Álex García's second and third substitutions came together.
He brought Ángel Alarcón on for Ilias Akhomach on the right wing. Then, for the first time in the match, one of the 'gang' was replaced. Dani Rodríguez came on for Casado, the boys exchanging the small embrace at the touchline as Casado had a small frown on his face.
The Barca Atlètic side made their first change of the day at the same moment. Ilaix Moriba came on for Álex Collado. The B side coach was already gesturing at his bench, pointing at a list, the body language reeking of frustration of a man whose first to third plan had failed and who was already moving toward his fourth.
The match resumed.
The U19 took possession from the throw-in. Mateo received the ball at the centre of the pitch.
And the game settled around him.
In the booth, Ricard was the first one to put a word on it.
"Four to two down and the U19 squad still has the ball. The U19 is still controlling this match in the way it has been controlling it all afternoon. The lead has not changed the pattern."
He stopped narrating for a beat to let the play breathe.
Mateo passed to Gavi. Gavi held it. Mateo moved away from Puig with the small drift that had become the U19's main pattern in the second half. Puig followed. Mateo came back to the ball with a one-touch return from Gavi. Mateo wiggled away from Ilaix Moriba, the fresh midfielder who had not yet adjusted to the tempo, with a small drop of the shoulder. Two yards of space. He passed to Balde on the left.
Balde took it. He drove ten yards. He returned it.
Mateo took it again. He drove the ball back. One-two with Dani Rodríguez, the new midfielder finding the rhythm in his first touch of the match.
"And look at this. Mateo. Pass, moves away from Puig. The ball comes back to him. Run with Balde. Pass and go. The ball is back. He drives it again."
Alejandro picked it up.
"He is like... I don't even know how to put it in words. He has decided he is going to play every other touch of this match. The U19 is running through him."
"The game is centred around him, isn't it. The technical aspect of what he is doing. He is conducting an orchestra in real time."
Alejandro let a breath out.
"It is really just not fair, is it."
As Alejandro's words landed across the broadcast, they captured something that everyone watching the match was, at that exact moment, also thinking.
From novices like Olivia in the stands, who could see how easy it looked, who could see how Mateo seemed to move between players, she might not know the sport that intensive, but she knew it could not be this easy looking.
To experts like Patrick Kluivert, the director of La Masia, sitting in the executive row with the other academy directors, watching with the slightly tired but quietly proud expression.
To the more than 143,827 fans now watching online on the Barca TV channel, the count having ticked steadily upward across the afternoon as clips were posted and shared across the club's official accounts.
All of them thinking the same thing.
It was not fair.
And like that to justify their thought, the fifth goal of the U19 squad came again.
After trying and trying to contain him, all of it came to nothing.
The move started in the U19 half. Mateo received the ball from Marsà inside his own half. He turned with his first touch and faced the B side defensive shape. Puig stepped to him. Mateo passed him with a small shoulder drop and a touch with the outside of his right foot. Past the first man.
Ilaix Moriba came across. The fresh midfielder lunged. Mateo took the ball with the inside of his right foot, dragged it back across his body, and was past Ilaix too. Two players beaten.
Nico had started to come over.
Mateo saw him. He did not slow down. He pushed the ball forward fifteen yards into the half-space. He sprinted into it. Nico met him on the edge of the centre circle and made the challenge. Mateo just rolled the ball with the sole of his foot, the very specific drag that academy boys spent years learning, and let Nico's momentum carry him past.
Three players in eight seconds. Past Puig, past Ilaix Moriba, past Nico.
The Barca Atlètic shape was scrambling. You could hear them on the broadcast, the boom mic catching the desperate shouting from the back four.
"Get in between him!"
"Get in between him!"
"Comas, step up! Step up!"
"Rosanas, hold the line!"
The instructions were flying. The instructions were not working.
Comas stepped up to engage. Rosanas held behind. The two of them were now the wall. They closed in on Mateo together. One from the front, one from the back. They pressed in with their bodies. Comas got his shoulder against Mateo's chest. Rosanas got his against Mateo's back. Two senior defenders, both taller than him, both stronger than him, both physically squeezing him between them with the ball in the small space between his feet.
Mateo did not panic.
He leaned.
He used his low centre of gravity, the thing that had been one of his actual physical strengths since he was twelve years old. He bent at the knees. He let the two defenders push against him. He let them feel his weight. He kept his arms wide. He kept the ball pinned with the inside of his right foot.
He held.
In the booth, Ricard's voice was rising.
"And the Atlètic side double up on Mateo. Comas in front. Rosanas behind. The boy is holding them off. He is holding them off."
"Look at the body position. The strength. They have him sandwiched."
"Have the Atlètic finally found a way to contain Mateo King? Hold him with two bodies, keep him from turning, force him to play back?"
For one second it looked like they had.
Mateo's perspective was narrow. His eyes were down at the ball. His ears were full of the grunts of the two defenders pressing against him. He could feel Comas's hand against his hip. He could feel Rosanas's chest against his shoulder blade. The pitch behind him was, for the moment, irrelevant. He was a boy with a ball and two senior defenders and no immediate option.
Then he heard it.
"Nico! Nico, come help us get the ball off him!"
Comas was shouting it. Over Mateo's shoulder. Calling for the third defender.
Mateo glanced up. Just enough to see what was coming.
Nico was running. He had recovered from being beaten ten seconds earlier and was sprinting at full pace into the cluster, his eyes on the ball, his body shape ready to add the third body to the double.
Mateo smirked.
Puig, who had also recovered and was now arriving with Nico, said it from somewhere behind Comas.
"End of the line, Mateo."
Mateo did not look up. He just spoke into the small space between Comas's neck and his own shoulder.
"How wrong you are, boys."
He moved.
The first move was a shoulder drop. He pushed his weight into Comas, used Comas's resistance as leverage, and rotated his entire body ninety degrees to the right. The rotation came so fast that Comas's hand, which had been on his hip, lost contact and reached for empty air.
The second move was a step over with the right foot. The ball stayed where it was. Comas reset his stance to engage.
The third move was the actual move. Mateo dragged the ball with the outside of his left foot, slid it through the small gap that had opened between Comas and Rosanas, and burst into the space behind both of them.
He went past Comas and Rosanas in one motion.
Nico, arriving at full sprint, had no one to engage. The cluster he was running into had dissolved before he reached it. He kept running because he could not stop in time and ended up at the edge of the same vacated space, looking back at the boy who had just escaped through the gap he had been running to close.
But Sergi Rosanas, the defender who had been behind Mateo, had recovered fastest. He turned with the move and was now between Mateo and the goal.
Mateo did not slow down.
