It was not just Mateo who saw the news.
The Barcelona documentary was something a great many people had been waiting for.
"What are you looking at?"
Antonella came into the room behind him with a cloth in one hand.
"Hm?"
"Last night was fun, by the way."
"Yeah." Leo did not look up. "It was."
"It really was."
She stopped.
"Leo."
"Mm."
"What are you looking at that has got you like that?"
And he turned the phone round.
"It is out."
"What is?"
"The documentary."
Antonella's hands came up over her mouth.
"Ohh."
She spun round.
"Really? Now? Right now?"
"Right now."
"Okay."
She was already going.
"Okay, I am getting the kids. We are watching it. All of us."
She pointed at him over her shoulder.
"Go and set it up."
And Leo smiled and stood up.
"Okay."
It took eleven minutes to get five people onto one sofa.
Antonella had Ciro on her lap and was holding both of his hands to stop him doing something. Thiago and Mateo had both got on, then both got off, then both got back on in different positions, and were now squirming against each other over territory that did not exist.
Leo stood in front of the television with the remote.
"Okay."
"Wait."
Thiago put a hand up.
"Daddy, wait."
Then he turned to his brother.
"Go and check the popcorn."
"Why me?"
Little Mateo's face collapsed.
"I was the one who put it in!"
"So you know where it is."
"That is not FAIR."
"Mateo," Antonella said.
"UGH."
He got up off that sofa with the heaviest sigh a six-year-old has ever produced and went out of the room muttering, and came back about ninety seconds later carrying two bowls and looking deeply put upon.
He handed one to his mother.
"Thank you, my love."
And he sat back down with the other one.
Leo lifted the remote.
And clicked it.
And immediately, out of the corner of his eye, little Mateo's hand shot out sideways and started ferrying popcorn out of his own bowl and into his brother's mouth without either of them looking away from the screen.
Little Mateo gave him a side eye that could have stripped paint.
And said nothing.
And on the television, in white on black:
BARÇA: MÉS QUE UN CLUB
And it did not stop with the Messi family.
Somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, a cabin light went off with a small chime.
"Sir?"
The attendant leaned in slightly.
"You are free to unbuckle now. We should be on the ground in France in about twenty minutes."
Ousmane Dembélé smiled up at her.
"Thank you."
He waited until she had gone, then put his AirPods in, pulled his hood up, and opened his laptop on the tray table.
And pressed play.
"I am taking Milan to the dentist."
Gerard Piqué looked up from behind the desk in his study.
"Oh. Okay."
Shakira did not leave.
She stood in that doorway with one hand on the frame, looking at him.
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing."
"Geri."
"Working."
"Mm-hm."
And Piqué sighed and turned the monitor round.
It was on a Netflix page.
"The documentary is out."
"Ah."
"I wanted to watch it."
"Hmm."
She nodded slowly.
"Okay."
"It is work, technically."
"Mm."
"It genuinely is."
"Okay, Geri."
She pushed off the door frame.
"We should be back in about an hour. Do you need anything?"
"No, I am good."
"Okay. Byeee."
"Bye."
And she was barely out of the room before his chair had turned back round.
In a quiet house on the other side of the city, Ronald Koeman sat down in an armchair with a cup of coffee and a remote.
He looked at the screen for a moment.
Then let out a long breath through his nose.
And pressed play.
"And that should be everything."
Joan Laporta shut the folder in front of him.
Ferran Reverter gathered his own papers, stood, and got as far as the door.
Then turned round.
"Oh. President."
"Hm?"
"The documentary is out. If you wanted to—"
"Ah."
Laporta waved a hand.
"Yes. Yes, I know."
Reverter left.
And Laporta sat there for a while longer, moving files from one side of his desk to the other, signing two things and not signing a third.
Then he put the pen down and pressed his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his own eyes.
"Hm."
He held it for a second.
"Maybe I should take a break."
He got up, crossed his own office, turned on the television that mostly gets used for matches, and worked his way through the menu.
And sat back down on the arm of a chair to watch it.
And it was not only people connected to the club.
In an office in Doha, with the blinds half down and the afternoon light coming in in strips, Xavi Hernández had a laptop open in front of him.
