The city knew.
That was the thing Richard noticed first in the days after the Leverkusen win — a shift in the texture of Dortmund around him, something in the way the city carried itself when the second leg was on the horizon. Not loud about it. Not yet. But present. A awareness in the streets and the shops and the ordinary places that said: something is coming. We know it. We are waiting for it.
He noticed it on the Monday morning when Chidi stopped at the bakery on Märkische Strasse — the one Ella had found in the first week, the one that opened before six and made the kind of bread that made you understand why German bakeries had the reputation they had. The woman behind the counter — mid-fifties, efficient, the kind of person who had served the same neighborhood for twenty years and knew everyone in it — looked up when Richard came in and said, without preamble:
"The Madrid match. You will score."
Not a question. Not a hope.
A statement of fact delivered with the same certainty she used to tell customers the price of a loaf.
Richard blinked. "I'll try."
She shook her head. "You will score," she repeated, and handed him his bread roll.
Chidi paid and said nothing until they were back in the car. Then: "This city has decided."
"Decided what?"
"That you're going to do it." He pulled out into the morning traffic. "I've lived in London my whole life. I've never seen a city just — decide something like that. Like it's already happened and they're just waiting for the confirmation."
Richard looked out the window.
Yellow and black everywhere. A hardware shop with a Dortmund flag in the window. A pharmacy with a handwritten sign that said, in German, Dortmund — Glaub Daran. Believe in it.
He had been in this city for less than three months.
It felt like longer than that.
It felt like home in the specific way that places feel like home not because you were born in them but because they decided to claim you and you decided to let them.
He was two streets from the training ground when his phone rang through the car speakers.
Evan.
"Morning," Richard said.
"Morning. Quick update before you go in. Adidas called yesterday evening. They want to accelerate the timeline slightly — they've seen the Leverkusen performance and the Madrid coverage and they'd like to finalise the framework before the second leg rather than after."
Richard looked at the road ahead. "Why before?"
"Because after the second leg — whatever happens — your value changes. If Dortmund go through it changes significantly. They want to lock in the structure before the market fully processes what you are." A pause. "It's a reasonable commercial instinct on their part. It's also an indication of how seriously they're taking this."
"What does Amara say?"
A brief pause on the line — brief enough to be nothing, brief enough to be something.
"I was going to call her after this," Evan said. "But her instinct will be to wait. She'll want the strongest possible position, which means after." He paused. "I think there's an argument both ways. But the decision is yours."
Richard thought for a moment. Outside the window Dortmund moved past in the thin morning light.
"Set up a call," he said. "The three of us. Before I decide."
"Good," Evan said. "I'll arrange it for Wednesday."
He hung up.
Chidi pulled into the Brackel car park and stopped the engine.
"Adidas?" he said.
"Yes."
Chidi nodded slowly, the way he nodded when something was significant enough that his usual commentary felt inadequate. "Your mum is going to cry again."
"She cries at everything now."
"She's earned the right." Chidi looked at him. "Go train."
Monday's session was the first one where Richard felt the shape shift was no longer subtle.
Schmidt had reconfigured the positional play almost entirely. The structure now had a specific logic that Richard could read from his own position within it — a logic built around what happened when he received the ball in certain areas and moved in certain ways. Guirassy's diagonal runs were timed to Richard's first touch rather than to a fixed pattern. Adeyemi's width was more disciplined, holding wider longer, which kept the center of the pitch open rather than congested. Brandt's positioning gave Richard a consistent short option without crowding the half-spaces he needed to operate in.
It was not a formation change. On paper it looked like the same system.
But it felt like a different team.
After the session Schmidt called Richard over. Just Richard. They stood at the edge of the pitch while the rest of the squad moved toward the changing rooms, the two of them alone in the grey morning air with the damp grass and the empty goal behind them.
Schmidt looked at him for a moment before speaking.
"How did that feel?" he asked.
