"YESSSSSS!"
Nico Barrera was already on his feet, both arms in the air, screaming it at the ceiling.
The Boixos Nois bar had gone off like a bomb. The logo behind the counter, the scarves pinned across every wall, the place packed wall to wall with men who could not set foot inside a stadium anymore and had stopped caring years ago, because they had this room, and this room was theirs. Beer went up into the air in arcs. Glasses banged. The whole place was on its feet at once.
"YES! YES! YES!" Nico drove his chest into Marc Puig, then into Jordi Ferrer, the three of them roaring into each other's faces.
He climbed up onto the bar.
He stood up there over all of them, flung his arms wide, flexed both fists at the room, and the room screamed back at him.
"Let's go! LET'S GO! Visca el Barça! VISCA EL BARÇA!"
Sixty heads went up with him, sixty voices answering, beer raining down, the bar shaking on its legs.
Across the city it was the same in every other room. Offices stopping dead mid-meeting. Men shouting in the middle of conference calls. Bars spilling out onto pavements. A projector in a park throwing the match up huge against a wall while a few hundred people lost their minds in front of it. More than half the city had been watching one thing, and one thing had just happened.
Barcelona was celebrating its team.
And La Masia was no different.
The big hall was, at this exact moment, every bit as loud as the Boixos Nois bar. The only difference was that the people coming apart here were children, kids who had given their hearts to this club exactly the way the men in that bar had.
"HAHA! Messi is INSANE!" Balde was on his feet, mouth wide open.
"Dude." Fermín had both hands on his own head. "I thought he fell. I saw him fall. How did he get up? Did he bounce the ball off his hand? How? HOW, man?"
And Alejandro, who was supposed to be the adult keeping these kids in line, was no better than any of them.
"What did I say! WHAT DID I TELL YOU!" He was up, jabbing a finger at the screen, at the boys, at the room. "I said it! I said you cannot hold them! You cannot hold us! What did I say! GET IN, MAN!"
It was not only Barcelona, and it was not only Spain. England. France. Norway. Pakistan. Ghana. San Marino. Bhutan. China. One of the biggest clubs in the world playing the biggest sport in the world, and all over it the people who loved them were on their feet at once. It was still only the first half. Anything could still happen. They did not care. And it was not only the high of a goal, that quick electric thing. It was deeper than that. It was the belief, sitting underneath all of it, that this team was going to do this.
That this team was going to win their twenty-seventh La Liga title.
"Just an incredible thing we are witnessing here," Drury said over the top of it. "And yet, you know, with this team, we have learned not to be surprised by it anymore. In the twenty-eighth minute, Barcelona have struck, and they have struck deep. As it stands right now, Jim, they are champions. Ninety-two points apiece. Level on the table, both of them. But not level in the reward, because Barcelona hold the head-to-head, and so Barcelona, as we speak, are wearing the crown. The trophy first lifted in 1929. The twenty-seventh in their history, and it would belong, tonight, to the rebels of Catalonia."
"As it stands," Jim said. "And I want to be careful with those three words. Because this is Atlético Madrid. This is not a side anyone counts out. And here is the number that should frighten Barcelona, Peter. This season, when Atlético have conceded first, around three-quarters of those games have still finished as a draw or a win for them. And a draw or a win is exactly, precisely, what they need tonight."
"So which is it." Drury. "Do the statistics get their man? Or do Barcelona keep the miracle going? Whichever it is, that silver sits waiting on the touchline, and it does not care who it ends up in the arms of."
Out on the pitch, Messi had not been allowed to do a single thing.
He had scored the goal and then his own teammates had buried him before he could even turn to the fans. Pedri, Mateo, Busquets, Alba, Araújo, De Jong, all of them piling onto him at once, and the one thing that gave him away as the man underneath all of it was that he had not gone down. They were hanging off him from every angle and he was still on his feet, that absurd core strength holding the whole heap up.
"Leo, you animal." Busquets, laughing.
He and Alba, who had been around the pressure of nights like this and the impossibility of Messi for years, were the more collected of the bunch. The other two were not.
"Guy, the way you move, what are you even doing, what is that—"
"Who are you calling your guy?" Mateo cut in.
