A/N
I was going to post this chapter later today, but I genuinely couldn't wait because I am honestly baffled. Truly baffled.
Against PSG, the only reason Barcelona are even here is Mateo. He was the one who stood out and scored, helping stage the comeback that got them through.
Against Bayern, Mateo was the one who stood out again. He scored the last-minute winner.
Against City, it was still Mateo who staged the comeback. He assisted Piqué twice and then scored himself.
Against Real Madrid, he scored from outside the box and then completely dominated the game.
Against Atlético Madrid, he was still the one who made the last-minute defensive play that took Suárez out of the game.
Now Messi scores a last-minute equalizer for the first time, literally the first time someone other than Mateo has scored a goal this important during this Champions League run, and suddenly there is this massive meltdown about Mateo being Messi's second fiddle and needing Messi to bail him out.
I'm sorry, but what?
Mateo has literally been Barcelona's best player in almost every major game they have played since he arrived.
So I genuinely don't understand where the idea that I have spent this entire story making Mateo look like Messi's sidekick is coming from. Obviously off the pitch he defers to Messi but that's normal, on the pitch though Mateo has been by far the standout, I mean you literally have Barcelona fans screaming his name in a pitch where Messi is there (no other player received that during Messi time not even Neymar )
If you are expecting Mateo to score every game or be the hero every single time something important happens, then please stop reading the story now, because that is not how I am going to write this.
Football is a team sport.
Sometimes one player is the difference. Sometimes another player is. Sometimes a defender makes the decisive play. Sometimes the goalkeeper does. Sometimes the player who has carried you through several games is not the one who scores the next important goal. Even in a single match there could be more than one hero of the match.
That does not suddenly erase everything that player has done before.
And what is genuinely funny to me is that since I started this story, no player has stood out more consistently than Mateo.
Nobody.
He has been THE biggest reasons Barcelona have won the league and are even in a position to win the Champions League. Koeman says it. The press says it. Messi himself says it. The story has repeatedly shown it.
So Messi scoring one important last-minute goal does not change the fact that Mateo has been more impactful during this Champions League run.
That is why the whole "Messi bailed Mateo out" argument genuinely frustrates me.
Bailed him out from what?
Mateo is the reason they got this far in the first place.
Without Mateo, they don't even reach this stage.
PSG? Mateo was instrumental.
Bayern? Mateo was instrumental.
City? Mateo was instrumental.
Real Madrid? Mateo was instrumental.
Atlético? Mateo was instrumental.
And now Messi scores an equalizer and suddenly Mateo is apparently a bum who needs Messi to save him.
I genuinely don't understand that logic.
This is a football team. Messi is allowed to have a massive moment without it automatically becoming an indictment of Mateo.
Mateo does not become less important because another player did something important.
And that brings me to the whole "cheats" argument.
I have mentioned this before, but apparently I need to explain it again.
Having different elite abilities does not mean Mateo Is suddenly the greatest ever.
Yes, Mateo is busted. Of course he is. I have never denied that.
He has Neymar's dribbling.
He has Rivaldo's shooting.
He has De Bruyne's passing.
He has elite speed.
His technical ability is already ridiculous.
But there are still arguments to be made within those abilities. You can still argue Messi's dribbling is better than Neymar's. You can still argue Messi's shooting is better than Rivaldo's. You can still argue Messi's passing is better than De Bruyne's.
Mateo is ridiculously overpowered, but that does not mean I need to keep adding another cheat every time somebody says he hasn't gotten one recently.
What exactly am I supposed to give him at this point?
What passing ability am I supposed to give him that would somehow pass De Bruyne?
What shooting ability am I supposed to give him that would be beyond Rivaldo?
What dribbling ability am I supposed to give him that would be beyond Neymar?
What speed am I supposed to give him when he already has elite speed?Or you want him to be faster than Usain bolt ?
At some point, it stops being progression and starts becoming pointless power inflation.
I've already made almost every aspect of Mateo's football ability absurdly good.
What Mateo needs now is time.
He needs to grow into the abilities he already has.
He needs to learn when to be flashy and when to be efficient.
He needs to learn how to use his abilities against different opponents and different systems.
And most importantly, he needs experience.
This is Mateo's first season as a professional footballer.
He is 17 years old.
I have emphasized this more times than I can remember.
His Cruyff understanding of the game is not the same thing as experience.
Understanding football does not magically give a 17-year-old years of professional experience.
He can understand what he should do and still not have the experience to execute that decision perfectly every single time.
That is why you will see older players talking to him.
That is why you will see him learning from people.
That is why sometimes another player can help him.
That does not make him a bum.
It means he is 17 and playing his first professional season.
And then there is the Pedri and Aina complaint.
I genuinely don't understand this one either.
Someone complained about Pedri and Aina dating because apparently showing them together for a single chapter somehow means Mateo is no longer the sole focus of the story.
A single chapter.
Seriously?
Does every relationship in this story have to revolve around Mateo?
Does every character interaction have to somehow involve Mateo?
Does every chapter have to make Mateo the centre of everything that happens?
Because if that is what some of you are asking for, then the story would become incredibly one-dimensional and repetitive.
Mateo is the main character.
That does not mean the other ten players on the pitch suddenly stop mattering.
It does not mean every other character needs to exist purely to talk about Mateo.
It does not mean every relationship has to somehow connect back to Mateo.
Other characters are allowed to have their own lives.
Other players are allowed to have their own moments.
Other relationships are allowed to develop.
That is how an actual team and an actual world are supposed to feel.
And honestly, that is the part of this criticism that I find the strangest.
You are complaining that everything doesn't revolve around one person, while also complaining that the other characters don't matter.
Those two things cannot both be what you want.
If Mateo scores, assists or decides everything every time, then the story becomes repetitive.
If another player has an important moment, then suddenly Mateo is being undermined.
So what exactly am I supposed to do?
Make Mateo the only player on the pitch?
And the same applies to the Messi situation.
Messi scoring an important goal does not mean Mateo has suddenly become irrelevant.
It means Messi scored an important goal.
That's it.
I genuinely understand criticism. I really do.
If I write something badly, point it out. If there is something about Mateo's development that genuinely hasn't been handled properly, I am more than willing to listen and correct it.
But I cannot pretend that this particular criticism makes sense to me when the argument seems to be based almost entirely on the fact that Messi scored one important goal.
Because apparently after 198 chapters of Mateo consistently being one of the most important players in the story, one last-minute Messi equalizer is enough to suddenly rewrite all of that.
I genuinely don't know what else you want me to do.
