The Home Depot Center in Los Angeles was packed for New Manchester United's first friendly of pre-season.
Affordable ticket prices and the chance to see the newly crowned European champions had drawn a crowd approaching the stadium's twenty-seven-thousand capacity, while ESPN carried the match live across the United States.
LA Galaxy took the occasion seriously.
They selected a strong side and treated the match as an opportunity to measure themselves against the best team in Europe.
Mourinho had similar reasons for naming a powerful starting eleven.
Drogba led the attack.
Ronaldo started on the left and Robben on the right, with Kaká operating through the middle.
Beckham partnered De Rossi in central midfield.
Evra, Terry, Curtis and Maicon formed the back four.
Čech started in goal.
On paper, it looked formidable.
On the pitch, it looked like a team in early July.
New Manchester United had been back in training for little more than a week.
The players were still carrying heavy conditioning loads, their timing was not yet sharp and too many simple passes went astray.
The tempo remained sluggish.
Movements that would have flowed naturally in April required an extra touch.
Pressing triggers were missed.
Attacking combinations broke down before they could develop.
Robben struggled more than most.
It was his first proper match after more than half a year out injured, and it showed.
His acceleration was tentative.
He hesitated before taking defenders on.
On several occasions he received the ball in positions where the old Robben would have attacked immediately, only to recycle possession instead.
Behind him, Maicon was one of New Manchester United's better performers.
The Brazilian looked sharp, powerful and increasingly comfortable with his defensive responsibilities.
At half-time, the score remained 0-0.
Mourinho used the interval to change almost the entire side.
Villa replaced Drogba.
Ribéry came on for Robben.
Essien replaced De Rossi.
Lahm took Evra's place.
Vidić and Chiellini replaced Terry and Curtis.
Dani Alves came on for Maicon.
Kasey Keller replaced Čech.
Keller's introduction produced one of the loudest reactions of the afternoon.
The American national-team goalkeeper had spent most of his career in Europe, and the Los Angeles crowd welcomed him with prolonged applause.
The substitutions did not transform the match immediately.
New Manchester United still lacked rhythm.
But one change did become increasingly noticeable.
Dani Alves.
The Brazilian attacked the right flank relentlessly.
He and Ribéry began combining with greater frequency, and LA Galaxy gradually found themselves being pushed deeper on that side.
The breakthrough finally arrived in the seventy-first minute.
Alves accelerated down the right, exchanged passes with Ribéry and continued his run beyond the Frenchman.
Ribéry returned the ball into his path inside the penalty area.
Alves reached it before the covering defender and lifted a measured cross towards the far post.
Villa arrived perfectly.
One touch.
Goal.
1-0.
It proved to be the only goal of the match.
New Manchester United won, but nobody inside the club pretended it had been an impressive performance.
The result mattered very little.
The condition of the players mattered much more.
Ronaldo and Kaká both looked visibly tired as the second half progressed and were eventually withdrawn for academy players.
Several others struggled to sustain their intensity.
That was exactly what the performance staff expected at this stage of pre-season.
Mourinho had not introduced any major tactical changes either.
The basic structure remained familiar.
What attracted more attention was his decision to replace Robben at half-time and the Dutchman's poor performance before the interval.
The media immediately began wondering whether Mourinho had already lost faith in him.
Inside Newton Heath, nobody viewed it that way.
Robben had spent more than six months recovering from a serious injury.
Expecting him to return at full speed in his first pre-season match would have been absurd.
The coaching staff had always known that his rehabilitation would continue long after he had been declared medically fit.
There was a difference between being healthy enough to train and being ready to perform at Champions League level.
The Lab had prepared a detailed progression plan.
Robben understood it.
So did Mourinho.
At the moment, the Dutchman's biggest opponent was not Messi, Ribéry or anyone else competing for minutes.
It was his own body.
He needed to regain trust in his acceleration.
He needed match rhythm.
He needed the confidence to change direction at full speed without instinctively protecting the leg that had been injured.
Only after that would the discussion about starting places become meaningful.
Robben was realistic enough to understand something else.
During his absence, Messi had improved enormously.
Even if Robben returned to exactly the level he had reached before the injury, there was no guarantee that he would automatically displace the Argentine.
That meant recovery alone was not enough.
He would have to improve as well.
Reaction to the Galaxy match was mixed.
Some supporters defended Robben and the team's general performance, pointing out that this was the first friendly of a long pre-season.
Others complained about the lack of intensity and questioned Mourinho's decision to make so many changes.
