The medal ceremony somehow felt even worse than the final whistle.
Ling had collected enough winner's medals during his club career to understand exactly how different silver felt.
The England players walked onto the podium one by one, accepted their medals, shook the hands waiting for them, and moved aside until Ling eventually found himself looking down at the one hanging around his own neck.
It was beautifully made and surprisingly heavy, yet at that particular moment, he found it deeply irritating.
A few minutes later, Italy climbed onto the podium and gathered around the Henri Delaunay Trophy beneath the Wembley lights.
Ling watched Chiellini lift it above his head as the Italian players erupted around him, blue shirts disappearing beneath falling confetti while their supporters roared from the stands.
For a moment, Ling imagined the same scene with Kane holding the trophy instead.
Human beings were greedy that way.
Before Euro 2020 began, reaching the final would have sounded like an extraordinary achievement for a player entering his first major international tournament after only a few previous England friendlies.
Once he was actually standing there with a silver medal around his neck, however, second place felt painfully close to first.
That was football. Every time you reached one height, another immediately appeared above it, and Ling was already thinking about his next opportunity before the celebrations around him had even ended.
Qatar was only two years away.
The World Cup would be a larger stage, a more difficult tournament, and another chance to finish what England had failed to complete tonight.
Ling wanted it already.
...
Later, after the ceremony and the seemingly endless interviews had finally finished, Ling remained inside Wembley for a little longer than necessary.
The stands were gradually emptying, stadium staff had already begun returning the ground to normal, and the enormous emotional storm of the final was quietly dissolving back into ordinary work.
Standing there, Ling found himself thinking about his childhood.
His father had taken him to plenty of football matches when he was young, and those experiences had helped create the obsession that eventually carried him into Manchester United's academy.
International football, however, had always produced a slightly different feeling from the club game.
Club football belonged to cities, neighborhoods, families and traditions that could stretch across generations. International football somehow gathered people who spent most of the year arguing bitterly over club loyalties and placed them behind the same shirt for a few weeks.
Ling understood that much more clearly now.
Only a short time earlier, Liverpool supporters had been joking online about temporarily suspending their hatred of him.
Arsenal supporters had celebrated his goals, while Tottenham fans had found themselves cheering Kane and Ling together instead of worrying about the clubs they represented every weekend.
For the duration of the tournament, the old divisions had temporarily become secondary.
Ling wanted to experience that feeling again.
More importantly, he wanted the ending to be different next time.
Everyone reached important decisions through a different collection of experiences, circumstances and personality.
Those choices accumulated quietly over the years until, when you finally looked backward, they seemed to have formed a road that had been waiting for you all along.
Ling had chosen his own road a long time ago. Manchester United was part of it, England was part of it, and so were his family and the work he had begun doing away from the pitch.
He knew following that road would continue demanding plenty from him.
That had never frightened him before, and losing a European Championship final was not going to make it frighten him now.
...
Once Euro 2020 ended, Ling finally allowed himself a brief holiday, although brief quickly proved to be the important word.
The new club season was already approaching, and after three consecutive Premier League titles and three consecutive Champions League trophies, Manchester United had reached a dangerous stage in their development.
Standing still was effectively another form of decline because every major club in Europe had spent years studying them, searching for weaknesses and preparing specifically for the opportunity to become the team that finally knocked them from the summit.
Ling therefore returned to Manchester ahead of schedule.
The 2020–21 season began brilliantly.
United came flying out of the gates in their league opener and dismantled West Ham 5–1, and with the squad strengthened again over the summer, the momentum of the previous three seasons initially appeared to have carried directly into another campaign.
For several weeks, Ling even experienced something he had occasionally joked about wanting during the previous season: luxury football.
There were matches in which United controlled possession so completely that he barely needed to leave the dangerous areas around the opposition penalty box.
The midfield progressed the ball efficiently, the full-backs stretched the pitch, and his teammates created so many openings that Ling sometimes felt he covered more distance celebrating goals than he did creating them.
Dimitar Berbatov would probably have approved.
Unfortunately, the comfort did not last.
...
As the season developed, Liverpool began gathering momentum, Chelsea improved, and Manchester City rediscovered the hunger that had seemed slightly dulled after watching United dominate England for three consecutive years.