"He's right, though." Mateo turned back to Messi, suddenly solemn, and bowed. Full bow, both hands out. "I bow. I bow to you."
Messi laughed.
Mateo grabbed the back of Pedri's head and pushed it down too. "Dude. Show some respect."
The two of them stood there bent over double, doing exaggerated bowing gestures at the most decorated footballer alive, while Busquets and Alba cracked up beside them and De Jong shook his head, grinning.
"Nice goal," De Jong said.
Messi nodded at him. Then he turned to the two boys still bowing at him and pushed Mateo's arm off Pedri's head.
"Okay. Okay, enough." He was still smiling. "I'm happy you're having your fun. I love it, I do. I love that you can do that out here, tonight, on a night like this." Then the smile went out of his voice. "But we also have to stay focused."
He pointed.
"You see that?"
Mateo and Pedri followed his finger. The trophy. Sitting lit up on its plinth at the edge of the grass.
"If you want to have real fun," Messi said, "wait until we've won that."
The two of them, both an hour from the first major title of their lives, stood and looked at it. Their faces changed. The grins came down.
"Come on, then." Messi clapped them each on the shoulder. "Let's do this. Together." He raised his voice for the rest of them. "Visca Barça!"
Messi was not joking with any of it.
He really wanted this one. And it was not only the respect he carried for the game, or even the respect he carried for his friend. He had not decided to play harder out of pity, out of some need to do right by Luis. He would have given everything tonight regardless. He always did. But there was a reason he was playing tonight past even that, past his usual best.
He turned, a little apart from the others, and looked up at the away corner, at the thousands of his own people still screaming his name. His eyes drifted up toward the section where he knew his family was sitting, even though he could not pick them out at this distance. He held it for a second. Then he looked away.
The want for this one. He could not have named all of it.
"Dude, you scattered my whole hair."
He turned back. Pedri was pushing his own hair back into place while Mateo grinned at him. Busquets and Alba were still laughing about something off to the side. De Jong had drifted over to Dembélé and the two of them were cracking up at nothing.
Messi stood and watched them for a moment. This. These boys. This loud, daft, impossible group of people he got to walk out beside.
He just wanted to win it. With them.
But wanting a thing did not make it come to pass. At the very least, it did not make it easy. And this was never going to be easy. Atlético Madrid never were. Not with that man on the touchline.
"Más compactos! Closer! Closer together!" Simeone had pulled the nearest players into a loose huddle, talking fast, hands carving the shape in the air. "We press together now, all as one, we suffocate them, and we go forward through the wide areas. The flanks. Stretch them and hit them out wide." He pointed. "And listen. Messi, the seven, do not dive in on them, do not let them turn you. You stay close, you block the lane, you put your body on them, a little bump, that is all. You make them give it backwards. And watch the pace. Dembélé, the seven, do not give them the space to run into. And do not leave that midfielder, the small one, Pedri, do not leave him a single metre. Cut the supply."
He clapped his hands together, hard.
"Vamos! Go, go, go, go!"
The second the goal had gone in, Simeone had groaned for about three seconds flat, and then he had called his men in. The goal hurt. He was not going to pretend it did not. His plan, in all honesty, had been to drag this into a dogfight and grind out the draw and finally, after all these years, lift his second league title.
The goal itself, the falling, the rising off the floor, the hand on the turf, those were things nobody on earth could have predicted.
Except, maybe, this man.
He did not know exactly what was coming. But all these years in this league, facing the two people who had broken the scale of normal planning, had quietly made him immune to surprise. Not celebrating when Messi came on. Groaning at the interviews where the number seven talked big. Somewhere along the line he had started planning for the unplannable. He had a plan B for the mad eventuality that Barcelona scored first.
This was a man who had taken a mid-table side in crisis and built it, in his own words, into a powerhouse standing toe to toe with two heavyweights. He had made them bleed those giants more than once. He had turned them into a team Europe was afraid of. He had done that. He had built that.
He would do this.
His eyes went, for a second, to the silver sitting on its plinth at the edge of the grass. He looked at it. Then he carried his eyes away.
"Vamos! Let's earn our pay!"
The highest-paid coach in the world clapped his hands and shouted it, because he knew the game was not over. It had only just started.