New Manchester United ignored the debate.
Training continued.
There were more important things to do in California than worry about the score of a July friendly.
One of them took the squad north to Silicon Valley.
After more than two years of development, the sports technology project involving Apple, Adidas and New Manchester United was finally ready for launch.
The product was introduced as the Adidas + iPod Sport Kit.
A sensor embedded in compatible Adidas footwear transmitted training information to an iPod receiver, allowing users to monitor data such as running time, distance, pace and estimated energy expenditure.
The New Manchester United edition carried the club crest on both the footwear and the customised iPod.
Apple had previously used Beckham prominently in campaigns connected with the club.
For the new launch, Kaká, Ronaldo and Messi joined him.
The four players represented exactly the audience Apple and Adidas wanted to reach.
Beckham offered global recognition.
Kaká brought elegance and an increasingly powerful international profile.
Ronaldo appealed strongly to younger consumers.
Messi represented the future.
Both companies expected the product line to generate significant revenue over the coming years.
For New Manchester United, the value went beyond its share of sales.
Every product placed the club's crest in front of consumers who might not otherwise have bought football merchandise.
The players benefited too through their individual endorsement agreements.
The trip to Silicon Valley was only one commercial commitment.
The entire squad was soon back in Los Angeles for another event.
The Hollywood premiere of Goal!
DreamWorks had turned it into a major red-carpet occasion.
Film stars attended.
Athletes attended.
Sponsors attended.
Kobe Bryant was among the sporting figures invited.
For one evening, the premiere became less a conventional film screening than a collision between football, Hollywood and American celebrity culture.
Ethan attended with Eva.
Beckham arrived with Victoria.
Kaká, Curtis, Ronaldo and several other players appeared with their partners.
Those without partners simply arrived together and endured the inevitable jokes from their teammates.
The actor playing Santiago had spent months training for the role.
He had played football before entering acting, which made the process considerably easier, and he had worked regularly with New Manchester United's players during production.
By the end of filming, he had become friendly with much of the squad.
The marketing campaign had made heavy use of one phrase:
Inspired by a true story.
It was not literally a biography.
Instead, the screenplay borrowed extensively from events surrounding New Manchester United.
Santiago's medical difficulties incorporated elements inspired by Messi's childhood treatment.
The rivalry with Manchester United drew on real tensions surrounding the Red Rebels' rise.
Episodes involving hostile away supporters came from incidents the club had experienced during its climb through English football.
The screenwriters took those fragments and reshaped them into a conventional Hollywood narrative.
The result ran for roughly two hours.
The pace rarely slowed.
Training scenes moved quickly.
Matches were shot and edited for maximum intensity.
Real football was compressed, rearranged and heightened without becoming completely unrecognisable to people who understood the sport.
One sequence drew a particularly strong response at the premiere.
New Manchester United were trailing Manchester United at home.
The dressing room was flat.
Confidence had disappeared.
Then Gareth Turner, appearing as himself in a fictionalised coaching role, began talking about the club's history.
He spoke about the beginning.
The lower divisions.
The tiny crowds.
The volunteers.
The supporters who remained when there was no money and no guarantee the club would ever become anything.
He reminded the players what the badge represented.
By the time he finished, the mood of the scene had changed completely.
The team returned to the pitch.
They fought back.
They won.
The sequence was unapologetically emotional.
Several people in the theatre wiped their eyes.
Even the New Manchester United players were caught up in it.
They had filmed pieces of the football separately, often repeating the same action several times for different camera angles.
Seeing those fragments transformed into a complete match was something else entirely.
Almost the entire senior squad and many academy players had participated during production.
Beckham, Curtis, Ronaldo, Kaká and Messi appeared as Santiago's teammates.
Santiago himself played as a striker.
That meant Drogba and Villa had been given the distinctly less glamorous task of portraying the teammates competing with him for a place.
Neither had allowed the other to forget it.
DreamWorks and Disney had treated the film as a serious commercial project from the beginning.
Jerry Bruckheimer was brought in to oversee the trilogy as producer.
Ethan knew his work well from his previous life.
Bruckheimer had a talent for large-scale, emotionally direct entertainment, and he immediately recognised the potential in New Manchester United's story.
Another sports project had been competing for his attention, but once he became involved with Goal!, the football trilogy became a priority.
What fascinated him most was the club's rise.
A team beginning near the bottom of English football and eventually becoming Premier League champions already sounded like a screenplay.
