A New Era #2
Even flying alone had never felt like this.
A heavy, complicated ache sat in his chest — and Caroline being right beside him did nothing to ease it. With Hailey staying behind in America, the strength simply would not come. It was not that he wanted to do nothing. But a vast emptiness had settled deep inside him and refused to leave.
"When are you going back to America for good, Aunt Caroline?"
"Hmm? Not for a while. I'll just be going back and forth between Milan and Rome. I'll probably spend more time in Milan, though."
"I see..."
Yohan already knew. Caroline could have done all her work from Milan alone. The reason she kept coming to Trigoria, where she had nothing particular to do, was him. She must have been worried — about the boy who would be left alone without Hailey. He felt genuinely sorry about that, but he never brought the subject up out loud. He wanted to be with Caroline, too.
The meals she cooked — one of the women who was a mother to him — were delicious, and going out with her was always fun. The nuns were the same in their own way, but outings with them were rare. Convent rules made it extremely difficult to spend any money that had not been earned by the convent itself. So as things stood, the people Yohan could lean on inside were the sisters of the convent, and the person he could lean on outside was Caroline. It might have been a little selfish, but Yohan no longer wanted to be parted from his family.
Once he was back in Trigoria, Yohan spent a great deal of time with Caroline until the season began. He did the same with his friends. They went out often, whether or not people crowded around them on the street, and through the smartphone he had worked so hard to learn, he kept texting Hailey — and that, at least, let him forget some of the grief of being apart from her.
Then, in the middle of all that, a piece of shocking news hit Rome.
Bayern Munich had signed Rossi — a product of Roma's youth academy and one of the key pieces of the midfield. When a club a tier above your own comes calling, almost no player can resist the temptation. Ambition for European competition and league trophies, higher wages, greater prestige — none of it was easy to ignore.
In the old days, when each country's league was more closed off, one-club men were common enough. In the globalized world of modern football, such players had become rare. The handful who still showed lifelong devotion to a single club despite lower wages and the risk of future obscurity — players like Lorenzo — were now considered the strange ones.
Of course, Roma was a historic club, and the opportunity cost of chasing trophies was higher there than at most sides. But it was not Bayern Munich, and with no European silverware to its name, Roma fell short of other clubs on that front. Even so, Roma was a club its academy graduates hated to leave — romantically speaking, a club with soul; less charitably, a club with nothing but soul. With Rossi's departure, some fans began to worry that even that reputation might become a thing of the past. Still, the transfer fee had been substantial, the parting amicable, and the fans wished him well.
Articles analyzing Manager Kruger's tactics followed close behind. Volk Kruger was widely regarded as a coach with an exceptional gift for building a system out of whatever resources he had. But every manager has an ideal tactical shape in mind. A primary formation they prefer to use. No coach on earth is without one.
When a manager changes, the tactics change — and a change in tactics means a change in formation. Usually, that meant the defenders and midfielders essential to almost any system kept their places, while players in the front two lines found themselves without a role. A player who had been a regular under the previous manager could suddenly become surplus to requirements. It typically happened to players who lacked versatility, and at Roma, that player was Guidotti.
Volk Kruger built his system around a 4-3-3. With two wingers in the second line, it was, on paper, a classic shape. The finer details would only become clear once the season was underway, but a 4-3-3 generally demanded a high level of passing technique and tactical intelligence from its players — and there was no place in it for Guidotti, whose technique and decision-making were relatively weaker.
Even so, he was a useful player even if he lost his starting spot. With his height, hold-up play, and heading ability, he was perfect as a super-sub who could smash through a defensive wall. The problem was that Guidotti was not the kind of player who would be satisfied as a mere impact substitute.
Guidotti had already been unhappy about how often he had come off the bench the previous season. If tactical reasons now erased his place entirely, the odds of him requesting a transfer were very high — and that was exactly what happened. Several clubs sent offers to both Guidotti's agent and Roma. Roma did not particularly refuse them, and in that fashion, pieces of the squad began to change.
And so Roma entered the era after Lorenzo.
Manager Kruger spoke English fluently. Plenty of players at Roma could not understand German, but nearly all of them spoke English well enough that communication was never a serious problem.
With the money from selling Rossi and Guidotti, they signed a new winger, and when the new season began, the atmosphere was still good. They had surrendered the Supercoppa Italiana in the final, losing 2–1 to Napoli — but they tore through the opening match and the three that followed, racking up four straight wins. The attack was blistering, and bringing in Manager Kruger was being called a masterstroke.
Yohan, deployed as an inverted left winger or filling the hole Rossi had left, was putting up strong numbers of his own. Roma's future looked brilliantly bright.
But contrary to those expectations, Roma's results steadily worsened as time went on. The early four-game winning streak became a distant memory. Across the next eleven league matches they managed only three wins, four draws, and four losses. In the Champions League group stage, six matches produced one win, two draws, and three losses — a wretched report card for a side that had finished second in the league the previous season and lifted the Coppa Italia.
Drawn into a group with Manchester City, Lyon, and Fenerbahçe, Roma had been expected to finish second. Instead they finished fourth, failing even to drop into the Europa League, and suffered a shocking group-stage elimination.
"God... this is driving me insane."
Day by day, the expression of the new captain, Ricci, grew darker. With results so poor in the very first season after Lorenzo's retirement, he was blaming himself. You could see it on him — the thought that he was failing, as captain, to lift his teammates up.
Roma thrashed and clawed, trying by any means to climb the table. But once results started sliding, they did not improve easily. By the time the first half of the season was nearly over, Roma sat seventh in the league — a humiliation far beyond anything they could afford. Then, two days before the new year, on the day they were thoroughly thrashed 3–1 away by newly promoted Benevento and dropped to ninth, everything boiled over.
CRASH—!
After the match, having apologized to a handful of teammates and the traveling fans, Ricci stormed into the away dressing room and smashed an entire locker to pieces with his bare fist, startling every player in the room.
"Hey. You fucking bastards."
Blood dripped steadily from his knuckles as he glared at the wide-eyed players as if he meant to kill them.
"Does losing mean nothing to you? I'm not talking about the handshake or a few polite words. Respecting the other side when the match is over is the right thing to do. But what the hell are you doing laughing it up with the guys who just put three past you — and against a newly promoted side, no less?"
His teammates stayed silent. That only seemed to make it worse. Ricci kicked over a freestanding trash can and kept going.
"You came straight here instead of going to the fans, so it's not like you have no sense at all... What are you people even doing? Why does it look like not a single one of you is sorry? Not a single one of you is angry? We won a trophy last year, so that's good enough — is that it?"
Ricci's gaze swept briefly across three players, Yohan among them. He knew that only Yohan, Solomon, and Miguel had tried to create something — anything — even while the match was slipping away. But this was a team talk. Singling people out and letting them off the hook would not help team spirit, so he kept his words aimed at everyone.
"You pieces of trash who aren't even worth chewing up — have some damn awareness that you play for Roma."
THUD—!
He slammed his already-wounded hand into another locker and kept raging until Manager Kruger and the coaching staff spent a long time calming him down.
And the next day, word of what had happened in the dressing room leaked. Criticism of Manager Kruger's ability poured in from every direction. He had already been sacked at Leipzig after failing to control the dressing room and producing inconsistent results. Monaco had gone reasonably well — but with the same problem exploding again at Roma, people began saying he had a serious issue with squad management.
Yohan's own form had also fallen off sharply from the early-season surge. Because of that, the Golden Boy award — which tallied performances from January through December — went to Grasso, succeeding Barcelona's prodigy Adrian Castillo.
And so the year came to an end.