Mateo has been the main reason Barcelona have gotten this far.
He has carried major games.
He has scored important goals.
He has assisted important goals.
He has made decisive plays.
He has been praised by Koeman.
He has been praised by the press.
He has been praised by Messi.
The story has never hidden his importance.
But if your definition of Mateo being the main character is that he has to score every important goal, then yes, we are going to disagree, because I am never going to write football that way.
The only criticism from the last chapter that I genuinely feel deserves a proper answer is the question about his system and why it didn't appear before the game especially with it being a final.
And yes, there is a reason.
I have been phasing the system out a little.
Not because I forgot about it.
Not because Mateo doesn't have it anymore.
But because I have already improved almost every aspect of Mateo's game to the point where constantly giving him another ridiculous footballing upgrade would be overkill.
His dribbling is already elite.
His passing is already elite.
His shooting is already elite.
His speed is already elite.
His technical ability is already elite.
So what exactly am I supposed to keep giving him?
At this point, the more interesting development is seeing him learn how to actually use everything he already has.
When should he be flashy?
When should he be efficient?
When should he take a risk?
When should he pass?
When should he trust his teammates?
When should he take responsibility himself?
How does he deal with an opponent who specifically builds a game plan around stopping him?
Those things are growth too.
I don't want Mateo to become a character who gets a new cheat, uses it once, dominates everybody, gets another cheat, dominates everybody again, and repeats that for hundreds of chapters.
That would get boring very quickly.
So yes, I am genuinely frustrated by some of these comments.
I understand being emotional about the story. I understand wanting Mateo to have his moment. I understand wanting your favourite character to dominate.
But calling him a bum because Messi scored a last-minute equalizer after Mateo has been THE biggest reasons Barcelona even reached this stage is something I genuinely cannot understand.
This is Mateo's first season.
He is 17.
He is not supposed to personally score every important goal Barcelona ever scores.
I will repeat this one last time.
If you want Mateo to score every game, score every important goal, assist everything, solve every problem and be the only character who matters in every chapter, then this is simply not the book for you.
Mateo is the main character.
He is not the only character.
And Messi having one massive moment does not change that.
Enjoy the chapter,
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...
"GOOOOAAAALLLLLL! GOALLLLL! GOOOOOAAAALLLL!"
In the family area everything had gone completely insane.
Antonella was jumping. Antonella Roccuzzo, who had sat with her hands folded in her lap for eighty minutes and stopped smiling with ten to go, was up out of her seat with both fists in the air and jumping like a teenager.
The kids had lost their minds entirely, all of them, running, screaming, climbing on seats.
David and Isabella were locked together, her face in his shoulder, his arms wrapped all the way round her.
Oriol had grabbed Nora by both arms and was shaking her, and then he turned and grabbed grandma Núria and shook her too, and the old woman was laughing and shouting and hitting him on the arm at the same time.
"THEY DID IT! THEY DID IT! THEY DID IT!"
Aina had both hands on Olivia's shoulders and was screaming directly into her face.
"THEY DID IT! OLIVIA! THEY DID IT!"
And Olivia had both hands pressed over her own mouth.
She was not screaming.
She was just staring at the pitch, at eleven men piled on top of one small man in the corner, and her eyes were enormous and full and she could not seem to make her hands come down.
"They did," she said, very softly, into her own palms.
In the CBS studio, Micah Richards was on his feet.
He had not stood up. He had simply arrived there.
"OHHHHH! WHAT A GOAL! WHAT A GOAL! WOW! WOOOOW!"
Jamie Carragher had both hands on top of his own head and his mouth open.
"No way." He was shaking his head at the monitor. "No way. No way they have just done that."
And Thierry Henry was not saying anything at all.
He was sitting back in his chair with both hands out slightly, and he was laughing. Just laughing, helplessly, the way you laugh when something happens that your brain has not caught up with yet.
"HAHAHA."
He turned to Kate.
Kate looked back at him.
And the two of them just looked at each other for a second, both completely stunned, and both of them started laughing again.
"HAHAHA."
Neither of them said one word.
And everywhere, everywhere on this earth that there were Barcelona supporters, the same thing was happening.
Barcelona. La Masia.
The whole building went off.
Boys came off sofas and out of chairs and up off the floor in every common room in that residence at exactly the same second, and the noise came down every corridor at once.
Lamine Yamal, thirteen years old, was jumping on a couch with both arms above his head.
"GOOOOAAAAALLLL! GOAL! GOAL!"
Down the hall, Alejandro, who had supervised these boys for years, who was supposed to be the responsible adult in a building full of children, had completely abandoned any pretence of it.
He was in the middle of a room full of teenagers with both fists clenched and every muscle in his neck standing out.
"GOOOOAAAALLLL!"
He flexed, both arms down, face contorted, screaming with the kids.
"COME ONNNNN!"
And in Mateo's old room, four boys had lost their minds completely.
Gavi was on the bed. Balde had grabbed Casadó by the shirt and was shaking him so hard the boy's head was going. Fermín had both hands in his own hair and was screaming at the ceiling.
"MESSSSIIIII!"
"NO WAY! NO WAY! NO WAAAY!"
"DID YOU SEE IT? DID YOU SEE IT?"
Gavi jumped off the bed straight into the middle of them and all four of them went over into a heap on the floor, and none of them stopped shouting for about twenty seconds.
A small restaurant, somewhere in Barcelona.
The place was empty except for two people and one television.
"AHHHHHHH!"
Manuela did not so much stand up as launch herself, and she went straight into her husband, both arms around his neck, shrieking.
Francisco caught her.
He was smiling, the whole way, and he had not taken his eyes off that screen for a single second.
He held his wife with one arm.
And with the other one he made a fist, and pumped it, once, hard.
"Come on. GET IN."
Somewhere with a phone on a stack of books.
ishdafish5 had gone down onto his knees in front of the television.
He was rubbing both hands together in front of his own face, over and over, rocking slightly, and his voice was completely destroyed.
"Oh, thank you, Lord. Oh, thank you, Lord. Oh, thank you, LORD."
And then he lay down.
Flat on his back on his own bedroom floor, arms out, staring at the ceiling, and he started singing.
"Messiii. Messiii. Messiiii."
Eleven thousand people watched him do it.
And in the away end at the Estádio do Dragão.
"NO! NO, NO, NO!"
Three of the four had both hands on their heads.
And the fourth one, the one who had bet his tuition, was not saying anything at all.
He was just standing there. Completely still, in the middle of twenty thousand people, looking at the pitch with absolutely nothing on his face.