There were papers all over that desk. Printed shape diagrams. A notebook with three different pens in the spine. Something with arrows on it that had clearly been worked on more than once.
He moved a stack of it out of the way with one forearm.
And started it.
And in a house in Spain, Andrés Iniesta had a child on one side of him and another one climbing over the back of the sofa.
"Papá, what is it?"
"It is about the club."
"Which club?"
"Our club."
"Oh."
And especially, of course, the fans.
Oriol Cerdà had been ready since eight o'clock that morning.
He had the chair reclined. He had a small table pulled over beside it with four beers on it, three of which he did not need. He had crisps. He had taken the entire morning off work.
He picked up the remote.
And then stopped.
"Right."
He looked at it.
"What did he say again?"
There followed about six minutes that would have been genuinely distressing for any young person to watch.
He found the wrong menu twice. He accidentally opened the settings. At one point he ended up on a screen that asked him to select a profile and he selected Nora's, and had to work out how to get back.
But he got there.
And when the logo came up on that screen, Oriol Cerdà sat back in that chair, cracked open the first beer, and bounced twice with his shoulders.
"Ahhh."
In a flat somewhere near Gràcia, a couple had pulled a blanket over both of them on a sofa.
"Okay. Okay, shh, it is starting."
"I am not saying anything."
"Shhh."
Then, about ten seconds in, she tilted her head up.
"Imagine."
"Hm?"
"Imagine if they show what happened to us after the PSG game."
The man beside her laughed.
Awkwardly.
At the ceiling.
"Yeah."
He cleared his throat.
"I really hope they do not."
Back at the training complex, Alejandro Balde was standing in the middle of a corridor with a phone in his hand and a thumb moving very fast.
"Balde."
"One second."
"Dude."
Casadó came round the corner with his boots in one hand.
"Drop the phone, man, we are literally about to—"
"I am coming."
Balde did not look up.
"It is Mateo. He is asking me for my Netflix password."
Casadó stopped.
"Why?"
"Why do you think?"
"Wait."
Fermín's head appeared from somewhere down the corridor.
"Wait, is it out?"
"Is it out?"
"It is OUT?"
"Is it out right now?"
"Give me your phone."
"It is out, look, it is on the group."
"Let us watch it."
"Here?"
"Right here."
"Get the tablet, somebody get the tablet from—"
Eleven teenagers had folded themselves into one corner of that corridor in about forty seconds and were currently crowding around a screen that was much too small for eleven people.
Which is exactly when the coach came round the corner.
"Hey."
He stopped.
"HEY."
He spread his arms.
"What are you doing? What is this? It is still training time. Every single one of you should be—"
"Gaffer."
"Gaffer, it is the documentary."
"It just came out."
"Gaffer, it literally just came out."
"Five minutes."
"Ten minutes."
"Gaffer."
"Please."
"Gaffer, PLEASE."
The coach stood there and looked at eleven faces.
And let out a breath through his nose.
"Okay."
"YESSSS!"
"OKAY."
He put a hand up.
"Watch it."
"THANK YOU, GAFFER."
"BUT."
Everybody went quiet.
"I am adding it onto your session tomorrow."
The groan that came out of that corridor was enormous.
"Ohhh, gaffer."
"Come ON."
"That is not fair."
"Every minute you watch, I am adding."
"Fine."
"Fine."
"Okay, fine, fine, put it on."
"Move your head."
And back in the medical building, Mateo King was lying flat on an examination bed with a phone held up above his own face.
He typed in the email.
Then the password Balde had sent him, which contained a number sequence that told you a great deal about Balde.
It loaded.
He typed into the search bar with one thumb.
Barcelona.
And there it was, sitting at the top of the row, with the crest on it.
Mateo shifted the pillow behind his head.
Got comfortable.
And pressed play.
...
It opens in silence. Black screen. No music. Nothing at all for three full seconds, which is a very long time when you are looking at nothing. And then a voice. Old audio. Slightly worn at the edges, the way tape sounds when it has been copied too many times, with a Dutch accent bending around the Spanish. "Barcelona has always been more than—"
"Cruyff." Mateo said it out loud to an empty medical room.
In a corridor at the training complex, eleven boys were crammed around one tablet. "HA." Balde threw a hand out. "Of course. Of course it starts with Cruyff."