He came at Rosanas with the ball at his feet, and at the last second, the very last second, he did the thing that academy boys would talk about for the next week.
The nutmeg.
The ball went through Rosanas's legs at the exact moment Rosanas was closing them. The timing was so fine that Rosanas, in the half-second of the move, actually had time to register what was happening to him and to close his eyes.
His thought, in that small interior space, was clean and resigned.
But I wasn't even the one who talked.
The ball came out the other side of his legs and into Mateo's stride. Mateo was past him. Mateo was zooming off toward the goal.
"AND HE GOES! HE GOES! NUTMEG! NUTMEG ON ROSANAS! MATEO IS THROUGH!"
Ricard had lost his commentary voice entirely. He was just shouting now.
"Look at this. Look at this. THE BOY HAS JUST GONE THROUGH FIVE PLAYERS!"
"FIVE!"
Alejandro was matching him.
"PUIG, ILAIX, NICO, COMAS, ROSANAS! IN ONE PHASE!"
The academy section was at full volume. The roar was rolling. Even the executive row, the usually composed group of directors and academy staff, was up on their feet. Deco had both hands on his head.
In the box, Iñaki Peña was the last man. He saw what was coming. He stepped off his line. He came at the angle, his arms wide, the goalkeeper's last stand of trying to close the geometry.
Mateo took one more touch into the box. He had the angle for the shot. He had the open side. The whole stadium expected him to shoot.
He did not look up.
He just squared it.
The ball rolled across the face of the goal, left foot, one-touch, hard enough to carry across the six-yard box and soft enough to leave the ball at a teammate's feet.
"AND HE SQUARES IT! FERMÍN! FERMÍN IS THERE! FERMÍN!"
Fermín was arriving. The false 9 had been making the late run for the whole sequence. He had read the move from the moment Mateo had passed Comas. He was at the back post arriving with both feet in motion. The keeper was out of his line. The goal was a tap-in.
Fermín did not care. He did not need it to be a tap-in. The boy who had not yet got his second goal of the match, who had scored the first goal of the first half, who had missed an open chance in the 40th minute, was not going to do anything cute.
He thundered it.
Both feet behind the ball. Full instep. The ball flew off his right foot and into the back of the net with a noise that was almost embarrassing for how much harder than necessary it had been.
"GOAAAAAL!"
Ricard exploded.
"FERMÍN LÓPEZ! HIS SECOND! AND MY GOD WHAT A FINISH! HE THUNDERED IT!"
"HE THUNDERED IT!"
Alejandro picked up the call.
"HE WAS NOT TAKING ANY CHANCES! MATEO GAVE IT TO HIM ON A PLATTER AND HE ATE IT!"
"ATE IT! ATE IT! HE DEVOURED IT, HAHA! THAT SHOT DID NOT NEED TO BE THAT HEAVY!"
"BUT IT SURE AS HELL WAS SATISFYING!"
"U19s FIVE! BARCA ATLÈTIC TWO!"
The booth was laughing. The academy section was going off. The chant of Fer-mín, Fer-mín, Fer-mín was rolling forward in waves through the section.
On the pitch, Fermín was running.
"DUDEEEE."
He was screaming it as he sprinted at Mateo. Mateo was already laughing, hands on his knees, the small private laugh of a boy who had just enjoyed himself far too much across the previous eight seconds.
Fermín jumped on him. The collision was full-bodied. The other U19 boys came running in. Gavi. Balde. Abde. Dani Rodríguez. Ángel Alarcón. All of them piling into the celebration. Even Marsà had come up from the back to be in the picture.
Mateo, in the middle of the pile, laughed and shook hands with Fermín first.
"Let's finish this."
Fermín nodded fast, breathing hard.
"VISCA!"
The shout went up from the cluster. The boys broke off the celebration jogging back to their positions, but the jog had the small fooling-around energy of teenagers who had just realised, collectively, that they were not just winning this match.
They were obliterating it.
In the Barca Atlètic dugout, Coach Francisco sighed.
It was a long sigh. The kind a coach gave at the touchline when he had run out of ideas and had not yet found the language to admit it to himself.
His assistant came over to him. The man had a notepad in his hand and an expression that was trying to be helpful.
"Sir. Maybe we could ask Nico and Puig to mark him with support from—"
"What is the point?"
Francisco said it flat.
The assistant stopped mid-sentence.
Francisco took another big sigh. He looked at his bench. He looked at the four boys still in their training kits, the ones who had not yet been on the pitch.
"Tell Peque. Monchu. Pereira. And Gustavo. Get them warm. All four of them. They have over fourteen minutes to play the best game of their lives."
The assistant blinked.
"Okay, sir. What are the instructions?"
"Just tell them to play their hearts out."
The assistant stood there for a second, his pen still half-raised. He had been expecting tactical notes. Specific marks. Specific patterns. He had been preparing to write the half-time speech adjustment.
There were no adjustments coming.
He realised what he was being asked to do.
"Sir..."
He recovered.
"Okay, sir. I will relay your words."
Francisco nodded once. He looked back at the pitch.
"And tell them. Welcome to the history books."
The assistant turned and walked toward the warming substitutes with the small heavier step of a man carrying news he had not wanted to carry.
In the booth, Ricard had been watching the dugout through the touchline camera.
"And we are seeing a flurry of activity on the Barca Atlètic bench. Four boys warming up. Four. That is unusual. Four substitutions in fifteen minutes of football remaining."
"What is Coach Francisco planning here, Alejandro? Does he have a way to limit that bullet train out there on the pitch? Fifteen minutes of game time remaining. Let's see what comes out of this."
Alejandro did not respond immediately.
When he did, his voice was quieter.
"I think it is something else, Ricard. I think Coach Francisco knows something we are not saying out loud."
"What is that?"
"That it is done."
He let the word sit.
"He is giving four boys the run-out before the result becomes official. He is not chasing the comeback. He is letting his bench have their match."
Ricard exhaled into the microphone.
"That is a coach who has accepted what is happening."
The four substitutions came on together. Peque, Monchu, Pereira, and Gustavo, four academy boys who had spent the first hour of the broadcast watching from the bench, jogged onto the pitch with the small specific energy of players who had just been told to write their own story. They came on for Hiroki Abe, Sergi Rosanas, Álex Valle, and Rey Manaj. The four players being replaced shook hands with the four players replacing them at the touchline.
The match resumed.
And something strange happened.
Maybe it was the tired legs of the U19 boys who had been pressing for fifty minutes. Maybe it was the fresh energy of four B-side players who had something specific to prove. Maybe it was the small collective recalibration of a match that had been one-sided for ten minutes finding its breath. Whatever the cause, for a short while the Barca Atlètic side took control.
