The press room smelled like sweat and ambition.
Not the clean ambition of the pitch — the other kind. The kind that lived in press credentials and recorder batteries and the specific cologne of men who had never once kicked a ball professionally but had spent twenty years explaining to those who had exactly what they'd done wrong.
Luca knew the smell. He'd been the smell.
The room was standing capacity. Rows of plastic chairs, every one of them filled, and another two dozen journalists pressed against the back wall with their phones raised like they were at a concert rather than a post-match debrief in the bowels of the Santiago Bernabéu. Camera rigs jutted from the sides. A Brazilian television crew had somehow wedged their entire setup between a pillar and a fire exit. The overhead lights were the brutal, shadowless kind — the kind designed to make everyone look guilty.
Mister Rossi sat to Luca's left at the long table, a plastic cup of water in front of him that he hadn't touched. He was in his post-match suit, the dark navy one he wore for away games in Europe, and he had the expression of a man who had decided, somewhere between the final whistle and the tunnel, that tonight was not going to be his problem.
He'd made that clear in the corridor.
"You want to sit at the table?" Luca had asked.
Rossi had straightened his tie. "I want to watch you work."
So here they were. Luca at the microphone. Rossi beside him, visibly comfortable. The club press officer, a nervous Florentine named Davide, sat on Luca's right and was already looking at the room with the expression of a man calculating exit routes.
The first two questions were easy. An Italian journalist from Corriere dello Sport asked about the tactical shape. A Spanish radio correspondent asked about the goal, the 85th-minute equalizer, and whether Luca had seen the run developing before it happened. Luca answered both in clean, flat sentences. He didn't perform. He didn't smile for cameras. He stated facts like he was reading coordinates off a map.
Then the British journalist stood up.
He was in the third row. Mid-forties, maybe. The kind of face that had been handsome once and had since become authoritative instead, all jaw and thinning hair and the specific confidence of a man whose publication had a very large readership. He had the microphone before the moderator had fully pointed at him.
"James Whitmore, The Guardian." He said it the way people say things they've said ten thousand times — no inflection, pure muscle memory. "Luca, brilliant performance tonight, congratulations." He paused. The pause did a lot of work. "But I think we have to be honest about what we actually saw in the first half, don't we? Real Madrid had sixty percent possession. Fifteen shots. Your goalkeeper made seven saves before the break." Another pause. Shorter this time. "Would you admit that Fiorentina was incredibly lucky to escape with a point tonight?"
The room shifted. Not loudly. Just — shifted.
Luca felt it the way you feel a change in air pressure. Thirty recorders tilted forward by two degrees. The Brazilian camera crew stopped arguing with each other. Even Davide, to Luca's right, went very still.
Rossi picked up his water cup.
Luca leaned into the microphone.
"No."
Just that. One syllable. He let it sit in the room for a full three seconds.
Whitmore blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"I said no." Luca's voice was level. Not aggressive — flat. The flatness of someone who is not angry, who is simply correcting an error. "I won't admit that, because it isn't true. And I think the framing of your question tells me more about how you watched the game than it tells me about the game itself."
The room went very quiet.
Whitmore's jaw tightened. "Sixty percent possession—"
"In what zones?"
"I — the overall figure—"
"The overall figure is meaningless." Luca didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "Possession is not a performance metric. Possession is a location metric. It tells you where the ball was. It tells you nothing about whether those locations were dangerous." He paused for exactly one beat. "We gave Real Madrid the wide channels. Both of them, deliberately. We compressed the central corridor from the first minute. Their full-backs had the ball constantly — because we wanted them to have it there. That isn't luck. That is the design."
Whitmore had his pen in his hand. He wasn't writing anything. "Fifteen shots—"
"Twelve from outside the box." Luca cut across him without raising his voice, without changing his posture. "Twelve long-range attempts through a block of five bodies. If you filter those out, they had three clear looks at goal. Three. Our goalkeeper made three meaningful saves." He tilted his head, barely. "That is not a team that was lucky to escape. That is a team that made exactly the saves it needed to make, because it had positioned itself to face exactly that volume of low-probability attempts."
Silence.
Then — from somewhere near the back — a single low laugh. Not mocking. More like recognition. The laugh of someone who had just watched a very clean piece of work.
Whitmore wasn't laughing. "You're sixteen years old," he said, and the way he said it was supposed to be devastating — a reminder, a reduction, a way of pulling the floor out from under everything Luca had just said.
Luca looked at him.
"I know," he said simply. "Does that change the possession data?"