"How else would it start?"
"There is no other way to start it."
"Shhh."
In an office across the city, Joan Laporta sat on the arm of a chair with his hands together in front of his mouth and smiled at a screen.
And the images start coming. A city from above at dawn. A boy in a street kicking a ball against a wall that has a crest painted on it. An old woman in a window. Hands passing a scarf over a barrier. An empty Camp Nou at six in the morning with the sprinklers going. And over the top of it, voices. Dozens of them. Different ages, different accents, men and women, some of them clearly recorded on a phone in a bar.
"A club."
"A family."
"It is more than football. It has always been more than football."
"It is a community."
"It is who we are. Not what we support. Who we are."
"It is a flag."
"It is where I took my father and where my father took me."
And then the footage cuts. Johan Cruyff, in a chair, in a shirt with a collar too wide for it, somewhere in the nineties. And he says it.
"Més que un club."
In a studio in London, on a break between things, Thierry Henry was watching it on a laptop with one earphone in. And he found himself saying it under his own breath at exactly the same time. "Més que un club."
"People think it is a slogan." Cruyff leans forward slightly in that chair. "It is not a slogan. It is a problem."
"Because when you say you are more than a club, you have promised something. And now you must do it. Every year. Every match. And if you do not do it, then you are just a club, and you have lied."
He shrugs.
"So it is not a nice sentence. It is a debt."
"But I will tell you why I am not worried about this place."
And he smiles.
"At the end of the day, the reason Barcelona will always be larger than life is that they love football more than everybody else. Not better. More. They love it more."
"And as long as they keep doing that."
He spreads his hands.
"Everything will be fine."
And then the music comes in.
And it is joy. That is all it is for the next eleven minutes. Pure, uncut, ridiculous joy. A ball rolling through a forest of legs. Ronaldinho with his tongue out, doing something in the middle of a pitch in 2005 that nobody had ever done, and then laughing at it himself before anybody else can. The elastico. The no-look. The bicycle kick against Villarreal that made a stadium stand up. Rivaldo, falling backwards, in the ninetieth minute. Eto'o running with his arms out. And a nineteen-year-old with long hair being told he is going to start.
"INIESTAAAAA!" The commentary tears out of the speakers. "INIESTAAAA OF BARCELONAAAA!"
In a house in Spain, Andrés Iniesta had one hand over his own mouth and was laughing at his own television with a child asleep against his side.
And the clips keep coming, and the commentary underneath them stops describing football and starts describing a mood.
"They are playing out there. They are just playing out there!"
"He is laughing! He is actually laughing while he does it!"
"This is not a football match any more, this is a performance!"
Oriol Cerdà was sitting forward in that chair with a beer in his hand and had not drunk from it in about four minutes. Because he remembered these. All of them. He remembered where he had been standing for that one. He remembered who he had been with for that one. He was grinning at his own living room like a lunatic.
"MSN!"
"MSN! MSN! MSN!"
"Is there a better front three in the history of this sport? Is there? Name one!"
In an apartment in Paris, a phone was going off on a counter and being ignored.
"Ney." Somebody leaned round the doorway. "Ney, come on. Let us go, the thing is starting."
"I am coming."
He did not move.
"Ney."
"I am coming, I am coming."
Neymar da Silva Júnior was standing in front of a television with his arms folded and his weight on one leg, and on that screen three men in red and blue were running toward a corner flag with their arms round each other. One of them was twenty-two years old and had his whole face open. He did not move for another four minutes.
And then the tone shifts, and it gets serious, and the screen goes to a training ground in 2008.
"He was thirty-seven years old."
"He had coached one season. One. With the B team."
"And they gave him the first team of FC Barcelona."
Pep Guardiola, in a black jacket, standing on a touchline with his hands in his pockets, looking at something nobody else can see.
In an office in Doha with the blinds half down, Xavi Hernández had stopped taking notes. He had a pen in his hand and he was not using it.
"People ask me what the idea was." Guardiola, in a present-day interview, in front of a grey wall. "There was no idea. There was a group of players who had been taught the same thing since they were eleven years old, in the same building, by the same people, and my job was to not ruin it."
He shrugs.
"That is all I did. I did not ruin it."
