Substitute Resource
“Alright, one more time.”
“Ah—yes. I’m sorry.”
“No need. I understand how excited you must be.”
Yohan was stuck on a serious problem.
The profile shots had come out fine. That much was good. The trouble started with what came next: the clip they needed for the big screen whenever a first-team player scored, or for the club’s social media. Capturing that was proving far harder than expected.
He was so giddy he couldn’t stop smiling. No matter what pose he struck, he looked like a fool, and nothing usable came out of the frame. The delay stretched on until Yohan turned to the camera director with an apologetic face.
“Um… I’ll try again properly.”
The man, still reviewing the footage he’d already taken, simply shook his head with a smile.
“No need. We’ve got one that looks great.”
“Really…?”
“Yeah. Want to see it?”
“I’d love to, but I’m worried I’ll be late for training… Can I look later?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. I’ll head over, then.”
Yohan sprinted down the tunnel toward the training ground. Quite a few Primavera players had come up to join the session; he exchanged greetings with them. Then Miguel appeared, wrapping an arm around his head in a rough hug. Yohan patted the older man’s arm in return.
“Hello, Miguel.”
“So. Couldn’t sleep a wink from the excitement, right?”
“No. I slept fine.”
“Still the same boring kid. Drink some mate.”
“Thank you.”
While he and Miguel chatted, the first-team veterans began filtering in one after another: Aiden Mackenzie, the Scottish right-back; Nathan, the Brazilian centre-back; Hakon Vasten, the Dutch goalkeeper; Andrei Solomon, the academy-raised mezzala; and Alessandro Rossi, his partner in the double pivot…
The rest of the Roma squad, each man filling his role, gathered as well. They offered Yohan high-fives or handshakes and simple words of welcome. Playing among these men, thriving alongside them, had been the dream he had carried since childhood. Actually training with them now sent his spirits soaring. At the same time he found himself strangely calm about the reality of it—probably because of the resolve he had forged on the way up from the Primavera. Or maybe the squad’s atmosphere simply felt a little sharp-edged, and he was reading the room.
“See? I told you he’d make it up here.”
While Yohan was still busy fielding the players’ attention, Ricci emerged with Lorenzo and murmured to him.
“I said he’d be a star someday. I never said he’d come up this soon.”
“Same difference.”
Lorenzo gave a dry laugh at Ricci’s shrug and called the squad together. Then he introduced them to Yohan.
“About a third of the guys here are faces you already know pretty well.”
It was a faintly self-deprecating joke—plenty of them had been forced down to the Primavera with injuries. Just as Lorenzo said, Roma this season had been plagued by injuries. The club had always been called an infirmary, but this year was especially bad. Ten players had gone down with injuries large and small through the first half of the campaign, and the Primavera call-ups had produced nothing of note, so results had plummeted. In the second half they had ground out enough wins to claw their way back toward the upper mid-table, yet for Roma the standing was still nowhere near satisfactory. That was why the training-ground air felt so taut. The edge Yohan had sensed was no illusion.
It was lucky that the cheerful Miguel and Ricci had taken on the role of mood-makers. Without those two, the current Roma squad would have carried a gloom heavier than a funeral parlor.
Clap. Clap.
Finished with the introductions, Lorenzo clapped twice and jerked his chin toward the entrance to the pitch.
“Let’s go.”
The players filed out, each settling into his own routine. Yohan followed at the very back.
That’s him.
In the middle of the training ground a middle-aged man stood talking with the coaches. Yohan recognized him at once as Pierluigi De Ferraro, manager of Roma’s first team. A former Serie B player who had retired early and taken the coaching path, De Ferraro had spent more than a decade managing in Serie B and C before his ability earned him a contract with a mid-table club—Fiorentina, one of the “Seven Princesses” of 1990s Serie A. In five years there he had turned Fiorentina into a top-half side. Friction with the owner over playing time led to his departure; after a short break he took over Roma mid-season, guided them to fourth, and had remained in the job ever since.
His preferred system was the diamond—central-congested 4-3-1-2—that Milan had once used to great effect. It placed heavy emphasis on the attacking midfielder, so whenever the aging Lorenzo Lucca could not impose himself the side often got overrun. On those days De Ferraro would tweak things and hand the creative burden to other positions. When matches truly refused to open up he would even change the formation outright—not often, but often enough. A fundamentally conservative coach who still knew how to improvise when needed: that was the public verdict on Ferraro.
His free-flowing attacking style had won him strong early support from the fans and helped him last so long at Roma, yet when results turned sour he tended to collapse spectacularly, and recent form had sparked talk of the sack. Sympathy existed too. Some said no one could keep a season afloat with the resources on hand better than Ferraro; others insisted that if the owner simply spent on reinforcements the team could climb as high as it liked. The one criticism nearly everyone shared was that Ferraro’s high-intensity tactics dramatically raised the risk of injury. For a Roma squad whose average age was already high, the physical toll was severe. The already thin depth had frayed further, and players kept going down.
