"Are they actually allowing Mateo to play?"
The voice came from the bench at the far side of the locker room.
"Yeah. I heard he is in the lineup. Honestly it makes zero sense."
"Yeah but technically, he is still a youth member, isn't he? I mean he even played in the inter-high competition."
"No no. I'm sure I read some news about him signing a first team contract a while back. Which begs the question."
"Yeah, I also feel it's the management doing this. Is this to test us or what?"
"Yeah. Heard the director of the youth team is even coming today."
"Nah I think you all are blowing this out of proportion. I mean even if he has signed a new contract, I don't think it is already in effect."
"Yeah Konrade is right. Last match he was still wearing that number. Ehm. Thirty something. Well whatever it was, it wasn't the 9 he had on in that trailer."
A small pause.
"Side note. I loved that trailer."
"Yeah bro. The way he came at the end. 'You already know my name'. That was sick, bro."
"Hahaha. I know what you mean. It is thanks to him that I am even planning my own—"
"Can we all focus."
The voice cut across. Sharper than the others. The kind of voice that was bringing the room back to the problem.
"Whatever the reason for why he can play does not matter. What matters is he is playing. And we need to fully determine how to deal with him on the pitch."
"Do we really need to do all that?"
"Yeah I mean it is one player. No matter how good he is, he at most scores two or three goals. There is really no need to do all this."
"Well. I'm sorry. I don't want to be part of a groundbreaking historical team being the first to lose to U19 youths."
"Oh come on. Aren't you exaggerating? He isn't that much of a threat."
"No. Alex is correct. He is that much of a threat."
The discussion of the Barca B squad's preparation, which had been moving easily across the room, finally stopped. Everyone turned. The conversations that had been continuing in undertones went quiet. All eyes settled on the player who had spoken last.
Riqui Puig.
He was sitting on the bench in front of his locker, tying his shoelace, head down. He did not look up immediately. He kept tying.
"That's true. Puig. You have played with him in the first team."
One of the players moved across the room toward Puig and draped an arm over his shoulder, the slightly performative gesture of a teammate pretending the question he was about to ask was a casual one.
"I get he scores a lot of goals. But dude, come on."
He paused. He looked back at the rest of the room, the players who had been arguing about Mateo for the last few minutes. They were all looking at him now too.
"Come on, you all. He is one player."
Another voice from across the room.
"Yeah, I mean I get he is good. But man. We have all watched the matches. He is still just one player. No way he lives up to all this hype."
"How I wish that was true."
Puig had finished his shoelace. He sat up properly. He looked at the room.
"You all have watched him through screens. I have watched him live too. Trainings. Drills. The small stuff that does not get clipped. I assure you all."
One of the impatient ones cut in.
"Assure us what?"
"That he lives up to the hype."
Puig finished it with the kind of flat seriousness that did not invite a follow-up question.
"Damn."
"Yeah, they are treating him like Babayaga or something."
"Hahaha. I caught that reference."
The room started laughing again, the tension breaking the way it did in locker rooms when something had been said too seriously and the boys needed to release it.
Puig kept going through the laughter.
"I get your point. Honestly. He is one player. But I have seen it. If we give him one space, just half a chance, let up a bit—"
He paused.
"I promise. He can deal a lot of damage. The kind we might not be able to come back from."
Óscar Mingueza, who had been listening from his locker on the other side of the room, looked up.
"Yeah. And it's not just him."
The room turned to him. He had everyone's attention now. He continued.
"I'm sure as most of us came up through La Masia, you all know how this generation was called the second golden generation."
One of the boys from the academy track nodded.
"The class X generation."
"Yeah. Fermín. Gavi. Abde. Balde. They are all also very good it's not just Mateo that could be a problem."
The room went quiet for a beat. The names hanging in the air. Each one a player the boys in this room had grown up training next to, watching, sometimes losing minutes to.
Then someone broke it.
"And there goes the morale."
Someone else laughed. "I am telling you. Hahaha. Where is the coach?"
"Gaffer. Gaffer. Come and give us a moral boost if you don't want us creating history today."
"Hahaha."
The whole room had started laughing again. The kind of nervous laughter that ran through a locker room when the boys had finally agreed, collectively, that the match in front of them was harder than they had been pretending it was.
One player did not laugh.
Among the Barca B squad, he was visibly the youngest, his frame still the lean undeveloped frame of a boy who had not yet finished growing into himself. The face still soft at the edges. Where the rest of the locker room was wearing the laugh, his face was set. He scoffed.
"Class X."
The scoff came out small, just to himself.