Pep Guardiola had far too much experience to allow City's frustration to turn into resignation.
Instead, he gave his players a very clear target: Manchester United and, more specifically, the dynasty that had formed around Jeremy Ling.
One club and one player had effectively become the opponents everyone wanted to bring down.
Eventually, the pressure started working.
The relentless succession of high-intensity matches accumulated faster than United's players could properly recover from them.
Ling had spent years treating physical limitations as though they were negotiable, but even his body eventually required careful management, leaving Mourinho and the medical staff with no realistic choice except to rotate him.
Other players needed the same treatment, and as the changes accumulated, United began dropping points.
Draws appeared first, followed eventually by defeats, and the problem was not particularly difficult to understand.
When a team remained at the top for too long, everyone studied them more carefully, prepared specifically for them, and celebrated beating them with an intensity that rarely appeared against ordinary opponents.
United no longer entered many matches against teams simply trying to play their normal football; they entered against opponents who had spent an entire week thinking about how to stop them.
Understanding the problem was easy.
Finding a solution was considerably harder.
...
The Champions League offered no relief.
Every team drawn against Manchester United seemed to approach the tie as though eliminating the reigning champions would become one of the defining achievements of their season.
Nobody wanted to hide behind a defensive shell or simply accept United's superiority anymore.
They attacked them, pressed them, disrupted their rhythm and treated every weakness as something to exploit immediately.
The situation gradually drove Mourinho half mad.
His hair seemed to become greyer with every month that passed, and Ling occasionally joked that another season like this might leave him looking like Wenger during his later years at Arsenal.
Mourinho never found the comparison particularly amusing.
United were also facing problems that could not be solved on the training pitch.
Financial Fair Play restrictions had pushed their squad building increasingly close to its limits, meaning they could no longer respond to every weakness by simply spending another enormous transfer fee.
Departures therefore became unavoidable.
Some players still wanted to remain beside Ling and continue collecting trophies with Manchester United, while others wanted larger roles elsewhere.
Some believed they could earn contracts United were no longer prepared to offer, and others simply wanted to discover what their careers might look like outside a team where one player inevitably attracted such an enormous share of the attention.
Ling gradually began understanding that problem as well.
Standing beside the brightest star in the room could certainly be rewarding, but it also made it harder for anyone else to be noticed.
A teammate could play brilliantly and still find the headlines dominated by whatever Ling had done in the same match.
Several players eventually refused contract extensions, recruitment became more complicated, and uncertainty slowly entered the dressing room until it inevitably began affecting performances on the pitch.
...
United eventually slipped to third in the Premier League, and Ling did not always handle the decline particularly well.
There were matches when he completely lost his temper in the dressing room, shouting and swearing at teammates while demanding more from everyone around him.
His competitive instincts made it almost impossible to watch standards fall without reacting, especially after spending several years inside a team where winning had become an expectation rather than an ambition.
Yet once the anger faded and Ling found himself lying awake late at night replaying everything more calmly, part of him understood his teammates better than he wanted to admit.
Not everyone wanted the same career, nor did everyone measure success by the same standards.
Some players cared most about trophies, others wanted responsibility or a larger role, while some valued money, a new country, a different challenge, or simply the chance to experience another kind of life before their careers ended.
Ling could disagree with those priorities, but he could not choose for them.
His own desire remained unchanged because competition had become inseparable from who he was.
He suspected the day he genuinely stopped caring whether he won or lost would also be the day he needed to stop playing football altogether.
Even so, football was not an individual sport, and no matter how good Ling became, he could not preserve an entire dynasty by himself.
Building one had been difficult enough.
Keeping it alive was proving even harder.
The teammates who climbed with you did not necessarily remain beside you forever.
Some declined physically, some left, some changed their ambitions, and others simply discovered another road they wanted to follow.
Ling could not control any of that.
All he could control was how far he continued pushing himself.
...
By the time the 2020–21 season ended, Manchester United had endured what qualified as disappointment only because of the extraordinary standards they had created during the previous three years.