Richard considered the question carefully. Schmidt was not a man who wanted approximations. "Like there was more space available. Like the structure was — creating it rather than me having to find it."
Schmidt nodded once. "Yes." He looked at the pitch briefly. "I have been watching what you do. How you move. Where the spaces appear when you move correctly." He paused. "We have been fitting you into something that existed before you arrived. That is changing."
He said it simply. No drama, no ceremony.
Richard said nothing for a moment.
"The second leg?" he said.
"We will be ready," Schmidt said. He looked at Richard directly. "You will need to trust it. The structure will give you the space. What you do in the space — that is yours."
He walked off toward the changing rooms.
Richard stood on the pitch for a moment longer, alone, the empty stadium around him, the Yellow Wall grey and quiet in the morning without its people.
He looked at it.
Then he turned and went inside.
Tuesday was a rest day.
Richard slept until eight-thirty, which was late for him, and woke to the specific quality of silence that a Dortmund morning produced when there was nowhere to be — the house settled around him, the street outside quiet, the light coming through the blinds in the unhurried way of a day with no demands in it yet.
He made coffee and stood at the kitchen window and looked at the garden, which Dortmund's facilities team maintained and which Richard had started to look at properly only recently — a small, ordered space, a table and two chairs, the first suggestion of green arriving in the flower beds along the fence now that March had decided warmth was eventually coming.
He was still standing there when a knock came at the front door.
He opened it to find Ella, in running clothes, slightly out of breath, holding a small paper bag.
"From the bakery," she said, offering it. "The woman said to give these to you specifically. She said — " Ella paused, constructing the translation — "she said the boy who will score against Madrid should eat properly."
Richard looked at the bag. Then at Ella. "She said that?"
"Verbatim." Ella grinned. "She also said if you don't score she wants the pastries back, but I think she was joking." A pause. "Mostly."
Richard laughed and took the bag. "You want coffee?"
Ella checked her watch with the expression of someone checking a watch purely for form. "Yes obviously."
They sat at the kitchen table — Richard with his coffee, Ella with hers, the pastries between them, the Tuesday morning doing nothing in particular outside the window. It was the most ordinary situation Richard had been in for several weeks and he felt the ordinariness of it like something physical — a loosening in the shoulders he hadn't noticed were tight.
Ella talked the way she always talked — with the energy of someone to whom silence was a problem to be solved — about the neighborhood, about a dispute between two residents further down the street involving a fence and some strong opinions, about a German class she had started attending on Thursday evenings that was going better than expected.
"Mr. Krause helped me with the homework last week," she said. "He sat at his kitchen table for forty-five minutes correcting my grammar with a red pen like I was back in school. It was terrifying and also the most helpful thing anyone has done for me since I moved here."
"How is he?" Richard asked. He had seen Krause twice since the neighborhood introduction — brief exchanges over the fence, a wave through the window, the comfortable acknowledgment of people who lived close to each other and had decided they liked the arrangement.
"Good," Ella said. "He watched the Madrid match in his living room. I could hear him through the wall." She smiled. "He was not quiet about it."
"What did he say when they scored the fourth?"
Ella considered. "I won't translate that exactly. But the general sentiment was that the tie was not over." She looked at Richard. "He said specifically — after the fourth goal — he said: the boy will fix it at home. Then he turned the television off and went to bed."
Richard looked at his coffee.
The boy will fix it at home.
"He said that?"
"He said that." Ella wrapped both hands around her mug. "Krause doesn't say things he doesn't mean. He's been watching Dortmund for forty years. He's seen things. He knows what he's talking about." She paused. "He also made me write Borussia Dortmund correctly in my German homework three times as extra practice, so."
Richard laughed.
They finished the pastries and the coffee and Ella left for the rest of her run with the wave of someone who had completed a task she had appointed herself to complete. Richard stood at the open door and watched her go, then looked at the street — quiet, ordinary, yellow and black in the windows of every third house — and felt the city around him the way you felt something that had become part of you without the moment of becoming being visible.