Online, the reactions were already pouring in.
we just need defenders man. give this team two real centre-backs in the summer and we are winning the ucl again i swear
@ messi and mateo on the same pitch is genuinely not fair. why are we even pretending
ngl i feel so bad for suarez. man is trying his heart out
atletico are cooked. they still owe mateo a goal from the youth days so its basically 2-0 already
as a madrid fan it pains me to say this but that goal was filthy
chelsea fans watching this like 👁️👄👁️
Everyone had said their piece. The wants, the fears, the confidence, the plans, the grief, all of it laid out. And none of it would decide a single thing. The pitch would tell the truth, because football never cared for any of that. Tactics. Skill. Determination. Ability. Those settled matches, the same as they always had, even when the stage was this big and a trophy stood waiting on the side of it.
The referee waved them back on. Suárez did not wait a second. He rolled the ball back and the game was live again.
Atlético Madrid 0, Barcelona 1.
Barcelona did not take their foot off it. Not for a moment. They kept the intensity exactly where it had been, kept showing why they led this match and why, right now, they led the league. But Atlético were out of their shell now, forced forward by the scoreline, and though there was none of the open malice that had run through the Madrid game, the match was starting to get to everyone. The challenges came in harder. The plays turned grinding and rough.
The 28th minute and 34 seconds.
Barcelona moved it through the middle, quick and clean, De Jong to Pedri to Messi and back, the ball never sitting still. Dembélé peeled wide on the left and went at Trippier, dropped a shoulder, beat him on the outside, and stood up a through ball into the channel.
"And there's the run, Mateo King in behind—"
"MATEOOO!" the Barça bench roared.
He got onto it at full stretch, Giménez climbing all over his back, the two of them grappling, and Mateo poked it goalward off the front of his boot.
Wide. By a yard.
Mateo's hands went straight to his head. He turned in a slow circle, looking at the sky.
"Nice one, nice one." Dembélé was already there, slapping his shoulder. Messi came past too, a quick hand on his back.
"And close again," Drury said. "The pressure does not let up. And we all know it by now, do we not. For this team, one is never, ever enough."
The 29th minute and 17 seconds.
Atlético's turn, and it came off a Barcelona mistake. Busquets tried to thread one through the lines and a red leg got in front of it, the ball ricocheting loose into the centre. Correa pounced.
"Stolen! Atlético break!"
Correa drove at Sergi Roberto and put his whole body across him, muscling him off, surging into the space behind. Busquets turned and chased back, hands reaching, not getting there.
Araújo got there.
He came across at a sprint and stuck out a leg and took it clean off Correa's toe, then stood up, turned, and slammed it long up the left.
"YES! YES! YES!" He was screaming it at his own back four as they reset.
Mateo and Pedri were not the only two chasing the first league title of their lives. Ronald Araújo was right there in the same boat, and he was defending like a man who could see the silver from where he stood.
The 31st minute and 27 seconds.
Atlético came again, sharper this time, Lemar driving from deep and feeding Carrasco wide. Carrasco cut inside, looking for the one-two with Suárez, and for a second the left side opened up.
Messi tracked back to help, the way Simeone had warned his players he would not, and as the ball broke loose he set off the other way, the counter forming in an instant.
Lodi made the choice for his team. He chopped him down.
The whistle went. The card came out. Yellow, for Lodi, for taking the legs of a Barcelona break before it could start.
"And that's a booking, and a smart one in its way," Jim said. "Renan Lodi takes one for the side. He could not let Messi run at that back line with the numbers they had. Cynical, yes. But you understand exactly why he did it."
Lodi took the card with a flat face and jogged back.
The 33rd minute and 3 seconds.
Barcelona again. Always Barcelona. Dembélé picked it up on the left and went on one of his runs, beating Trippier on the outside, then cutting back in past him before he could recover, the crowd in the away corner up on their feet. He looked up and slid it through.
"Dembélé, and the ball is threaded, Mateo King onto it—"
Mateo took it on the run, Savić and Giménez both folding in on him, all three of them shoving and pulling and grunting as he tried to force a yard of room. He got his shot away under the pressure.
Oblak was down on it. Smothered at his near post, the ball clamped to his chest, the keeper curling around it on the turf.
