"Mateo King is down, and it looks really bad This is the nightmare scenario for every Barcelona fan!—"
The commentary cut through the noise of the stadium like a knife, sharp and urgent above the collective gasp of the crowd.
Mateo was on the pitch. He had gone down hard — the kind of fall that tells everyone watching that something is wrong before the player even reacts, the body knowing before the mind catches up. He was on the grass now, both hands clutching his leg, his face pressed toward the ground, and the sounds coming from him were the small, involuntary sounds of someone in genuine, serious pain — short whimpers pushed out through gritted teeth, the kind that come not from choice but from the body being overwhelmed.
Pedri reached him first, dropping to a knee beside him, one hand on his shoulder, his face tight with worry. Messi was close behind, crouching low, speaking to him — the words inaudible beneath the din of the stadium but the expression on his face saying enough. Fati stood just above them, his hands on his head, jaw set. Gavi had pushed through from further back and was now kneeling on the other side, saying his name, his voice steady in the way voices get when someone is trying to be steady for someone else who cannot be.
Mateo writhed slightly, still gripping his leg, still down, the pain refusing to be managed or minimised.
Around them the stadium had gone to a particular kind of quiet — not silence, but the held, collective breath of sixty thousand people watching something they do not want to be watching and cannot look away from.
The medical team was coming. Running.
The commentary came again, quieter now — the voice of a man who had seen things on pitches for many years and recognised the particular quality of this moment.
"The medical staff are making their way on. You can see from the reactions of his teammates that everyone is concerned. Mateo King has been having the kind of season that redefines what we expect from someone his age — and right now, looking at this, the worry in this stadium is palpable."
A pause. The weight of it hanging in the broadcast.
"This might very well be the end of Mateo King as we know it."
"Hah—!"
The breath ripped out of him like something pulled by force.
"Hah—! Hah—!"
Mateo shot upright in the bed, both hands grabbing at the sheets, chest heaving, eyes wide and open and seeing nothing for a full second — just the darkness of a room that was not the pitch, not the stadium, not any of it.
He gasped. Again. His lungs catching up with the rest of him.
He sat there, chest rising and falling rapidly, sweat sitting cool and thin across his forehead and the back of his neck, his heart running at a pace that had not yet received the message that there was no emergency.
He looked around.
A room. His room — or rather, the room that was his now, in the apartment he had moved into yesterday, which his body had apparently not yet accepted as home enough to stop presenting as unfamiliar at six in the morning with adrenaline still moving through it.
Slowly, the details of the space assembled themselves in his vision as his breathing evened out.
The room had clearly been put together with a specific person in mind — or at least a specific type of person — and that person was a teenage boy who loved football and deserved somewhere that reflected that without being embarrassing about it. The walls were a deep, clean navy, warm rather than cold, and set into the wall opposite the bed was a large flat-screen television — properly large, the kind that justified the wall it occupied. A wide desktop setup sat along the right side of the room, the monitor dark and waiting, the chair in front of it the kind you could sink into for hours without noticing. The desk surface was clear and organised, a small lamp at one corner, the space ready to be used.
On the wall above the headboard, a Barcelona crest had been mounted — not a poster, not a printout, but a proper emblem, clean and bold against the navy, the red and blue sitting deep and rich in the low morning light. Around it, mounted at careful intervals, were framed photographs — aerial shots of Camp Nou, action images from famous matches, the kind of images that made the room feel like it had a point of view. A shelf ran along the left wall, already holding a small collection of things — trophies from his academy years that had been brought over and placed without ceremony, as if they had always lived there.
The carpet underfoot was thick and dark, the wardrobe built-in and flush with the wall, the room as a whole carrying the quiet, considered quality of somewhere that had been designed to feel like it belonged to someone.
It was, objectively, a beautiful room.
Mateo had no time to appreciate it at all.
He was still pressing two fingers against his temple, massaging the space there in slow circles, the dream retreating now in the way dreams do — quickly and entirely, leaving only the feeling behind without the images, the anxiety without the source.
"What a weird dream," he muttered.
He rubbed his face with both hands — a long, thorough rub, the kind that starts at the forehead and ends with the palms pressing into the jaw, the universal resetting motion of someone emerging from somewhere their mind should not have taken them. He shook his head once, firmly, and that was the dream officially dismissed.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment.
Then, with the instinct that required no conscious decision and was shared by approximately every person on earth who owned a smartphone, his hand went sideways across the sheet, searching.
His fingers found his phone.
He pulled it toward him and lay back against the pillow, screen brightening in the morning dimness.
He spent a while going through it.
There were messages from his mother — a few from last night that he hadn't seen, and one sent early this morning that was mostly logistical and ended with three heart emojis. His aunt had sent something similar. His friends from the party had been active in the group chat well into the night, the conversation a long, scrolling record of the kind of energy that takes hours to wind down after a day like yesterday had been.
His uncle Andrew had sent a separate message, more focused — he was starting interviews today for a full staff team, wanted Mateo's thoughts on a few things when he had a moment. Mateo made a mental note to reply properly once he was properly awake.
