Chapter Two: The One-Euro Squad

Twenty hours before the registration deadline, Lanhaven still needed a healthy goalkeeper and two club-trained players. Gu turned the meeting room into a war room. Players covered the left wall, creditors the right, and one sentence filled the whiteboard: Every euro spent must purchase a greater chance of survival. Every goalkeeper recommended by conventional scouts wanted a signing fee. Gu instead opened three years of failed medicals. Among forty-seven names, he stopped at Elias Vaughan: twenty-six, former youth international, unemployed after a knee injury. They found Vaughan logging crates in a harbor freezer, a brace on his right leg.