"Saved by Oblak," Drury said. "And these two centre-backs, Savić and Giménez, they are putting their bodies through it tonight. They will feel every minute of this in the morning. But right now they are holding. Just."
Two of them slapped hands again over the smothered ball, chests out, roaring.
And the match wore on, every challenge a little heavier than the last, every man on that pitch wanting the same thing and only one set of them able to have it.
...
And it continued.
The 34th minute and 27 seconds.
Barcelona again, and this one had everything. Pedri found Dembélé wide and kept moving, dragging a man with him. Mateo started a run off the front, Messi drifting backward to open the channel, and Dembélé saw the gap and went, beating Trippier on the burst and tearing into the half. Alba came flying up the outside in support, screaming for it.
Dembélé did not need him. He cut inside one more challenge, slipped a short pass into the space he'd made for himself, and fired.
Oblak threw himself across and got a strong hand on it, parrying it down.
Mateo was onto the rebound in a flash.
So was Oblak. Flat on the ground, beaten once already, the keeper shoved off the turf and threw his whole body back across the line, diving straight onto the loose ball and smothering it whole. Mateo had to hurdle clean over the top of him to avoid landing on him, sailing over and groaning as he came down the other side, the chance gone.
The two Atlético defenders Mateo had beaten getting there jogged over and rubbed the top of Oblak's head, half-laughing with relief.
"Oblak, twice in one phase!" Drury. "And Dembélé, my word, Dembélé has been a menace all evening. He is exactly, precisely the player the Atlético supporters did not want to see in this kind of form tonight."
The 36th minute and 39 seconds.
Simeone might have changed his instructions, Atlético might have been coming out a little more, but Barcelona's attack was still Barcelona's attack. Nothing dulled the edge of it.
Mateo picked it up at the top of the box and went at his man, dropped him with a stutter, then played a quick one-two off Messi. The ball came back to him and the angle was wrong for a normal pass, so he did not play a normal pass.
Rabona.
He wrapped his standing leg and curled it round the back with the other, the whole away corner gasping at it, and bent the ball into Dembélé's path. Dembélé burst onto it and shot first time.
Giménez threw his body in front of it. The block came off his chest and ribs, the defender grunting at the impact, the ball spinning up.
Mateo arrived again. He met the loose ball with his head, a downward stab toward the corner.
Oblak caught it. Clean, two hands, plucked out of the air.
"OH, how is this fair!" Jim was almost laughing. "A rabona from a seventeen-year-old, a header on the rebound, and Oblak just reaches up and takes it. That could have been three, Peter. That should have been more than one."
"It is matchday thirty-eight," Drury said. "These players have a Champions League final waiting for them in days. And they are still this sharp, this hungry, against the best defence in the country. There is something almost cruel about it."
The 37th minute and 12 seconds.
Atlético, finally, with one of their own. Suárez dropped deep and took it on the half-turn, Piqué pressing into his back, and the old striker simply leaned, planted himself, used Piqué's own weight against him and held him off long enough to lay it forward.
Lemar ran onto it. Alba slid across to cover, torn between him and Pedri's man, getting neither cleanly. Lemar drove to the byline and cut it back to Suárez, who had kept moving into the space at the top of the box.
Suárez hit it first time, the outside of the boot.
Wide. Curling away past the far post and into the side netting.
"And Suárez again, looking for that goal he has wanted all night," Drury said. "Just the wrong side of the post. But the desire in him, you cannot miss it. That man wants this more than anybody on the pitch."
Right now, a hundred things were happening at once. The tension in the family box. The jokes flying around the La Masia hall. The chaos at the Boixos Nois bar. Oriol somewhere down in the fan stand, hoarse already. The presidential box and the king in it. Rivals watching from their sofas. Future opponents studying their next final. The two managers screaming on the touchlines.
So much was going on that could be talked about.
But this, the action on the grass, the twenty-two men actually doing it, was, right now, the only thing that mattered.
And it continued.
The 38th minute and 20 seconds.
Barcelona built and built and got nothing, the Atlético block closing every lane, and when De Jong overhit a pass at the top, the ball was suddenly the other way.
Atlético broke at speed. Carrasco carried it, slid it to Correa, and Correa was clean through, racing onto it behind the Barcelona line, the away corner rising in horror.