Various others had messaged in the hours since he had fallen asleep — people from the party, people from the academy, people he had not spoken to in a long time suddenly finding their way back into his notifications with the reliable precision of people who had recently seen his name trending. He scrolled through them at the pace of someone who intended to respond to most of them at some point but was being honest with himself about which ones that actually applied to.
Then one stopped him.
He stared at it.
Someone — he had to scroll up to check the name, because he genuinely could not place it immediately — had sent him a message asking for twenty euros.
Not a lengthy message. No preamble, no catching up, no acknowledgment of the years of silence preceding this request. Just the request. Twenty euros. Direct.
Mateo looked at it for a moment with the expression of a man encountering something that defied straightforward categorisation.
Then he closed the messaging app without responding and opened Instagram.
8.1 million followers.
He saw the number and stopped, the way you stop at a number that is still surprising even when you have been watching it grow. It had been increasing by close to fifty thousand a day lately, the curve steepening with each week, the momentum of it building on itself. At this rate the double digits would not be far — the ten million mark sitting somewhere not too distant on the horizon, a thing that had once been entirely abstract now becoming, quietly, a matter of when rather than whether.
He smiled at the number for a moment.
Then he navigated to his most recent post — the one he had put up last night before bed, in the brief window between his friends leaving and Olivia's hello arriving at his door. He had captioned it simply: #NewHome.
The photo was from earlier in the evening, during the FIFA session — Adrian slightly out of focus in the background, clearly unaware he was being included, while Gavi, Fermín, Casado, and Balde sat across the sofa in various states of competitive intensity, controllers in hand, faces doing the full range of things faces do when the margin is one goal and there are two minutes left. Someone — he couldn't remember who had taken it — had caught the moment when all of them were smiling at the same time, which happened less often than you might think in the middle of a serious game. The living room of the new apartment framed them warmly behind it, the new space already looking, in the photograph, like somewhere people belonged.
Over four hundred thousand likes.
Mateo scrolled through the comments for a minute with the easy, slightly detached pleasure of someone who was not going to respond to any of them but enjoyed the texture of them — the familiar patterns of excitement and warmth and the occasional bizarre non-sequitur that always made the comments section feel alive.
He was smiling.
The dream was completely gone now. Whatever his sleeping mind had decided to construct in the hours before morning had dissolved entirely, the way things do when the morning is bright enough and the phone is full enough and life is sufficiently, undeniably present.
He checked the time.
6:42.
He made a sound that was not quite a word — something low and resigned, the noise of a person registering an obligation — and swung his legs over the side of the bed.
He stood.
His arms came up automatically, the full morning stretch, both hands reaching toward the ceiling, his back arching and his jaw dropping in the kind of yawn that requires full facial commitment. The sounds that came out during this process were entirely involuntary and not something he would have produced with an audience.
"Let me get ready," he muttered, to no one.
He crossed to the bathroom.
Mateo had never been particularly musical in the mornings — not the kind of person who needed a soundtrack to start the day, not someone who felt the absence of noise the way some people did. He rawdogged the entire thing: brush, shower, all of it in the plain company of his own thoughts, the water running and the morning being quiet and that being sufficient. It took him a little over fifteen minutes from start to finish, which was efficient even by his standards, and when he came out of the bathroom with the towel tied at his waist and his face still slightly damp, he was already thinking about the day ahead.
He moved to the wardrobe.
Normally he would have taken an extra five or ten minutes here — hair, moisturiser, the small unhurried rituals of a morning that had margin in it. Today did not have that margin. He dried off properly and reached for the first thing his hand found, pulling it out — and then stopped.
The wardrobe was organised.
Not just the clothes he had brought over himself — those he had put away last night in whatever order made sense to him, which was a system he understood and nobody else would. But the rest of the wardrobe was arranged: folded, spaced, hung with intention. His older items had been relocated and placed alongside new ones — shirts, training gear, outerwear — all of it sitting in the careful order of someone who had been in here before him and treated the task seriously.
And then he saw the shelf.
Sprays and perfumes — his old ones, the ones he recognised from the dorms, lined up beside several new ones he had never seen before. Different brands, different sizes, all of them chosen with some knowledge of what he actually liked rather than just what was available. He picked one up, turned it over, put it back.
The thought arrived quietly, the way thoughts do when something is simply true: someone had cared enough to think about all of this. To know the old ones, to find the new ones, to arrange them in a way that said we thought about you specifically.
He stood in front of the wardrobe for a second longer than he needed to, taking it in.
Then he quickly finished getting ready.
He reached into the wardrobe and pulled out one of the new training kits.
It wasn't just the kit either. The wardrobe had come stocked — properly stocked — in a way that made it clear Nike and Barcelona had coordinated on this with some thought. Everything in there bore the swoosh, everything carried the club's colours somewhere on it, and all of it was new. A Nike Dri-FIT Strike training jacket hung at the far left — navy and blue, the Barcelona crest sitting clean on the chest. Beside it, a selection of Nike Dri-FIT Academy training tops in the same colour palette, short and long sleeve options both accounted for. Folded on the shelf beneath were Nike Dri-FIT Academy pants — slim fit, ankle zippers, the crest again on the left thigh. Club socks were paired and stacked. A Nike Academy team duffel bag sat on the lower shelf, already packed with what appeared to be his essentials, handles up and ready.