The fact that much of it had actually happened made it stronger.
Bruckheimer used that history carefully.
The entire seven-year climb occupied only a few minutes of screen time, shown partly through flashbacks and montage.
Yet it became one of the most memorable sections of the film.
Old grounds.
Small crowds.
Rain-soaked lower-league matches.
Supporters building banners by hand.
Promotion celebrations.
The first major trophy.
Then the new stadium.
The Premier League.
Europe.
By the time Gareth Turner spoke in the dressing room, the audience already understood what the fictional players were being asked to defend.
The film's climax returned to that idea.
New Manchester United completed the comeback.
The final whistle went.
Players lifted the Premier League trophy beneath a sky filled with fireworks.
Around Ethan, even people who knew exactly how the scenes had been constructed were applauding.
The film also filled its two hours with moments built around familiar New Manchester United figures.
There was Messi dribbling through a crowd of defenders.
Kaká arriving onto a ball and striking spectacularly from distance.
Ronaldo bending and dipping a free-kick beyond the wall.
Beckham curling one into the top corner.
Curtis finishing a match bloodied but refusing to leave the pitch.
Terry stepping in to defend a teammate during a confrontation.
None of those scenes was presented exactly as it had happened in reality.
That was not the point.
The filmmakers had taken recognisable pieces of the club's identity and converted them into cinema.
Tom Cruise's fictional owner embodied another part of the story.
He was shown in tears after the championship was secured.
Earlier, he confronted violent supporters rather than abandoning the club when things became dangerous.
George Clooney's character brought Santiago into the stadium for the first time, looking around the ground with the reverence of someone entering somewhere sacred.
The film was commercial.
Nobody denied that.
It had stars.
It had heroic speeches.
It had dramatic music.
It compressed years of football into moments designed to make an audience cheer.
But Ethan had never wanted it to become a two-hour advertisement pretending to be a film.
That was why he had resisted demands to make New Manchester United even more dominant in the screenplay.
Hollywood could handle the storytelling.
The club provided the world, the people and the inspiration.
The premiere suggested the decision had worked.
Early reviews were exceptionally strong.
Rotten Tomatoes showed an initial freshness rating of ninety-seven per cent from the first wave of critics.
On IMDb, early audience scores averaged around 8.5.
Those numbers would inevitably move as more reviews arrived, but the opening reaction was far beyond what the producers had expected.
Reviewers repeatedly praised the football sequences.
More surprisingly, many also responded to the film's themes.
Community.
Ambition.
Commercialisation.
Loyalty.
The relationship between supporters and clubs.
The tension between football as a business and football as something people felt belonged to them.
The Red Rebels' philosophy had survived the transition into a Hollywood blockbuster.
That pleased Ethan more than any individual review.
The commercial expectations rose immediately.
DreamWorks and Disney intensified the final marketing campaign.
Internally, executives began talking seriously about a North American box-office target of $100 million.
For a football film in the United States, that was extremely ambitious.
Nobody was dismissing it anymore.
Ethan left the premiere convinced that his original approach had been correct.
He had repeatedly been told to use the film as aggressively as possible to promote New Manchester United.
He had refused.
The club would provide access.
The club would provide players.
The club would provide stories.
After that, filmmakers had to make a film people actually wanted to watch.
If Goal! succeeded as entertainment, the commercial benefits to New Manchester United would follow naturally.
More supporters.
More merchandise.
More recognition in markets where the club was still growing.
Greater appeal to sponsors.
And, perhaps most importantly, a version of the Red Rebels' story that could reach people who had never watched a Premier League match in their lives.
The first film would open on July 15.
The release was designed to be genuinely international, with North America, Europe and major markets across Asia, South America and Australia receiving the film in the opening rollout before it expanded further.
Football media across the world covered the premiere heavily.
The first instalment of an ambitious football trilogy was about to reach cinemas on a scale the sport had rarely seen before.
Even Sepp Blatter, despite FIFA's increasingly hostile relationship with Europe's leading clubs, welcomed the attention the film could bring to football.
For Ethan, the irony was difficult to miss.
Only days earlier, G14 and FIFA had been preparing for another political battle.
Now both sides could agree on at least one thing.
On July 15, football was heading to Hollywood.
(To be continued.)
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◇ One bonus chapter will be released for every 200 Power Stones.
◇ You can read the ahead chapter on Pat if you're interested: p-atreon.c-om/Blownleaves (Just remove the hyphen to access normally.)