After the final whistle, David collected his Player of the Match award for the third time in as many league appearances. But when supporters filed out of the Emirates that evening and stood on the concourse debating what they had seen, the two goals were almost secondary. What they kept returning to was the sequence on the left touchline, the three Liverpool players converging, the ball somehow emerging on the other side of them, the arc it traced across the London sky. They described it to people on their phones. They described it to strangers at the tube station. They were still describing it when they got home.
On the way out of the north stand, Bertrand Carlson spotted Hannah, and beside her a boy with curly hair and glasses who looked enough like Bertrand that a stranger would have guessed the connection immediately.
Bertrand stopped walking.
"Bertrand! You came tonight?" Hannah had seen him first and was bouncing slightly as she approached.
"I thought it would be a good match," Bertrand said, gripping the shopping bag a little tighter. "Are you two heading for dinner? I could give you some money for—"
"We're fine," Louis said, and his voice was flat enough to close the conversation.
Bertrand looked down at the bag. "I bought this for you. A shirt. Number ten. David Qin."
"Mum already got me one."
Hannah read the silence between the two of them and stepped forward, lifting the bag out of Bertrand's hands with a warm, easy smile. "I'll carry it for now, we need to get to the tube. Lovely to see you, Bertrand!"
She pulled Louis along with her, and Bertrand stood on the concourse and watched them go.
He knew what Hannah knew about the cap. Louis had worn the same battered Arsenal cap for three years, the one that matched the one hanging in the pub's back room, the one that had been Bertrand's before it was anyone else's. She had mentioned it once, carefully, making sure it landed the right way.
So the shirt would find its way. Bertrand was fairly certain of that.
He breathed out, and the evening felt suddenly lighter. The match had produced what he had hoped for, in more than one sense. He walked toward the tube with a step that had recovered some of the spring it had been missing for a while.
In the dressing room, the mood was the opposite of the quiet satisfaction of a difficult job done. Giroud was singing.
The song had appeared on social media several days earlier, written by an Arsenal supporter who had uploaded it with a simple guitar backing, and it had spread faster than anyone had anticipated.
He is our Chinese striker,He is our number ten,He plays for Arsenal in red and white,Scoring goals is what he does best,And he goes by the name of Qin, Qin, Qin!
Giroud had learned every word and was performing it with full commitment. David stood in the middle of the room holding his Player of the Match award and swayed along because what else could you do.
Sánchez hesitated for a moment at the edge of the group, then stepped in.
The dressing room filled with laughter and noise and the specific warmth of a group of people who had worked hard and won and were now allowing themselves to simply enjoy being there together.
David eventually dropped into his seat, back against the cool locker, catching his breath. Klopp's Liverpool had cost him more energy than the two previous matches combined.
"No hat-trick tonight," Cazorla said, with genuine sympathy.
"The season's only just started. I'm not in any hurry."
David set the trophy on the bench beside him and peeled off his shirt. Giroud looked at the situation with the expression of a man reviewing a maths problem he has already solved.
"Not in a hurry? David, three league matches, four goals. Do you understand what a rate that is?"
"The competition for the Golden Boot is going to be fierce this year," David said. "Because City now have the best creator in the world sitting behind their forwards."
He had thought about this more than he let on. At Wolfsburg, De Bruyne had been his partner. Now Kevin was feeding Agüero, and if the early signs were anything to go by, the combination was working. The most surprising thing about his own previous season had been realising that his main competition for the top scorer award was a midfielder.
"The pressure keeps things interesting," David said, looking up at the bright overhead lights.
"You're not on your own," Coquelin said, raising a fist.
"None of us are," Giroud confirmed loudly, which the room received with enthusiasm.
At the press conference, Klopp sat with the honest composure of someone who has processed what the evening meant and arrived at a useful conclusion.
"We have a great deal of work to do," he said. "The result today does not mean the world has ended. Arsenal deserved to win. As for David Qin, I paid close attention to him specifically, and he still managed to produce things I did not expect. That is the honest answer. He is a player without a visible ceiling."
He did not say it with resentment. There was something in his voice that sounded, if you listened carefully, like the particular appreciation that one football person feels for another when they have seen something genuinely exceptional.
Wenger, in the adjacent room, gave his own account.
"Every team has things to improve," he said. "We won three from three but today's press caused us real difficulty. Were it not for some extraordinary moments from David, we might not have scored at all. That tells you something about what we still need to build. A team cannot rely on one player to solve every problem. We are working on that."
A journalist from The Sun asked whether the training footage showing David moving into central positions meant Wenger was considering deploying him as a number ten.
"We have no current plans to change his position," Wenger said carefully. "But David has qualities that translate naturally to a more central role, and we have been exploring that in training. The future will answer the question better than I can."