He closed the door.
Went back inside.
Picked up his tactical notebook.
Nine days.
The Wednesday call happened at ten in the morning.
Richard sat at the kitchen table with his laptop open, Evan's face in one window, Amara's in another. It was the first time he had seen them in the same frame and there was something briefly strange about it — the two people who managed the most serious parts of his life outside football, existing in the same space, their professionalism meeting across the screen with the ease of two people who had already established a working rhythm.
Amara had sent her notes the night before — four pages, clear, annotated, her position on each clause of the Adidas framework laid out with the precision Richard had come to expect from her and rely on entirely.
Evan opened the call. "Amara, you've reviewed the framework."
"Fully," she said. "The revised social media clause is acceptable. The territory rights are now appropriately scoped. My concern is the timeline on the signature boot conversation — eighteen months is too soon given where Richard is in his development. I'd want that pushed to twenty-four, with a performance review built in."
Evan made a note. "Agreed. I'll push on that."
"The base fee structure is conservative given current market comparables," Amara continued. "I've sent you the comparables separately. I think we have room to move them ten to fifteen percent without the conversation becoming difficult."
"Also agreed." Evan looked at Richard. "Richard — your position on timing. Before the second leg or after?"
Richard looked at Amara's window. She was looking at her notes, professional, composed.
"Amara," he said. "What's your honest read?"
She looked up. A brief pause. "After," she said. "Unambiguously. Whatever happens in the second leg — win or lose, through or out — your profile is higher after than before. The only scenario in which before makes sense is if you believe the second leg will go badly and you want to lock in the current valuation." She paused. "I don't believe that. So my recommendation is after."
Richard looked at Evan.
Evan spread his hands slightly. "She's right. I'll keep Adidas warm and we move after the second leg."
"After," Richard said.
"Good," Amara said. She made a note. Then, without looking up from it: "Is there anything else or can we let him go train?"
Evan smiled briefly. "That's everything."
"Good luck on Saturday, Richard," she said.
The call ended.
Richard sat for a moment with the closed laptop in front of him. He was thinking about the call but he was also thinking about the way she had said I don't believe that — quiet, direct, certain, the same certainty the baker had used about the bread roll and Krause had used about the boy will fix it at home.
Everyone around him had decided.
He closed the laptop and went to get ready for training.
Saturday was Freiburg at home.
A Bundesliga match that existed in the story of the season as a necessary thing — three points needed, preparation maintained, the squad kept sharp in the days between legs. Schmidt named a rotated side, resting Kobel, Emre Can, and Schlotterbeck with the second leg in mind. Richard started.
The match was not spectacular. Freiburg were organized and difficult and came to Signal Iduna Park with the specific intent of making it ugly, which they achieved for the first hour. The crowd was present and supportive but the urgency that usually filled the stadium was somewhere else — held in reserve, saved for something coming.
Richard felt it too. The sense of the stadium being warm but not yet ignited.
He worked carefully. Precise, efficient, doing the things the match needed without forcing things the match didn't need. An assist on thirty-one minutes — a first-time pass through a narrow gap that Adeyemi converted with a low finish — and then the disciplined work of managing a one-nil lead through a second half that Freiburg spent pressing for an equalizer they never quite found.
Full time. One-nil.
Third place. One point above Leipzig. Ten matches of the Bundesliga remaining.
The crowd acknowledged it warmly and went home with the energy of people who had one eye already on the midweek.
In the dressing room afterward, while the squad was changing and the noise was the comfortable noise of a job done, Richard sat with his boots unlaced and became aware of a conversation happening two benches away between Jobe Bellingham and Falk — the young academy midfielder who had been training with the first team for several weeks now and had graduated from visibly terrified to merely extremely focused.
Falk was saying something in German that Richard caught fragments of. Jobe was listening and then responding in the mix of German and English he used with younger players.
Richard couldn't hear all of it. But he heard Jobe say, clearly: "Watch how he moves in the space. Not where he is — where he's going. That's what you learn from."