Possession came back to them. The press from the U19 slackened. The midfield triangle of Riqui Puig, Nico, and Ilaix Moriba started moving the ball at the rhythm they had been wanting to move it at since the first half.
The B side, knowing the window was small, knowing it would not last, did not let the chance go.
The move started in the Atlètic half. Konrad picked up a loose ball from a half-cleared U19 pass. He turned, ran, and laid it back to Puig.
Puig found Ilaix Moriba on the half-turn. Moriba's first touch was clean. He drove forward, ten yards, then twelve. Gavi came across to press him. Moriba slid the ball wide to Peque, the new winger on the right, who took it with one touch and went at Balde.
Balde, his legs visibly heavier now than they had been in the first half, matched the first move. The second move pushed past him. Peque got into the channel.
Gavi sprinted across from the centre. He arrived at exactly the moment Peque was about to deliver a low ball. The interception was clean. Gavi took the ball off his foot with the inside of his right boot.
Gavi looked up. He saw Ángel Alarcón on the far side.
He played the long diagonal.
Ángel took the ball at the U19 right wing, the cross-field switch from Gavi having beaten the entire Atlètic shape.
He drove at the recovering defender.
Then Nico arrived.
Nico had read the diagonal pass before it had been played. He had been drifting toward the right side of the U19 attack for the last thirty seconds, anticipating exactly this kind of counter. When Ángel took his first touch, Nico stepped to him, planted his foot, and tackled him cleanly on the boundary.
The ball came loose. Konrad was the first to it. He played it back to Puig. Puig drove forward.
The B side was now committed. Five players forward. The full chase.
Puig played it across to Moriba. Moriba touched it back to Nico, who had continued his run from the tackle.
Nico had it twenty-five yards from goal.
He looked up. The U19 defenders were scrambling back. The angle was tight. The keeper Tenas was on his line.
Nico did not pass.
He took the touch with his right foot. He took another. He squared his body. He hit it.
The shot was from outside the box. The contact was perfect. The strike came off the laces of his right foot with the small clean sound that academy footballers chased their whole careers to produce. The ball moved with pace. It bent only slightly. It went over Tenas's outstretched dive and into the top corner.
"GOAAAAL!"
Ricard was up again.
"WORLDIE! WORLDIE FROM NICO GONZÁLEZ! FROM WINNING THE BALL ON THE EDGE OF HIS OWN BOX, TO STOPPING THE COUNTER, TO SCORING THIS!"
"NICO GONZÁLEZ HAS NOT GIVEN UP."
Alejandro picked it up.
"THE BARCA ATLÈTIC GETS ONE BACK. THIS IS TWENTY-NINE YEARS OF HERITAGE ON THEM. IF THEY ARE TO FALL, THEY WILL NOT FALL WITHOUT A FIGHT."
"FIVE TO THREE! NICO ON THE BOARD! THE ATLÈTIC LIFTS!"
In the stands, Koeman wrote in his notebook. The first thing he had written since Mateo's stage of the second half had begun.
Nico. Goal under pressure. Twenty-five yards. Right foot. Clean.
On the pitch, Nico was running to the corner with both arms out. Konrad reached him first, then Puig, then Moriba. The four-man Atlètic celebration was small but intense. Behind them, the U19 boys jogged back into shape with the slightly chastened body language of a team that had just been reminded that the match was not actually over.
The score was 5-3.
Despite the fact that being just two goals down was, in football, not necessarily a large margin to recover from in fourteen minutes plus injury time, nobody in the stadium thought the Atlètic side was going to come back.
It had been said a lot today. The comment section was filled with it at this moment. Mateo really was a huge wall. The gap is enormous. The pressure is big. This isn't even fair for the other guys
It might be getting repetitive and annoying,
But it was true.
His La Masia mates, who were now back on the pitch with him for the second half, were starting to recognise, properly, how huge the gap really was between one of their closest friends and themselves. They had grown up with him. They had trained with him for years. They had thought, in the small private competitive way that academy boys always thought, that he was just one of them. A little ahead, maybe. The most gifted of their cohort, sure. But still one of them.
This afternoon had reset that assumption.
The boy on the pitch with them was not one of them. The boy on the pitch with them was a different category of footballer. The friends were watching it land in real time. Gavi had said nothing about it, but Fermin, Balde, Casado, all of them had given each other small glances across the half, the small academy-internal acknowledgments that the gap was something they had not fully calculated until today.
And like that, with the pressure of Mateo on the pitch sinking in on both allies and opponents alike, the game continued.
Álex García made his fourth substitution. Abde came off for Fabián Luzzi, the boy on the left wing who had earned his minutes after Abde's selfless assist for the second goal had landed in the coach's notebook the same way it had landed in Koeman's. Abde walked off to a small standing ovation from the academy section. He raised his hand. He took the seat on the bench beside Aleix Garrido.
The match resumed.
The 51st minute.
Mateo received the ball from Marsà in the U19 half. Puig was on him again. Mateo turned with the ball facing his own goal and rolled it back to Dani Rodríguez. He took two steps forward. He called for it. He got it. He turned. He played a one-two with Gavi.
The U19 were back in possession. The Atlètic equaliser hope was already being suffocated.
The 53rd minute.
Mateo found Balde in space on the left. Balde drove forward. He had Peque on him this time, the fresh winger. Balde used his fresh-against-fresh matchup to his advantage. He pushed past Peque on the inside with a quick burst. He looked up. He found Fabián Luzzi running into the box from a deep starting position.
Luzzi met the cross with a header. The ball glanced off his forehead and dropped wide of the post.
The chance was clear. The header was not clean. Iñaki, who had set his feet, watched the ball go past his goal.
"Oh. So close. The new boy on the left, Luzzi, with his first chance. Got onto the cross from Balde. Could not get enough on it."
The 55th minute.
The Atlètic tried to push. Puig dropped deep, demanded the ball from his keeper, started looking for the long diagonal. He found Konrad on the left. Konrad took it, drove, and was met by Marsà. The clearance was simple but the Atlètic kept the pressure on. The second ball fell to Moriba. Moriba shot from outside the box. Tenas saved it cleanly down to his right.
"And Moriba with a swing. Tenas gathers."
Alejandro was reading the rhythm of the match correctly now. The Atlètic were trying but the U19 was no longer letting them set the tempo.
The 57th minute.
The U19 went forward again. Possession had been settling. Mateo had been pulling Puig out of the centre for the last sixty seconds. The B side midfield was, finally, beginning to crack.
The move came through Dani Rodríguez. He picked up the ball at the centre of his own half. He found Gavi. Gavi found Mateo. Mateo turned, took two touches, and Puig was on him.
