he’s a Hollywood star. What about football? What about trophies?”

“What he needs right now is rest and training! Not running off to a film set and pretending to be some damn celebrity!”

Comments like these were inevitable.

Zayn was one of football’s most closely watched young talents, carrying the enormous expectations of Great Britain on his shoulders, and he was still so young.

People were terrified that even one wrong step could send him down the wrong path.

English football history had seen far too many gifted players fall apart because of things that happened away from the pitch.

...

Monaco, Monte Carlo.

Raiola lounged in his office, enjoying the rare luxury of an entire afternoon to himself.

Beyond the window stretched the deep blue Mediterranean. Several white-sailed boats lay moored in the distance, while a cool sea breeze drifted in through the half-open floor-to-ceiling windows.

For the wealthy, Monaco was undoubtedly a wonderful place to live.

It offered an extraordinarily luxurious lifestyle, first-rate privacy, and most importantly, zero personal income tax.

Personal income tax had been abolished there in 1869, and to this day the vast majority of residents paid no tax on their personal income. It truly deserved its reputation as a “billionaire’s paradise.”

Raiola had lived there with his family since 1996.

His office, situated in one of Monte Carlo’s most prestigious areas, was more than enough to show what the Italian had achieved after years of hard work.

The property was worth an astonishing €100,000 per square meter!

And yet Raiola was lying back in this outrageously expensive office, phone in hand, grinning at the screen.

All the stories about Zayn circulating online had him thoroughly amused.

He really hadn’t expected one trip to Manchester to attract this much attention.

That was a good thing.

He had just been wondering how to bring up the subject of getting Dortmund to raise Zayn’s salary, and now the media was building momentum for him free of charge.

Raiola began considering how best to capitalize on all this attention.

Should he ride the transfer rumors and put some pressure on Dortmund’s management?

Or should he simply contact Manchester City for real and add a little more fuel to the fire?

While he was thinking it over, Raiola received a phone call that genuinely surprised him.

It was from Chelsea CEO Marina Granovskaia.

Known publicly as “the most powerful woman in football,” she was one of the central figures in Russian oligarch Abramovich’s personal business empire.

Since buying Chelsea in 2003, Abramovich had rarely lived in London, only making occasional visits to Stamford Bridge.

Yet whenever he came to London, the first person he met was neither the team’s head coach nor any of the rumored women in his life. It was Chelsea’s female chief executive.

Abramovich had gone through three wives over the years, but none of them had been at his side as long as Marina, who had served as his personal assistant since 1997.

Raiola looked at the name on his phone, and the corners of his mouth curled upward.

It seemed someone was getting anxious.