Limitless Pitch
Chapter 103 – Edges of Belonging

Chapter 103: Chapter 103 – Edges of Belonging

The days blurred together like frost spreading across the bus windows - slow at first, then all at once.

Thiago had learned the rhythm of winter training now. Wake up to the sound of his alarm cutting through the dark. Ice cracking under his boots on the way to breakfast. The endless cycle of training ground, recovery sessions, matches, hotel rooms. His body had become a map of aches - the tightness in his left hamstring when he slept wrong, the dull throb in his right knee when the temperature dropped.

His fingers had gone past numb into something more permanent. The cold didn’t shock him anymore. He barely noticed the way his breath fogged in the air, or how the snow squeaked underfoot during morning runs. It had all become background noise.

Preseason was ending without fanfare. No announcements, just subtle shifts in routine. More video analysis sessions where assistants pointed out every misplaced pass. More staff lurking at the edges of training, clipboards in hand. More hushed conversations in the locker room that stopped when someone got too close.

Thiago felt the weight of it - in the way coaches’ eyes lingered after mistakes, in the extra notations in their notebooks. But the panic that used to claw at his throat stayed quiet now.

Something had settled in him.

The first of their final preseason matches was against SC Paderborn, played on a pitch that looked more mud than grass. Thiago came on in the 63rd minute, his lungs burning from the first sprint.

"Just link play," Klopp had told him, hands jammed in his coat pockets. "No heroics."

He didn’t score. Didn’t assist. But in the 78th minute, when their right-back got caught upfield, Thiago tracked back thirty yards to cover the space. The Paderborn winger tried to cut inside, found Thiago already there, and the attack fizzled out.

After the match, Klopp clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to make him stumble. "That covering run? Very grown-up of you." The coach’s beard hid his smile, but not the crinkles around his eyes.

The second match against 1. FC Köln was uglier. Their opponents played like it was a derby already, tackles flying in with extra venom. Thiago started this time, and for the first twenty minutes, he might as well have been wearing concrete boots.

"Wake up, kid!" Hummels barked after Thiago got muscled off the ball by a center-back who looked like he’d been playing since the Berlin Wall fell. "This isn’t Brazil!"

Then - crunch. The sweet sound of studs meeting ball, not shin. A fifty-fifty challenge won cleanly. The game opened up after that.

In the locker room afterward, Kuba tossed him a banana. "Now you’re learning," the Pole muttered around a mouthful of his own.

By the final preseason match - a low-key friendly against some regional side - Thiago didn’t even need to psych himself up. He sat in the locker room tying his boots, listening to the familiar sounds around him: the rip of tape being torn, the slap of pregame massages, Großkreutz telling some awful joke that made three players groan.

He played sixty controlled minutes. Picked up a yellow card for a professional foul to stop a counter.

"Smart," Hummels said as they jogged off together. "Sometimes you need to take one for the team." He ruffled Thiago’s hair like an annoying older brother. "Still a babyface though."

The bus ride back was quiet, the kind of comfortable silence that comes from shared exhaustion. Thiago leaned his forehead against the cool glass, watching streetlights blur past. Dortmund didn’t feel so foreign anymore. His hotel room had become a place he could leave his toothpaste uncapped and his clothes in a pile without worrying. His nameplate in the locker room looked like it belonged.

Back in his room, he dumped his gear bag with a thud. The sweat-soaked base layer peeled off like a second skin. The shower water was scalding, turning his skin pink as it washed away the grime.

He was toweling his hair when he saw it - the envelope that had slipped from his bag. White, edges softened from being carried so long. His name in that familiar blue ink.

Camila.

His breath caught the same way it had the first time he’d found the letter slipped into his bag at the airport. That last moment before boarding, when she’d hugged him tight enough to bruise and whispered "Don’t open it until you’re ready" against his neck.

The paper felt fragile between his fingers, like it might dissolve if he handled it too roughly. He could imagine every word inside without looking - her teasing him about the cold, asking if he’d learned to like sauerkraut yet, maybe even a stupid doodle in the margins like she used to do during team meetings.

His thumb traced the sealed edge. Part of him wanted to tear it open right now. Another part knew he wasn’t ready to hear her voice in his head, not when he was just starting to find his footing here.

"Not yet," he whispered, tucking it carefully into the inner pocket of his bag. The zipper sounded too loud in the quiet room.

Outside, the first snowflakes of another storm began to fall. Thiago watched them spiral past his window as he pulled up the next day’s schedule on his laptop.

7:00 AM - Breakfast

8:30 AM - Team Meeting

10:00 AM - Pitch Session

The routine grounded him. This was his life now. The letter could wait.