Mateo did not fight him. He dropped the ball back to Dani, who switched it long to the right.
Ángel Alarcón took the ball on the right wing. He had Pereira on him, one of the new Atlètic players. Ángel drove at him. He went outside. He went inside. He cut back outside. Pereira was beaten on the third move. Ángel was into the box from the right.
He looked up. He saw Fermín.
Fermín had made the late run. The false 9 was at the penalty spot.
Ángel could have shot. The angle was tight but he had it.
The thing that had been happening on this team for the entire match, the thing Koeman had been writing about in his notebook, the thing the academy boys had been doing without being told, happened again.
Ángel passed.
Fermín took it on the half-volley with his right foot. The contact this time was clean. Not the thunder of his second goal, the placement of his first. The ball came off his boot low and curling. It went past Iñaki's hand and into the bottom corner.
"GOAAAL!"
Ricard.
"FERMÍN LÓPEZ! HAT-TRICK! HAT-TRICK FOR FERMÍN LÓPEZ! HE HAS HIS THIRD!"
"AND THIS U19 SIDE GO SIX TO THREE!"
"WHAT A NIGHT FOR FERMÍN LÓPEZ! WHAT A NIGHT FOR THIS YOUTH GENERATION!"
The academy section exploded again. The chant of Fer-mín, Fer-mín, Fer-mín came up so loud the broadcast had to ride the levels down.
Fermín ran to the touchline and pointed at Mateo. He did not bow. He did not make it explicit. He just pointed once and the cameras caught it, the small acknowledgment of a striker thanking the player who had created the system in which he was scoring goals.
Mateo waved him off. Already laughing.
In the stands, David was up on his feet. Isabella was up on her feet. Mounir was clapping with both hands above his head, Sheila beside him just smiling. Lamine was on his feet with his fists in the air, the small fanboy shouting YES, YES, YES the way only a thirteen-year-old academy boy could shout it.
Pedri was laughing.
Olivia and Aina were both up.
Koeman, in his seat, did not stand. He just smiled.
The match continued.
The 58th minute.
The Atlètic tried once more. Puig collected from his keeper. He drove forward. He played it to Moriba. Moriba turned and laid it back to Nico. Nico took it on the half-turn and tried to drive into the U19 third. Gavi met him on the line. The challenge was firm but clean. The ball came back the other way.
The U19 was in control again. They were not going to let the B side breathe. The pressing had returned with the fresh legs of the substitutions.
And just like that, the game dwindled toward the end.
6-3.
The unbeaten Barca Atlètic squad were being destroyed. This generation of Atlètic talents were not at fault. Fate was just too cruel, letting them play against that.
And unluckily for them, there was a certain left-back now who was not going to let them lick their wounds with just a three-goal deficit.
It's time for my secret weapon.
Balde started moving forward.
He had genuinely thought this was going to be a tight game. Everyone in the squad had. They knew Mateo was a professional. They knew he was going to be a massive advantage. But this was football. You could not win alone. That was what they had all thought walking into the tunnel this afternoon, the natural assumption of boys who had grown up in the same building as Mateo and who had watched him train and watched him play and who believed, in the honest way of people who had seen a great deal of him, that they had a realistic measure of how good he was.
They had not had a realistic measure of how good he was.
They had all just spent sixty minutes finding out.
What Mateo had done on this pitch today was not the kind of thing you arrived at through honest assessment. It was the kind of thing you could only understand by watching it happen in front of you in real time, by feeling it from the inside of the same game, by reading it with the professional eyes of boys who had been trained to read football and still could not quite keep up with what they were watching.
They had underestimated him. All of them had underestimated him. Not the level of his talent, exactly, because they had known the level of his talent. They had underestimated what it meant to be on the same pitch as it. The gap between knowing someone was brilliant and experiencing what brilliant actually did to the fabric of a football match was a gap Balde had not expected.
He understood it now.
With the game going so well, with the U19 coasting at 6-3 and two minutes of added time on the clock, he had not found the right moment to try out what he had been working on. He had been looking for it since the second half had opened. He had been tracking the moments. Waiting for the space. The game had kept moving.
Álex García had made his fifth and sixth substitutions of the match. Gavi had come off to a standing ovation from the academy section, the boy who had bossed the second half now walking off with the sweat-soaked jersey and the grin of a player who had already done everything he came here to do. José Marsà had also come off, the centre-back replaced with the B team's structural lead now reduced.
Now it was two minutes of added time. Now it was the last chance of the entire match.
Balde had made up his mind.
He started moving forward.
From his perspective on the left side of the pitch, the game looked like it had looked for most of the second half. Mateo was on the ball again. In the right centre area. The Barca Atlètic players around him had given up on the idea of pressing him individually. They were now doing the only thing left to them, which was to quadruple-mark him. Four bodies within arm's reach. Four sets of eyes on the ball.
None of it working.
Balde pushed up the left side at pace. His legs were tired. They had been tired for twenty minutes. He was running on something below the tank level, the specific energy source you found only when the match was almost over and the thing you had been saving was finally ready.
He called out across the pitch.
"Mateo! When I get in front, loop me the ball!"
He shouted it. Loud enough to carry across the noise of the academy section.
Mateo, on the ball, surrounded by four Atlètic players, did not speak. He did not turn his head. He just gave the single nod. The small specific nod of a boy who had been reading his teammates all afternoon and did not need more than one second to register what was coming.
Balde kept running.
Mateo dragged the ball to the other side.
The four defenders followed the drag. For a brief moment the whole cluster moved away from Balde's side of the pitch, the gravity of the ball pulling everyone in the same direction.
Balde was not worried. He did not break stride. He did not adjust the plan. He had seen Mateo run games for sixty minutes. He knew Mateo had the ball. He knew Mateo would find him. He just kept going with his plan.
He got to the front third of the pitch. He found Abde on the left.
Abde was the only one remaining from the original front three who had not been subbed off. He had been brought back on after Álex had initially taken him off earlier for Luzzi, then reshuffled the rotation. He was still out there, still moving, still the boy who had passed to Ilias instead of shooting when the simpler choice was himself.
He saw Balde coming.
"Dude. We won."
Fabián said it laughing. After calming down his anxiety about impressing the coach he just realised in the last ten minutes what they had truly done, They were the first team ever since the founding to beat the B squad.
Balde smiled back. He kept moving.
"Yeah yeah."
He positioned himself on Fabián's shoulder. They were both in the attacking third now. Ahead of them, the Atlètic back line was holding its shape with the last professional dignity of a side trying not to concede again.
"When Mateo gets over here," Balde said, still moving, "and when he loops the ball, overlap with me up front."
