Chapter 28: Eyes of the Nation

"You all know me already, but I’ll say it properly anyway. Saint Maddox. Thirty-one. I’ll be running this squad going forward." On the training pitch, Villa’s players stood in two loose rows, Saint standing in front of them.

Saint stood just over six feet, carried himself well, and, whatever else people said about the appointment, cut a genuinely sharp figure on that touchline. Dark eyes, a steady gaze that didn’t waver under scrutiny.

What actually set him apart, though, wasn’t the physical presence. It was the confidence underneath it, the kind that had nothing to do with age, and clearly hadn’t come from nowhere.

That same confidence had genuinely surprised Whitlock during their meeting the day before. A man who’d built his career reading people for a living, and even he’d found himself thrown slightly by how completely unbothered Saint seemed by the size of the moment.

"This is a challenge for me, and it’s a challenge for every one of you. Whether you’re on board with it or not doesn’t change the situation, this is where we are." No grand speech, no rousing call to arms. Just the plain fact of it, laid out flat.

Nobody in that group, players or staff, had expected quite this level of restraint from a man’s very first address as a manager.

Training began right after, and Saint didn’t step in. He didn’t leave either, just stood at the edge of the pitch, gaze slightly distant, looking almost absent for a moment.

He wasn’t, in fact, distracted. Something had shifted in his head the moment the session started; Scout’s Eye felt sharper and different. Where before he’d only ever seen a player’s ceiling, now he could see something else layered underneath it.

An upgrade. Scout’s Eye had evolved the moment he’d officially taken the reins as first-team manager. The potential grading had sharpened considerably, and, more significantly, a whole new layer had appeared: current ability, distinct from raw ceiling.

Potential now carried modifiers, a plus or minus attached to each letter grade. Lavelle, previously a flat S-rating, now showed as S-minus.

Rocher, unsurprisingly, sat above everyone else in the squad as a S-plus potential, and his current ability already graded A-plus, closing in fast on that S-level ceiling.

A-plus was genuine top-flight, first-team-at-a-big-club quality. Which meant, in blunt terms, that a teenager barely a season into senior football was already, by ability alone, too good for this level of English football.

Rocher stood alone at that tier within the squad. Just below him sat Lavelle and Whitfield, both grading out at B-plus.

Beneath that, the squad had real depth. Conlan and Delgado both sat at B-level, and Loach, Peña, and a handful of others weren’t far off.

On paper, Villa’s attacking talent looked genuinely strong for this division, arguably too strong for where the club currently sat in the table. But talent alone had never guaranteed anything in football. Ventham’s season was proof enough of that on its own.

This upgrade to Scout’s Eye was an enormous gift, whatever else Saint felt about it. Potential had always been useful. Being able to read a player’s actual current level, in real time, was something else entirely; a genuinely decisive edge in every selection decision going forward.

Saint found himself quietly irritated with the system even as he appreciated it. Whatever intelligence sat behind that voice clearly had no interest in announcing itself properly, it just quietly upgraded things in the background and left him to notice on his own.

If the thing could actually hear him complain, Saint would have had plenty to say. The reward for landing the first-team job had apparently arrived the moment the handshake with Whitlock was final; Saint had simply been too caught up in the moment to notice it at the time.

Alongside the ability upgrade, the system had also handed him a task tied to holding onto the job itself.

⟦Reward: Enhanced physical conditioning.⟧

Fitness as the foundation of everything, Saint couldn’t argue with the logic. Management is widely considered one of the most physically and mentally punishing jobs in professional sport, and he was barely a day into it and already feeling the weight of that.

Satisfied there was nothing else waiting behind it, Saint pulled his focus back to the pitch. Pratt hadn’t been exaggerating, this squad wasn’t just low on morale. The training itself looked sluggish, sloppy, mistakes piling up that shouldn’t have been happening at this level.

Saint watched the players. The players, in turn, watched him; not unfamiliar with him exactly, but plainly unsettled by how much his role had changed since they’d last seen him regularly.

If anything, the players seemed almost let down by how little had actually changed in his manner. Back before Ventham exiled him to the U21s, Saint had been the loudest, most hands-on voice among the coaching staff. Today, he’d said barely a word beyond the opening address, standing quietly at the edge of the pitch instead.

Pratt, watching the same session, felt something closer to genuine disappointment. Weeks of watching Saint operate up close hadn’t fully answered the question nagging at him: why hand this job to someone with barely three years in coaching, over a man who’d spent years embedded with this exact squad?

"Maybe it’s time I looked elsewhere." The thought crossed Pratt’s mind more than once that morning.

Saint had no idea his own assistant was quietly weighing his exit. His attention, in that moment, was entirely on the players in front of him.

That focus didn’t last uninterrupted for long, though; Sallow arrived not long after, looking notably more anxious than Saint himself.

Ventham’s departure had restored most of Sallow’s authority at the club almost overnight. Pedmore, by contrast, had gone quiet, keeping his head down while the situation settled.

"Lee... you need to brace yourself for what’s coming," Sallow said, clear worry in his voice.

Both he and Whitlock had known this appointment would generate real attention and no small amount of controversy. What they hadn’t quite anticipated was the scale of it.

Major national outlets like Sky Sports, The Athletic, BBC Sport, talkSPORT, even The Guardian, had all sent people to cover the press conference. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say Saint’s appointment had become the single most-discussed story in English football that week, treated with the kind of attention usually reserved for a genuine A-list signing.

A Championship club, one with real history but currently punching well below its old weight, handing the reins to a manager barely into his thirties with almost no experience; it was, undeniably, an irresistible story.

Saint understood exactly why, and it didn’t flatter him. Most of that attention had nothing to do with genuine belief in what he could do. It was curiosity, mostly; plenty of it thinly disguised mockery, waiting to see how spectacularly this would fail.

"Relax. I know exactly what I’m doing." Compared to Sallow, Saint didn’t look remotely rattled by any of it.

’Genuinely not normal, this one,’ Sallow thought to himself, watching Saint’s total composure. And that thought only deepened, moments later, into something closer to real astonishment.