He was not breathing properly. He was not making any expression at all.
He was just blank.
And beside him, Amos was screaming.
"FUCK! DID YOU SEE THAT GOAL? DID YOU SEE IT? WOW!"
He turned around, genuinely delighted, and grabbed the nearest friend by the arm.
"Did you guys see that? It looked EXACTLY like that late Madrid winner. Exactly the same. That is insane, man. That is insane."
His friend turned and looked at him.
"Dude." His face was completely dead. "The fuck."
Amos shrugged.
"Well." He spread his hands. "I did tell you."
"TOLD US WHAT?"
The friend threw a hand at the pitch.
"Barcelona have just destroyed everything! The game is going to end in a draw now! A DRAW! NOBODY has won!"
Amos's eyes widened.
His mouth opened slightly.
"Oh," he said.
And beside them, the one who had bet his school fees kept staring at the pitch and did not move.
High up in the stadium, in the VIP boxes.
"GOOOOAAAALLLL!"
Joan Laporta had both fists shaking above his head.
The Barcelona board were on their feet all round him, applauding, shaking hands, several of them laughing, one of them with both hands flat on top of the glass.
And Laporta was gone. Completely gone. He was shaking his whole body, arms going, absolutely radiating, the president of a football club with about four hundred million euros of debt watching his team level a Champions League final in the ninety-sixth minute.
He turned.
And he grabbed the hand of the man next to him and shook it enthusiastically.
"YES! YES!"
Aleksander Čeferin let his hand be shaken. His face did not move.
And two seats along, Roman Abramovich watched Joan Laporta celebrate with an expression that could have frozen the glass.
Laporta did not notice either of them.
He turned back to the pitch and pumped both fists again.
"YES! YES!"
Back on the field.
Lionel Messi was still standing in the middle of it.
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
The chant had not stopped. It had spread out of the Barcelona end and across whole sections of neutrals, and it was coming down out of that stadium in one continuous wall, and his own teammates were still doing it around him.
The only people in the Estádio do Dragão not making a sound were in blue.
Twenty thousand of them.
And you could see all of it in their faces.
Some had both hands on their heads and were just staring, not blinking, mouths slightly open. Some were shouting, abuse at the pitch, at the referee, at nobody at all, needing somewhere to put it. Some had turned away entirely. A few were trying to start a song, and it was not going anywhere, and the ones next to them were not joining in.
A man in a Chelsea shirt sat down in his seat, in the middle of a standing crowd, and put both hands over his face.
Two rows down, a girl was crying.
Whatever any of them were doing, whatever it looked like from the outside, they all had exactly the same thing inside them.
Because at the end of it, after watching their football club stand thirty seconds away from being champions of Europe, there was only one thing left.
Disbelief.
How did that happen?
How did we let that happen?
We were there. We were THERE.
And however each of them expressed it, whether they shouted it or swallowed it or sat down and covered their face with their hands, that disbelief turned into the same thing within about ninety seconds.
Despair.
The supporters were the ones it hit hardest. It always is. Because the players have another forty-five minutes to do something about it, and the fans have nothing at all to do but stand there and feel it.
And the Chelsea players were not much better.
Édouard Mendy was flat on the pitch.
Face down, arms up over his own head, not moving. He had not got up after he hit the ground and nobody had made him.
Most of the rest of them were sitting. Just sitting, on the grass, all over their own half, hands on knees or hands on faces, staring at nothing.
Thiago Silva was standing with both hands on his hips, looking at the goal, and had not moved in about a minute.
Somebody was shouting at somebody else near the penalty area, an argument that was not going to help anybody.
And Antonio Rüdiger had sat straight down on the turf with his legs out in front of him.
He had both hands over his own mouth.
He sat there like that, and after a while he looked across the pitch at the Barcelona players, still celebrating, still going, and he watched them for a few seconds.
Then he took a huge breath in through his nose and let it out.
And he looked up at the sky.
No.
While all of that was going on, Thomas Tuchel was somewhere else entirely.
The instant that ball had crossed the line, something in him had simply switched off.
He had not shouted. He could not have. His arms had gone out at his sides and stayed there, and the last thing he actually remembered was the sound. That enormous, tearing, world-ending noise that had come down out of the Estádio do Dragão and gone straight through the middle of him.
After that, nothing.
He was standing at the edge of his technical area with his arms half out and his eyes on a pitch he was not really looking at.
And inside his head it was chaos.
How? HOW? Are you serious? How could you? Why? Why did nobody go with him? Why was nobody on the runner? WHY?
Thirty seconds. THIRTY SECONDS.
And then, without deciding to, it turned.
If Timo scores that.
If he scores that one, this does not happen. It is over. It is two nil and we are lifting it and none of this happens.
And then it turned again, and this one was worse, because this one came for him.
Why did I take Silva's cover away? Why did I put Christensen in there? Look at the space. LOOK at the space he was standing in, twenty-two yards, nobody within four feet of him, what was I THINKING?
I did this.
His mind was everywhere at once, spinning through anger and blame and self-loathing in about four seconds and then going round the whole loop again.
He just stood there.
Thomas Tuchel had been a football coach for a long time.
And this was the worst he had ever felt in his entire career.
And he had not even lost yet.
Because that was the thing. Even now, even after all of it, the score was one-one. There was extra time coming. It was still, by any logical measure, anybody's football match, and every single person in that stadium with any understanding of the game knew it.
But football has never once been about logic.
Because to anybody watching, with or without any knowledge of the sport at all, the fact remained exactly the same.
Chelsea Football Club had been one minute away from being champions of Europe.
The UEFA officials in the tunnel had already been getting ready. Somewhere in that building there were men holding ribbons in the wrong colours. Somebody was probably already writing the name.
And it had been taken back out of their hands with the last kick of the match.
There is no way to spin that. There is no version of that which is anything other than pain. You cannot tell a group of men that a thing which was already theirs, already in their hands, already finished, is fine because there is more football to play.
And Tuchel could not get himself right.
The dark thoughts had got into him so deeply and so fast that he could not see through them, and it was unbearable, and he wanted to stand in this exact spot and let it drown him.
But he still had to bear it.
Because Thomas Tuchel was the head coach of Chelsea Football Club.
That was the job. He was responsible for all of it. For the men sitting on that grass with their faces in their hands. For the goalkeeper lying flat on his own six-yard box. For eleven exhausted human beings who had just had a Champions League taken off them in the last thirty seconds of a football match.
They needed somebody.
They needed somebody to walk out there and put their heads back together, right now, in the next four minutes, before extra time started.
