Dynasty Awakening: Building My Own Football Empire

Chapter 297 297: Cult of the Bald Man

The problem with buying a sanctuary to escape the madness of football is that the madness usually has a GPS tracker and drives a Bentley.It was Monday morning. Michael Sterling was sitting on his new terrace, overlooking the serene Yorkshire lake. He was drinking coffee from a mug that didn't have a chip in it, wearing slippers that felt like hugging a cloud, and for the first time in three months, his heart rate was below 120.

He took a sip. He closed his eyes. He listened to the birds.

SCREEEECH!

The sound of tires tearing up gravel shattered the peace.

Michael didn't even open his eyes. He just sighed.

"Kenji," he whispered to the ducks on the lake. "Why are you like this?"

The front door of his new mansion banged open.

"MICHAEL!" Kenji Sato's voice boomed through the hallway. "WE HAVE A CRISIS! A CATASTROPHE! A FINANCIAL DISASTER OF THE BEST KIND!"

Michael stood up, tightening his bathrobe. He walked into the open-plan living room to find Kenji standing there. The billionaire looked like he had been electrocuted. His hair was wild, his tie was sideways, and he was holding a purple football shirt like it was a dead rat.

Arthur Milton was behind him, clutching a box of invoices and looking, as usual, on the verge of tears.

"Good morning, Kenji," Michael said calmly. "Nice to see you used the doorbell. Oh wait, you didn't."

"Fuck the doorbell!" Kenji shouted, waving the shirt. "Look at this! Do you see this?"

Michael squinted. It was the new Barnsley third kit. Black and gold. Very sleek.

"It's a shirt, Kenji."

"It's empty!" Kenji roared. "The back! Look at the back!"

He spun the shirt around. It was blank.

"We ran out of letters, Michael! We ran out of the letter 'N'!"

Michael blinked. "We ran out of... a letter?"

"Yes! Because of him!" Kenji pointed a trembling finger at a stack of sales reports Arthur was holding. "Diego fucking Nunez. Every kid in Yorkshire wants 'NUNEZ' on their shirt. That's two N's! And 'TANAKA'? That's another N! And 'JENSEN'? Another N!"

Kenji collapsed onto Michael's new Italian sofa.

"We have plenty of Q's," Arthur offered helpfully. "And Z's. But the N's are gone, Boss. The club shop is a war zone. I saw a grandmother fighting a teenager for the last 'U'."

Michael walked over and picked up the sales report. He scanned the numbers.

His eyebrows shot up.

"Holy shit," Michael whispered.

"Exactly," Kenji breathed, staring at the ceiling. "We sold 50,000 shirts in forty-eight hours. The website crashed. The server farm in Dublin caught fire. Michael... we are richer than God."

The Warehouse

An hour later, Michael was standing in the club warehouse. It was usually a quiet place where boxes of scarves gathered dust.

Today, it looked like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, if the stockbrokers were sweaty teenagers packing boxes.

"Move! Move! Move!" A supervisor was screaming. "I need fifty 'KAITO' shirts for Tokyo! I need a hundred 'DIEGO' shirts for... why are we shipping to a prison in Colombia?"

Michael walked through the chaos, stepping over piles of purple fabric. Kenji was walking beside him, doing mental arithmetic and giggling.

"This is the Madrid Effect," Kenji said, rubbing his hands together. " beating them didn't just give us points. It gave us clout. We are the cool kids now. The hipsters in Shoreditch are wearing Barnsley kits ironically. The kids in Rio are wearing them unironically."

They reached the back of the warehouse.

There, sitting on a crate of socks, were the culprits.

Diego Nunez, Kaito Tanaka, and Jax.

They were supposed to be resting. Instead, they were signing things.

Diego was signing a bald cap. A rubber, flesh-colored bald cap.

"Why are you signing a bald cap, Diego?" Michael asked, crossing his arms.

Diego looked up. He had a sharpie in his mouth.

"Is for the fans," Diego grunted, spitting the pen out. "They want to be me. They shave heads, or they wear this. It is the Cult of Diego."

"The Cult of Diego," Michael repeated slowly. "Arthur, make a note. If they start sacrificing goats, we intervene."

"Noted, Boss," Arthur squeaked, typing into his phone.

Kaito Tanaka looked up from a pile of Japanese flags he was signing. His nose was still taped up, giving him a rugged, battle-hardened look.

"Boss," Kaito smiled. "Did you know I am trending on Twitter in Japan? They call me 'The Titanium Samurai'. There is a manga about me being written."

