A Cancerous Mass #2
The incident that had driven Yohan into a rage never leaked to the outside world.
Even so, gossip-chasing reporters, working their various sources, managed to piece together a hazy picture of what had gone down inside the locker room.
It was under a flood of headlines like these that the next match arrived: Inter.
Contrary to every prediction that Roma would be cheerfully torn apart, they won 2–1 and salvaged some dignity. Whatever had happened in the locker room had jolted the players awake, and for this one match, at least, they put in a proper shift.
That said, it had been a desperately hard-fought win — one that owed more than a little to luck.
Yohan started as a central midfielder, covered fourteen kilometers, was involved in both goals, and walked away with Man of the Match. He was exhausted, but he felt good. He could see the team starting to pull together.
It might only be temporary, he thought — but if they could hold on to this, a turnaround was still possible.
With that in mind, he wrapped up his mixed-zone interview on a positive note, then found himself doing a short follow-up with a reporter from another paper near the tunnel leading out of the stadium.
"First win in four matches."
"Yeah. It is. Beating a tough side like Inter — I'm genuinely happy about it."
"There's talk that the reason results have been this bad is the atmosphere in the Roma squad. Is there a problem at the club, the way the rumors say?"
"No, there isn't."
"There isn't?"
"No. There isn't. It's just rumors."
"But there were a lot of raised voices mid-match in previous games, and the connection between the defense and midfield really wasn't there — those mistakes—"
"Those are mistakes anyone makes."
"So you're saying it's not a communication problem?"
"I'm saying it isn't."
"But looking at the goals you conceded, anyone could see the communication broke down—"
Listening to the reporter's questions, Yohan felt something start to boil inside him. The moment it looked like things might be tightening up on the inside, the outside world started poking and prodding at them. It made him furious.
"Hey. Reporter."
"Yes?"
"Do you want to see our team fall apart?"
"No. I just want to understand the situation—"
"If that's what you want, you should be asking the club whether there's a problem. Why are you putting this on a single player like me?"
"Over the last few matches, you and Miguel Perez have been the only two players actually trying to communicate with the rest of the squad. That's why I wanted your objective take—"
"I already answered you. You asked if there was a problem, and I said no."
"I see."
"And yet you keep digging. Like you've already got the answer you want. What do you want to hear? Go on — tell me. I'll say whatever you want me to say."
Yohan's tone was growing more aggressive by the second. Solomon, who happened to be passing near the tunnel, heard him starting to lose it, went pale, and came running over to haul him away.
"Gio—! You give those guys an inch and they'll take a mile. Just ignore them."
He dragged a still-fuming Yohan out and kept talking.
"The guy who just got in your face is from Sportivo Centro. They're a paper that chases every scrap of Italian football gossip like their lives depend on it. They're slick with the packaging, so players usually don't give them the time of day."
"I didn't know. I'm sorry."
"What are you sorry for? Of course you wouldn't know. We're the ones who should be apologizing."
Yohan's interview set off a massive reaction. His playing career hadn't been long, but in that time he had never once spoken harshly to anyone. When a video of him delivering an impassioned interview went up, Roma fans and rival supporters alike were stunned — and they tore into Sportivo Centro.
At the same time, the fact that Yohan had been needled hard enough to snap made it look like the club's situation was genuinely dire, and the fans erupted, demanding the manager be sacked as soon as possible.
In the middle of all this, Ricci booked out an entire restaurant and invited people in. He called everyone, regardless of faction, and he was careful and polite about it — which was how the entire first-team squad ended up gathered in one place.
And the first thing Ricci said there was an apology.
"I'm sorry."
The past few days had taught him a lot, and he set his pride down completely.
"You all know Enzo was an insane player. I know it too. Taking the captaincy after a guy like that was a lot of pressure, and when results went to hell on top of it, I got desperate and treated you all like shit. Punching people in the locker room was messed up too. Getting everyone together like this should've come first — but my personality's garbage, so I couldn't keep my temper and did something completely out of line."
