# | Team | MP | W | D | L | Pts
--|------------------- |----|----|---|---|----
1 | Atlético Madrid | 35 | 27 | 5 | 3 | 86
2 | Barcelona | 35 | 26 | 5 | 4 | 83
3 | Real Madrid | 35 | 25 | 9 | 3 | 78
4 | Real Sociedad | 35 | 21 | 7 | 7 | 70
5 | Sevilla | 35 | 20 | 6 | 9 | 66
In another universe, the league had been won with 86 points.
In that universe, the final day had played out exactly as it had been modelled. Both Madrid clubs winning their respective games, Atlético holding on by the smallest margin against a team that had nothing to play for, the trophy confirmed in the last minutes of the last matchday with the specific unglamorous arithmetic of a title won through accumulation rather than spectacle.
In that universe, the league race had been between two Madrid clubs, and the better one had won it, and the outcome had been settled and sensible and consistent with everything the preceding thirty-seven matchdays had suggested.
But in that universe, there was no variable known as Mateo King.
With his involvement, many things had changed for Barcelona in this universe. His addition had affected more than the results in Paris and the Champions League journey or getting Messi more fired up and ambitious again. Mateo's presence in the league had changed the fabric of La Liga itself.
Seeing Barcelona in a better position, winning games they should not have been winning, pursuing the league title from a position nobody had expected them to occupy, the other clubs had buckled. Risen. The competition had tightened. It always did when a dominant force came into the picture. There was no greater motivation in professional sport than watching your rival perform at a level that reminded you of what was possible. Games that should have ended in draws were dragged to late winners. Tactical adjustments that clubs had been delaying for weeks were suddenly implemented. New combinations were tried. Managers pushed their squads harder. The clubs below them in the table had started playing with the specific desperate intelligence of teams who could not afford to let Barcelona keep running.
Nobody had felt this butterfly effect more than Atlético Madrid.
Diego Simeone's side had been sharp before Mateo's arrival in the first team. Then With the knowledge that Barcelona were chasing them properly, they had become something sharper than sharp. More compact. More ruthless. The defensive block that had always been their identity had become an instrument. The late goals that had always been part of their identity had been coming with a reliability that the statistics people were starting to write about. They were on a hot winning streak. Fuelled, in part, by the same force that was chasing them. Fuelled by Barcelona's New dominance.
This was how football had always worked. It was a human sport. The emotions ran wild inside it. The individual variables altered the collective picture. Every team in world football, major or minor, would eventually feel the effects of what Mateo King was adding to the game. Football had always evolved with its human variables, and the humans inside it responded to each other in ways that rippled outward across competitions, across seasons, across years.
Mateo King, born into this universe at seventeen years old and living his first professional season inside it, knew none of this.
To him, this was simply how everything was. How everything had always been. How everything should be.
And right now, there was only one thing he could do.
Move forward.
Matchday 36: Barcelona vs Real Sociedad. Home.
Matchday 37: Real Madrid vs Barcelona. Away.
Matchday 38: Atlético Madrid vs Barcelona. Away.
Champions League Final: Barcelona vs Chelsea. Away.
4th in the league.
3rd in the league.
1st in the league.
Champions League finalist.
It read like a cruel joke.
Four games. Each one harder than the one before it. The schedule building toward the two heaviest mountains at the end, with no descent between them. If Barcelona wanted the league and the Champions League, they could not afford to drop a single point across this run. Not one. Any slip, at any point, and the math would turn against them.
This was precisely why the Barcelona lineup looked the way it did.
A 4-3-3.
Ter Stegen in goal. The defensive line of Jordi Alba, Gerard Piqué, Ronald Araujo, and Sergi Roberto. The midfield of Sergio Busquets, Frenkie de Jong, and Pedri. The front three of Dembélé, Mateo King, and Lionel Messi.
Identical. One-to-one. Unchanged from the team that had started against Manchester City. The same eleven players who had produced the 4-2 at the Etihad.
Koeman had made his decision and made it clearly, and the reaction across the football world had been almost immediate.
The critics came first. Pundits on Catalan radio calling it unnecessary risk with Real Madrid just days away. Spanish football analysts pointing out that resting two or three senior players against Real Sociedad would have been the sensible management approach. Some of the more hostile voices using the word stupid, which was the word people used when they meant risky but wanted it to sting more or they could have actually just meant he was stupid. Fan accounts on Twitter had spent the morning theorising about the rotated lineup they expected to see, the blend of starters and bench players that logic suggested was coming.
Seeing Koeman name the same eleven who had played the Etihad, in the same positions, with no concession to fatigue management, had left the commentariat genuinely surprised.
Koeman who made this decision knew exactly what he was doing.
He had heard the logic about Real Sociedad being the weakest team on the remaining schedule. He had read the columns. He understood the argument. He had been making a version of that argument himself in the staff meetings, in the sense that he had been the one confirming that Real Sociedad were, on paper, the most manageable of the four opponents remaining.