What Wenger had not said was that the Coquelin-Ramsey combination, while effective defensively, left a creative gap in midfield that required someone to bridge it. Cazorla in a deeper role was an option but left the attacking midfield position vacant. Sánchez, Arteta and Ramsey were all imperfect fits there. The cleanest solution, in the long term, might be to give David licence to drift central when the situation called for it, the way Messi had been given that freedom at Barcelona. Not yet. But the thought was forming.
After three rounds, the Premier League table had clarified.
Manchester City sat top on goal difference, nine points from nine, the De Bruyne signing already paying visible returns. Arsenal were level on points. Leicester had seven, sitting third alongside United, whose early season had been uneven enough to produce quiet concern among their supporters.
Sterling had missed several clear chances across City's opening matches, which De Bruyne had reportedly found testing. The gap between forty million pounds and ninety million pounds, as David had observed privately, was not always visible on paper.
The British football press had a good deal to say.
The Daily Star called David a sprite on grass, producing chances through methods beyond normal imagining. Sky Sports drew the Ronaldinho comparison directly, noting that what David shared with the Brazilian was not merely technical quality but a specific relationship with the unexpected, and expressing a hope that unlike Ronaldinho, whose flame had burned briefly and brilliantly, David would sustain his level across a long career.
The Times reported that Arsenal's Premier League broadcast numbers in China had risen by three hundred and twenty percent since David's arrival, that the number ten shirt had sold out across every official channel and most unofficial ones, and that a second print run had already been commissioned.
The Sun led with a story about Hazard being photographed leaving a Burger King near the Chelsea training ground, having apparently purchased three smoked chicken burgers with extra black pepper mayonnaise. The detail about the double portion of sauce was reported with the gravity of a breaking news bulletin. A subsequent online search confirmed that the smoked chicken burger contained a reasonable four hundred and thirty calories, though the double mayonnaise rendered this academic.
The fan forums were briefly united in their response to this information.
@TacticalGnome_GZ: Hazard's nutritional choices are more scrutinised than most governments' foreign policy.
@BundesligaxBanter: The double mayo was the story. Nobody cares about the burger.
@NorthBankNoodles: He's literally eating a diet meal while injured. He's trying his best.
@CanaryWharfGooner: The sauce alone is probably six hundred calories. Love him though.
The day after the Liverpool match, David stretched, recovered, and met Barnett at a coffee shop near the training ground.
"The boot deals," Barnett said, pushing a tablet across the table. "Five options. I've had preliminary conversations with all of them."
David read through the summaries. Adidas, Nike and Puma were the obvious names. The other two, Umbro and Hummel, he set aside without spending long on them. The commercial logic was straightforward: boot sponsorship was not simply about money. The Ballon d'Or voting criteria now included commercial value as a measurable component, and in that environment, which brand you wore and how visible they made you mattered to the calculus.
"What do you think?" David asked.
Barnett turned the tablet to the Puma summary. "Adidas have Messi. Nike have Ronaldo. Both of those arrangements are established and well-resourced, and breaking through in that environment is difficult even for someone performing at your level. Puma is the third-largest sports brand in the world but their football presence is still growing. I had dinner with their European director recently. They have capital to deploy, they've been signing Premier League clubs as kit sponsors, and the flagship individual deal has not yet been awarded. They want someone to build around. The terms they can offer will exceed what Adidas and Nike are prepared to put on the table for a player at your stage."
It was not a pitch for Puma's sake. Barnett's interests and David's were the same, and he would have said so regardless of who had taken him to dinner.
"I want to think about it properly," David said. "It's not a small decision."
"They are in no rush," Barnett said. "The longer you perform like this, the more this contract is worth. The urgency is on their side."
There were also several smaller endorsements to attend to, product advertisements and brief promotional appearances that Barnett had already scheduled around the training timetable. London made these easier than they would have been in Wolfsburg. The city was full of brand offices, production companies, and the infrastructure that surrounded the commercial life of professional sport.
Two days before the Newcastle match, David and Wenger flew to Monaco.
The Champions League draw was being held at the Grimaldi Forum, as was the Europa League draw and the awards ceremony, which were scheduled for the following day. The two events overlapping in the same venue meant David needed to stay for an additional night, which was a manageable inconvenience. The flight from Nice to London was direct and took just under two hours.
The two of them stepped out of the car in matching dark suits and were immediately met by cameras and a cluster of supporters who had stationed themselves near the venue entrance.
David was still not entirely at ease in formal clothes. They pulled at his shoulders in ways his training kit did not, and he found himself adjusting his collar as they walked toward the building.
"Why are we among the first to arrive?" he asked.
"Arsenal are in the second tier of seedings this season," Wenger said, with the mild equanimity of someone who had made peace with this particular fact some time ago. "The protocol for the draw puts lower seeds in ahead of the top seeds."
David nodded and accepted it. Football had its hierarchies, its orderings, its traditions about who entered the room first and who entered last, and these were enforced with the gentle severity of institutions that have been doing things a certain way for a very long time.
He straightened his jacket and walked through the entrance into the light.
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