He pulled out the training top and pants, got dressed with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this every morning for years, and then crouched down for the shoes.
The Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 38s were new — white base with blue and black detailing, clean out of the box in the way new trainers are before they've met a single surface. He laced them up properly, working through each eyelet with the particular focus of someone who had learned early that loose laces on a training day were a problem you created for yourself. He pulled the knot tight, gave it a tug, straightened up.
He had noticed the football boots in there too — new ones, proper ones, also Nike, also untouched. He left them where they were. His cleats were already at the locker room at the training ground, broken in and familiar. It made no sense to take new ones now.
He stood in front of the wardrobe mirror for a moment.
The kit sat on him well — the training top fitted through the shoulders and loose enough to move in, the pants clean and tailored at the ankle. He looked, in the plain and honest way of someone assessing a reflection without vanity, ready. Not just dressed — ready. There was something in the set of his shoulders this morning, some quality in the way he was standing that had not been there the night before when he had dropped into bed still carrying the weight of the day. He had slept well despite the dream, and the morning had done the rest.
He looked like someone who had a day to go and start.
His phone was still on the bed where he'd left it. He could see it from here — screen dark, sitting in the centre of the slightly chaotic pile of sheet and towel he had left behind him. He crossed the room toward it, picked it up, turned it over in his hand.
The screen lit up with an incoming call.
He looked at the name.
The smile came before he had made any conscious decision to smile.
He answered.
"Hey, Adrian."
It was, of course, Adrian. After yesterday's arrangements and the plan for this morning, they had exchanged numbers — and now here Adrian was, as promised, calling to say what Mateo had already more or less known he was going to say.
"I'm already downstairs."
"Okay." Mateo was already moving, phone to his ear, heading toward the door. "I'm done — coming down now."
He ended the call, pocketed the phone, and turned back to the room.
The bed was a disaster — sheets pulled out from one end, the pillow at an angle, his towel spread across the middle of it like it had been dropped from a height. He looked at it for a moment with the clear-eyed assessment of someone who was not, at this precise moment, going to do anything about it, and turned off the light.
He stepped out into the hallway.
The apartment was quiet in the specific way of somewhere that has sleeping people in it — a soft, inhabited quiet, different from the empty kind. He stood in the corridor for a moment, his eyes moving toward the other bedroom door at the far end of the hall.
He had the thought — brief, obvious — that he should knock and let them know he was leaving. Aina and Olivia, still asleep behind that door, in a new apartment in a building they did not know, in an area of Barcelona they had not been to before.
He looked at the door.
Then he looked at the time.
He let the thought go. Waking them up before seven on their first morning here was not the considerate option, whatever his instinct said. They would be fine. He had a better idea.
He moved through to the living room, heading for the front door.
By the entrance, on the small console table against the wall, the key cards sat where Adrian had left them yesterday — two of them, looped together on a simple keychain. He picked them up, separated one from the other, and slipped it into his pocket. The other he set back down on the table — visible, accessible, exactly where someone waking up and looking for it would find it.
He opened the front door with the card in his hand, stepped through, and pulled it shut behind him.
He tested it — handle down, a gentle push, a firmer one. Locked. He tested it once more, because that was simply what you did, then stood back.
Along the edge of the door frame, he noticed it properly for the first time — a small panel, recessed into the frame, with the smooth dark surface of a fingerprint reader. He hadn't set that up yet. He made a mental note to do it when he got back, filed it away, and started toward the stairs.
His phone was out before he reached the first landing.
He navigated to iMessage while walking, found Aina's contact — it had been there since before she arrived, their mothers having coordinated it — and typed quickly, one thumb, moving down the stairs:
Hey — heading out now. Left a key card on the table by the front door for you.
He read it back once, sent it, and pocketed the phone.
The lobby was quiet, the building holding the particular stillness of early morning, and he pushed through the main door into the outside air.
The van was there — the same one from yesterday, parked along the front of the building with the engine running, Adrian visible through the windscreen. Mateo lifted a hand in a small wave as he crossed the pavement toward the passenger side.
He was already pulling the door open when his phone buzzed in his pocket — the message delivered. He climbed up into the seat, pulled the door shut behind him, and dropped his phone onto his lap.
"Morning," Adrian said.
"Morning." Mateo reached for the seatbelt, clipped it across himself, settled back. He let out a breath — not heavy, just the first proper breath of someone stepping from the private quiet of a morning into the beginning of a day.
He yawned.
It arrived without warning or apology — a proper one, jaw fully deployed, eyes briefly squeezing shut — the kind that comes not from tiredness exactly but from the body taking one last moment to acknowledge that it was, technically, still early.
Adrian, apparently timing it perfectly, held something out toward him.
Mateo looked at it. A cup — sealed, condensation on the outside, the colour visible through the plastic suggesting something dark and mixed.
"Banana, berry, and oat smoothie," Adrian said, already pulling away from the kerb. "Picked it up from the cafeteria on the way over. Figured you wouldn't have eaten yet."
Mateo took it. "Thanks, man."