"A manga?" Michael raised an eyebrow.

"Yes. In the manga, my hamstrings are made of dragon scales."

"That sounds accurate," Michael nodded.

Then there was Jax. The Brazilian prodigy was currently filming a TikTok with a warehouse worker named Brenda.

"Say 'Vibes'!" Jax shouted at the camera.

"Vibes!" Brenda shouted back, looking confused but happy.

Jax stopped recording and looked at Michael. "Boss! We are viral! The 'Chicken Dance' you did? It is bigger than the Macarena!"

"I didn't do a chicken dance," Michael sighed. "I was signaling a press trap."

"No, no," Jax shook his head. "It is a dance now. Look."

He showed Michael his phone. A video of thousands of people in a nightclub in Ibiza, flapping their elbows to a techno remix of Michael shouting "PRESS!"

"I hate the internet," Michael muttered.

The Boardroom Lunch

After the warehouse tour, Kenji ordered lunch to the boardroom. Not sandwiches. He ordered sushi flown in from London, because "we can afford it now."

They sat around the long glass table. Michael, Kenji, Arthur, and the three players.

It felt less like a football meeting and more like a gathering of a dysfuntional crime family.

"Okay," Kenji said, picking up a piece of tuna sashimi with gold chopsticks (he brought his own). "We have a problem. A good problem. We have too much money coming in, and we need to maximize it before the Dortmund game."

"Maximize how?" Michael asked, stealing a piece of salmon.

"Sponsorships," Kenji said. "Since the Madrid game, my phone hasn't stopped ringing. Rolex. Mercedes. A company that makes industrial-strength hair gel for Diego."

Diego touched his bald head. "I do not need gel. I need polish. Like a car."

"We can arrange that," Kenji nodded seriously. "But there is one offer... it is big. Very big."

He slid a contract across the table.

Michael picked it up.

BRAND PARTNERSHIP PROPOSAL: JELLY BELLY CANDY CO.

Michael looked at Arthur.

Arthur stopped breathing. A piece of sushi fell out of his mouth.

"Is this..." Arthur whispered. "Is this real?"

"They saw you," Kenji grinned. "They saw you fainting with the bag. They saw you eating them on the bench. They want to make you the face of the brand. 'The Stress-Relief Candy'."

Arthur looked like he was about to cry. "I... I'm an influencer?"

"You're a meme, Arthur," Michael corrected gently. "But a profitable meme."

"And for the players," Kenji continued, looking at Jax and Kaito. "A Japanese tech company wants to make a video game. Misfits: The Game. You play as the team. But instead of football, it is... fighting zombies?"

"I play that," Diego said immediately. "Do I get a chainsaw?"

"I think you use a tackle," Kenji said. "But we can negotiate the chainsaw."

Michael leaned back in his chair. He looked at his squad.

A year ago, they were nobodies. Rejects. A manager who had failed, an assistant who was a nervous wreck, a billionaire who didn't know the offside rule, and players who were broken.

Now? Now they were a global brand. They were selling out shirts. They were inspired manga. They were fighting zombies in video games.

It was ridiculous. It was absurd.

And it was dangerous.

"Listen to me," Michael said. The room went quiet.

He put down his chopsticks.

"The money is great. The manga is cool. The jelly babies..." He looked at Arthur. "Are acceptable."

"But," Michael's voice dropped. "We play Borussia Dortmund in four days. The Yellow Wall. They don't care about your TikToks, Jax. They don't care about your bald cap, Diego."

He stood up and walked to the window, looking out at the training pitch below where Lars Jensen and Enzo Moretti were doing drills.

"Fame is a drug," Michael said, turning back to them. "It makes you soft. It makes you think you've already won because people are buying your shirt."

He looked at Kaito.

"Real Madrid was a miracle. But miracles don't happen twice unless you work for them. If we lose to Dortmund, nobody buys the shirt. Nobody reads the manga."

The room was silent. The sushi lay forgotten.

Diego Nunez stood up. He walked over to the window and stood next to Michael.

The bald defender looked out at the pitch.

"Boss," Diego said quietly. "Do not worry."

"Why?"

Diego tapped his chest.

"The shirt... it is just fabric. It rips. I rip many shirts."

He turned to the group, his eyes burning with that familiar, terrifying intensity.

"But the hunger? You cannot buy hunger. And I am still fucking hungry."

Jax stood up. "Me too, Boss. No cap. I want to cook Hummels."