And it did not matter one bit that his own head was in pieces.
It did not matter that he wanted, more than he had wanted anything in a very long time, to sit down on the grass with them and feel it.
He was not allowed.
His job would not let him.
Tuchel looked at the pitch.
He looked at his own players sitting all over it.
And he pushed himself off the edge of the technical area and started walking toward them, and his assistants came flooding in around him from every side, all of them talking at once.
He was going to do everything he had.
Every single thing.
To make sure that goal was a setback on the way to a trophy, and not the beginning of the end.
But he could feel it in his chest as he walked, sitting there underneath everything, refusing to move.
Despair.
He was carrying it out onto the pitch with him.
...
"HAHAHA! GOD, I CANNOT BELIEVE WE JUST DID THAT!"
"AHHAHAHA!"
"DUDEEEE!"
For the Barcelona players it was the exact opposite of everything happening in blue.
And it could not be explained. Not properly. Not by anybody in that pile.
Because there is a specific feeling that comes with equalising in the ninety-sixth minute of a Champions League final, thirty seconds from losing it, and it is not the same feeling as winning. Winning is different. Winning is relief and release and a trophy in your hands.
This was something else entirely.
Every single man in that pile was the happiest he had been all year, and possibly the happiest he had ever been on a football pitch, and there was nothing above this. There was no higher place to go from here.
Coming back in a Champions League final with one minute left.
Nothing on this earth beats that.
"Okay. Okay, guys."
Koeman was pulling at the edges of the pile, laughing, both hands going in and grabbing shirts.
"Come on, get up. Get UP. Do not injure yourselves. HAHAHA. Do not injure yourselves now, please."
He was smiling with his whole face.
And as they started coming apart, as men climbed off each other and got up off the grass still shouting, Ronald Koeman looked at them.
And something moved in his eyes.
They had gone shiny at the edges.
He looked down at his own hand.
There were four small red marks pressed into his palm, deep ones, from where his own fingernails had been.
Because Koeman would not have lied to you if you had asked him.
He had given up.
Somewhere around the ninetieth minute, standing on that touchline with a ruined voice and a one-goal deficit and a wall of eleven blue shirts in front of him, Ronald Koeman had accepted that his team had lost a Champions League final.
He had.
And they had not.
He had given up, and eleven men in his shirt had not, and they had gone out and done it anyway.
He shook his head at the grass and laughed, once, to himself.
The bench had emptied into the pile too.
Dembélé was in the middle of it in his bib, screaming, hanging off somebody's shoulders.
And Mateo came out the side of it on his hands and knees, laughing, and Pedri grabbed his forearm and hauled him the rest of the way up.
"Hey. HEY."
The two of them were both grinning like idiots.
"I cannot believe." Pedri was shaking his head. "I cannot."
He did not finish it.
He did not have to.
Mateo turned round.
He looked at the rest of them, still gathered around Messi, still shouting, still touching him.
He looked at the Barcelona end, which had not stopped for two minutes, thirty thousand people jumping and screaming and holding each other, scarves going round above heads.
He looked at the whole thing.
And Mateo King could not believe it either.
Because the last few minutes of that match had been dark for him.
Not the last few. From the eightieth minute onward.
The amount of black that had got into his head in those sixteen minutes had been genuinely incredible. It had come in slowly and then all at once, and it had not stopped, and it had got worse every single time the clock moved.
I have to do something.
We cannot lose this. We cannot.
If I can just get one. If I can just.
Come on. COME ON.
We are losing this.
We are actually losing this.
And standing here now, on the grass in the ninety-seventh minute with the scoreline level, all of it came back through him at once. Every single one of those thoughts, arriving together, and underneath them the frustration of ninety-six minutes of hitting a wall, and on top of all of it the enormous, unbearable, screaming relief of not having lost.
He looked around the stadium.
At the fans. At the field. At his own teammates.
And it came out of him.
"AHHHHHHHHHH!"
He flexed, both fists down at his sides, every muscle in his neck and shoulders standing out, and screamed it into the air with everything he had.
Because if the shout before kick-off had been to let the nerves out of his body.
This one was something else entirely.
"Boys. BOYS."
Koeman had them in around him now, all of them, the bench players too.
"Listen to me. LISTEN."
They came in.
"We still have to do this."
He looked around them.
"We have done the hard part. The hard part is done. That was the hard part, right there, and you have done it, and it is behind you now."
He pointed at the pitch.
"But we are not finished. We are not finished, and I am telling you right now, do not you dare waste this. Do not you DARE."
His ruined voice cracked and came up anyway.
"Look at what just happened. LOOK at it. Ninety-sixth minute. God himself wants us to win this football match."
Somebody laughed.
"I mean it! He does! Thirty seconds left and He gives us that? He wants this! So go out there and TAKE IT."
He put a hand into the middle.
"Let's do this. Visca Barça."
"VISCA BARÇA!"
And the whole group came apart shouting, chests banging into chests, hands slapping shoulders and heads and backs, men shoving each other and roaring.
"What can I say, Peter. What can I even say."
"Who could have predicted that? WHO? Who among us, five minutes ago, would have told you that this is where we would be right now?"
"The ninety-sixth minute of a Champions League final."
"And I am going to say something, and I am going to say it selfishly. We are blessed. We are blessed to be about to receive another thirty minutes of this."
"Do not let the Chelsea supporters hear you say that."
"HAHAHA. No. No, perhaps not."
Drury's voice came down.
"Because you do have to feel for them. Genuinely. Fifty minutes in front. Fifty minutes of standing in front of the greatest attacking side in Europe and refusing to let them through. One hand on that trophy. Both hands on that trophy."
"And in the last minute, from absolutely nowhere."
"All by the courtesy of one man."
A pause.
And Drury smiled as he said it.
"Lionel Messi. The greatest player who has ever lived."
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
They were still doing it.
"You are insane, man."
"Great job. GREAT job."
"Insane. Absolutely insane."
They were all over him as they walked back toward the halfway line, hands coming in from every side, somebody rubbing the top of his head, somebody else pushing his shoulder, all of them talking at once.
Messi was in the middle of it laughing.
Piqué came past and clapped his back twice.
Busquets got both arms round him properly and held on for a second.
"Great job."
Alba was laughing at him.
"I never doubted you. Not once. Never. Insane stuff, man. INSANE."
Messi just smiled back at him.
Koeman got a hand on his shoulder as he went past.
"Great job, captain."
Messi smiled at him too.