He brought it to his lips and tried it — cold, thick, the banana coming through first and the berry underneath it, the oats giving it a weight that made it feel like something rather than just a drink. He held the taste for a moment, nodded once to himself with the quiet approval of someone who had been given something better than expected, and set it in the cupholder beside him.
He watched the building slide past the window as the van pulled out onto the road, the early morning Barcelona streets still unhurried and cool, the light thin and clean the way it is before the city fully wakes.
"Slept off pretty early last night," he said, turning slightly toward Adrian. "Were you and the guys able to get back before six?"
Adrian kept his eyes on the road. A small, slightly complicated expression moved across his face — the expression of a man for whom the answer was technically yes but the margin had been genuinely uncomfortable.
"Barely," he said. "But yeah — we made it."
The drive to the Joan Gamper training facility took only a few minutes — the route short enough that the conversation filled it easily, a few exchanges back and forth, Adrian navigating the early morning Barcelona streets with the comfortable familiarity of someone who had made this particular journey more times than he could count. Mateo watched the city pass outside the window, phone in hand for part of it, the smoothie slowly disappearing from the cupholder beside him.
Then Adrian pulled up to the training centre and brought the van to a stop.
Mateo unclipped his seatbelt, tucked his phone back into his pocket, and pushed the door open, dropping down onto the tarmac. He reached back in for the smoothie — still a third full, the straw still in it — and straightened up, taking one last look at the building in front of him.
"Thanks," he said, leaning slightly back toward the open door.
Adrian lifted a hand from the wheel. "Just doing my job."
A beat passed.
"Will you need a ride back after you're done today?"
Mateo shook his head. "No need — I'll grab one with Pedri later. Don't worry about it."
"Okay." Adrian nodded, easy and unbothered. "Works for me."
Mateo was already turning when Adrian's voice came again.
"The documentary team are waiting for you — they're set up in the lounge area."
"Okay." Mateo looked back one more time. "Thanks, Adrian."
"Go on."
He pushed the door shut. Adrian's window came up. The van idled for a moment and then pulled away, and Mateo turned toward the entrance of the building.
He moved through the familiar corridors at an easy pace — not rushing, but not dawdling either, the comfortable gait of someone who knew where they were going and had been here enough times that the space had stopped requiring navigation.
The staff members he passed greeted him as he went — some by name, some with a nod, one of the kit room attendants calling something across the corridor that made him laugh as he walked. He greeted them back, each one briefly, the particular warmth of someone who had learned early that the people who kept a building running were worth knowing properly.
He took the last of the smoothie in one long pull as he walked, the straw rattling at the bottom of the cup as it ran dry. He found a bin at the corner before the lounge corridor, dropped the cup in cleanly, and kept walking.
He paused outside the lounge door. Straightened the front of his training top once — the kind of automatic, unnecessary adjustment that the body makes before entering a room — and pushed the door open.
"Wow."
The word came out before he had made any decision to say it.
Mateo had been in this lounge before. Not constantly, not as a regular fixture of his daily routine, but enough times that he had a clear internal picture of what it looked like — the furniture, the layout, the general feel of a well-appointed room that existed primarily as a waiting space and occasional meeting area. He knew this room.
This was not that room anymore.
The documentary crew had taken it and replaced it with something that shared only the floor plan. Equipment was everywhere — cases open on the floor, cables running along the baseboards, lighting rigs positioned with technical precision at angles that Mateo couldn't immediately identify the purpose of but which clearly had one. People moved through the space in all directions, none of them moving randomly — each person carrying something, heading somewhere, consulting something, the whole room operating with the layered, overlapping efficiency of a production that had been set up by people who did this for a living and had done it many times.
Mateo stood just inside the door and took it in.
Then his eyes moved to the equipment — the cameras, the cases, the monitors being adjusted on their stands — and found something that repeated itself across almost everything he was looking at.
A red logo. A particular shape. A specific letter.
N.
He looked at it for a moment, the letter appearing again on a camera case, again on a bag near the far wall, again on the back of a crew member's jacket.
Netflix?
The thought arrived with a particular quality — the quality of something that was probably obvious to everyone else in the room and was only now catching up with him. He was not, by his own admission, a dedicated consumer of streaming content. He watched what was in front of him when something was in front of him and otherwise did not spend much time thinking about it. But the red N was not something you needed to be a movie person to recognise. That logo existed in the atmosphere now. You simply knew it.
He was still looking at it — eyes moving from the N on one case to the N on another, the fact of it assembling itself properly in his head — when he walked into someone.
Not hard. Not a collision that sent anyone anywhere. But solidly enough that the contact was unambiguous, a shoulder-first impact with a crew member who had been moving across his path from the left while Mateo was looking to the right.
"Oh — sorry—" Mateo stepped back immediately, hand coming up. "Sorry, my fault, I wasn't—"
"It's fine—" The man was already saying it, steadying himself, waving the apology away before it finished landing. "It's fine, really—"
He looked at Mateo.
Something shifted in his expression — recognition arriving in stages, the way it does when the face in front of you matches something from a context you weren't expecting it to appear in. His eyes moved over Mateo's face, then the training kit, then back up.
"Mateo?" he said. The name came out laced with disbelief, the single word doing more work than it usually did.
"Yeah." Mateo smiled, the slight self-consciousness of having just walked into a person still sitting on his face. "Really sorry about that—"
"No—" The man shook his head immediately, the last trace of any feeling about the impact disappearing the instant he understood who had caused it. In fact, if anything, the expression that replaced it was the expression of someone recalculating the event entirely — the smile breaking wide, the wave of the hand now not just dismissive but almost enthusiastic. "It's fine. It's really — it's completely fine."
He was grinning now. The full, unguarded grin of someone who was already composing the story in his head — the version of this moment that he was going to tell his family, his friends, whoever would listen. You'll never believe who stepped into me today. You'll never guess. Mateo King. Yes, that one. Walked right into me. Already a good story. Already getting better with each second he stood here.
He blinked, returning to the room.
"You must be here for your session?"
"Yeah," Mateo said. "That's me."
The man turned toward the room.
"MATEO KING HAS ARRIVED FOR HIS SESSION!"
The volume of it was startling — the announcement delivered at a level that had clearly not been modulated for indoor use, cutting clean across every conversation and background noise in the lounge simultaneously. Mateo's head pulled back slightly, eyes briefly narrowing at the sheer output of it, and around the room a dozen heads turned at once, hands paused on equipment, conversations interrupted mid-sentence.
Mateo recovered quickly. He looked at the faces looking at him, smiled — the easy, slightly amused smile of someone who had not asked for this but was not going to be difficult about it — and lifted one hand in a general wave at no one in particular.
"Thanks," he said. "I think."
The man beamed. "No problem." He was already stepping back, already returning to whatever he had been doing before the collision had happened. "I've got to get back to it — good luck with the session."
"No worries, man," Mateo said. "Thanks."
The man went. Mateo stood, the eyes of the room still tracking him in the way eyes do when someone has just been loudly announced, and smiled through it.
Among the many people who had turned at the shout, one pair of eyes had done something different from the rest.
The man was of medium build — a slightly rounded face, dark hair, the particular bearing of someone who was accustomed to being the most organised person in any room he was currently standing in. He had been mid-conversation when the announcement came, standing near the far side of the lounge with a clipboard in one hand and his full attention directed at whoever was in front of him.
At the sound of the name he had paused. Not sharply — just a small, quiet pause, the kind that comes from attention being redirected without the body needing to be told.
He looked across the room.
The boy standing by the entrance — navy training kit, Nike Pegasus on his feet, smoothie-free hands now tucked into his pockets, grinning at the room with the relaxed ease of someone who was comfortable being looked at — the man matched him against the footage he had been reviewing for the past several days. Match clips, training recordings, press appearances, the particular way someone moved in space even when they were not on a pitch.
It matched. Entirely.
The man allowed himself a small, private smile — the smile of someone whose preparation has just been confirmed by the reality in front of them.
He turned to the woman beside him — his assistant, standing with her own clipboard and the focused expression of someone perpetually three steps ahead in the logistics.
"Get the interview spot ready," he said, quietly, efficiently. "And tell the makeup crew to start making their way over."
"Yes, sir." She was already moving.
He watched her go for a moment, then turned back toward the entrance of the lounge, toward the boy in the training kit who was still greeting people with the easy warmth of someone for whom this came entirely naturally.
He straightened his jacket once.
And started walking over.
The man crossed the lounge with the purposeful, unhurried stride of someone who always knew exactly where they were going and had never once needed to recalibrate mid-step. He reached Mateo, extended a hand, and smiled — the warm, practiced smile of someone who spent a significant portion of their professional life meeting people for the first time and had gotten very good at making those first moments feel easy.
"Hey, Mateo."
Mateo took the hand and shook it.
"I'm David." A brief pause, the introduction landing cleanly before the rest followed. "David Charles Rodrigues. I'm the director of all of this." He released the handshake and made a single, sweeping gesture with the same hand — one fluid motion that took in the entire room, the equipment, the crew, the cables, the lights, every moving part of the operation that had transformed this lounge into something else entirely.
Mateo's eyes lit up slightly. His grip on the handshake, just before it had ended, had tightened a fraction — the involuntary response of someone whose interest had just sharpened considerably.
"Nice to meet you, Mr. Rodrigues," he said, and he meant it with the particular sincerity of someone who had just understood the scale of who they were talking to.
David laughed — easy, unbothered. "You can call me David."
"Okay." Mateo smiled. "David."
"Good." David settled, the introduction complete. "I've asked them to get the interview spot ready for us—" He paused, as if something had just come back to him, and then continued with the smooth pivot of someone whose schedule was always running simultaneously on two tracks. "But before we head there — you can go to the makeup station first."
Mateo's face did something.
It was not dramatic. It was not a full expression of anything — more the beginning of one, a small, quiet hesitation that arrived in the fraction of a second before he could do anything about it, the micro-pause of someone who had not been expecting that particular sentence and was not entirely sure how they felt about it.
"Makeup?" he said.
The word came out with a specific quality — not refusal, not complaint, just the sound of someone asking a question they very much wanted clarified before they committed to any position on the matter.
David, mid-thought and already moving forward in his mental checklist, did not appear to notice the note in Mateo's voice.
"Yes—"
"Sir." The assistant appeared at David's elbow, clipboard up, eyes efficient. "They're ready for him."
David's face opened into a satisfied smile. "That's great." He turned to Mateo one more time. "She'll lead you over — I'm going to go start the preparations. We'll get going shortly."
And then he was turning, already moving, already back in the mechanics of the production before the sentence had fully finished landing.
Mateo opened his mouth.
"Wai—"
David was gone. Absorbed back into the room, redirected toward a conversation with a camera operator that had apparently been pending, his attention fully given over to whatever came next on a list that clearly had many items.
The assistant turned to Mateo with the pleasant, efficient smile of someone whose job it was to keep things moving.
"Mr. King — please, this way."
And Mateo, with the slightly dazed expression of a man who had wanted to say something and had been denied the opportunity by the speed of events, was led away.
Wanting to become a footballing star, Mateo had understood — in the abstract, conceptual way you understand things before they happen to you — that the path involved a certain amount of sacrifice. Training when the body said no. Missing things to be somewhere the game required. The gradual, voluntary narrowing of a life around a singular pursuit.
He had not, in any version of that understanding, accounted for this.
He sat very still in the makeup chair and stared straight ahead while two people worked on his face with a focused professionalism that suggested they had done this many times and were not going to be moved by his feelings about it. Things were applied. Blended. Patted. Adjusted. He endured it with the particular stoicism of someone who had decided, somewhere in the first ninety seconds, that the dignified option was to simply get through it without making it into something.
Mercifully, it did not take long. Just under ten minutes from start to finish, and then the brushes were put down and the chair was tilted slightly and someone said something about checking the light and Mateo was, apparently, done.
He looked at the mirror.
He sat with that for a moment.
Because the thing was — and he was genuinely reluctant to arrive at this conclusion, but the mirror was right there and the evidence was right there with it — he looked good. he thought vainly as he kept looking at himself in the mirror even using some poses as he admired himself.
Not different, exactly. Not like a different person had been constructed on top of his face. More like someone had taken what was already there and made it more itself somehow, the way a good photograph does compared to a casual one. His skin sat evenly, warmly, without looking like anything had been done to it, which he suspected was the entire point. His hazel eyes — which he knew were one of the more commented-upon things about him, not that he spent time thinking about it — looked clearer than usual, the colour more defined, catching the studio lighting with a sharpness that had not been there forty minutes ago when he was yawning in the passenger seat of Adrian's van.
He looked at his reflection for thirty full seconds.
Then he made a decision, internally, to never mention this to any of his friends under any circumstances.
"This way, Mr. King."
The assistant was back. He stood, straightened his training top, and followed.
The interview spot was in the far corner of the lounge — a section of the room that Mateo recognised, or rather had recognised, before it had been transformed into something else. He was fairly certain that the large corner sofa had lived here previously, the kind of heavy, permanent furniture that you stop seeing after a while because it has always been there. It was gone now. In its place: a single chair, black, clean-lined and upright without being uncomfortable, positioned against a background that the lighting crew had apparently spent considerable time making look exactly right — soft, directional light falling from two angles, the tones warm and controlled, the kind of setup that did not look like a setup at all once it was finished. Cameras faced the chair from two positions, the main one head-on and a secondary one slightly off-axis, both on their rigs and waiting.
Mateo sat down in the chair.
He had been in front of cameras before. Press conferences. Post-match mixed zones. The pre-debut media day that felt like a lifetime ago now. Cameras were not new to him, and he would not have described himself as someone who struggled with them.
This felt different.
He was not sure exactly why. It might have been the quantity of them — the number of lenses pointing at him simultaneously, the awareness of being observed from multiple angles at once. It might have been the lights, which were closer and more concentrated than anything he had sat under before, warming his face and forearms with a heat that was not unpleasant but was noticeable. It might have been the silence of the room in the immediate vicinity of the chair, the way the crew moved and adjusted things around him but none of it was directed at him, just at the setup he was sitting inside.
He sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the camera in front of him.
Across the room, David was with the camera operator — close together, David's hand making a small horizontal movement while the operator adjusted the rig by some corresponding increment, both of them looking at a monitor Mateo couldn't see the screen of. They spoke to each other in shorthand, the quick, abbreviated language of two people who had worked together enough that full sentences were a waste of both their time. The other crew members were in various states of final preparation — someone checking a cable, someone adjusting a light, someone standing slightly apart from the action looking at a tablet.
Mateo watched all of it and said nothing and tried to look like he was comfortable.
He was not, at this precise moment, entirely comfortable.
David finished with the camera operator, said something to him in closing, and turned toward Mateo. He crossed the space between them and came to stand a few feet in front of the chair.
"Sorry about the wait."
Mateo produced a laugh. It was a reasonable facsimile of a natural laugh — correctly timed, correctly pitched — but it was not fully inhabited, and a person paying attention would have noticed the slight effort behind it.
"It's not a problem," he said.
David's eyes moved over him — a brief, professional assessment, the look of someone whose job involved reading rooms and people and the gap between what someone was presenting and what was actually happening. His brow shifted, just slightly.
