Football: Maxed Out The Wrong Stat

From five o’clock to eight o’clock.

Three hours on an empty pitch - cones, ball work, repetitions of the outside-of-foot technique he’d used in the morning session. Nothing fancy, just the same movements over and over until the light went. The kind of session that didn’t look like anything from a distance but accumulated in the small muscles of the ankle and the side of the foot, in the calibration between what the brain intended and what the body actually produced.

At Dortmund they’d had afternoon sessions he was never included in. He’d spent those hours alone at the far end of the pitch anyway. This was the same, except now nobody was pretending to ignore him. They were simply elsewhere, and the pitch was his.

He was hungry in the uncomplicated way of someone who has burned through everything they had.

At eight he packed his cones and walked to the canteen. The light was already off inside. He arrived at the serving hatch and found a locked door and a notice he didn’t entirely need to read to understand.

Closed.

He stood there for a moment, then turned around and went back to the dormitory.

Back in the room he dug through his bag and found the bread from this morning, the emergency supply he’d packed for the airport run that never happened. Slightly flattened, still sealed. He ate two rolls with water from the tap, sitting on the edge of his bed, and decided this was adequate.

Then he opened the system.

The attribute panel was the same as he’d left it after the physical testing - all grey, the single red bar of maxed Passing standing out against everything else. He looked at it for a moment, at the 64 in Ball Control, at the 65 in Shooting, at the overall 67 sitting unchanged at the bottom.

Then he noticed the training value bar.

It had been flat zero when he’d checked it after leaving Dr. Hoess’s room. He’d logged it and moved on. Now it showed a thin strip of green along its left edge - not much, but definitely not empty. A small, honest increment from three hours of solo work.

He stared at it.

”System. What is this?”

[Training value converts to free attribute points.]

[Current overall attributes: insufficient for professional baseline.]

[Accumulation rate: 1 attribute point per 10 hours of training.]

[Current training value: 3.1 hours logged.]

Ten hours.

He read it again to make sure. Then he sat up straighter on the bed.

One attribute point every ten hours was not fast. It was not the dramatic overnight transformation of a skill card binding. It was slow, granular, and required him to be on his feet and working for ten solid hours per point earned. But it was consistent. It didn’t require a mission reward or a treasure chest or a lucky system trigger. It just required him to train.

He looked at the bar. Three hours logged. Seven more to go.

He thought about which attribute to target first. Ball Control, obviously. His was a 64, and it was the reason his first touch misfired under pressure, the reason the La Croqueta had twice executed cleanly in the morning and twice bobbled in the afternoon, the skill card could only do what the body could support, and his body’s close-control foundation was still two or three years behind where it needed to be. Ball Control was the floor. Everything else sat on top of it.

He stood up, grabbed his boots, and went back out.

The training ground was quieter at eight-thirty than it had been at five. The groundskeeping staff had collected the equipment and gone home. The floodlights were off, the club cut them at nine on non-match nights, and there was still enough residual light in the September evening to work by if you stayed near the wall.

He ran the same drills. Cone slalom, ball control shuttles, the outside-of-foot repetitions that were slowly becoming mechanical in the right way - not automatic, not thoughtless, but less effortful than they’d been three hours ago. His body was tired in a layered way: the morning physical, the afternoon sessions with Raúl and Farfán watching, the three hours just finished. The fatigue sat in the joints rather than the muscles, the specific ache of a long day rather than a single hard effort.

His stamina attribute was 88. He noted this practically rather than proudly, it was a number that meant this schedule was sustainable in a way it wouldn’t be for most seventeen-year-olds, and he intended to use it.

The floodlights went out at nine as scheduled.

He kept going by feel.

Daniel closed his notebook at eleven o’clock and yawned.

He’d been in his office since eight, working through the tactical setup for the first German Third Division match of the season. Formation confirmed. Starting eleven written down for the first time rather than just carried in his head. Set pieces divided. The pre-match meeting agenda mapped out.

He stretched, killed the desk lamp, and walked downstairs.

The club was quiet. The corridors were empty. He pushed through the side door into the night air — cooler now, properly September, the sky clear and the moon high enough to cast visible shadows on the training ground.

He stopped.

There was someone on the pitch.

He checked his watch. Eleven. He looked back toward the movement, a figure running a short shuttle, ball at foot, turning and repeating. The movement was uneven in the specific way of someone who has been running drills for several hours and is still choosing to keep running them. Dark hair, soaked through, each bead of sweat catching the moonlight as it fell.

He stood and watched for a moment.

The figure ran the shuttle again. Turned. Ran it back. Turned. The ball stayed close, not perfectly, but close enough, each repetition marginally cleaner than the last in the way that only happened when someone was grinding into a specific mechanical correction rather than just going through motions.

Daniel thought about what he’d seen in the afternoon session. The La Croqueta firing clean out of a triple-team. The rainbow pass bending over an entire defensive line. He thought about Wickliff’s numbers from the physical - 14.1 seconds over a hundred metres, muscle mass two standard deviations below professional baseline for a seventeen-year-old.

He watched the figure turn and run the shuttle again.

He said nothing. He turned around and went back inside.

At eleven o’clock Mateo checked the bar.

[Current training value: 6.0 hours logged.]

Six. He needed ten.

He gathered his things slowly, the kind of slow that came from legs that had been going for six hours and had given what they had to give. He walked back across the dark pitch to the dormitory building, up the stairs, into the room. Ben Kehi’s side was empty and tidy as always, the bed unslept-in, the curtain half-open onto the dark outside.

Mateo sat on the edge of his own bed, untied his boots, and lay back without bothering to change.

Six hours, he thought. Four more tomorrow.

He set his alarm for five and was asleep within minutes.

Across the complex, in a first-team apartment the club rented for players who didn’t want to commit to buying property during a contract, Farfán was sitting in front of his laptop with a bowl of leftover rice.

He’d pulled up a football forum he used occasionally, a mid-size European fan board with a decent Bundesliga section, more interested in actual football than in transfer gossip. He’d been on it for years, mostly reading.

He uploaded a short clip. Forty seconds. The La Croqueta through three players, the pause, and then the outside-of-foot delivery curling over the defensive line and dropping onto Benedict’s run.

He typed a title: U18 kid at Schalke, watch the pass at 0:23.

Posted it. Went back to his rice.

He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d done it. Something about watching that ball leave the kid’s boot and not being able to fully account for the trajectory. He’d been receiving passes at professional level for seven years and he still wasn’t completely sure how the ball had ended up where it ended up. That felt like something worth putting in front of people who paid close attention to these things.

He finished his dinner and went to bed without checking the replies.

Plz Drop Some Power Stones