Manchester City eliminated them in the Champions League semifinals, United finished third in the Premier League, and the League Cup became their only trophy of the campaign.
For almost any ordinary team, finishing among England's top three while still lifting silverware would hardly have represented disaster.
For a side coming off three consecutive Premier League titles and three consecutive Champions League triumphs, however, the season felt unmistakably like the end of an era.
City reclaimed the Premier League and then added the Champions League as well, taking both major crowns United had spent years defending.
For the moment, at least, the throne had changed hands.
...
Ling's international campaign progressed far more smoothly.
England moved through World Cup qualifying with considerably less drama than Euro 2020 had produced, and the repeated international windows gradually helped Ling develop a more natural understanding with Kane, Sterling, Mount and the rest of Southgate's attacking group.
The relationships that had still felt relatively new before the European Championship were becoming increasingly instinctive, although nobody inside the squad confused qualifying matches with the pressure that would be waiting for them in Qatar.
England eventually secured first place in their group and qualified directly for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
For Ling, confirmation of qualification brought a particular sense of satisfaction.
Euro 2020 had given him his first genuine experience of major international football, ending painfully with Italy lifting the trophy at Wembley, while Qatar would give him another opportunity to chase the ending he wanted.
Away from England, the football projects he had invested in across China were also beginning to establish themselves properly.
The academies, coaching partnerships and development pathways were gradually creating opportunities for larger numbers of young players, even though Ling understood perfectly well that most of them would never become professionals.
That was normal.
Youth development was never about pretending every talented child would become a superstar.
The point was to create a large enough and healthy enough system that exceptional players had a realistic chance to emerge rather than disappearing because the pathway had never existed.
Among enough seedlings, one might eventually grow into something extraordinary.
Ling could not repair an entire football culture by himself, nor had he ever been arrogant enough to believe otherwise.
What he could do was create opportunities and help build structures that would remain after his own career ended.
Sometimes that was where real change began.
...
Toward the end of the season, however, football briefly became secondary.
At a hospital in Manchester, Pep Guardiola seemed completely incapable of removing the smile from his face.
Manchester City had finally reclaimed the Premier League from United and added the Champions League for good measure.
Under normal circumstances, Pep would undoubtedly have found several creative ways of reminding his son-in-law about both achievements.
Today, he barely seemed to care.
Maria was pregnant and had just finished a prenatal examination, with Ling supporting her carefully as they walked along the hospital corridor while Pep followed nearby wearing a ridiculous grin.
Ling watched him for several seconds before something finally occurred to him.
So this was how irritating he himself must have looked during those years when Manchester United were winning practically everything.
The realization was humbling, although only slightly.
Remembering that he had married Guardiola's daughter remained an extremely effective way of softening the disappointment of losing both the Premier League and Champions League to Manchester City.
There were some competitions Pep could win.
Ling still considered himself comfortably ahead in another.
Maria apparently recognized exactly what he was thinking because she elbowed him lightly before he could say anything aloud.
...
Football, unfortunately, was not going to wait for the new arrival.
After several discussions involving Mourinho, Ling and United's senior management, the club had already accepted that the squad required a substantial overhaul.
The group that had built Manchester United's three-year dynasty was gradually separating, but that did not necessarily mean the dynasty itself had to disappear with them.
Years earlier, Ling had been one of the young players following experienced figures such as Ibrahimović into matches that seemed almost beyond them.
He had watched those veterans, learned from them, fought beside them and gradually developed from a teenager trying to establish himself into the centerpiece of Manchester United.
Now the roles were beginning to reverse.
Ling was no longer the teenager following established stars.
He had become one of the veterans himself: the captain, the Ballon d'Or winner, and the player younger signings would watch whenever training became difficult, results turned ugly, or the pressure surrounding Old Trafford became uncomfortable.
United would change because every football team eventually had to.
New players would arrive, some familiar teammates would leave, and another cycle would begin whether anyone felt ready for it or not.
Rather than fearing that transition, Ling found himself looking forward to it.
Losing hurt, and watching the dynasty he had helped build begin to fracture hurt even more.
Yet rebuilding offered something he had not truly experienced for several years.
After spending so long defending the summit, there was suddenly another one waiting to be climbed.