He was talking about Richard.
He did not know Richard could hear him.
Richard said nothing. He tied his boots and picked up his bag and walked out into the corridor.
He stood there for a moment in the quiet between the dressing room noise and the outside world.
A seventeen year old, being studied by a younger player trying to learn.
The thought landed differently than he expected.
He walked out to the car.
Sunday was rest again.
He ran in the morning — not for the training load, just for the clarity it produced, the specific clearheadedness of a body moving through cold air with nothing required of it except the next step. He ran for forty minutes through streets that were quiet and yellow and increasingly familiar, past the bakery that was already open, past the park where two small children were being pushed on swings by their father in the thin morning light, past the corner where he had stood with Chidi in January looking at this neighborhood and thinking: this is real now.
He ran back to the house and found Krause outside.
The old man was in his garden, doing something with a plant that may or may not have needed doing, wearing his Dortmund scarf the way he always wore it — not as a statement, just as a garment, the way a man wears a thing so familiar it has stopped being a choice.
He looked up when Richard came through the gate.
"Good run?" he asked.
"Good run," Richard said.
Krause nodded. He looked at his plant for a moment. Then, without looking up: "Four days."
"Four days," Richard agreed.
Krause was quiet for a moment. Then he looked up, and his expression was not the dry humor he usually deployed nor the warmth he occasionally allowed through underneath it. It was something simpler and more direct than either.
"I have watched this club for forty-one years," he said. "I have seen nights that this city will never forget." He paused. "Thursday will be one of them."
He went back to his plant.
Richard stood at the gate for a moment.
Then he went inside.
Monday. Three days before the second leg.
Schmidt gathered the full squad in the meeting room at Brackel — not the tactical room, the larger room, which was significant because Schmidt used the larger room when he had something to say that was for all of them rather than for the tactical details of one opponent.
He stood at the front without notes.
"Real Madrid are the best team in the world," he said. "This is true. I will not pretend otherwise and neither should you." He looked around the room. "They won the first leg four-one because they were better than us on the night. In specific moments — the set piece, the transition error — we gave them things we should not have given. But they were also better than us."
The room was quiet.
"Three goals," Schmidt continued. "This is what is required. Against the best goalkeeper in the world, against the best defensive structure in European football, in front of our supporters, in a single match." He paused. "I have been asked by journalists this week whether I believe it is possible. I told them my interest was the performance." He looked around the room. "I will tell you something different."
He stopped. The room was completely still.
"I believe it," he said. Quietly. Simply. The way he said everything that mattered. "I believe it because of what I have seen in this room and on that pitch for the last three weeks. The work. The adjustment. The preparation." His eyes moved around the room and stopped briefly on Richard. "We are ready. Not to hope. To do."
He held the silence for three seconds.
"Thursday," he said.
He walked out.
The room broke into noise — not wild, not chaotic, but warm and certain and building. Can banged the table once. Guirassy stood. Adeyemi said something in his own language that nobody needed to translate.
Richard sat still for a moment in the middle of it all.
He was thinking about the Yellow Wall.
About what Lukas had said: it gets bigger.
About Krause in his garden with his Dortmund scarf: Thursday will be one of them.
About his father's text from after the first leg: the second leg belongs to you.
About Amara: I don't believe that.
About Chidi, who had known him since he was fourteen years old and had driven him to training every morning and had been in the car the night they drew Real Madrid and sent three words in capitals at midnight:
BRO.
SEVENTEEN.
He stood up.
Picked up his bag.
Walked out of the meeting room, through the Brackel corridors, past the statistics screen he had stopped looking at because the statistics were no longer the point, out into the Dortmund morning where the air was cold and clear and the city was four days away from something it had already decided was going to happen.
He breathed it in once.
Then he got in the car.
"Thursday," Chidi said, pulling out.
"Thursday," Richard said.
The city moved past the windows, yellow and black and certain, all the way home.