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The announcement came at 9:14 in the morning.
Rossi stood at the front of the room the way a man stands before a firing squad — shoulders back, chin level, eyes fixed on a point just above everyone's head. The tactical board behind him still had yesterday's pressing triggers diagrammed in red marker. Nobody had erased them. The room smelled of liniment and old coffee and the particular sourness of men who'd already been through one warm-up and knew another was coming.
Luca sat on the bench nearest the door. Third row. The spot he'd taken on his first day because it was closest to the exit and furthest from the noise. He'd kept it out of habit.
"There's been a decision from the front office," Rossi said. His voice was flat. Practiced. "Ferrara will be training with the Primavera squad for the foreseeable future. Contractual reasons. Nothing more."
The room didn't react. Not immediately.
That was the thing about Serie A veterans — they didn't gasp. They didn't look at each other. They processed. Luca watched it move through them like a slow current, each man absorbing the information and running it through whatever private calculus governed his career decisions. Bramante, across the room, had his eyes on the floor. Taddei was retaping his left wrist with the mechanical focus of a man who needed something to do with his hands. Coletti, the goalkeeper, had gone very still.
Then Moretti stood up.
He didn't say anything at first. He just stood. And in the silence, the standing was enough.
Moretti was thirty-four years old, built like a man who'd spent two decades absorbing tackles that should have ended careers. He had a scar along his left jawline from a clash of heads in a Coppa Italia semifinal. He wore the captain's armband even in training, even when it wasn't required, because he'd long since stopped distinguishing between the performance of leadership and leadership itself.
He reached down and picked up his training bib.
He held it for a moment. Then he set it on the floor.
"Mister." His voice was quiet. That was worse than shouting. "We're three points from a Europa League spot. Six from Champions League. And you're telling me the kid who's been threading forty-meter passes between defenders like he can see through walls is being sent to play with sixteen-year-olds."
Rossi's jaw tightened. "It's not my decision, Capitano."
"No." Moretti's eyes didn't move. "That's the problem."
"The front office—"
"The front office doesn't play ninety minutes against Napoli on Saturday." Moretti took one step forward. Just one. "I do. These men do. And I'm telling you — if he's not in this training session, we are not in this training session."
Silence again. Heavier this time.
Then Bramante stood up.
Luca hadn't expected that. He'd done the calculation a hundred times — Bramante was the one man in the room with a reason to want him gone. Luca had taken his position. Had made him functionally redundant in the system. Had sat in the dugout and watched Bramante's minutes evaporate game by game. If anyone was going to stay seated, it was Bramante.
He stood. He reached down and untied his right boot. Then his left. He set them both on the floor beside the bib.
"The kid fixed my knee," Bramante said. His voice was rough, unhurried, the voice of a man who'd stopped caring about office politics sometime around 2007. "Not the physios. Not the doctors. Him. He watched me train for three days and told me I was loading wrong on my plant foot. Three days." He shrugged. "I don't care who owns this club. I'm not running patterns without my Regista."
Taddei dropped his tape roll.
Coletti unstrapped his gloves.
One by one. Not dramatically. Not in unison, the way it happens in films. One at a time, with the unhurried certainty of men who'd made harder choices than this and knew exactly what they were doing. Boots on the floor. Bibs on the floor. A small, growing pile of equipment that meant something very specific.
Rossi watched it happen. He couldn't stop it. He'd understood that the moment Moretti stood up — the only question was how far it would go, and now he had his answer.
Luca kept his face still. Inside, the analyst in him was already mapping the geometry of what had just occurred. The veterans hadn't acted out of sentiment. Not entirely. They'd acted because they were professionals who understood leverage and they'd identified, with cold accuracy, that a fifteen-year-old had become load-bearing infrastructure in their push for Europe. Sentiment had simply made it easier to act on what self-interest already demanded.
That distinction mattered to him. He needed to understand it correctly.
"Mister." Moretti again. Quieter now, almost gentle. "Call him."
Rossi looked at the pile of equipment on the floor. He looked at the fourteen men standing in front of him. He looked at Luca, who said nothing, who hadn't moved, who was watching all of it with that particular stillness that had unnerved coaches since the day he arrived.
Rossi smiled. It wasn't a happy smile. It was the smile of a man who'd just been handed a live grenade and told to deliver it upstairs.
He pulled out his phone.
He dialed.
The room waited. Rossi turned slightly toward the window, and when the line connected, his voice was very measured, very careful, the voice of a man choosing each word like he was stepping across ice.
"President. It's Rossi." A pause. "We have a situation."