The world outside the small, slightly damp Macclesfield away dressing room was a symphony of celebratory noise.
His Apex FC players were singing, banging on the lockers, and generally behaving like they'd just won the World Cup, not just a crucial seventh-tier league match. Leon stood in the middle of it all, the phone still pressed to his ear, Marco's final, devastating words echoing in the sudden, profound silence of his own mind.
"He wants you, Leo. He wants you."
Flavio Briatore, the man who had sacked him from Monaco, the man who operated on a different plane of reality where football clubs were apparently just interchangeable parts in a giant, glamorous, ego-driven machine, wasn't just trying to disrupt the transfer market.
He was trying to un-retire him. He wanted Leon, the retired player, the fledgling manager, the owner of a tiny club in the North of England, to be the 'player' part of his insane, galaxy-brain scheme to bring Lamine Yamal to Inter Milan.