While Ricci was asking the squad for a truce, the club wasn't sitting still either.
They went as far as floating a club ban and a reporting ban, leaning hard on the paper. Beyond that, they reached out to other clubs that had been burned by the same outlet — which was active across central and northern Italy — and asked them to stand together.
Lazio was among them.
The two clubs were bitter rivals, practically enemies, but in a situation like this they backed each other. Tomaso Vitale himself had been hit with similar questions when Lazio's form was poor, so Lazio moved quickly, eager to use the moment to squeeze a paper that had long been a thorn in their side.
Other clubs had been plenty irritated by Sportivo Centro's high-profile gossip over the years as well, and the northern giants — including Milan and Inter — decided to join the coalition.
Milan. Inter. Roma. Lazio.
If a sports daily operating in central and northern Italy could no longer cover clubs of that caliber, it would stop being a sports daily at all. It would just be a gossip rag. Sportivo Centro issued an apology at blistering speed.
Having put that whole affair to rest, Roma didn't stop there. They started dealing with the club's own problems.
All of it was handled in less than a day. Roma had already been considering Kruger's dismissal for a month and had been quietly hunting for a successor. The moment they locked one down, they showed Kruger the door.
Fabrizio Marchetti was a well-known former player. His positions had been central midfielder and defensive midfielder — a bull of a man who covered every inch of the pitch with enormous work rate. His temperament was rougher than Ricci's. You could fairly call him someone who burned with passion every single second, and the consensus was that his grip on a dressing room was absolute.
Tactically, he was both attacking and conservative. Think of him as similar to a manager like Ferraro, who stuck stubbornly to one formation — only with far less detail in the fine work, often leaving the attacking construction to the players themselves. Against weaker sides that changed managers often and never had time to install a system, he would thrash them for fun. Against strong teams, or managers who had spent years building a polished tactical identity, he tended to struggle. That was his style.
Installing a man with a somewhat modest name value sent a clear message: they were going to fix the locker room.
While Roma was transforming at that breakneck pace, some nine thousand kilometers from Trigoria, in the United States, Hailey sat at her desk with her chin propped on her hand, fiddling with her phone.
He's not answering, is he?
Lately she couldn't shake the feeling that things between her and Yohan had grown a little awkward. The chats that had come almost every day after he got his new phone — time zones be damned — had gradually thinned out, and his replies were taking longer. Then there was the look on his face when he'd gone back to Italy. That kept catching on her mind.
"Hailey? What are you doing?"
A boy from her group drifted over to the sulking girl. She waved him off with an irritated flick of her hand and looked toward the students making noise at the front of the classroom. They were her crowd — the kind of people who didn't care who was watching. She used to think they were like her: free, funny. Looking at them now, though, something felt off. Their behavior suddenly looked like showing off.
Ugh...
A sudden hollow feeling hit her, and she let out a dry little laugh. It felt like her head was full of nothing but garbage — and she'd probably looked the same way to other people. She clicked her tongue inwardly. When class time rolled around and Yohan still hadn't answered, she figured he might be in a match.
So she checked whether Roma had a game on, and ended up scrolling through a few related articles.
What is this?
She set the rest aside. The line about him losing his temper in an interview with a reporter was the one that snagged hard. She tapped through the link, and a video started playing at once — Yohan, face set, chewing out a Sportivo Centro reporter. It was the first time she had ever seen him that angry. Her eyes went wide as she watched, and then she shot up out of her seat.
She muttered under her breath.
"I have to go. This is exactly his problem...! He never says anything — just keeps insisting everything's fine... God..."
Until now, chats alone had been enough to keep her in the loop, and football itself had never been her thing, so she'd switched her interest off completely. She had no idea anything like this was going on. No — those were just excuses, and she knew it.
"What...? Where are you going? What problem? What are you talking about?"
She didn't answer the startled boy. She walked out of the classroom and called Caroline right away.