He was not really dismissing the class X generation. In fact, Nico González was, technically, one of the players from that generation. Not just a player. He was one of the reasons the entire cohort had been talked about in the first place. He had been one of the names. Him, Ansu, and Xavi Simons. The three brightest stars from that age group.
Mateo, Abde, and the rest had been highly rated too, of course. The whole generation had been rated. But those three, Nico, Ansu, Simons, those were the names that the academy directors had used in the staff meetings when they were discussing the future of the club.
They were meant to be the ones having all the glory now. The actual golden generation. The class that was meant to take Barcelona into its next decade. The names that should have been in every match programme, every kit launch, every preview of the coming season.
But Xavi Simons had left for PSG.
The departure had hit harder than anyone outside the academy fully understood. It had been the first betrayal of the cohort, the first signal that the generation that had been built around shared loyalty might not actually share loyalty. Simons had walked. The rest of the boys had been left to absorb the implications.
It had worked out for Ansu. Ansu had been called up to the first team. Ansu had broken into the senior squad in the Messi era and had been ratified, despite the recent injury setback, as a valuable future asset of the club. The investment in him would continue. The path was clear, even if interrupted.
For Nico, the path was less clear.
Earlier this season he had been asked to move up from the U19 team to the B squad. He had thought, when the call came, that this was his moment. That the next step would be the first team. That the timeline was finally turning over for him.
Then the reality of Barcelona's midfield situation had landed.
Barcelona was the one club, the one position, where there was almost no space to break through. The first team had Busquets, who was past his peak but still anchoring. De Jong, who had been bought for ninety million and was untouchable. And then, when Nico had moved up, Pedri had arrived. Pedri, who was technically the same age as him, but who had been brought in not as a project but as a starter. Almost instantly. The first team had not waited on Pedri. They had given him minutes from the day he walked into the building.
Nico had stood at the edge of that and watched.
He had not let it get to him. He had told himself the things you tell yourself in those moments. Slow and steady wins the race.It is not by how fast but by how well. He had stood his ground at the B team. He had kept playing. He really was good. And it had paid off in its own way. He had become an indispensable part of the B team now. He was a regular starter. He had a name in this division. The path was, by any reasonable measure, in motion.
Then he had seen Mateo.
Mateo, who in the academy rankings had been below him before. Mateo, who had been rated, sure, but rated as a striker, not as one of the names. Mateo, who had broken into the first team because the team needed a striker after Suárez had been pushed out the door and the injury on the other strikers. Of course, Nico had been happy for him. That was his teammate. That was a friend.
But the more he had watched Mateo play. The more he had seen Mateo become a starter. The more he had seen the press start to use the words the future of FC Barcelona. The jealousy was real. He would not lie to himself about it. That was meant to be him. That was, specifically, what he had wanted his entire footballing life. To lead the Barcelona midfield. To do for this club what Iniesta had done. What Xavi had done. What Busquets had done. The dream had a specific shape and the shape had been him.
Watching someone he had felt, with the casual certainty of an academy peer, was not as talented as him achieve all of that and now achieve more than Nico had ever even dreamt of, hurt. Even when the someone was a friend. Even when the someone was a kid he had played with for years and had broken bread with and had been to family dinners with.
Maybe especially when.
"Okay everyone. The Juvenil A squad is heading out for the greet. So everyone should get ready. In a few we will go out also."
The voice came from the doorway.
The coach. Francisco. Walking through the doorway in his training gear, clipboard in hand, the morning routine moving forward whether the squad was emotionally ready or not.
Nico raised his head.
He thought, in his own head, with his hands clenching at his sides into the small fists of a boy about to walk out into the stadium tunnel:
It's time.
...
"Dude, you are late."
Gavi shouted it as he saw Mateo running toward the team in the tunnel, the words bouncing off the concrete walls. The rest of the U19 squad was already lined up, waiting on the coach, the small specific energy of a team about to walk out into a stadium.
"I know I know. Sorry sorry. Just needed to do one more thing."
Mateo reached the line. He went down the row shaking hands with some of the teammates he had not seen in the changing room, the boys he had played with for years before he had made the jump up. He moved through them and made his way to where Gavi, Balde, Casado, and Fermín were standing at the back.
"What were you even doing?"
Fermín asked it the way Pedri had asked it earlier.
Mateo smiled.
"You will see."
Balde came up behind them and put both arms around Fermín and Mateo's shoulders, pulling them in.
"Dude. My heart is pounding. I just cannot imagine it if—"
"When."
Mateo cut him off, smiling.
Balde laughed and corrected himself. "When we win. We would become the first ever under squad to ever beat the B team. Ever. In the history of La Masia."
