When anyone who knew Marcus Carter heard his name mentioned, they'd shake their heads and let out a long sigh. The more eloquent ones would frame it poetically: "Heaven itself grows jealous of true talent."
Marcus Carter's father, David Carter, was something of a local legend in East London. When their council estate was demolished for redevelopment in the early 2000s, most of their neighbors became overnight millionaires—immediately blowing their compensation money on booze, birds, flash cars, and gaudy mansions in Essex. But David Carter? He sold off all his properties except one family home, then used the cash to start a small renovation crew. That crew eventually expanded into full-scale property development. There's an old saying: when you're standing in the path of a strong wind, even a pig can fly. And David Carter—a man who'd barely scraped through secondary school—caught that wind and absolutely soared.
It helped that East London was entering a period of explosive Olympic-driven regeneration. Timing, as they say, is everything. The Carter family struck it rich.
Anyone who knew David Carter knew one thing for certain: the man was absolutely obsessed with football. After making his fortune, that obsession only intensified. He'd tell anyone who'd listen that his greatest regret in life was never becoming a professional footballer. His employees would nod along with plastered-on smiles, eagerly agreeing: "Absolutely, Boss Carter! If you'd played professionally, England would've won the bloody World Cup by now!" Of course, these were just yes-men on his payroll—nobody wanted to contradict the boss who signed their paychecks.
When Marcus Carter was born, the Carter family gained its second football fanatic.
From the moment little Marcus could toddle around on his own two feet, David would drag him to Upton Park whenever there was a match—West Ham through and through. Didn't matter if it was pouring rain or scorching hot—if the Hammers were playing, they were there.
By the time Marcus was old enough for school, David enrolled him in the newly established youth academy of a local club. He even paid a hefty "sponsorship fee" to make it happen—the kind of under-the-table money that greased wheels and opened doors.
From that moment on, Marcus Carter's life became inseparable from football.
Growing up under his father's influence, Marcus fell head over heels in love with the beautiful game. And from a young age, he showed genuine prodigy-level talent. He could watch players perform their signature moves on Match of the Day and replicate them after just a few attempts—Giggs's blistering pace down the wing, Zola's clever backheels and dribbles, Bergkamp's silky first touch, Le Tissier's audacious tricks. He didn't just copy them either; he could pull them off in actual matches, leaving defenders stumbling and grasping at air.
But here's the thing about genius: it needs the right environment to flourish. And that's exactly what English lower-league football sometimes lacked.
After his first youth club collapsed due to financial mismanagement and unpaid wages—a scandal that sent shockwaves through London football circles—Marcus transferred to another academy in the city. But the rot ran deep. Dodgy agents, backroom politics, clubs favoring mediocre kids with well-connected parents over genuine talent—the system was poisoned from the inside out. The soil that should've nurtured brilliance was contaminated. Marcus found himself increasingly out of place, a square peg in a round hole. Meanwhile, David Carter's business began its downward slide as the 2008 financial crisis hit, making Marcus's situation even more precarious.
Then came the day that changed everything.
During a routine academy training session, someone played dirty—a brutal, malicious two-footed tackle that left Marcus crumpled on the pitch, his knee completely wrecked. Just like that, his professional career ended before it truly began. When he returned to "normal" life, Marcus felt more lost than ever. For over a decade, football had been his entire universe. Without it, he was unmoored, adrift. He tried to reintegrate, to find some new purpose, but right when he needed his parents most, David Carter's company went into administration. They had no time or energy to spare for their struggling son.
Depression crept in slowly at first, then all at once. It grew darker, heavier, dragging Marcus deeper into an abyss he couldn't climb out of. Eventually, he withdrew completely into himself, shutting out the world. And finally, one night in his shabby London bedsit, he swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills and let the darkness take him.
In that exact moment—as Marcus Carter's consciousness faded into oblivion in a dingy flat in East London—something violent was unfolding thousands of miles away at Ciudad Real Madrid in Valdebebas, on the outskirts of Madrid, Spain.
On the pristine training pitch of Real Madrid Castilla—the B team and feeder squad for one of Europe's most legendary clubs—a full-blown brawl had erupted. Though "brawl" wasn't quite accurate. It was more like one person taking on an entire mob. And incredibly, that one person was winning. Actually, "winning" didn't do it justice. This wasn't even a fair fight. A massive Black teenager stood in the center of the chaos, looking almost bored, while several other academy players lay scattered at his feet, groaning and clutching various body parts.
The scene was almost biblical in its absurdity—one against many, and the many were getting absolutely battered.
But even Goliath had his David.
Like Achilles in the Trojan War facing countless enemies, this modern-day one-man wrecking crew in Spain seemed unstoppable. But he didn't fare quite as well. Seeing they couldn't beat the big bastard head-on, one sneaky kid circled around to his blind side. In his hand was that most classic of street-fighting weapons—a brick, grabbed from God knows where near the construction site adjacent to the training grounds. He swung it like a cricket bat and slammed it directly into the back of the big guy's skull.
Crack.
That was serious. The unconscious teenager was immediately rushed to the club's medical room by panicked coaches.
To everyone's surprise, before he even made it through the door, the guy's eyes snapped open. He was groggy, disoriented, but conscious. The medical staff quickly determined he didn't need emergency treatment—just observation—so the coach sent him straight back to his dormitory with strict orders to rest.
What no one knew was that a completely different soul now inhabited that massive body. That brick had sent the original occupant straight to the great beyond. But in the strange, inexplicable moment of his soul's departure, Marcus Carter's consciousness—somehow crossing impossible distances and dimensions—slipped into the vacant vessel like a hand into a glove.
Currently occupying this burly teenager's body, Marcus lay in what could only be described as an absolute pigsty of a dormitory room. Clothes everywhere, empty protein shake bottles scattered across the floor, a stench that could knock out a horse. As his head cleared, Marcus was surprised to discover that because he'd arrived at the exact moment of death, the previous occupant's memories were still there—vivid, intact, accessible. After carefully sifting through them like files in a cabinet, Marcus couldn't help but give a low whistle and mutter to himself: "Christ, mate... you really were a piece of work, weren't you?"
The guy's full name was André Cristiano dos Santos Cleto.
Just reading that name made Marcus's head spin. André Cristiano dos Santos Cleto. That middle name rang a hell of a lot of bells. Cristiano. Wasn't there a saying in football that everyone named Cristiano or Ronaldo was destined for greatness? So why was this bloke the exception?
After digging deeper through the memories, it all clicked into place. The name was familiar because—and you couldn't make this shit up—André was actually Cristiano Ronaldo's cousin. His mother and CR7's mother were sisters. Well, not blood sisters technically, but close enough in Portuguese family reckoning that they were essentially family. And the only reason André had managed to get a spot at Real Madrid's legendary La Fábrica academy? Pure nepotism. Cristiano Ronaldo had pulled strings.
André was sixteen years old. When his mother passed away when he was twelve, he went to live with Cristiano's mum, Maria Dolores, back in Madeira. To be fair, looking through his memories, before joining Castilla last year, the kid had been something of a sporting prodigy. He'd dabbled in everything—boxing, athletics, basketball, even some amateur MMA. Everything except football, ironically. But no matter what sport he tried, he always got kicked out eventually. The reason was always the same: fighting. After burning through every youth sports program in Madeira and Lisbon, CR7's mother had finally convinced Cristiano to get him into Real Madrid's youth setup. A fresh start. New environment. World-class coaching.
It... hadn't exactly gone to plan.
When André first arrived at Castilla, Real Madrid's youth director Zinedine Zidane—yes, that Zidane—thought the club had stumbled onto another freak athlete named Ronaldo or Cristiano. This was because André's physical attributes were genuinely beyond comprehension. In Zidane's own words, he'd never seen a young player with such raw physical gifts in his entire career—and this was a man who'd played with and against Ronaldo Nazário, Thierry Henry, and Zlatan Ibrahimović.
André stood 1.90 meters tall (about 6'3") and weighed in at 91 kilograms of almost pure muscle. His body was practically nothing but sinew, bone, and raw power. What absolutely amazed Zidane and the other Real Madrid coaches was that at only sixteen years old, André's body fat percentage was already down to 8%. That was professional athlete territory. That was world-class striker conditioning. At sixteen.
Furthermore, in terms of pure physical strength, the sixteen-year-old André didn't just outmatch his peers at Castilla. He could genuinely give even defensive stalwarts like Sergio Ramos from Real Madrid's first team a proper challenge in a physical duel. The kid was built like a damn tank.
However—and this was a monumentally large "however"—this same André whom Zidane had considered a potential generational talent had, in less than six months of joining, become an absolute cancer to the Castilla youth academy.
He couldn't play football to save his life. His first touch was like a rugby player's. His passing accuracy hovered somewhere around 30%. His positioning was nonexistent. And worst of all, he had the temperament of a lit firework in a box of dynamite. The slightest provocation and he'd drop gloves like he was in a boxing ring, not on a football pitch.
The other academy players despised him. The coaches were tearing their hair out. Even Zidane, patient and measured as he was, had started to regret the decision to take him on. Cristiano Ronaldo's cousin or not, the kid was a disaster.
And now, lying in this disaster of a dormitory room, Marcus Carter—former English academy prospect, dead-end kid from East London, possessor of actual football talent—found himself inhabiting André's ridiculously overpowered body.
Marcus sat up slowly, his new body moving with an unfamiliar weight and power. He looked down at massive hands that weren't his, arms corded with muscle he'd never possessed in his previous life. A slow grin spread across his face.
"Well then," Marcus muttered to himself in perfect Portuguese—another gift from André's intact memories. "This might just work out after all."
Outside his window, he could hear the sounds of training continuing on the distant pitches. Somewhere out there, the greatest football club in the world was molding the next generation of superstars.
And Marcus Carter had just been given a second chance he never thought possible.
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