“Okay. Let’s start with leg swings.”
They took their places and began stretching under a first-team coach’s guidance when De Ferraro himself approached Yohan.
“Welcome. What should I call you? Lee? Yohan? Giovanni? Gio?”
“Hello, Coach. Whatever’s easiest for you is fine.”
“Got it. Then I’ll go with Gio, like everyone else. You’ve already met the coaching staff?”
“Yes. Lorenzo just introduced them.”
“Good. When stretching’s done, stop by the tactical coach for a minute. He says he has something to tell you.”
“Understood.”
“Looking forward to working with you.”
The manager’s eyes were deeply sunken. He looked as though he had been through a great deal of mental strain. Seeing that, Yohan felt a sudden, sharp surge of determination for reasons he could not quite name.
“The pleasure’s all mine, sir.”
On the day Yohan first trained with the first team, photos of the session appeared on the club website, across the internet, and in the local papers. There was a shot of him receiving advice from Lorenzo Lucca during a mini-game, another of Miguel thoroughly ruffling his hair, and one of Ricci exploding with laughter at one of Yohan’s jokes. All of them drew attention, but Rome’s largest daily gave him especially heavy coverage. Thanks to its club connections the paper reported how the first session had gone, what the coaching staff thought of him, and how realistic a debut looked. One fan posted the article to a popular threaded Roma fan page, and the reaction was massive.
Opinion on Yohan’s possible debut split sharply. The main camp against it argued that with a loss in the next match dropping them to tenth, this was no time to blood a prospect. The camp in favor countered that the table was already a mess and European places were slipping out of reach, so they might as well give the kid regular minutes and let him grow. The two sides clashed fiercely, yet every single voice shared the same quiet hope that Yohan would do well.
After Yohan entered first-team training, Matchday 32 arrived. He was left out of the squad. Roma lost to Udinese, a perennial mid-table side. Worse, Alessandro Rossi suffered a hamstring injury in that match, throwing the double pivot into crisis. The final table position after the game: ninth. If they failed to rebound over the remaining six rounds and slipped into double digits, Roma would post their worst finish in twenty-four years.
Lorenzo Lucca, who had still been showing flashes of veteran brilliance early in the second half, now looked unmistakably diminished. Yet they could not drop him. His physical decline was obvious, but the razor-sharp delivery and vision remained, producing the occasional moment of magic—and, more importantly, there simply were not enough players. They had to keep using him.
Matchdays 33 and 34 began under those conditions. Yohan continued to train with the first team but still did not make the matchday squad. Roma managed to win both games with second-half goals. Even so, the fans’ mood remained murderous. Andrei Solomon, who had played every minute of every round without injury until now, was diagnosed with a mild knee problem after the match and would inevitably miss the next one. The only bright spot was that the two wins had lifted them to seventh; several mid-to-upper-table sides had collapsed in the same round, handing Roma a lucky two-place jump. That thin thread of results kept De Ferraro’s managerial life from being snuffed out completely.
“Gio, come here a second.”
Yohan was training with the first-team players as usual when the manager called him over.
“Yes, Coach.”
“Your work in training has been good enough to convince me and the staff. You’re going on the bench for the next match.”
“Uh… what?”
“I’m registering you as a substitute.”
Clubs under pressure rarely blood prospects—especially when European places or relegation battles are on the line. In those moments they send out their strongest available side and try to win every single game. There is no reason to use a youngster with zero first-team experience. Yet even in that situation a club sometimes has no choice: when the squad is so ravaged by injury that even the bench is threadbare. No players left, transfer window closed, so they are forced to reach down. That was exactly where Roma stood now, and Yohan was the one receiving the benefit.
In truth De Ferraro had wanted to put a more experienced player on the bench. He had worried that seating a boy who had been with them barely a month would create tactical and chemistry problems. Watching Yohan train had changed his mind. The tactical understanding was beyond anything he had expected; the technique and vision were excellent; and for someone so young the training performances and attitude had been better than anyone else’s. On pure merit the manager decided to include him in the squad.
“Me?”
“Yes.”
Yohan’s Adam’s apple bobbed hard. He had never imagined he would already be on the substitute list. Serie A matchday squads listed twelve substitutes, yet only three changes were allowed. Talk of expanding to five substitutes was circulating, but the rule had not yet taken effect. That meant the chance of Yohan actually seeing the pitch was vanishingly small—pushed aside by more important players. Of course the mere possibility of coming on still excited him. They had gifted young talent on the books, yet they had chosen the youngest of all. It would be a lie to say he felt no expectation. Coldly, though, the odds were almost nonexistent.
Even so, he felt his heart hammering. Because it meant he would walk into the Stadio Olimpico as a player.
Yohan quietly steadied his breathing. The wide eyes settled. Then, face set, he gave a firm nod.
“Understood.”