But Koeman had been a professional footballer for twenty years before he became a coach, and in twenty years of professional football he had learned, specifically and painfully, that the games you approached as manageable were the games that ended your season. The matches that nobody worried about were the matches that produced the upsets. The team positioned comfortably in mid-table that caught you flat and scored in the third minute and held on for ninety minutes while your squad, too comfortable, too sure, too conserving, never found the urgency to recover.
Football thrived on this. It was one of the things that made football football. The Premier League giant falling to the fourth-division club. The Champions League holder losing to the team with nothing to play for. The league leader dropping points to the relegated side on the final day.
Complacency. Overconfidence. The misreading of what a gap on the table actually meant inside a ninety-minute match.
Koeman had seen some fatigue in training over the last two days. The players were carrying the Etihad in their legs. The midfield looked slightly slower than usual in the possession drills. Messi had been managing a small ache in his left calf that the medical team were monitoring.
He had still named the same eleven.
Because the goal was simple, and he had stated it to the players in the pre-match briefing that morning:
Cause damage.
Not win the match. Win the match was obvious. Cause damage. Score fast. Score multiple times. Put the game to bed before Real Sociedad could settle into whatever their own game plan was. The moment the scoreline was comfortable enough that the result was no longer seriously in doubt, Koeman would begin rotating. He would bring the bench into the match. He would manage his players' minutes.
But that required the first goal to come early. Which required the lineup to be the lineup that scored early.
Which was why it was this lineup.
It had also got him thinking, not for the first time, about the depth of his bench. The players available to him when he needed to rotate were not the level he required for a title run. He had been compiling the list of demands for the upcoming transfer window for weeks. Each match added something to it. Today would add more. He pushed the thought aside, that would be for the transfer window.
Real Sociedad were not a weak team.
He wanted that understood in the dressing room and understood properly. Fourth in the league was fourth in the league. Imanol Alguacil had built one of the most technically coherent sides in La Liga across the past two seasons. The goalkeeper Remiro was excellent. The defensive structure of Nacho Monreal, Aritz Elustondo, Robin Le Normand, and Andoni Gorosabel was compact and well-organised and had been one of the harder defensive units to break down all season.
But it was the midfield that Koeman had been watching most carefully on the preparation tapes.
Mikel Merino, the box-to-box engine, who covered ground and won physical duels and had the specific quality of a midfielder who made himself available in every phase of the game. Zubimendi, the deep controller, whose positional intelligence was among the best in the league and who read the game from a position that made it seem like he was barely moving while the play organised itself around him. And David Silva.
David Silva. Thirty-five years old. Operating in a free role in that midfield that let him be everywhere the moment required him and nowhere the pressing could find him. One of the finest midfielders of his generation, not at the peak of what he had been, but still carrying enough of it in his body that on a good day, in a home match, with the crowd behind him, he was the most dangerous player on the pitch.
Their attack was not decoration either. Portu on the right. Oyarzabal on the left, the club captain whose leadership was as important as his goals. And the central striker Alexander Isak, twenty-one years old, Swedish, six foot four, quick enough to be a wide player and sharp enough to be a target man, the striker that European scouts were already calling the new Ibrahimović and whose name had been appearing in Premier League speculation for the past two months. A player who could run in behind Piqué and Araujo's line with a stride length that made the distance look shorter than it was.
Alguacil had named his strongest lineup too.
He had no reason not to. Barcelona were Real Sociedad's biggest game remaining. A result here, a point or three against the team chasing the title, would be its own kind of statement. And the four-point gap above Sevilla in the Champions League places meant Real Sociedad had their own pressure running underneath the match. They were not here to play for a draw.
Both teams at full strength. Both teams needing the win for different reasons.
At the Camp Nou, the crowd was already in its pre-match register.
The stands were loud it was obvious i mean it's the Camp Nou especially now a high-stakes home game, The last home game of the season. Not the roar of a goal. The sustained, building hum of eighty thousand people who had been in their seats for long enough that the noise had become collective. The wall of it audible even from the tunnel.
In the stands above the players' entrance, Oriol Cerdà was already on his feet.
Mateo's uncle. Beside him in the row was Aina, his daughter, and beside Aina was Olivia. A few seats along, Isabella. And beside Isabella, David King, who was at his first professional match of his son's career.
Nora was still back home taking care of his mother, Grandma Nuria. She had called. She had told him to take photos.
He was already taking photos.
He was always going to take pictures.
The noise of the Camp Nou, the specific physical sensation of over eighty thousand voices finding a common frequency in an enclosed stadium screaming his son name, was something David King had not experienced before. He had watched his son play in the Etihad semi-final from a screen behind the bar at King's Palace, the customers cheering around him while he stood at the end of the counter not able to say anything, just watching. He had watched the intra-high match from the academy ground with a seat and a view and the relatively contained noise of a few thousand people.
This was different.
This was the Camp Nou.