"And we will not stop there."
Mateo's voice picked up.
"The women's squad. And then even the men's squad."
He said it half-joking, half-not. The ambition in it was real.
"Okay simmer down there, golden locks."
Casado said it dry, looking at him sideways.
Fermín jumped on it.
"More like baldie locks."
The group went off. Mateo hit Fermín in the shoulder for it, fake-offended, the laugh breaking through anyway. Casado was already shaking his head.
"Lets first win the ones in front of us before we think of anything."
"Okay team. We are about to get out there."
The voice came from the front of the line. Álex García, the new U19 squad coach, the man who had taken over since Óscar López had left at the start of the season. He had a clipboard in one hand. There was a small visible patch of sweat at his temple.
One of the boys at the front of the line saw the sweat and grinned.
"Gaffer. Why are you the one nervous?"
The whole tunnel laughed.
Álex shook his head. "Who is nervous? You are nervous. Not me."
Balde, who had not even finished laughing yet, opened his mouth.
"Coach. I do not think it is really a good decision to say your players are nervous before a match."
The laugh broke again. Louder this time. Mateo was laughing into Gavi's shoulder. Fermín was clutching his stomach. Even the boys at the front of the line, the ones who did not normally laugh at Balde's jokes, were laughing.
Álex's face started doing the small twitching thing it did when he was being managed by his own players. He muttered, mostly to himself.
"Why do I even bother with you all."
The boys went off again. Álex just waved his hands.
"Just get out, you all."
They started moving, still laughing.
"Don't worry coach. We got this."
"Yeah. Just remember your promise to take us all out to eat when we win."
"Yes. I hope you have gotten your salary, I am feeling very hungry."
The laughs running through the line as they started to file forward.
Mateo was laughing as he walked past. He felt a hand catch his elbow.
"Mateo."
He staggered slightly from the yank, his foot catching on the concrete. Álex saw it and let go immediately.
"Oh. Sorry sorry."
Mateo shook his arm out and rolled it slightly. "I am fine. It is all okay."
Álex looked over at the rest of the team, who had stopped to look back.
"You all can keep walking out. He will join you. Don't worry."
Mateo nodded to his friends. They moved on, the line continuing forward without him.
Álex turned to him properly.
"Sorry I stopped you like that. I just wanted to say something to you."
Mateo looked at him. "It is all good, coach. Really. You can say whatever you want to say."
Mateo was not unfamiliar with Álex. The man had been his coach back when he was at U13, years ago. He was not a stranger. There was a comfort in the way the older man stood in front of him, a comfort that had been there the first day Mateo had walked onto the academy training pitch as a boy and was still there now.
"I just wanted to thank you."
Álex said it carefully.
"I know that if you did not want to play this game, nobody would have said anything. Nobody. Not the academy. Not the first team. You are first team now. You are not obligated to come down for an intra-Masia fixture, even one as significant as this. So I want to say it. Thank you for—"
Mateo cut him off.
"Coach. Stop. I am happy to play this. This is where I grew up. This is where all my friends are. I want to be on this pitch today. There is nowhere else I would rather be this afternoon."
Álex smiled. The kind of smile that warmed at the corner first and then spread.
"Good to know."
He paused.
"With you out there I am sure we can win."
Mateo grinned.
"Oh you can bet on that."
Álex laughed.
"Okay. Go. Go. Lets win this."
Mateo laughed back and stepped out of the tunnel.
Meanwhile in the stands.
Pedri had walked back from looking for Mateo and was making his way along the row to where he had been sitting. The seats were filling up steadily, the pre-match atmosphere not quite a real matchday atmosphere but its own particular kind of thing.
"Have they started?"
Pedri said it as he reached the row.
Aina was sitting where he had left her. She looked up.
"Hey."
The two of them smiled at each other. The smile sat for a beat longer than the situation required.
Olivia, who was sitting on Aina's other side, was watching the two of them with the very specific expression of a friend who was trying not to laugh. She muttered, just loud enough for Aina to hear and not Pedri.
"Girl. Get yourself. He was just here a few minutes ago."
Aina, who heard, fake-coughed and shifted slightly so Pedri could sit down.
"Yeah. They just started coming out now."
"Mateo isn't out though?"
Olivia leaned over and asked it.
Aina looked at Pedri. "Didn't you go find him? You didn't see him?"
Pedri sat down. "No. I found him. He should have reached there by now. Not sure what is happening."
Olivia tilted her head.
"What I do not get is why you aren't playing."
Pedri exhaled through a small laugh. "Well. I am a first team player."
Aina turned her head.