Dembélé, in his bib, tapped him on the chest on the way past. Pedri did not say anything at all, just shook his head at him, grinning.
And then Mateo arrived.
He did not congratulate him. He did not say great goal, or insane, or any of the things everybody else had said.
He just looked at him.
"Thank you."
Messi's smile changed.
It got smaller and it got warmer, and he looked at this boy for a second.
"Come on." He tipped his head at the pitch. "Let us go and win this thing."
Mateo pumped both fists.
"LET'S GO!"
"VAMOS!"
"VISCA BARÇA!"
"COME ON!"
And then the rest of them moved away, and for a moment Lionel Messi was standing on his own.
He turned around.
And he faced the Barcelona end.
Thirty thousand people were still going. Still chanting. Still jumping. An entire end of a stadium in Portugal that had come here on planes and buses and in cars from every corner of the world, that had stood in silence for ninety-six minutes watching their football club lose.
And they were screaming his name.
His chest was still going. His heart had not come down at all. His head was completely erratic, thoughts arriving and leaving without any order at all.
We are still in it.
Thirty minutes.
Three years. I said it three years ago.
Not yet. Not yet, it is not done, do not think about it yet.
We are still in it.
And underneath all of it, that thing sitting in his chest, huge and warm and impossible to describe.
He lifted both arms.
And he waved to them.
And the noise that came back down out of that end at him was the loudest thing that had happened in that stadium all night.
Then Lionel Messi brought his hands together.
And he did it.
The one he has done since he was seventeen years old. Both index fingers, pointed straight up at the sky, both arms extended, head tilted back, looking up past the roof of the Estádio do Dragão at something a very long way past it.
At a woman who had fought for him. Who had argued with coaches and clubs and his own parents about a boy who was too small. Who had never once said might.
Who had died when he was ten.
And who he had told a seventeen-year-old boy about on a balcony in this city two nights ago.
And Lionel Messi said one thing, up at the sky, and nobody in that stadium heard it.
The exact same thing he had just been told.
"Thank you."
"And the referee has finally managed to get everybody calm again. The players are coming back. We are going to finish this football match."
"And look at this. Look at the Chelsea shape."
"Christian Pulisic is going to take the kick-off. Pulisic, up front, on his own."
"And you just know, Jim. You just know that Thomas Tuchel never once thought it would come to this."
"He did not. Because look at what those substitutions were for. Havertz off, Mount off, Werner off. Christensen on, Kovačić on, Pulisic on. That is a manager shutting a door. That is a manager saying we have what we need, now get me more bodies in front of it."
"And ten minutes ago that looked brilliant. It looked like the smartest set of changes anybody had made all night."
"And now?"
"And now he has taken off three of his four attacking players, and he is going into thirty minutes of extra time with one forward on the pitch and no substitutions left except the extra one."
"It looks hasty now."
"It looks very hasty now."
"Ready? Are we ready?"
The referee was turning in the circle, arms out.
"YES! LET'S GO!" Pedri was bouncing on his toes, absolutely wired. "LET'S DO THIS! COME ON!"
Mateo looked over at him and started laughing.
All around them the Barcelona players were up, moving, talking, clapping.
And on the other side of the halfway line, not one Chelsea player said anything at all.
They stood in their positions with their heads mostly down. Nobody was organising. Nobody was shouting. Rüdiger was looking at the grass.
And on the touchline, Tuchel was clapping, both hands going, trying.
"One minute! ONE MINUTE, BOYS! Ride this out! Just ride this one out to the whistle and we reset! That is all! ONE MINUTE!"
"And we are underway again."
"Chelsea taking it, and they are just going to keep it. Pulisic rolls it to Kovačić."
"Kovačić back to Jorginho."
"Jorginho, out to the left, Chilwell."
"And Chilwell has time here. Chilwell turns, comes forward, and looks for Kanté in the middle—"
And the whole place went up.
"MATEO! MATEO KING! HE HAS INTERCEPTED IT!"
He had come from nowhere.
He had read Chilwell's body from twenty yards and gone at the pass at a dead sprint, and he got his boot in front of it and it was his, and he did not even take a settling touch.
He looked up once.
And he hit it.
A long, driven, first-time ball down the middle of the pitch, over the top of a Chelsea defence that had every single man in the wrong place because they had all just gone forward for the first time in an hour.
"HE HAS DROPPED A LONG BALL TO GRIEZMANN! GRIEZMANN IS RUNNING! GRIEZMANN IS THROUGH—"
Antoine Griezmann took it in stride.
He had come off the bench eight minutes ago. His legs were fresh. There was nobody within six yards of him and Mendy was already coming out.
"HE SHOOTS IT—"
"OOOOOHHHH!"
"OHHHH! IT GOES WIDE! IT GOES WIDE!"
"HAHAHA! WHAT? WHAT IS THIS FOOTBALL MATCH?"
"That could have ENDED it! Right there! Barcelona could have finished this football match with the very last kick, no extra time, no anything, from one goal down to winners in ninety seconds!"
"They are not letting up. Look at them. They are not letting up for a SECOND."
"ARGHHHH!"
Mateo screamed it and kicked the grass, both hands going up onto his own head.
He was not the only one.
Ronald Koeman had come charging four yards out of his technical area with both arms already halfway up, and when that ball went past the post he went straight down onto one knee on the grass and stayed there.
And twenty yards along the touchline, Thomas Tuchel had not moved at all.
His hands were still up in front of his chest, mid-clap, exactly where they had been when he was shouting at his players.
They stayed there.
And what went through him was not frustration.
It was relief.
Enormous, sickening relief, washing all the way down through him, because if Antoine Griezmann had put that ball six inches to the left then it was over. It was finished. Chelsea Football Club would have lost a Champions League final in the ninety-eighth minute having led it for fifty-three of them.
He shook his head, hard, once.
He did not want to think about it.
Mendy took the goal kick.
He put the ball down, walked back, and hammered it as high and as far as he could.
Piqué won the header off Pulisic, cleanly, and the ball came back down into midfield.
And Barcelona started passing again.
Busquets, Pedri, De Jong, out to Roberto, back inside.
And now something had changed on the other side.
Because Chelsea were coming for it.
Whether it was the pure shock of that last thirty seconds, or the fact that they had just been six inches from losing the entire thing, something had woken those men up. They were pressing again. Kanté was closing. Kovačić was snapping into challenges. Pulisic was chasing back.
Mateo took it on the left, drove at Reece James, dropped his shoulder, and rolled it backwards instead of forcing it.
Messi got it.