Aina was clapping, her hands above her head, the stadium energy having done what stadium energy did to people who had not spent much time inside it. She was laughing at something. The sheer volume of the place. The flags. The constant movement in the stands around her. She turned to look at Olivia.
Olivia was doing the full thing. Both hands up. Wooing. Her mouth open in a sound that the stadium was swallowing entirely. She was laughing and cheering and looking around at the scale of it with the expression of a girl who had been to concerts and performances and crowds of various kinds but had not been to this kind of crowd before, the specific crowd of a football stadium where everyone around her already knew every word of every chant.
Aina smiled.
She had been thinking about her situation for a while now.
Aina had never planned to be in Spain for more than a month. She had a goal, the same goal she had been working toward since she was a child, the one that required her to be in the United States, at MIT, in the environment where the work could actually be done even if she hadn't gotten a letter from them. Her father had tried to convince her to stay longer. She had refused. She had been sure.
She was still sure, she told herself. The cute boy who made her smile harder than she was used to smiling was not a reason to reconsider a goal she had spent years building toward. What would be, would be. Her grandfather had said that. She had always believed it.
What made her perplex was something else.
Aina planned everything a very big irony to the word she just remembered her grandfather use to say. It was, if she was being honest, one of her more obvious qualities. She planned her reading lists. She planned her research timelines. She planned her social calendar in the same Google Calendar where she tracked her academic deadlines. Her trip back to Spain had been no different. She had planned the visit to her maternal grandparents in the city. She had planned the afternoon with childhood friends whom she had not seen since she left for America. She had planned the day she would spend at her father's farm, just sitting in the back room the way she used to sit as a child as she laughed with him and handed him cold lemonade she always charged him for. She had planned the meal at her grandmother's house with the whole family.
She had done all of those things. Every planned item had been completed they were the problem.
It was the unplanned items that had her stumped.
Spending a night on a balcony in Barcelona eating soup and watching YouTube videos and laughing with her cousin and his friends had not been in the plan. Staying in her cousin's apartment had not been in the plan. Standing in the Camp Nou in a Barcelona jersey with over eighty thousand people chanting around her and her American friend losing her mind in the seat next to her was absolutely not in the plan.
She was here anyway.
Her eyes drifted from Olivia, from the stands, from the noise, back down to the pitch.
The players were lining up on the field. The two squads taking their pre-match positions, the small organised ritual of warm-up and spacing and standing in formation before the referee called them to the centre.
Her eyes crossed the pitch.
And found Pedri.
He was in the midfield position. He was looking up at the stands. His eyes moved through the rows and then, for a reason she could not explain and did not need to, they found her.
He flashed her a smile.
Aina froze for a half-second.
There was a quality to his eyes at this distance, even at this distance, that she registered in the small clear way you registered things about people whose expressions you had been paying attention to without fully deciding to. The joy in them. The specific kind of joy that was not about the match, not about the crowd, not about the Camp Nou, that was directed across forty rows of seats at one specific person.
She waved.
Small. One hand. The kind of wave that was not quite sure how big it wanted to be.
His smile got deeper.
What was I saying.
With her thoughts or rather lack of sorted, the players on the pitch finally finished everything, Barcelona were going to start the kick-off, everyone had started getting to their positions.
On the pitch, the lineup had finished settling into position.
The players were in their places. The referee was conducting his final pre-match routine. The Camp Nou was at the specific pitch it reached in the thirty seconds before a home kickoff, the noise coiling.
Mateo walked to the centre circle.
He looked up.
He found his parents.
His mother was already waving. Both hands. Up and down, with the full-body enthusiasm of a woman who had been waiting to do this in person for the better part of a season and was not going to contain it now that she was finally here. His father was beside her, smiling, the same smile he had been wearing at the intra-high match, the open unembarrassed smile of a man who had decided he was not going to pretend he was not extremely proud of his son.
Mateo smiled back at them.
He kept looking. Past his uncle. Past Aina. His eyes settled on Olivia, who was already looking at him, as if she had been watching for him to come to the centre circle and had been waiting.
Her smile was large. Full. The one he had told her he had been looking for.
He looked at her for a second.
Then the referee's voice cut across.
"Ready? You ready?"
Mateo turned. The referee was looking at him. Standing a few yards away. His hand raised toward the centre.
"Ready?"
Mateo nodded.
The referee looked at the Real Sociedad players positioned across from him. Merino. Zubimendi. Isak taking the kickoff position. The referee completed his scan of the field. He raised the whistle.
Lock in. Forget everything. Just the pitch.
Mateo bounced lightly on the balls of his feet. He shook his hands out. He lowered his eyes to the centre of the pitch, to the ball sitting at the midfield line, and he breathed out and he was present and he was ready.
The referee looked around one final time.
"Okay. Okay."
He lifted the whistle.
"PIIIIIIIIIIP!"
The whistle blew.
Mateo turned fast and passed the ball back.
Matchday 36. Barcelona versus Real Sociedad at the Camp Nou had started.
A/N
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