"Isn't Mateo a first team player?"
The line stumped him. He opened his mouth and then closed it again.
"Well yeah. No. I am not sure."
He shifted in his seat. Tried again.
"Well. Let me put it like this. I did not come from the academy."
Aina actually leaned back at that.
"Wait. Really? I thought you just joined the academy later."
Pedri laughed.
"Sadly I was bought."
"I always just thought, with how close you were to Mateo and the guys, that you all knew each other. That you were also from the academy."
Pedri was still laughing.
"I actually just met the guys a few months back. When Mateo introduced us. We all just clicked. The friendship feels older than it actually is."
Aina shook her head.
"I will never understand guys' friendships. I could have sworn you all knew each other for years."
Pedri laughed again.
"He is out. He is out."
Olivia's voice came from the other side. Pedri and Aina looked back at the pitch.
"Wooooooooooo!"
The sound came up from the stands as Mateo stepped out of the tunnel and onto the grass. Hands up. Heads turning. The crowd, even this constrained version of a crowd, finding the volume that crowds find when one specific name walks into view.
Higher up in the stands, not far from where Pedri and the girls were sitting.
"Aren't you glad you came?"
Isabella said it from her seat, looking sideways at her husband, who was standing and shouting and finally beginning to lower himself back into the chair.
David King sat down. He was still smiling. The kind of smile that did not quite leave the face after the moment had passed.
"Yes. Yes. Yes."
He looked around. He looked at the people in the stands shouting his son's name. The pride on his face was the open, unembarrassed pride of a man who did not care who saw it.
He had gotten more staff at the restaurant in the last month. Two more cooks, an extra waitress, a manager he was training to take some of the operational load. It had finally allowed him to come. It was, he thought as he sat there with the chants still moving through the rows below him, a slightly funny situation. He had not been to a single official first team match of his son's. Not the El Clásico. Not the Etihad. Not the Camp Nou matches he watched on television from behind the counter at King's Palace. He had watched them all on screens. And now, here he was, at his second intra-high youth match in a row.
He found it funny.
His wife did not.
"Mr King. Mr King."
A voice came from the side. David turned.
He recognised the man immediately. The wide friendly face. The slightly tired but warm eyes of a man who had also been at the previous intra-high fixture, who had stood with him in the stands then and exchanged the small parental nods that fathers of academy boys exchanged.
The man moved closer along the row, smiling.
"I thought that was you."
David's smile brightened.
"Oh. Mr Nasraoui."
He stood up to shake the man's hand.
"I wasn't expecting to see you here."
"We came for a visit. So we decided to stay for the match."
"We?"
David said it slightly confused. The man turned to the side and waved his hand toward the row behind them. Standing there, slightly back, was an older woman, a young girl who looked maybe four or five years old, and a clearly pregnant woman with one hand resting on the small of her own back.
David's eyes widened. He smiled again.
"Oh. This must be your wife and kids."
The Nasraoui father did the small awkward shift of a man who had been about to make a polite introduction and was now navigating around an introduction that was not quite the one being offered.
"Well. No. Not really. It's, ehm—"
The pregnant woman stepped forward and extended her hand, laughing slightly.
"I am Sheila. Lamine's mom."
David, registering several pieces of context at once but choosing not to name any of them, just laughed lightly. The kind of laugh that allowed the moment to move past itself without making it more awkward than it already was.
"Ha ha. I am David."
He turned, gestured to Isabella beside him.
"This is my wife, Isabella. Come, sit, sit. The match is about to start."
The Nasraoui father exhaled with the relief of a man whose social moment had just been smoothed over without anyone having to address what had been about to be addressed.
"Okay. Okay. Let us sit. Hahaha."
The party shuffled into the row, Sheila lowering herself carefully into a seat with the Nasraoui father's hand on her elbow, the older woman taking the seat behind, the small girl climbing onto the older woman's lap.
Down on the pitch.
Mateo was making his way across to the line where his teammates were standing, the U19 boys spread out along the touchline waiting for the formal handshake greeting with the Barca B squad. He reached Gavi and the rest.
"What did the coach want?"
Gavi asked it, leaning in.
Mateo just shook his head. "It is nothing."
His eyes were already moving across the stands. Scanning.
Even here, the influence of the Super League had reached. Normally the 'final' of the intra-Masia high competition was a big deal for Barcelona supporters in the area. The local fan groups would come. There would be a small crowd of regulars. The atmosphere was always one of the small joys of the academy calendar.
This year was not that.