He came inside off the right and went at the block, and for a second there was a gap, and then Chilwell got a foot across the front of him and knocked it away.
The ball spilled loose.
Jorginho hammered it forty yards up the pitch.
And the referee looked at his watch.
He lifted the whistle to his mouth.
FWEEEEEEP.
Full time.
"And that is the end of ninety minutes of the 2020/21 Champions League final."
"And what have we just watched, Peter?"
"I do not know, Jim. Honestly, I do not know. I have been doing this for a very long time and I am not sure I have seen a game of football quite like the one we have just been given."
"Barcelona had twenty-six shots."
"Twenty-six. They hit the woodwork twice. They had a penalty given and taken away. They forced Édouard Mendy into the best goalkeeping performance in a European final in a generation."
"And they were losing it for fifty-three minutes, all the way to the extra time of the second half."
"Because Timo Werner, in the forty-third, would not stop running. And what a night that man has had. What a cruel, extraordinary night. He scored the goal that should have won it and he missed the chance that would have."
"And then, in the ninety-sixth minute."
"In the ninety-sixth minute, Jordi Alba cut inside from the left."
Drury let it hang.
"And Lionel Messi was standing exactly where Lionel Messi has been standing for the last seventeen years."
"One. One."
"Nobody has won anything yet."
"Nobody has won anything at all. Two football clubs, ninety-six minutes, and the score is level and the trophy is still sitting there under a cloth. Incredible stuff tonight from both teams."
A beat.
"And now, ladies and gentlemen."
"Now we get thirty more minutes of this beautiful match."
...
Down by the touchline, the Chelsea players were sitting and kneeling in a loose semicircle on the grass.
Some had bottles. Two of them were flat on their backs having their legs stretched out by physios. Nobody was talking.
And Tuchel was in the middle of them.
"Listen to me. All of you, listen."
He crouched down so he was at their level.
"I am not changing anything."
He said it flatly.
"Nothing. Not the shape, not the plan, none of it. Because it has worked. It has worked for ninety-six minutes against the best attacking football team on this continent, and one goal in the last thirty seconds does not change a single thing about whether it works."
He looked round all of them.
"You are not to be scared. Do you hear me? Not one of you. You have not been out-played tonight. You have been out-lucked in the last minute of a football match and that is all that has happened."
A few heads came up.
"Now."
He stood up.
"Remember something, boys."
He waited until every single one of them was looking at him.
"We have taken the lead in this match before."
A pause.
"We can do it again."
Twenty-five yards away, Barcelona were in their own huddle, and Koeman was moving in the middle of it.
"I honestly do not know what to say to you here."
He laughed at himself, hands out.
"I do not. I had a whole thing and it has gone completely out of my head."
He looked round at them.
"What I do know is that you lot are beautiful."
Somebody laughed.
"No, I mean it. I mean it. You are. You know exactly what you are doing out there, every single one of you, and I have not had to tell you anything for about forty minutes."
His voice came down.
"But listen."
He pointed back over his shoulder at the pitch.
"What he just did for us. What that man just did in the ninety-sixth minute."
Every single head in that huddle turned and looked at Messi.
"You do not waste that. You do not."
Off to one side, a physio was working fast on Mateo's calves while Mateo drank from a bottle with his eyes shut, breathing through his nose.
"Thirty minutes." Koeman clapped his hands. "Thirty minutes and it is ours. Now let us go back out there and do our thing."
The huddle started to break.
And then Koeman turned.
"Mateo."
Everybody stopped and looked.
Mateo took the bottle away from his mouth and looked up.
Koeman was watching him. Watching the way he was breathing. The physio's hands still on his calves.
"You good?"
And Mateo smiled at him.
"Perfect, gaffer."
Koeman held his eyes for a second.
Then he smiled too.
"That is what I like to hear."
He turned back to the group and threw both arms up.
"YOU HEAR THAT, BOYS? PERFECT! HE IS PERFECT! LET'S GO! VISCA BARÇA!"
"VISCA BARÇA!"
Up in the family area, Olivia had turned in her seat.
"So they play extra time now."
Aina nodded, eyes still on the pitch.
"Two halves." Olivia was working it out with her hands. "But this time only fifteen minutes each?"
"Yeah. Fifteen and fifteen."
Olivia nodded slowly.
"And then. If it is still a draw after that."
She paused.
"Penalties, right?"
"Penalties," Aina said.
Olivia let out a long breath and turned back to look at the pitch.
"Then it is truly anybody's game."
"And we are back."
"Peter, I could not wait for this. I genuinely could not sit still through that break."
"Neither could I, Jim, and I have been doing this for thirty years."
"So. Both managers keeping faith. No changes at all from either of them going into this."
"None. Ronald Koeman still has three substitutions available to him, which is a very interesting hand to be holding. Thomas Tuchel has one."
"And Messi wins the toss again."
"He does. And this time he has switched it. Barcelona will attack the other way, and it will be Christian Pulisic to get us started."
"Thirty minutes."
"Thirty minutes to decide the champions of Europe."
FWEEEP.
The whistle went and the noise came straight back up out of that stadium.
The Barcelona end was still the loudest thing in Porto. They had been feeding off that goal for ten minutes and they had not come down at all, singing, jumping, whole blocks bouncing in time.
And the Chelsea end was not silent either.
Not fully back. Nowhere near. But there were pockets of it now, groups of a few hundred here and there, chanting names, starting songs that half-caught and rolled a little way before dying.
Because as long as there is still hope, supporters will sing.
But for the twenty-two men on that grass, and it is a harsh thing to say, all of it had become noise.
Every scream. Every chant. Every drum.
It was a distraction and nothing else.
Especially for Mateo King.
He was chasing.
The ball was moving across the back of the Chelsea defence and he was running at it, angling, closing, and he got within about a foot of Christensen's boot before it was gone again.
And his chest was heaving.
Properly heaving. His mouth was open and his breathing was coming in enormous ragged pulls, and his hands had gone onto his hips the second the ball went out of his range.
Mateo had put a lot of work into his stamina. A great deal of it. He had spent months on it and he had improved enormously and he could feel that improvement every week.
But there is a limit to everything, and he had reached his.
He was at his absolute end.
The only reason he had lasted this long at all was Chelsea. The way they had set up, sitting deep, refusing to come out, meant that for most of the first ninety minutes he had not been sprinting into space, because there had been no space to sprint into. He had spent that match walking into blocks and turning inside them, and that had cost him less than a normal ninety minutes would have.
And even so.
Even with all of that.
There was no Camp Nou tonight. There was no home ground and no home boost and nothing at all sitting underneath him.