And then it is 2009 and everything happens at once. Six trophies in one calendar year. Rome. Wembley. The pass into the run, the pass into the run, the pass into the run, over and over, a team that appeared to know where each other were with their eyes shut. And a young Joan Laporta, considerably slimmer, in a suit, saying into a microphone with total confidence:
"We are the best team in the world. And we intend to stay the best team in the world."
In a club office, the present-day version of that man watched the past version of that man say it. And started laughing. He put a hand over his own stomach.
"Ah."
And then the screen goes white.
"MESSSSSIIIIII!"
"THAT IS DADDY!"
"THAT IS DADDY!"
Two boys came off that sofa at once.
"Mamá! That is Papá!"
"I know, my love."
And Lionel Messi sat in the middle of his own living room with his youngest on his wife's lap and his other two screaming at a television, and he did not say a single word.
Because for the next nine minutes, that documentary is about one person. The run against Getafe. The Bernabéu. The Champions League final headers. The free kicks. The goal against Athletic in the Copa where four men fall over. And the interviews.
"He is not a footballer. I am sorry, but he is not. I have been a footballer. That is something else."
"You could not coach against him. You could plan for ninety minutes and he would take four seconds off you."
"1 on 1 against Messi and you are dead. Dead."
"My son asked me if he was real. Genuinely asked me that."
And then the fans. A woman outside the Camp Nou, holding a scarf, crying and laughing at the same time.
"We do not need anything." She shakes her head. "People say we need signings, we need this, we need that. We do not need anything. We have Messi."
And then a stadium of ninety thousand people, all of them, in one voice.
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
And then the Ballon d'Or footage. 2009. 2010. 2011. 2012. Four of them, in a row, one after another, the same man walking up the same steps four years running.
"Four in a row." Mateo had rolled onto his side on that bed with the phone propped against a pillow. "Four in a row." He laughed at the ceiling. "Fuck."
"They ask me about individual awards." Messi, in a press room, years ago, twenty-four years old and visibly uncomfortable. "I do not know what to say about it. I play with Xavi and Andrés. I play with Dani, with Puyol, with Geri. Everything I do is because of what they do."
He looks off to one side.
"Nobody does anything alone here. That is the whole point of this club."
And then it is a dressing room, and the footage is shaky, and somebody is holding a phone. Lionel Messi, twenty-eight years old, absolutely destroyed, standing on a bench with a bottle in one hand and his shirt half off.
"YOU WANTED THE LEAGUE!"
The room screams.
"WE GOT THE LEAGUE!"
"YOU WANTED THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE!"
"AHHHHH!"
"WE GOT THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE!"
"YOU WANTED THE TREBLE!"
"AHHHHHHHH!"
"WE GOT THE TREBLE! VISCA BARÇAAAA!"
The screen holds on that for a second. Thirty men in a room who genuinely cannot imagine ever losing anything again.
And then it cuts to black.
And a title card comes up in white.
2010.
"Joan Laporta's presidency comes to an end today." News footage. A man walking out of a building. Cameras. "After seven years, and arguably the most successful period in this club's history, the Laporta era is over."
In an office, Joan Laporta had stopped laughing. He was sitting very still.
2012.
"I will not continue as coach of FC Barcelona." A press room. A man who looks like he has not slept in a month. "I am drained. I need to recharge. Four years is a long time."
And Lionel Messi, in the back of that room, looking at the floor. And then footage of the two of them in a corridor afterwards, and Messi has both arms round him, and neither of them lets go for a while.
2015.
A pitch, at night. A guard of honour. A man in a Barcelona shirt with the number six walking down the middle of it with a microphone in his hand and a stadium standing up.
"I am going to try not to cry."
Xavi Hernández gets about four words further than that.
In an office in Doha, a man sat behind a desk covered in tactics and watched himself say goodbye, and he did not move at all.
2017.
"Neymar Júnior has left for Paris Saint-Germain in a deal worth two hundred and twenty-two million euros." Cameras. Dozens of them. A car moving at walking pace through a crowd of journalists with hands banging on the windows. And Messi in an airport, coming through a gate, and a man with a microphone getting in front of him.
"Leo! Leo, Neymar! What do you think about Neymar leaving?"