Fabián was still smiling.
"Wait. You want to do that?"
Balde just gave him the smirk.
The reason they could have this conversation at all, the reason two U19 attackers could talk through a combination move while the match was still technically live, was because the Atlètic players had moved their entire defensive attention to the right side of the pitch, where Mateo was. The four bodies around him. The desperate final-minute containment.
Which meant the left side was empty.
Which meant Balde was free.
On the right, Mateo had the ball in a pocket around the edge of the Atlètic box. Four players. Arnau Comas, Nico, Monchu, and Puig. The four of them orbiting him at close range, none of them committing, all of them waiting for the mistake that was not coming.
Mateo held the ball.
He dribbled Comas first, the short sharp movement past the player he had been past three times in this match. Comas had given him a yard on the right side and Mateo had taken the yard. Comas grabbed his shirt briefly and let go.
Mateo was now moving left.
The other three came with him. He dragged the ball across the face of the Atlètic shape, the defenders breathing down his neck, the physical press of four players trying to collapse on one. His breathing was heavier now. The stamina training had got him to the 60th minute, but the 60th minute was the 60th minute.
He held the ball with his left foot against the pressure of Nico's shoulder.
He stood.
For a few seconds the cluster just held. Barca B players pressing in. Mateo pressing back. The stalemate of one boy and four defenders.
The B side players, looking at each other over Mateo's head, had made a collective unspoken decision about the last two minutes of this match. They were not going to let him score. They were not going to let him embarrass them again. The game was lost. The history was being made. They understood this. But there was a limit. They were professionals. The head coach was watching. Their friends were in the stands. Some of their girlfriends were in the stands. There was a line of dignity that even a 6-3 loss had to stop at.
Mateo had not received that memo.
He moved.
The step-over went first, the right foot dropping over the ball for Nico. Nico did not buy it. He had seen it six times today. He held.
Then the actual move.
Mateo drove the ball with the sole of his left foot straight through the gap between Nico and Monchu, the small space between two pressed defenders that technically did not exist but Mateo had made exist through a combination of body weight and timing that took less than one second.
He went through.
Monchu grunted. He had felt the contact of Mateo's shoulder. He stumbled sideways.
Puig, behind the move, found himself wrong-footed for the fourth time in the match.
Mateo was out. Free. Moving.
"Ooh, that's nasty. It's already just a minute away from the game and he just won't let up!"
Ricard's voice was somewhere between commentary and laughter.
"Hahaha! I genuinely feel for the Atlètic players at this point."
Alejandro was already laughing.
"Hahaha! They knew what they were getting into when they saw him lining up."
Mateo was moving rapidly now. In the right channel, with space in front of him for the first time in ten minutes. The other Atlètic players were chasing. The shape was broken. The defensive scramble was starting.
He had the ball. He had the speed. He could shoot. He could drive into the box. He could do the things he had been doing for sixty minutes.
He looked left.
He found Balde.
The left-back was already at the top of the U19 attacking third. Full sprint. Already past the halfway line. The Atlètic left side had been vacated for the pass. Nobody had tracked Balde. Nobody had seen Balde coming because nobody had been watching the left side when Mateo was doing what Mateo was doing on the right.
Mateo did not hesitate.
He hit it.
The pass was not a ground pass. It was a looped through-ball, the specific arc of a ball that had to travel forty yards across the width of the pitch and arrive at the feet of a full-back running at full pace. The ball came off Mateo's right foot with a curve that bent wide, dropped, and landed perfectly into Balde's stride.
A pass that had no right to be that accurate.
BANG.
"AND THE BALL RAPIDLY MOVING TOWARDS BALDE!"
Ricard's voice.
"Look at the curve on that! That pass covered forty yards! And it was NOT aimless! It was placed! It was curved right into his stride!"
"Mateo King. Threading a needle across the entire width of the pitch. In the sixty-second minute of a match he has been playing all afternoon."
Balde had the ball.
His stride had swallowed it cleanly. The first touch carried the ball forward without him having to break pace. The box was ahead of him. Mingueza, the last recovering Atlètic defender, was arriving from the right. The keeper Iñaki Peña was stepping off his line.
Abde was on Balde's shoulder. Exactly where Balde had asked him to be.
This was the moment.
Balde had been working on this for months. Not the pass, not the sprint, not the combination. The move. The specific sequence he had spent hours in the training sessions that ran after the official sessions, the sessions the coaches were not running but the boys were running themselves, the late-evening training that happened because some players could not go inside while there was still light.
The move he had been building.
He took the ball inside at pace. The Atlètic defenders, reading the run as a standard left-back attack, committed to the angle. Mingueza came across to cut off the inside cut. Iñaki narrowed the angle.
Fabián made the outside run. Two defenders. Two different threats.
Balde shaped to pass to Fabián .
Mingueza bought it. He shifted.
And then Balde stopped.
Not a slow stop. An instant stop. A planted left foot, heel down, weight back, the ball controlled under the sole of his right foot with the complete physical deceleration of a body that had been going at full speed and had simply chosen not to.
Mingueza's momentum carried him two yards past.
Iñaki, who had been closing the angle for the pass to Fabián , was now wrong-footed, his weight wrong, the angle he had calculated no longer the angle he was being asked to defend.
Balde looked at the ball.
He turned.
Not a half-turn. A full 360. His body rotating completely, the ball rolling with him, his right foot guiding it through the rotation so that at the end of the full circle his body was facing the goal, his weight was perfectly balanced, and the ball was sitting exactly where he needed it to be.
The 360 cut-back.
The move he had been waiting for.
In the booth, Alejandro made a sound.
Not a word. A sound. The kind of sound that came out of a commentator who had been doing this for years and had just seen something they had not fully expected.
"What."
Then:
"WHAT?!"
Then:
"WHAT IS THAT?! WHAT IS THAT MOVE?!"
Ricard was already shouting.
"A FULL 360! BALDE WITH A FULL 360 ON THE BALL!"
"MINGUEZA IS ON THE FLOOR! IÑAKI IS STRANDED!"
Balde blasted it.
He did not finesse it. He did not place it. He drove his right boot through the ball with everything that was left in his legs, every watt of energy remaining after sixty minutes of the hardest match he had played in his life, all of it going into one single strike.
The ball went low. It went fast. It went past Iñaki's diving hand.
It hit the back of the net so hard the net pulsed.
"OOOOOOH!"
The sound came from the academy section before the commentators could speak. The crowd noise building like a wave, reaching the peak and breaking.
"WHAT A GOAL! BALDEEEE! BALDEEEE! WHAT WAS THAT! THAT WAS THE BEST GOAL OF THE ENTIRE MATCH!"
Ricard was screaming. Actual screaming. The broadcast volume level was maxed.
"THE 360! THE CUT-BACK! THE BLAST! ALEJANDRO! ALEJANDRO! WHAT DID WE JUST SEE?!"
Alejandro took a beat.
When he came back, his voice had something in it that had not been there all match. Something quieter. The voice of a man who was watching a left-back from the academy he helped run announce himself to the world in real time.
"We just watched Alejandro Balde. Who is 17 years old. In added time of a youth match. Perform a move that you do not see in the Senior Champions League. And then score."
A pause.
"Write that down. Write his name down. Because you are going to hear it a great deal."
On the pitch, everyone had stopped.
Even the Atlètic players.
The U19 boys closest to Balde were standing with their arms out, the small specific paralysis of people who had just watched something happen that they could not immediately process. Abde had both hands on the back of his head. Dani Rodríguez was pointing at Balde, laughing, saying something nobody could hear.
Mateo was standing at the edge of the box.
Both hands on his head.
His eyes were wide and his mouth was slightly open and for three full seconds he just stood there, looking at Balde, with the expression of a person who had set up the pass specifically because he believed the boy at the end of it was going to do something special and was now watching the special thing actually arrive and realising the something was bigger than he had expected.
Then he started laughing.
He dropped his hands from his head and he bent forward and he laughed, properly, the full-body laugh of a boy who had just been out-skilled, in a match he was supposed to be the best player in, by his left-back.
Balde was already running.
He ran with both arms out, head back, the sprint of a player who had just scored the goal he had been building toward for months. The academy section chased him with the volume. Balde. Balde. Balde. The chant moving forward in the stands, row by row.
Mateo reached him.
He grabbed him by the back of the neck, laughing.
"Where did that come from?!"
Balde was already laughing too.
"I've been working on it!"
"WHEN?!"
"AFTER SESSIONS!"
The rest of the boys piled in. The celebration this time was different from all the previous celebrations. The previous ones had been celebrations of goals. This was the celebration of a thing. The recognition that they had all just witnessed something specific, something that went beyond the scoreline, something that the 144,000 people watching online and the people in the stands and the man in the executive row with the notebook on his knee were all separately registering as the same kind of moment.
A player had just been born.
In the stands, Koeman had his notebook open.
He wrote three words.
That was all.
He closed the notebook.
In the booth, Ricard gathered himself. The laughter was still in his voice but the broadcast was pulling itself back together. He looked at the score on the lower third.
"Seven. To. Three."
He said it slowly.
"U19 squad. Seven goals. Barca Atlètic. Three goals. Two minutes of added time. This match. This extraordinary match. Is almost over."
...
The two commentators let the noise of the academy section settle before either of them spoke.
When Alejandro finally came in, his voice had changed. The match energy was still in it, but underneath was something older. Something that had been there all afternoon and was only now finding its way to the surface.
"Seven to three."
He said the numbers quietly. Not building to anything. Just stating them.
"I have been sitting in this chair, at this fixture, for years. I have watched this competition grow. I have watched this academy send boy after boy to the first team. I have watched players graduate from these dormitories to the Camp Nou, to Wembley, to San Siro, to the Etihad. Boys whose lights-out I enforced. Boys whose parents called me when the homesickness got bad in November. Boys I watched cry after the first defeat and then watched score the winning goal of a Champions League match."
He paused.
"I have been saying the same thing for most of that time. The twenty-nine-year record. The legacy. The tradition. The unbeaten run of Barca Atlètic in this competition, the thing that proved, year after year, that the senior structure was ahead of the youth structure, that the machine was working in the right direction."
Another pause. Longer.
"I don't think I am going to say that anymore."
He let it sit.
"I do not want to talk about the legacy. The legacy is done. The legacy is behind us. What I want to do is look at the pitch right now. Look at those boys. The ones celebrating. The ones who are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, who woke up this morning in dormitory beds and played a sixty-minute match against senior professionals and won seven to three."
His voice was warm.
"I have been lucky enough to know most of those boys by their first names for years. I have been lucky enough to watch them grow. And I am telling you, as someone who has seen this game from the inside for longer than I care to admit, that those boys are not going to stop at this pitch. What you watched today is the first small sentence of a very, very long story."
He breathed.
"The legacy they go on to create. On the bigger stages. In the bigger nights. I cannot wait to watch it."
Ricard sat beside him in the booth. He had not interrupted. He had let the older man speak. Now he looked at Alejandro and smiled, the small smile of a journalist who recognised a moment and knew when to let it breathe.
Then he turned back to his microphone.
"Good match, Culés. After tonight, I think we all feel the same way. The conscious is clear. The future is very, very bright."
A beat.
"And we are done."
Ricard said it softly and moved back from the microphone.
"That was one hell of a game."
He said it mostly to himself, tidying the small stack of notes in front of him.
Alejandro laughed. A big, released laugh, the kind that came after a match you had been holding in your body for ninety minutes.
"Oh, it sure was."
He was already packing his things. His jacket off the back of his chair. His notes folded. The small broadcaster's ritual of leaving a booth in better condition than you found it, a habit developed over years of borrowed studios.
"I felt more hyped than some of the Division 2 games I do." Ricard shook his head, still laughing. "I cannot wait for next year."
Alejandro was mid-fold with his jacket. He smiled at the admission.
"I cannot wait to do this with you again either, Richard. Honestly. Today was something else."
He paused.
"But I have to go now. I need to join the kids."
Ricard looked at him. He was quiet for a moment. Then he reached into his jacket pocket.
"Why wait?"
Alejandro blinked.
"Pardon?"
Ricard had a card in his hand. A small white card. He held it out and placed it into Alejandro's palm.
"I know you always say you are not interested. I know you have your job, your dormitory, your routine. But I think you have a real knack for this. I have sat in this chair next to a lot of people across the years. You are different."
He pressed the card into Alejandro's hand.
"If you ever change your mind. Call that number. And I promise you—"
He snapped his fingers.
"Just think about it."
Alejandro looked down at the card in his palm. He looked at it for a moment. Then he closed his fingers around it.
He did not say anything.
He just gripped it.
Down on the pitch, someone had started the music.
A Barcelona anthem was coming through the small speakers set up at the ground, the familiar melody that the club used for its academy celebrations, and underneath the melody the boys were doing what boys did when they had just done something historic.
They were being Teenage boys.
Balde was running in circles with his arms out. Fermín was sitting on the grass refusing to get up until someone lifted the small trophy the academy brought out for the occasion. Ángel Alarcón had found a water bottle and was spraying it at anyone who got close enough. Dani Rodríguez was taking photos of everything on his phone. Txus Alba, who had played the second half as the sub, was doing the small specific celebration of a player who had just been part of something historic despite only getting thirty minutes.
On the far side of the pitch, where the Barca Atlètic players were gathered in the tighter, quieter group of a side that had just lost by four goals, some of the U19 boys had crossed over.
Gavi was standing with Nico.
They were talking they were boys who had grown up in the same building. Shoulders close. Not deep conversation. Just the easy back and forth of two players who had spent the last sixty minutes trying to beat each other and who were, at the end of it, still academy.
"You talked to Ansu lately?" Gavi asked.
Nico shook his head. "Nah. Been a while."
"Yeah, same." Gavi paused. "Mateo stays in his apartment now so I went to check him out but he wasn't around and his numbers not been going."
Nico's eyebrows went up.
"Wait. He stays in the apartments? Mateo stays in the building?"
"Yeah. Since a few week back."
Nico made a small sound. Not quite a laugh.
"Huh."
Someone called Gavi's name from across the pitch.
He looked over, raised a hand, then looked back at Nico.
Nico just smiled. The first genuine smile he had worn in the second half. The Mateo jealousy was not there in this moment. Whatever had been sitting in his chest through the match had been worked off somewhere in sixty minutes of running and tackling and an outside-of-the-box goal.
"Go enjoy yourselves."
Gavi grinned and jogged back.
The music kept playing.
Then Coach Álex García jogged onto the pitch from the technical area, and the boys saw him coming, and without a single word being spoken between them the whole group turned.
Álex came in with both arms out.
"GUYS! WE DID IT! WE ACTUALLY—"
He did not finish the sentence.
"GET HIM!"
Casado's voice. The shout going out before Álex had even finished his opening word.
"GUYS. GUYS GUYS GUYS. STOP. PUT ME DOWN. NOW. PUT ME—"
He was already off the ground.
Eight boys had taken him up. His feet were in the air. His arms were grabbing for the nearest shoulder. His face was a combination of genuine fright and the laughter of a man who had known, on some level, that this was coming the moment he stepped onto the pitch.
"DOWN! PUT ME DOWN! DON'T TOUCH THAT. LEAVE THAT ALONE. PUT ME—"
They were throwing him in the air.
He went up. He came down. They caught him. He went up again. Mateo was one of the eight. He was laughing so hard his throw was more of a controlled lift than an actual toss.
"OKAY. OKAY. OKAY. DOWN. PUT ME DOWN. GENTLY. GENTLY."
They put him down.
He stood there for a second, breathing, running a hand through his dishevelled hair, the jacket askew.
Then he laughed. The big released laugh.
"You are all running ten extra laps."
The groaning was theatrical.
"Awwnn, don't be mean, coach."
"Yeah. You were supposed to take us out."
"Yeah, don't forget your promise. Spend that salary."
"You promised, coach!"
"Me use my salary on you gluttons?" Álex made the expression of a man who had been asked to donate a kidney. "Why don't you just rob me? I still like providing for my family."
"Don't be stingy."
"Which wife and kids, coach? It's good to be realistic."
"YOU LITTLE—"
"Hahaha! You all should leave your coach alone."
The voice came from the side.
Every boy on the pitch heard it at the same time and turned.
"Dad?"
Mateo said it quietly.
"Bro."
"Mom."
"Mi amor." This one gathering looks
They came walking across the pitch. Not just Mateo's father. All of them. The parents, the siblings, the friends who had driven up. Balde's dad with his hand already reaching for his son's head to ruffle it. Gavi's mom with her arms already open before she had even fully reached him. Casado's elder brother catching up with him in three long strides. The families arriving in the way families arrived after a match had been won, the collective release of people who had been watching from a distance and were now allowed to be close.
David King had a smile on his face that he was not doing anything to contain.
"How about I take you kids out to my restaurant?" he called out to the group. "We celebrate your win. Everything on the house."
The reaction was immediate and loud.
"For real?!"
"YESSS."
"Dude, Mateo's dad's restaurant is so good. The food is unreal."
"It's British food though, isn't it?"
"Yeah but it's FREE."
"Who cares what it is, it's free. and I'm so tired of the cafeteria food "
Isabella, who had come up beside David, reached out and put her hand on his arm. A small, quiet gesture. The kind two people made when they had been together long enough that the gesture required no context.
David looked down at her.
She was looking at the boys, at the noise of them, at the scene of fifteen academy players simultaneously debating whether free British food was worth the travel while their parents laughed around them. She was smiling. The wide open smile of a mother watching her son's friends be happy in the middle of something that had partly happened because her son had decided to play.
David watched her face.
He smiled too.
"Ahh, but would 'mother' agree?"
One of the boys shouted it from somewhere in the cluster.
The title landed with the weight it always had. Mother. Alejandro's dormitory title. The man whose curfew still governed every single one of these boys who lived in the La Masia dorms. The man who could end this evening before it started.
Mateo glanced around. He located Alejandro at the edge of the group, talking with Álex García.
He made his decision faster than he should have.
"That's if we tell him," he said, dropping his voice. "We just sneak out. It is actually very easy if you—"
He stopped.
Some of the boys had already started looking away. One was examining the sky. Another was very interested in his bootlace.
Mateo read the room.
He sighed.
"He is behind me, isn't he."
"Oh, don't let me stop you."
Alejandro's voice. Completely calm. The specific calm of a man who had heard everything and was choosing to let the offender work it out for himself.
Mateo turned. He looked at Alejandro. He looked back at the boys.
"Ha ha. I was just telling them what not to do."
He turned to face the group. He put on his best responsible-senior-player expression.
"Yes. You all heard that. Never try to sneak out. Never."
Alejandro looked at him the way a person looked at a boy who was sixteen years old and thought he was being clever.
"Yeah, yeah."
Gavi stepped forward. He caught himself halfway through what he had been about to say.
"Don't mind him, moth—"
He stopped. He coughed. He tried again.
"Don't mind him. We were just going for a small dinner. Nothing big."
"It is a celebration," Gavi's mother said, moving up from behind him. "Let them go. They will come back."
"It is one evening," Balde's father said.
"They won seven to three," Casado's brother said.
"Seven to three," somebody else echoed.
Then the chant started.
"LET THEM GO. LET THEM GO. LET THEM GO."
The parents and siblings were doing it. Clapping in rhythm. The adults chanting with the same full-body commitment the boys had brought to the academy section ninety minutes ago.
Alejandro looked around at the chanting. He looked at Álex García beside him. Álex gave him the face of a man who was not going to be any help.
Alejandro looked at the card in his pocket.
He breathed.
"Okay. Okay. Okay."
He raised both hands.
The chanting stopped.
"But—"
They screamed before he could finish.
The answer was yes.
It did not take long. All of them piling into the various family cars parked outside the academy, the parents and the boys mixing together the way they mixed at the end of every significant match, the crowd sorting itself into vehicles with the cheerful disorder of people who were in a good mood and were going somewhere good.
Kings Palace had some customers when they arrived. A midday crowd, the tables at about half capacity, the restaurant busy with the low hum of a weekday afternoon service. David went straight to his staff and spoke to them briefly. No new customers for the next two hours. The back section was cleared. Tables were moved.
Within twenty minutes the Kings Palace had become something else entirely.
It had become a celebration ground for the U19 La Masia boys.
The noise was immediate and total. Boys who had been running for sixty minutes were now, on the other side of that adrenaline, operating at the kind of volume that only teenagers in a good mood in a restaurant produced. Fermin was demonstrating his second goal to anyone who would watch. Balde had somehow acquired a napkin and was using it as a flag. Dani Rodríguez had claimed a corner of the restaurant and was trying to order three desserts before the main course.
Someone had connected a phone to the restaurant's speaker system.
David had approved it.
Then the video call started.
It started because Fermín looked at his phone and saw a message from a number he had not expected.
Watching from home. Saw everything. That was special. Call me.
He held the phone up.
"Gaffer."
The name went through the group like a current. Phones came up. A video call was placed. The connection went through, and on the screen on Fermín's phone, slightly pixelated from a distance, was the face of Óscar López, the former U19 coach who had left at the start of the season for his new position.
He had watched the entire match.
"COACH!"
"OSCAR!"
"COACH DID YOU SEE—"
"Coach, my second goal. Coach. Did you see—"
"Coach, I had seven interceptions today—"
"Coach, Balde did a 360—"
"I KNOW ABOUT THE 360—"
The phone was being passed from hand to hand around the table. Nobody held it long enough for the conversation to be linear. It was simultaneous and overlapping and occasionally someone grabbed the phone and ran with it across the restaurant while whoever it had been taken from chased them.
"GIVE ME THAT BACK—"
"Coach, coach, tell him—"
"WHERE IS BALDE I WANT TO ASK ABOUT THE 360—"
"I'M HERE I'M HERE—"
Óscar López, on the screen, was laughing in the way a man laughed when he was watching something he had helped build doing exactly what he had hoped it would do.
"I watched every minute. I want you all to know I watched every single minute."
On the far side of the restaurant, away from the phone chaos, Alejandro and Álex stood together with their drinks. Watching.
Álex shook his head slowly.
"These kids."
Alejandro laughed.
"These kids."
Álex looked at them. At Fermín finally getting the phone back. At Gavi doing an impression of something that had happened in the match for the fourth time. At the boys who had been professional footballers sixty minutes ago and were now fifteen-year-old restaurant guests arguing about who had played better.
"They are a lot of work," Álex said.
He paused. He smiled.
"But when I see them like this. I cannot remember a better feeling."
Alejandro looked at them. The big smile came slowly, rising from somewhere deeper than the afternoon's match, the accumulated smile of a man who had spent years of his life in the same building as these boys, who had knocked on their doors when the lights were still on at midnight and had made them cereal when they were homesick and had sat with them through the quiet evenings before big matches.
"Yeah," he said.
Just the one word. But the one word said it all.
On the video call, Óscar was still talking, and the boys were still passing the phone, and someone was shouting about the replay of Balde's 360 being available online already.
"Where is Mateo?" Óscar's voice came through the phone. "I have not seen him this whole call."
The boys looked around.
Fermín, holding the phone, panned the restaurant slowly.
"Did he follow Pedri back?" someone said.
"Nah, he was just here."
"I saw him like ten minutes ago."
"Was he with his parents?"
The camera kept panning. Empty corner. The parents' table. Álex and Alejandro. The door.
Nobody could find him.
Upstairs in the apartment, having slipped away from the crowd a little earlier than anyone had noticed, were two people.
The apartment was quiet after the noise of the ground floor. The window was open. Late afternoon light coming through. The city of Barcelona going on outside, indifferent to the result of a youth football match.
"There it is."
Mateo said it softly.
Olivia looked at him. "What?"
"Your smile. I have been looking for it all day."
She laughed. The sound of it open and easy.
"You are silly. I have been laughing all afternoon."
"Yeah, but not like this."
She looked at him. He looked back at her. The comfortable silence that arrived between people who had been spending time together long enough that the silence had become comfortable settled between them, and for a moment the afternoon and the match and the seven goals were far away and it was just the two of them and the open window and the light.
Then the comfortable silence became something else.
The particular quality of a silence that is comfortable and then, in one small unidentifiable second, becomes slightly too much. The awareness of it arriving in both of them at the same moment. The small awkwardness of two people who were not quite where they were going and both knew it and neither was going to say so.
Mateo picked up his phone.
Not because he needed his phone. Because the phone was the easiest exit from the small awkward moment. He looked at the screen with the deliberately casual expression of someone checking something they had planned to check all along.
The notifications were everywhere.
He frowned.
Olivia noticed.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
He clicked through. His eyes moved across the screen. The frown deepened.
"What's wrong?"
She asked it again, softer. The voice she used when she actually wanted to know.
Mateo looked up.
"I think I was dissed?."
He said it like he was not quite sure if that was the right word for it. The mild bewilderment of a boy who had spent the afternoon playing youth football and had come upstairs to sit with a girl and had arrived instead at a controversy.
The upcoming match between Barcelona and Real Madrid, which was now less than a week away, had been generating the specific kind of pre-match media noise that big Spanish derbies generated. Questions about tactics. Questions about the league table. Questions about the champions league final the week after.
And questions about the supposedly unresolved situation between Mateo and the Spanish national team captain, Sergio Ramos.
The interview from a few months back. The slight. The thing that Mateo had tried to put down and move on from.
Sergio Ramos had just done an interview.
He had, apparently, added fuel.
Mateo read what had been said. His brows pressed together.
He put his phone face-down on the arm of the chair.
He sat with it for a second.
Olivia was still looking at him.
He did not say anything about what he had read. He did not explain it. He just looked at the open window and the late afternoon light coming through it and breathed.
He had been trying to forget about that day; Plenty people had told him to ignore it not speak about it. The interview. The implication. The specific small dismissal from a man whose career had been built across the years before Mateo had even been born.
It seemed the day was not going to let him forget.
But.
Before he could do anything about it. Before he could meet Sergio Ramos on a pitch and give his own kind of answer. A wall known as Real Sociedad was in the way.
A wall they could not ignore.
With everything coming at once, the real tests were finally beginning.
A/N
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