Somewhere beneath the fatigue and the cold and the constant push to prove himself, Thiago realized something - he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

Across the city, in a modest meeting room deep inside the Dortmund training complex, Jürgen Klopp took a long sip from a chipped Borussia Dortmund mug and grimaced.

"Why does this coffee always taste like someone boiled socks in it?"

His assistant Zeljko Buvač didn’t look up from his notes. "Because you insist on drinking the cheap stuff."

"It builds character," Klopp muttered, setting the mug aside. The heat from it had done nothing to soften the creeping ache in his shoulders. He slouched back in his chair and rubbed at his temples. "Alright. That’s the last of the friendlies. No more hiding. Time to make some decisions."

The room was dim, the overhead lights casting long shadows across the walls. A whiteboard stood to one side, smudged with formations drawn and erased a dozen times. Player names were scribbled in rows, some circled, some underlined, others crossed out. A laptop on the table played muted training footage on loop, the screen flickering with low-quality clips of counterattacks and midfield pressing patterns.

Peter Krawietz leaned forward, clicking to pause the footage. "Midfield compactness improved a lot between the first and last matches. You can see it here," he pointed, "ball recovery zones shifted ten meters higher."

Klopp nodded slowly. "Yeah, that’s true. And Kuba’s tracking back more than he did last year. He’ll never love defending, but at least now he’s pretending to."

Buvač gave a small grunt of agreement. "Großkreutz still needs babysitting. One minute he’s brilliant, next minute he’s chasing shadows. But he’s fitter than anyone. And he never stops." freew\ebno\vel..(c)om

"What about the new kids?" Klopp asked. "Sven? Hornschuh?"

"Raw," Krawietz said. "Talented, but... we’ll be bleeding goals if they’re starting regularly. Too soft in duels."

"Which brings us to our favorite headache," Klopp said, pulling a sheet of paper toward him. At the top, in neat black ink: Thiago Silva. fr.e ewe.bno.vel .com

Buvač raised an eyebrow. "You’re still thinking about keeping him close to the first team?"

"I’m not thinking," Klopp said. "I’ve already decided."

That got a reaction.

"He’s still learning German," Krawietz said, cautious. "He’s adapting. The cold is killing his energy late in matches. You saw it against Köln."

"I also saw him chase down a winger at full sprint in the 85th minute two days later," Klopp said. "And do it without diving in. That’s not just hustle. That’s instinct."

They sat with that for a moment.

"I’m not saying start him against Bayern," Klopp continued, "but the kid gets it. Not always, not yet—but you can feel it. Like there’s a brain behind the boots. He listens. And he’s fearless. That pass to Kuba in the last match—he saw the run before it even started."

Krawietz frowned. "He still holds the ball a bit too long. Doesn’t always look over his shoulder."

"Sure," Klopp said. "And Kuba still doesn’t track runners unless the ghost of his grandmother yells at him from the sideline. What’s your point?"

That got a smirk from Buvač.

"We’re not building perfect players," Klopp added. "We’re building ones who’ll kill for the badge. Ones who’ll sprint when they shouldn’t have to. Thiago’s got that look in his eye. Like he’s starving."

Krawietz glanced down at his notes. "He’s only seventeen. If we throw him into the deep end—"

"I’m not throwing anyone," Klopp interrupted. "I’m giving him a chance to swim."

A silence settled, broken only by the hum of the projector and the occasional scratch of Buvač’s pen on his notebook.

"Alright," Buvač finally said. "So he trains with the first team after the break?"

Klopp nodded. "And he gets on the bench once we’re into the rhythm. One or two Bundesliga minutes before the October break, if things go our way."

Krawietz leaned back in his chair. "You’re betting on him."

"I’m betting on them," Klopp replied, gesturing toward the board. "All of them. We don’t have the money to buy magic. So we make our own."

He stood, stretching his arms behind his back with a groan. "And besides," he added, glancing at the paused clip of Thiago’s recovery run, "you don’t see that every day from a skinny Brazilian teenager in sub-zero weather."

Buvač snorted. "You just like that he doesn’t complain."

"I love that he doesn’t complain," Klopp grinned. "He just plays."

There was a long pause, the kind that settled only when something important had just been said.

Then Krawietz added dryly, "Well, let’s hope he doesn’t crumble after his first Bundesliga yellow card."

Klopp smiled, wide and wolfish. "If he does, he’ll learn. That’s what this season’s for."

He turned off the projector, plunging the room into half-darkness.

"Now," he said, grabbing his coffee cup and turning toward the door, "someone please remind Großkreutz that we don’t drink before team photos."