"Correa, in behind, this is the chance—"
The flag was already up.
Offside. By a stride.
Correa did not see it at first. He took it round Ter Stegen's despairing dive and rolled it toward the empty net before the whistle fully registered, and then he turned and saw the flag and the line and lost it. He grabbed the ball up off the turf in both hands and hurled a stream of abuse at the linesman, his face red, both arms going.
"Correa is furious, and you can understand it from where he's standing," Jim said. "But it is the correct call. He is half a yard beyond the last man. The right decision, however much it hurts him."
The 38th minute and 45 seconds.
Almost straight from the restart, Barcelona again. Mateo collected it deep and turned, and there was something different in him in these last few minutes. He had grown up across the run of this match. The Cruyff mind was not only in his touches anymore, it was in his choices, in the patience, in knowing when to slow it down and when to detonate. And under the patience there was the other thing, the brute, irresistible ability that did not need permission.
He glided past one man, rode a challenge from a second, and laid it off to Pedri arriving at the edge of the box.
Pedri set himself and hit it first time, the outside of his boot.
It flew wide of the top corner.
Pedri put both hands behind his head and stared at it.
"Oh, that had the angle and the dip," Drury said. "Just not the inches. Pedri thought he had his moment there."
The 39th minute and 50 seconds.
One more before the half. Barcelona worked it patiently, side to side, probing, Mateo dropping in to combine, Messi appearing in pockets. They moved it through the lines, one touch, one touch, the Atlético shape shuffling and holding, holding, holding.
Mateo got it on the turn, twenty yards out, and the whole stadium leaned.
A red wall stepped out to meet him. Three of them. No lane, no gap, nothing.
He tried to force it through anyway and Koke's leg got in the way, the ball cannoning off it and behind for a Barcelona corner.
Mateo stood with his hands on his hips, breathing hard, looking at the wall of red and white that had not broken once since the goal.
The corner came to nothing, Savić rising highest to head it clear.
Forty minutes gone. Atlético Madrid 0, Barcelona 1.
And every man on that pitch was still chasing the same thing.
By now every man on that pitch had looked at the touchline at least once. At the silver standing there. At what was waiting tonight.
The Atlético players were not joking with this. They knew exactly what it had cost them to get here. Something in them, maybe their coach's voice still ringing in their ears, told them this was their year. Call it delusion if you liked, but when would they ever again get a chance like this, to take a league off both Barcelona and Real Madrid in the same season? They were not going lightly into a single minute of it.
The 40th minute and 12 seconds.
The first one felt it.
Busquets had the ball in the centre and Koke came through the back of him, studs scraping down the back of his calf. Busquets went down hard, shouting, rolling, his hand up.
The referee came in fast. Carlos del Cerro Grande did not reach for a card. He stood Koke up, pointed at him, and gave the warning, clear and firm, and then he turned and waved away the four Barcelona players already in his ear demanding more.
"How is that not a yellow!"
"Ref, look at his leg!"
"COME ON!"
He did not flinch. He had been given this match, this juggernaut of a match, for a reason. He let both sets of players say their piece, gave neither of them what they wanted, and got the game moving again with the flat calm of a man who had decided long before kickoff that nobody in this stadium was going to rattle him.
"Good management there from the referee," Jim said. "Everybody in this stadium has an agenda right now. He has none. That is exactly why he was the man they chose for this."
The 40th minute and 57 seconds.
Atlético came again, and the Barcelona corner was still cheering, still believing, the faith pumping through that little red-and-blue pocket. Some of them had started to believe a second goal was coming.
They were right. They just did not know whose end it would start at.
Because mixed in with all that faith, there was something else on this pitch tonight.
Pure hatred.
His love for the game had not gone anywhere. But Suárez needed to bleed this thing off him, needed somewhere to put it. Hatred of the coaches. Of the board. A little of the fans. A little of the players. Of the things people typed about him online. And underneath all of it, hatred of himself.
More than anything that had been done to him, Suárez hated that he could not say they had been wrong. He knew it. His legs were going. He had started missing chances he used to bury in his sleep. He was not the man who had owned the Premier League, one third of the most feared front line football had ever assembled. He hated that he could not be that again. He hated that he had been replaced. He hated, most of all, that they had been right.