He was empty.
And then the ball came loose and Mateo went again.
He came off the mark like something fired, chased Kovačić down, forced him wide and forced him backwards, and got close enough that the Croatian had to give it up entirely.
Pedri came in and took it.
"¡MATEO!"
And Pedri slid it straight into him.
Mateo turned into the middle of the pitch and went.
He came at Jorginho and dropped his shoulder and shifted it past him, one touch, gone, driving through the centre.
And instead of taking on the next one he swept it left.
Alba was already running.
Mateo did not stop. He kept going, straight up the middle at full speed, and Alba took it into the channel and Reece James went with him.
Alba clipped it long, the other way.
And Mateo beat James to it.
He was quicker over ten yards than a man five inches taller than him should ever be, and he got there first and got the ball under his boot on the touchline, and James arrived and shoved him hard in the back.
Mateo crossed it anyway as he was going down.
He looked up from the grass.
Griezmann rose.
And Thiago Silva rose above him and headed it forty yards clear.
Mateo got up.
He did not stop to look at anybody. He turned and started jogging back into position, and his breathing was so loud that Pedri, five yards away, could hear it over fifty thousand people.
And this was football.
Especially this football. Especially a Champions League final.
Logic does not get to have an opinion in here.
Mateo was tired. That was true.
Mateo was past his absolute limit. That was also true.
And Mateo King was going to play this football match to the bitter end regardless of either of those things, and that was truer than both.
He could not have told you how he was still moving. He could feel every single ache in both legs, the tightness in his hamstrings, the bruise on his hip that had gone from sharp to a dull deep throb somewhere around the seventieth minute.
None of it mattered.
He was playing this match.
And what a match it was.
The first half of extra time in the 2020/21 Champions League final between FC Barcelona and Chelsea was, well.
Judge it for yourself.
96th minute.
Mateo had drifted.
He was not on the left any more, not really. He was not anywhere. He had started playing as a free man, appearing wherever the ball was, drifting between the lines and out to the flanks and back inside, and Chelsea did not have anybody who could sit on him.
He picked it up on the right.
And he and Messi went.
One touch each, the two of them exchanging it at pace, twelve yards of grass, the ball going between them faster than anybody could get near it. Mateo drove forward. Chilwell came. He beat Chilwell. Azpilicueta stepped. He beat Azpilicueta too, boosting the ball forward past the Spaniard's hip and going round him.
They were in the middle of the box now.
And in Lionel Messi's head there was not one single thought about the goal he had scored ten minutes ago.
That was gone. That was finished. That had happened to somebody else.
All that existed now was this.
Win it. Win the match. That is all.
I promised them.
I promised him.
And I promised myself.
Bring it home.
BOOM.
Mateo cut it back to him and Messi did not take a touch.
He hit it first time, low and hard through a forest of legs, and Mendy was already going.
And it never got there.
Rüdiger threw a leg out. Full stretch, at the very end of his reach, and got a boot to it, and the ball flew off him at a completely different angle and out for a corner.
"OH! And Rüdiger! Rüdiger AGAIN!"
"He is not going to stop, Peter. That man is not going to stop."
97th minute.
Pedri won a ball in the middle.
He did not turn far enough with it, and Kanté came in behind him and shoved him in the back, and the ball came loose.
And Chelsea were about to break. Kovačić was already turning. Pulisic had started running.
The whistle went.
Foul. Barcelona.
And N'Golo Kanté lost it.
N'Golo Kanté, who most people who have ever played the game will tell you is the nicest man in professional football, threw both hands into the air and turned on the referee.
"WHAT? WHAT? THAT IS NOTHING! I GOT THE BALL!"
He was waving both arms, walking after him.
"THAT IS NOTHING! COME ON!"
The referee waved him away.
Kanté turned in a circle with his hands on his head and said something to the sky, and then just stood there for a second, actually furious.
That is how much this football match was worth.
100th minute.
Griezmann rolled it back to Mateo.
Mateo took it, drove, laid it wide to Alba.
Alba gave it straight back.
And the two of them went down that left side like a machine. Mateo inside, Alba outside, the ball going between them, one touch, one touch, Chilwell caught in the middle of it not knowing which one of them to go to, James coming across too late.
"And this combination! This has been an absolute HEADACHE for Chelsea all night! Alba and King, down that side, and Chelsea have not worked out what to do about it!"
Mateo came inside off the last pass and drove at the box.
And Antonio Rüdiger was waiting.
He was low, arms out, absolutely set, and he was talking. Not shouting at anybody else. Just talking, low and constant, at the boy or at himself or at both.
"You are not getting past. Nothing for you. Nothing for you here. Nothing."
Mateo went at him anyway.
He shifted it once, then again, then tried to knock it past the German's hip and go.
Rüdiger gritted his teeth and moved with him.
And it happened fast.
Rüdiger's leg came across and his whole weight went onto Mateo's right leg, not deliberately, not a challenge at all, just two bodies at speed arriving at the same piece of grass.
Mateo went down.
Hard.
The whistle went straight away.
"Sssssss."
Mateo's face screwed up completely and he sucked air in through his teeth, both hands going to his right leg.
Griezmann was there in three seconds, crouching, a hand on his shoulder.
"Hey. Hey. You good?"
Mateo pushed himself up onto his feet.
He shook the leg out. Once. Twice.
There was something in there. Not big. A small bright complaint somewhere down the outside of his thigh.
"Yeah. Yeah, I am good." He blew out a breath. "I just need to walk it off."
Griezmann tapped him twice on the chest.
"Good."
The free kick.
It was out on the left, which meant nothing at all, because Messi stood over it anyway.
The box filled up. Bodies pressing. The usual war.
Messi whipped it in.
Mateo made his run at the near post.
And Andreas Christensen got there.
The Dane, on for fifteen minutes, rose above the crowd and got his forehead on it and put it out to the edge of the area.
De Jong met it.
He hit it first time with everything he had, an absolute rocket from twenty-four yards, and the whole stadium came up.
It went wide.
Not by much.
"OHHHH! De Jong! What a strike, and it just, just misses!"
102nd minute.
Chelsea came.
For the first time in a while they actually came, Kovačić carrying it forward, Pulisic peeling wide, Reece James overlapping.
James got to the byline and squared it.
And Araújo got in front of it.
He came across at a full sprint and stuck a leg through it and knocked it behind for a corner, and immediately got up and started organising, pointing, shouting.
The Barcelona defenders came together and slapped hands, all four of them, quick and hard.