Due to the protests at the main complex, due to the security situation across the wider club, the academy administration had restricted attendance for the match. Only families of the players had been allowed in. Staff members. Friends with passes. And of course, the students of La Masia themselves, who packed the section closest to the pitch with the loyalty of boys watching their classmates step into something bigger than themselves.
There was also a group of La Masia executives in the stands. Higher up. Behind the parents' section. Even Deco was there, the sporting director, sitting with the academy directors and the senior administrative staff. So it was still prestigious. The eyes that mattered were watching.
Mateo's eyes kept moving.
Fermín bumped him with the shoulder.
"Dude. What are you looking for?"
"Yeah dude. Get your head in the game."
Gavi said it, looking at him sideways.
"Yeah yeah."
Mateo kept looking. His eyes kept moving along the rows, past the parents, past the academy boys, up toward the executive section.
Then he found him.
His face broke into a smile. A full one. The kind of smile that came when something he had been planning for hours had finally arrived at the location he had planned for it to arrive at.
"There."
Up in the stands, Pedri had been mid-sentence with Aina.
"I am serious. I—"
A voice cut him off.
"Is this seat taken?"
Pedri turned. The words started coming out of him reflexively.
"Oh. No. It is—"
He froze.
His mouth was still open.
"Gaffer."
Pedri said it small, the surprise of a boy who had not been expecting it.
Ronald Koeman stood at the end of the row, grey hair pushed back, dressed casually in the way coaches dressed when they were trying not to be coaches, a small smile on his face.
"Sorry for disturbing."
He looked at Aina. Smiled.
Aina, who had also frozen for a beat, recovered first.
"Good afternoon, sir."
"I didn't know you were coming."
Pedri said it still not fully recovered.
Koeman laughed.
"Well. Someone kept disturbing me. So I thought I would come out for a bit."
He stepped down the row and slid into the seat at the end.
Pedri was not the only one who had noticed.
Across the pitch, in the stands, the murmur was already moving. Heads turning. Phones coming up halfway and being put back down because their owners had decided, in the moment, that taking a photograph would be inappropriate.
"Is that Koeman?"
"Wait. That's the first team coach."
"Didn't the coach already try bringing him out?"
"Yeah. Didn't they say he was busy? Why is he here?"
"Does it matter why he is here? This is a God-sent chance. We better use it well."
For Balde and the rest, the realisation arrived faster than for the rest of the stands. They looked at each other. Then they looked at Mateo. Then at the stands. Then at Mateo again.
"Is this your surprise?"
"Dude. You cannot be serious."
"Bro. You should have said something."
Mateo was laughing.
"I just told him to come out and get some fresh air."
Gavi grabbed him by the arm.
"Dude. This is more than that."
For the players, more than for the executives, more than for the sporting director, this was the moment the stakes of the match changed. Because this was the first team coach. This was the man whose one phone call could change a player's destiny in the morning. If they impressed him today, properly impressed him, the path to first team glory was right there in front of them. One performance. One match. The right minutes in front of the right pair of eyes.
And it was not just the U19 squad whose nervous system had been redirected.
The newly arrived Barca B players, who were emerging from their own tunnel on the far side, registered it almost in unison.
"Wait. Is that Koeman?"
"What is he doing here?"
"He came down for this match?"
"Bro. Bro. Look. Top of the stands. He is sitting next to Pedri."
"Oh my God."
"Boys. Boys."
The Barca B captain was already turning to address his teammates, who had stopped walking and were staring up into the stands.
Then the realisation arrived for them at the same speed. The match had just changed. The opposition's secret weapon was not just Mateo. It was the audience now. The match was, suddenly, a first team audition.
Mateo, doing a small favour for his friends, asking the first team coach to come out for fresh air, had just made the match much harder than it had needed to be.
The Barca B players had not wanted to be the first in history to lose to the under squad. That had been their concern. That had been the thing they had been preparing for in their changing room. But they had not, until this moment, been preparing to give the match their full one hundred percent. They had been preparing to give the match the eighty-five percent that was professional, the eighty-five percent that was sufficient.
Now, with the first team coach sitting in the stands, they were about to give the match their one hundred and twenty percent.
Their full ability. Their full attention. Their full audition.
This was a must-win match.
For both teams.
A/N
If you want to read chapters ahead with uploads and to support me subscribe to my Patreon below There is also a picture of how mateo looks like posted and later there would be votes and all on the site some you wont need to pay to vote but you can if you want to support me thanks
patreon.com/David_Adetola
Thank You your support is greatly appreciated thank you all
I've also created a Discord channel to make communication easier, where I'll post updates, cover/character pictures for all my books, and more. Here's the link:
https://discord.gg/vpEKjNeP (New discord link)