He's tense.
He had seen this before. Many times, across many athletes, across many different kinds of people who were excellent at what they did and found that excellence offered them absolutely no protection the moment they were placed in a chair with cameras pointed at them and asked to simply be themselves. It never annoyed him. It never frustrated him. If anything it told him something useful — that the person in the chair was honest enough to feel something real rather than just performing ease they didn't have.
He could work with tension. He knew exactly what to do with it.
"Okay, Mateo." His voice shifted — still warm, but lighter, the formal register dropping a notch. "We're about to get started."
Mateo straightened slightly in the chair. "Okay."
"Hey—" David smiled, tilting his head. "You don't have to sit like that. You're not being tested." He kept his tone easy. "What we're doing right now is just a camera test — checking how you look on screen, how the light is sitting, how the angles are working. Nothing is being recorded yet. Nothing counts."
Something in Mateo's shoulders dropped — not all the way, but measurably, the upper half of his body redistributing itself into something fractionally less architectural.
"Okay," he said again. More quietly this time. More actually.
David smiled. "Good. Now — before we properly begin, let me explain what we're actually doing here. I'm sure you have questions."
Mateo's expression loosened further, the tension trading itself for something closer to genuine curiosity. A small laugh moved through him.
"Yeah — I guess. I heard it's for a documentary."
"It is," David said, nodding.
Mateo smiled, nodding back, settling into it.
"But what type?" David said.
Mateo's brow came together slightly. "Type?"
David nodded again, with the particular expression of someone who has asked exactly the question they intended to ask and is pleased to find it has landed the way they hoped.
"There are different types of documentaries," he said.
"There are different types," David said, settling into the explanation with the ease of someone who enjoyed this part — the laying out of a world someone else had not yet been given access to. "Biographical. Observational. Docuseries. Investigative." He counted them off cleanly, each one placed with its own weight. "Those are the main categories."
Mateo nodded, following it.
David smiled, noting the attention. "And then there are what we call hybrids."
"Hybrids?"
"Combinations — at least two of the main types working together in the same piece. Some of the most interesting work being done right now is hybrid."
"Okay," Mateo said, the word carrying genuine processing rather than just acknowledgment.
"And in terms of duration—" David continued, "a documentary can last anywhere from a few months of work to several years."
Mateo's head came up. "Years?"
"Years," David confirmed, nodding without hesitation.
"How many?"
"There are some — rare, but they exist — that go five years." He let that sit for exactly a moment. "Ten. Some as long as fifteen, twenty."
Mateo stared at him. "What — that long?"
David nodded again, entirely unbothered by the reaction, in the manner of someone who had given this information to people before and understood that it always landed this way the first time.
Mateo let out a slow whistle, looking briefly at a point somewhere above David's left shoulder while he absorbed it. Twenty years of following a single subject. Twenty years of cameras and crew and someone deciding, at the beginning of it, that this particular thing was worth that much time.
"In fact—" David said, a small, easy smile crossing his face, "I just finished one this very month. Four years. Wrapped it before coming down here for this."
Mateo looked at him. "Four years on one project?"
"Four years."
"Wow." A genuine one, not a conversational placeholder. "What was it about?"
"Football, actually." David's smile remained, settled and quiet. "Similar world to this one. But that one was about a player specifically, rather than a club." He paused — a deliberate pause, the kind used by someone who knows the name they are about to say is going to do something to the room. He let the pause finish. "Neymar Junior."
Mateo's expression collapsed immediately into pure, unguarded disbelief.
"What — really?" He leaned forward slightly. "No way."
"Yes way," David said, laughing — a real laugh, the kind that comes from watching someone receive information exactly the way you expected them to. "Still in editing right now. Should be out by next year."
Mateo shook his head slowly, the information settling in layers. Neymar. Four years. The same man now sitting in front of him, about to spend however long on this.
"The Neymar one was a hybrid," David said, bringing himself back to the thread. "This one—" He gestured between them, at the room, at the whole operation around them. "This one is Observational."
Mateo nodded, returning to the listening posture.
"Meaning we follow. We watch. We don't construct a narrative in advance and then go looking for evidence of it — we go alongside what's actually happening and let it show us what the story is." He said it with the particular conviction of someone who believed in the method, not just practiced it. "And what's actually happening at this club right now—" He tilted his head slightly, the smile returning. "Well. You know better than I do."
Mateo said nothing for a moment. Something had shifted in him — the last of the camera-awareness receding, replaced by the thing underneath it, the thing that came naturally when the subject was one he actually cared about.
"The documentary is centred around the club," David continued. "The season. How Barcelona has managed to turn something around that looked, for a long time, like it was not going to be turnable. Three points down in a title race. The Champions League run — the fights, the margins, the moments that could have gone either way and didn't." He paused. "And whether they can complete what, honestly, very few people believed was possible when the season started."
He let that sit. Mateo was nodding now — slowly, seriously, the reminder of everything still ahead of him landing with its actual weight. There was still so much left. The gap in the league was narrow and the margin for error was thinner than it looked. The Champions League was one match from a final that had seemed, months ago, entirely out of reach.