"And a corner. Chelsea's first corner of this entire football match."
"Their FIRST, Peter. In one hundred and two minutes."
The corner.
And this one was tense.
Every Chelsea player came up. All of them. Rüdiger, Silva, Christensen, Azpilicueta, all of the big men into that box, and Koeman did not like it one bit.
He had come to the edge of his area with both hands on his hips because he knew exactly what he was looking at. Chelsea were taller. Chelsea had always been taller. That had been the one thing Barcelona could not do anything about all night.
In the six-yard box, Ter Stegen was pointing and shouting.
"MARK HIM! MARK THAT ONE! PIQUÉ, THAT ONE, THAT ONE! GET TIGHT!"
Bodies were leaning on bodies. Shirts were being held.
Chilwell stood over it.
And even the referee was breathing hard, standing at the edge of the area with his eyes moving over all of it, watching for something to happen.
Chilwell struck it.
The ball came in high and hanging.
And in the middle of that box, one Chelsea player had lost his man completely.
I am getting this. I am scoring this.
He went up.
Eyes shut. Neck loaded. Everything in him going at that football.
And Marc-André Ter Stegen came for it.
He came off his line hard through a crowd of bodies with one glove punching up above everybody, and it was hand against head, and the goalkeeper got there first.
He got the very top of his fist onto the ball and knocked it clear.
And then, as if something intervened.
Because that ball did not go into the crowd, and it did not go out for a throw.
It dropped, out of the sky, twenty-five yards from the Chelsea goal.
Straight to Mateo King.
He did not take a touch to settle it.
Jorginho was on him immediately, arriving to close, and Mateo pushed the ball straight through the Italian's legs and went round him.
And then he was gone.
"AND MATEO KING IS AWAY! HE IS BEARING DOWN ON KOVAČIĆ!"
Kovačić came across to meet him, the only man between him and open grass, and he was set, and he was ready.
And Mateo's legs were screaming.
Come on. COME ON. One more. One more.
He dropped his shoulder one way.
Then he threw his whole upper body the other way, a feint from the hips, the ball staying exactly where it was.
Then he went the first way after all.
"Shit. Shit, shit."
Kovačić's weight was already gone. He gritted his teeth and reached and got nothing but air.
And Mateo was past him.
And in front of him, for the first time in a hundred and two minutes of football, there was space.
Real space. Grass. Mendy on his line and only Silva and Rüdiger between them, both of them still turning, both of them out of position from the corner.
That was the freest he had seen the Chelsea defence all night.
And Mateo King was already smiling.
He could see it. He could see the whole thing, the line he was going to run, the gap between the two centre-backs, the shape of the finish.
This is it. This is—
"Huh."
He felt the weight.
A hand, then an arm, then a whole body pulling backwards on his shirt at the shoulder, and his own momentum stopped dead underneath him and he stumbled and went down.
Mateo Kovačić had grabbed him.
Both hands, from behind, and simply pulled.
The stadium went insane.
Thirty thousand people howling at once, arms out, the whole Barcelona end screaming for a card.
The referee was already sprinting over with his hand going into his pocket.
Yellow.
"And that is a booking, and Mateo Kovačić will take it every single day of the week and twice on Sunday."
"He will, Peter. He absolutely will. Because look at where King was going. Look at the space in front of him. Kovačić has looked at that picture and decided that a yellow card is a great deal cheaper than what was about to happen."
"A professional foul in every sense of the phrase."
Mateo did not get up straight away.
He sat where he had landed, one hand on the grass behind him, and his chest was going so hard that his whole upper body was moving with it.
Pedri arrived and put a hand out.
"Hey. You good?"
Mateo looked up at him.
And he smiled. Still breathing like a man who had run up a mountain, sweat coming off his jaw, absolutely finished.
He took the hand.
The match went on.
And before very long at all.
FWEEEP.
"And that is the end of the first period of extra time."
"And it has been every bit as good as the ninety that came before it, Jim."
"Better, arguably. Because now both of these teams know exactly what is coming if nobody scores."
"Barcelona have kept going. Kovačić has been booked for stopping the boy. Rüdiger has thrown himself in front of another one. Ter Stegen has come and claimed the only corner Chelsea have had all night."
"And it is still level."
"It is still level. One goal each, one hundred and five minutes played."
A pause.
"Fifteen minutes remaining."
...
Down by the touchline, both teams were getting ready to go again.
Mateo sat on the grass with his legs out in front of him while a physio worked at his right thigh, and when the man pressed into a particular spot Mateo's face moved, just slightly, just for a second.
He did not say anything about it.
He shrugged it off, took the bottle he was being handed, and went back to listening to Koeman.
And twenty-five yards away, Chelsea were a different team.
Whatever had been sitting on them at the end of ninety minutes was gone.
It had gone somewhere in the middle of that first period of extra time, burned off by fifteen minutes of running and blocking and throwing themselves at things, and what was left in its place was something harder.
They were not grieving any more.
They were angry.
Because they had been winning this football match. For fifty-three minutes they had been winning it, and it had been taken off them, and they wanted it back.
Tuchel was in the middle of them with both fists going.
"FIFTEEN MINUTES. That is all it is. FIFTEEN. Look at them. LOOK at them, they are finished, look at their legs. You take this back. You take it BACK."
And every single man in blue was nodding.
A bar in Barcelona.
The place was packed to the walls and there was not one person sitting down.
Cigarette smoke, spilled beer on the floor, forty men crammed into a room built for twenty. Somewhere in the corner there was a chair with two legs snapped off it that nobody had picked up and nobody was going to.
Marc Puig had both hands flat on the bar and his head down between his arms.
Jordi Ferrer was standing on the rung of a stool, staring at the television.
And Nico Barrera, president of the Boixos Nois, was gripping the edge of the counter so hard that the tendons stood out all the way up his forearms.
Nobody in that room said a word for about thirty seconds.
Then Nico let out a breath through his teeth.
"It is starting."
Back on the field.
Mateo King stood in the centre circle.
His chest was going. Properly going, up and down, his shoulders moving with every breath, his shirt completely soaked through and stuck to him.
His right leg was talking to him.
And his eyes were steel.
This is it.
This is it, right here. Fifteen minutes.
Now or never.
We are doing this.
"And we are underway in the second period of extra time in the 2020/21 Champions League final."
"Fifteen minutes, Peter. Fifteen minutes, and then we are into penalties."
"Fifteen minutes to decide the champions of Europe."
Up in the family area, nobody was sitting.
Olivia and Aina were standing pressed against each other with their hands locked together. