The email on Leon's phone was a digital guillotine. He stood on the sideline at the York City stadium, the roar of the hostile home crowd a distant, muffled buzz, his entire world narrowing to the few, stark, and utterly devastating words on the screen.
[...all matches in which Mr. Adebayo has participated will be retroactively forfeited. Effective immediately, Apex FC will be deducted... 42 points.]
Forty-two points. Their entire season. Every drop of sweat, every muddy victory, every moment of beautiful, chaotic, impossible joy. Gone. Wiped out by a clerical error. A piece of paper Marco had forgotten to file, a registration he had failed to check.
He felt a profound, cold, and utterly hollow sickness in the pit of his stomach. He wasn't just a manager who had lost a match. He was the owner who had just bankrupted his own dream. He had failed. He had failed his players, his fans, his mother, Sofia... he had failed himself.