He knew all of this. He lived inside all of this. But hearing it reflected back from someone outside it made it real in a different, more solid way.
"Now—" David said, his tone shifting. Not heavier, just more direct. "A documentary about a club is one thing. But the best ones — and I mean the ones that actually stay with people after the credits roll — those ones always have a centre of gravity. A person the camera keeps coming back to. Someone who embodies what the whole story is about, even when we're watching other things." He looked at Mateo steadily. "Not because that person is more important than everyone else. But because stories work best when they have somewhere to anchor."
He leaned forward slightly.
"I want that to be you."
Mateo blinked.
His hand came up and pointed at his own chest, the gesture of someone who had heard the words correctly and still needed to verify the target.
"Me?"
"You," David said. Simply. Without any softening or over-explanation around it, because the word was sufficient.
"But — why me specifically?" Mateo said, not deflecting the offer so much as genuinely asking the question.
David looked at him with the particular expression of a man who has done his research and is now presenting it rather than constructing it on the spot.
"I've watched the matches," he said. "The footage, the press coverage, the numbers, the articles — all of it. And if you look at the arc of this club's season — the actual arc, the turning point, the moment where something shifted and the trajectory changed—" He paused deliberately. "It all comes back to one thing."
Mateo waited.
"You getting subbed on against Huesca."
The words landed quietly but with a weight behind them that had nothing to do with volume.
"That is the starting point," David continued, his voice measured and certain. "No matter how you look at it, no matter which angle you come from — that is where this season changed. And from that point until right now, it has only gone one direction." He held Mateo's gaze. "Up."
Mateo sat with that for a moment.
He felt it — the warmth of it, moving through him without asking permission, settling somewhere behind his sternum in the place where things land when they are genuinely true rather than just complimentary. He had known, in the way you always know the things that happen to you, that the Huesca match had been significant. He had known it from the pitch, from the dressing room, from the weeks that followed it. But hearing someone else trace the line from that moment to now — someone who had come into this from the outside with no prior relationship to it — made the line feel more real, more permanent.
He laughed — the laugh of someone happy in a way they were slightly unprepared for.
"Then — no problem, I suppose," he said.
David laughed too, the warmth between them easy now. "Good." Then he tilted his head, something more conversational taking over. "But I have to ask — and I mean this genuinely — you're one match away from a Champions League final. You have been in professional football for what, a few months?" He shook his head slightly, the disbelief behind the smile entirely sincere. "How does it feel? Getting there this fast?"
Mateo opened his mouth.
"Dude—" The word came out immediately, instinctively, carrying a quality that had nothing to do with cameras or microphones or the fact that this conversation was happening in a room full of equipment pointed at his face. He was just answering, the way you answer when someone asks you something real. "You cannot even understand—"
And he was talking. Properly talking — the looseness in him now complete and total, the last of the stiffness gone, his hands beginning to move the way they did when he was actually inside a thought rather than managing one. The words came fast and easy and genuine, one thing leading naturally to the next, and he was no longer thinking about the chair or the light or the cameras or any of it.
Across the room, David's eyes moved — a small, deliberate movement — to his camera operator.
The camera operator looked back at him.
They held that look for a moment. The camera operator smiled. A slow, knowing nod.
David smiled back.
He turned to face Mateo again — who was mid-sentence, animated, entirely elsewhere — and let the smile remain where it was as he asked his next question.
Mateo answered it immediately, without a pause, without a hesitation, without even the faintest awareness that the camera test had ended some time ago.
The real interview had already begun.
It went on for a long while.
Over four hours from start to finish — and they were not four linear, unbroken hours at the chair. There were breaks, proper ones, during which someone appeared with breakfast and Mateo ate it at a table near the window while David sat across from him and they talked about other things entirely, and a crew member adjusted something on a rig in the background, and it was comfortable in the way that a morning can become comfortable once the initial strangeness of it has been worn away.
Then there was the training ground itself — the crew following the session, cameras moving along the sideline while Mateo trained with the squad, the lenses picking up moments that would mean something in an edit room weeks from now in ways nobody could fully predict yet. La Masia featured too — a brief visit to the academy side, the dorms, the pitches where it had all begun, the places that looked like ordinary buildings until you understood what had happened inside them.
Through all of it, Mateo kept moving.
When they finally let him go — the director's assistant appearing at his shoulder with the particular expression of someone delivering welcome news — Mateo did not stop to breathe or recalibrate. He went directly to join his teammates, who were already well into the session by the time he arrived, and the moment his boots hit the grass something in him shifted cleanly.
All of it left him. The cameras, the lounge, David, the questions, the four hours, the makeup, the chair — all of it cleared out of him the way things do when the grass is underfoot and the ball is moving and the work is the only thing that is real.
Koeman's voice carried across the pitch. The training staff moved through the session with the purposeful urgency of people who understood exactly what was coming and how much preparation it required.
Two days.
Two days until a La Liga home match against Granada. Two days until it mattered again in the way only matches mattered. Two days until the next step in a season that had already been more than anyone had predicted and still had further to go.
Mateo jogged onto the pitch, found his place in the shape, and let the rest of the world catch up on its own time.
A/N
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