That hatred was the strongest thing in him, and that hatred had carried him past twenty goals this season, dragged Atlético to a run that, whatever happened tonight, was already remarkable.
It was fuel. And it was burning in him now as the ball dropped to his feet off a pass, the end of a tearing run from Lodi.
Suárez took it down. He looked up.
He went.
He twisted off the first man, used his body the only way his body still let him, leaned and held and bullied his way into the half. Come on. Come on, one more, you have one more in you. He laid it wide and kept moving for the return, the whole Atlético side pouring forward with him the way Simeone had drawn it, an all-out push, everyone committed, and Suárez was the heart of all of it. The ball came back to him and he carried it, his face screwed up with the effort, and he could feel the speed failing him, feel the half-yard that in his prime would have already been a goal. He made up the gap another way. With his shoulders. With his angles. With twenty years of knowing exactly where to be. Everything in him bent toward the same end, and for a few seconds it all seemed to be coming together, all of it, like it might just work.
Football is cruel.
Pedri stepped across the lane and took the ball clean off the move.
One touch. Gone. The whole attack, the whole commitment, the whole beautiful build, dead in an instant on the boot of an eighteen-year-old.
"PEDRI! Pedri snuffs it out!" Drury, lifting at once. "And Atlético have committed, Jim, they have committed everything to that, they are wide open, this is bad, this is very bad for them—"
Time is a punisher. And right now, against Luis Suárez, football and time had reached to show him that through a shaven-haired, very hungry, very gifted seventeen-year-old, who had just collected the ball off a fast break from his teammate.
It was over.
Atlético had thrown bodies at that attack. The whole front of their half was open now, two, maybe three red shirts back, and Mateo had already pushed the ball forward and was into a full sprint after it.
It was the fastest he had run all night.
"And Mateo King is away!" Drury. "Lemar is chasing, but Lemar is fading, Lemar is fading—"
The chasing defender stretched a hand out for the back of his shirt. He should have done it five seconds ago. Now all he could see was the flutter of the fabric pulling further and further away from his fingers.
The whole stadium was on its feet. The whole broadcast had gone up. Of every man on that pitch, the very last one you wanted leading a counter, with the ball, with the open grass, was the one leading it.
On the touchline, Simeone stood. All the calm trained into him by years of these two demons, all of it, did not matter here. He could see exactly how bad this was.
The nearest man to Mateo now was Dembélé. His own teammate.
The speed had not dropped. The ball had not got away from him. And Oblak had come out.
This game, Mateo had not had his epiphany. He had not had his moment, his monologue, the camera on him. He had not buried the chances he'd made. He had been waiting, all night, for this.
Oblak came off his line and spread himself, one of the very best in the world at exactly this, narrowing it, making the goal small. Which foot. Which way. And underneath the read, Oblak believed. He believed he was going to make this save, because a goalkeeper of his class did not come out for anything he did not believe he could win. You cannot do a thing if you do not believe it.
He was the only one who did.
Teammates, his coach, his fans, his city, every single person who had watched this boy all season long, had already reconciled themselves to a goal, Diego already had himself on the ground , fan had their hands on their head . They were right.
Mateo did not even think about it. No chip. No dribble. No flourish. He wanted to win, his first title was calling him, and he had no patience left tonight for anything pretty.
He got into his stride and he hit it.
BOOM.
A thunderbolt off the left foot. Oblak moved, leg out, body going down, and the ball screamed past him before he was halfway there. It was never a contest.
Mateo was already wheeling away to the touchline before it hit the net. His instincts had not been wrong.
"GOOOAAALLLL! HE MAKES HIS MARK! HE MAKES HIS MARK! WAS IT EVER IN DOUBT! It all began when he came on against Huesca, late in the season, and scored three! And now he finishes the job! He puts Barcelona two in front, he gives them that cushion, he does his job, he has DONE his job! The wonderkid! The boy of the future is dominating the present!"
A breath.
"Mateo King makes it two."