He does not answer. He does not look up. He just keeps walking.
In an apartment in Paris, Neymar was still standing in exactly the same place. He had not gone to the thing.
2018.
A stadium, and confetti, and a man in a number eight shirt walking round the pitch with his children. And Messi finds him near the tunnel and holds onto him for a long time and says something into the side of his head. Iniesta is crying. So is Messi.
In a house in Spain, Andrés Iniesta had one hand over his eyes. His wife had reached over and put a hand on his knee.
"Honestly? It took a toll on all of us." Gerard Piqué, present day, in a chair, in a black shirt. "People see the transfers and the results and they talk about the money. That is not what it was. It was that every year, somebody who had been in that dressing room for a decade was not there any more."
He shrugs.
"You lose one, fine. You lose another one, okay. But at some point you look around and you do not recognise anybody."
He looks off camera.
"And I think for one person especially, it was."
He stops.
"Yeah."
In a study in a house outside Barcelona, Gerard Piqué watched himself fail to finish that sentence. And did not move.
"ROMA HAVE RISEN FROM THEIR RUINS!"
It comes in loud and it is genuinely violent after twenty minutes of quiet.
"BARCELONA ARE OUT! FOUR-ONE! FROM FOUR-ONE UP!"
Men in red and blue on their knees on a pitch in Italy. And then it does not stop.
Liverpool. Anfield. Four-nil. A camera finds Messi at the whistle, standing completely still in the middle of a pitch while a stadium sings around him.
And then Lisbon.
"Eight."
"Eight-two."
"I do not know what to say to you. I have never seen this. I have never seen anything like this."
And a shot, held for far too long, of a small man standing alone on the halfway line with his hands on his hips, looking up at a black sky.
Oriol Cerdà had put the beer down. He had not picked it back up.
In the corridor at the training complex, eleven teenagers had gone completely silent.
2020.
"Luis Suárez has been informed he is not part of the new coach's plans." Footage of a man carrying a box to a car. And then, at a press conference, that same man in a suit, trying to speak, and not being able to, and putting a hand over his own face.
And then the screen goes quiet again. And it is Messi, present day, in a chair, in a grey room.
"How did all of that feel?"
He does not answer for a while.
"Ehm." He rubs the back of his own hand with his thumb. "It is difficult. Because people think it is about the football. Losing is normal. I have lost my whole life, everybody loses."
"It was not that."
He shrugs.
"It was that I would come into the building and it was not the same building. The people were not there. The ones who came in were good players, they were good boys, it is not about them."
He looks up.
"But I was the only one left who remembered what it used to be. And that is a very strange thing. To be in a place you love and feel like you are the only person who was ever there."
A pause.
"So, yeah." He nods. "I wanted to leave. That is the truth. I wanted to leave. Because it was not the club I knew any more."
"MESSI WANTS TO LEAVE BARCELONA."
The news footage comes in like a wall. Every channel. Every language. A ticker running along the bottom of a screen in Portuguese. A woman in a studio in Argentina with her hand over her mouth.
"The burofax has been received by the club."
"He wants out."
"Lionel Messi has told FC Barcelona that he wishes to terminate his contract."
And then the fans. Outside the Camp Nou, at night, hundreds of them.
"It is not possible. It is not possible. I do not believe it."
"He cannot leave. Where would he go? What would he even be, somewhere else?"
A young woman holding a piece of cardboard with something written on it in marker. And an old man, seventy-something, in a cap, who looks straight down the lens and says:
"Leo. We love you. Whatever you do, we love you."
And then the audio drops out entirely. And one voice comes in, on its own, over black.
"I promise you."
"I promise that this season we will do everything possible so that this beautiful, much desired trophy comes back to the Camp Nou."
And it plays again, quieter, underneath the footage.
"I promise you."
Rome.
"I promise that this season—"
Anfield.
"—so that this beautiful, much desired trophy—"
Lisbon.
"—comes back to the Camp Nou."
Nobody watching that, anywhere on earth, said a single word.
Lionel Messi was sitting on his own sofa in his own living room with his children in front of him. He was not moving. And Antonella reached over and took his hand and squeezed it. He looked at her. And he smiled.
