#please excuse any typos I typed this on my phone throughout my workday

[jamiesfootball]

hey do you have an au for Jamie meeting a Jamie who didn’t go into football? ;-)

I’ll be real I read this and typed. A whole list of Jamie AU’s. Then I reread your ask and realized you specified where they meet canon jamie. Whoops.

So in most of those AUs the issue is not that Jamie isn’t playing football, it’s more that he IS playing but a change has occurred.

I’ve got s1 Jamie meets girl!Jamie. At first everyone assumes that he’s gonna be an asshole about girls playing football. They are then annoyed and a little insulted when instead he meets her and is like ‘thank FUCK finally someone who can play good.’ The two of them trauma bond and turn into a little annoying world of ‘we shall play 1-on-1 together, fuck everyone else’ (cue lots of ‘oh god there’s two of them’). Meanwhile Ted is noticing how the two of them together seem….happy? And like, they certainly can pass to each other, so Ted starts scheming on how he can leverage that to them passing to everyone. But when that doesn’t work, a version of the the ‘practice’ scene from 1x06 happens and whichever one of them is there as a witness loses their shit at Ted for it. Cue drama

I’ve got s3 Jamie meets s1 post-fire Jamie and goes ‘ooooooh, I did not realize how transparent my issues were. Oh no. Oh no, I gotta do something to help.’ This is mainly Jamie trying to give love to his former self, who is furiously jealous of everything his future self has and doesnt believe him at all when jamie tries to explain ‘no no, this can be you!’ Cue angst.

And then I’ve got a ‘Where is Jamie?’ AU that is more about the cascade of butterfly effects that he’s had on the team. Basically the two Richmonds meet, and Other Richmond is…well, for starters they got relegated in season 1 and never got promoted again. They came so very close though. There’s no Total Football, there was never even a Zava. Nate, having not been bullied as much, never went full dark side and left for West Ham (as a result though he has a LOT of unresolved anger stored up at Ted).

But the biggest domino that never fell was Keeley, who never dated Jamie, and therefore never met Rebecca OR Roy. As a result it took Rebecca a lot longer to soften to…everything. Without Keeley to force her hand over the paparazzi photo, she didn’t confess that she’d been trying to sabotage Richmond until well into season two. She’s made progress, but her and Ted are far more tentative with each other, and because of how long it took the blow up was much bigger. Roy is on assistant coach, but his retirement was more of a whimper than a bang. He’s hanging onto his job like a life raft and he is severely depressed. Keeley is still floating around, doing modeling. She has tried to work her way into a few PR companies but hasn’t had much luck, so she’s currently working on her degree. Her life isn’t much worse, but it’s not great.

So canon!Richmond looks at all of this and goes ‘okay. So where the fuck is jamie?’

Meanwhile Jamie is trying to not hear ‘we only want you for your football’ but it’s really really hard given the circumstances.

They do eventually find that universe’s jamie living as a bartender in Manchester. Life has not been kind but he’s made the best of it. That said he takes one look at this Jamie, who is softer and lighter and happier than he’s ever been and who actually plays football, and thinks his old mates from the academy are playing a cruel prank on him— the fact that they somehow got Roy Kent in on it is an extra kick while he’s down.

Ironically he has been making a killing placing bets against Richmond (and other teams, but he doesn’t tell them that) because he’s taken all his passion for football and turned it into dissecting how awful other teams play, which actually makes for really good coaching strategy advice. You see where this is going.