Mateo reached the touchline and threw both arms up, his iconic pose, the whole away corner roaring his name. But even he could not slow the thing running in his head. He had been anxious tonight, if he was honest. He had half-expected the system to show itself in the biggest league game of the season, and it had not, and that had worried him. He had worried when he missed the first chance, his heart going faster, the thought arriving cold and clear that he could actually become a La Liga champion tonight. He had carried all of it for forty minutes.
He dropped his arms. One hand stayed up, balled into a fist. His face screwed up, almost angry with it, and he let every last bit of it out at once.
"COME ONNNNNN!"
...
"He scored."
A long way north, in an office in Madrid, three men sat in front of a television.
"Yes." One of them shook his head slowly. "That makes it twenty-seven in the league. In thirteen games."
"It's ridiculous." The second one spread his hands. "I understand teams haven't fully adjusted to how he plays yet, but still. Twenty-seven."
The first one groaned. "If we had a scorer like that. Just a stable one. Imagine."
He glanced sideways as he said it. At the man in the middle, who had not spoken. Because no matter what anyone said in this room, everyone in it knew who made the decisions at Real Madrid, and the man in the middle had said nothing at all.
"Sir." The second one leaned in, careful. "I've heard his release clause isn't even that high. Lower, apparently, than Neymar's was during the whole PSG affair."
The first one's head came up, startled, then he gave a short, awkward laugh. "Ha. Yes. Maybe we pull off another Figo, eh, sir."
"Lord knows we could use him."
Florentino Pérez opened his mouth.
"We are already tight on the budget," he said, "for the Galáctico signing we are planning this summer."
The two of them jumped on it, fawning. "Ha, that is true. And honestly, this Mateo boy is no less than him. He'd solve our scoring problems on his own."
"He's more proven, even," the first added. "You know how it is with these breakout stars, you can never be too sure they'll last." He said the last part lower, and he did not quite believe it himself. What he was watching was a great deal more than a breakout star. Every year he had spent around football told him the same thing. This one was real. Just like the one they had already begun chasing for next season.
"But it would not hurt to try."
Pérez's voice cut across them, and it caught both men by surprise. He had ignored their whole exchange. He was still watching the screen.
On it, Mateo had been zoomed in close, his teammates piling onto him, pulling at him, all of them laughing. Pérez's eyes had narrowed onto the boy alone, and his mind had already left the room, gone forward, to a season that had not happened yet.
What would it be like. To have them both.
Florentino Pérez. Billionaire. President of Real Madrid. Founder of the Super League. The thought was simple, and it did not come from any belief that Madrid were irresistible, that they were the biggest club in the world and could have anything they wanted. No. This came from somewhere further in. This was the thing that made Pérez Pérez. The confidence that had, somewhere along the years, crossed over into something way past arrogance.
Pérez always got what he wanted.
And now he had a new obsession.
On the pitch, his obsession had no idea, and would not have cared.
The boys were still messing with him as they walked back. Pedri shoving his head, Dembélé hanging an arm around his neck, somebody yelling "WE'RE WINNING THE LEAGUE" into the side of his face. Mateo was laughing, the whole anxious knot of the last forty minutes gone out of him, the childish joy back where it belonged.
Messi pulled them in one more time, a few quick words, and tried to land something serious on them and could not, his own grin breaking out before he got to the end of it, which set the rest of them off too.
He let them laugh. Then he got it out.
"If we want this feeling to keep going," he said, the smile still on his face, "we've got work to do yet."
In the away corner, the supporters had gone past words.
"KING! KING! KING! KING!"
And then a tifo went up across the whole of the lower tier, unfurling huge over their heads, and the players caught sight of it and went still. Messi, lifting Mateo into the air. Both of them in red and blue. Both of them smiling.
Mateo stared up at it. Messi, beside him, looked at it too. For a second neither of them said anything.
The teams lined back up.
Mateo was still buzzing. He turned to the away corner and pumped both fists at them again, dragging the noise up another notch, soaking in every bit of it, and the referee came over with a flat look and asked him and a couple of the others to please, gentlemen, calm it down and let him restart the match.
Mateo held a hand up. Okay. Okay.
Then, even after the warning, he turned and pumped his fist one more time at the crowd, grinning, looking faintly ridiculous about it, unable to help himself.
His eyes drifted off the supporters and across the grass, to the touchline, to the silver standing there under the lights.
He looked at it.
Soon.
A/N
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