"I do not recognise my club any more." An old man in a bar, sixty-five, seventy, with a glass in front of him. "I am not being dramatic. I am telling you. I have supported this club since I was four years old and I look at it now and I do not know what I am looking at."
And the numbers start coming. Coutinho. A hundred and forty-five million. Dembélé. A hundred and thirty-five. Griezmann. A hundred and twenty. Graphics. Balance sheets. A wage bill that goes up and up and up in a red line.
"The club is not what it used to be."
"Every single one of these signings was made to replace what they used to produce themselves."
"Josep Maria Bartomeu has resigned as president of FC Barcelona."
And then it stops.
And it is Messi again, in that chair, in that grey room.
"Have you ever gone back and watched the old footage?"
He shakes his head.
"No."
"Not really."
He almost smiles.
"I mean, sometimes it is on. If it is on I will watch it. And it is beautiful, all of it is beautiful, that was the best time of my life."
A pause.
"But you cannot live there."
He shrugs.
"You have to keep going forward. Right?"
He looks at the camera properly for the first time in the entire interview.
"And I want to go forward with this club."
And the footage changes. And it is grainy, and it is old, and a very small boy with long hair and a Barcelona tracksuit is being asked something by somebody off camera.
"What is your name?"
"Lionel Messi."
"And where do you play?"
"Barcelona."
"And what do you want to be?"
The boy shrugs.
"A footballer."
And over the top of it, the present-day voice.
"Barcelona, for me, has always been more than—"
Cut.
"JOAN LAPORTA IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT."
And the whole thing changes gear. Posters. A campaign office. A man in a crowd being grabbed at by eleven people at once. Somebody putting a scarf round his neck.
"He is back."
"He is actually back."
"This is what we need. We need familiar faces. We need people who know what this club IS."
"He was here for the good years. He was the one who was here."
And Laporta, on a stage, in front of a room, with a microphone.
"I am going to bring Leo Messi back."
"AHHHHH!"
"Not bring back. He never left. I am going to make sure he never has to think about leaving again."
"Because this club does not belong to a president. It does not belong to a board."
He points out at the room.
"It belongs to you. And it is time somebody remembered that."
In an office, on the arm of a chair, Joan Laporta watched himself and did not smile at all. He just nodded slowly.
"Joan Laporta has been elected president of FC Barcelona with fifty-four percent of the vote."
And then it is an interview. Present day. Laporta in a chair, relaxed, one ankle over the other knee, laughing at something.
"So, President. Congratulations."
"Thank you."
"The obvious question. What does this club need?"
And the laugh goes off his face.
"Barcelona needs a change." He sits forward slightly. "Not a signing. Not a coach. A change."
He turns one hand over.
"This club needs a catalyst."
And then it is voices again, overlapping, angry.
"We need to change. We cannot go on like this."
"We need to go back to what we were."
"They keep saying change, change, change—"
And an old man in a bar, on his feet, shouting at somebody off camera.
"WHO?" He throws a hand out. "Everybody keeps saying we need a star. We need someone. WHO? Where are we going to find him? Ehn? WHERE?"
"We have been trying! We have spent a billion euros trying! We bought them from Liverpool, we bought them from Dortmund, we bought them from Atlético!"
"It does not work! WHERE ARE WE GOING TO FIND HIM?"
And then it goes very quiet.
And it is the Huesca match.
A red card. A referee's arm going up. And Lionel Messi walking off a pitch with his head down, and the camera stays on him the whole way, all the way to the tunnel, and he does not look up once. The tunnel swallows him.
And over that shot, the voices come back, quieter now, layered.
"Where are we going?"
"Who?"
"Where is he?"
"Who is going to—"
And then, cutting straight across all of it, clean, from a stadium PA:
"NUMBER THIRTY-SIX. MATEO KING."
"AHHHHHHH!"
Eleven boys in a corridor came apart at once.
"AHHHH!"
"THERE HE IS!"
"THAT IS OUR GUY!"
"THAT IS MATEO!"
"AHHHHHH!"
Lionel Messi, on his own sofa, smiled for the first time in twenty minutes.
And Mateo King, flat on a bed in a medical room with a phone propped against a pillow, grinned at it with his whole face.
"And Barcelona are making a change, and it is a name I do not have on my sheet."
"Mateo King. Seventeen years old. He is a striker, he is out of the academy, he came up through La Masia, and this is his first involvement with the first team."
"And forgive me, but what exactly is Ronald Koeman doing here? They are two goals down. There is a little over fifteen minutes left in this football match and he is putting on a seventeen-year-old who has never played a minute of senior football."
A pause.
"Well. Ladies and gentlemen. Mateo King."
And the footage shows him on the touchline, waiting for the board. And the boy is bouncing. Both feet, on the spot, unable to stand still, grinning at absolutely nothing.
"Mateo?"
Cut. Interview room. Gerard Piqué, arms folded.
"Describe him in one word?"
He laughs.
"One word?"
Ter Stegen, in a chair.
"One word. Okay. Hold on."
Griezmann, leaning back.
"Ah, that is difficult."
"GOOOOAL!"
"GOOOOAL! AND THAT IS A HAT-TRICK!"
"THAT IS A HAT-TRICK! WHERE DID BARCELONA FIND THIS BOY?"
"FIFTEEN MINUTES! A HAT-TRICK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES! WHO IS THIS KID?"
And then it goes fast.
Goals. One after another after another, from every angle, in different kits, in different stadiums. A boy running at a defence with the ball glued to his boot. The calma. A shirt over a face. A crowd coming off its feet. Magazine covers. Front pages. Television panels with his face frozen behind them.
"WHO IS THE BARCELONA WONDERKID?"
"EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MATEO KING."
"HE IS SEVENTEEN."
And through all of it, underneath, the crowd noise builds, and the Camp Nou is louder in every clip than it was in the one before. A club coming back to life.
Oriol Cerdà was laughing at his own television with both hands on top of his head.
"HAHAHA!"
"THAT IS MY NEPHEW!"
He told nobody. There was nobody in that room. He said it anyway.
"In one word." Piqué scratches his chin. "Well. I would say—"
Cut.
Training ground footage. Somebody's camera, handheld. A shot goes in from about twenty-five yards and the net comes off the ground. And Mateo King comes running out with both arms spread wide, screaming.
"GOOOOAL!"
Then he wheels round and points at the player who took it.
"You are shooting like THAT?"
The player throws both hands out.
"YOU SCORED IT!"
"Yeah, but that is only because I am me."
"WHAT?"
"That is only because it is ME."
And four men jump on him.
More footage. Four players dragging a seventeen-year-old across a dressing room toward a chair, with clippers.
"NO."
"SIT DOWN."
"NO. NO. GET OFF ME."
"HOLD HIS ARMS."
"I AM NOT DOING IT."
In a study outside Barcelona, Gerard Piqué watched himself hold down a boy's shoulders and laughed out loud at his own monitor.
"Impossible."
"Troublemaker."
"Fast. Very fast."
"Lethal, honestly."
"Annoying."
"He is annoying. Can I say annoying?"
"HAHAHA."
"He is a good kid. He is a very good kid. Do not tell him I said that."
And then it is Messi. In that same grey room, in that same chair.
"One word?"
He thinks about it. He actually thinks about it, for about four seconds, looking off to the side of the camera. And then he says it.
"Joy."
"It has been a long time since that dressing room felt like that. A long time."
He shrugs.
"He is seventeen. He does not know what has happened here in the last few years and he does not care. He comes in every morning like it is the best day of his life."
A small laugh.
"And you cannot stay in a bad mood around somebody like that. It is not possible. You try, and you cannot."
And more goals. And the crowd. And a stadium singing a name.
"MA-TE-O! MA-TE-O! MA-TE-O!"
And then, finally, a different room. A boy in a chair, in a black Barcelona polo, laughing before the question has even finished.
"So. Your teammates had quite a lot to say about you."
"HAHAHA." Mateo King puts both hands up. "I hope all of it was good."
"Some of it."
"Only some?"
"Some of it was extremely good."
"Okay. I will take that."
"You know, you are just like they said you really are not nonchalant, are you?"
And Mateo laughs at that.
"No." He shakes his head. "No, I do not think I like being nonchalant, honestly."
"No?"
"No." He shrugs one shoulder, still smiling.
"Why would I hide the joy God gave me?"
A/N
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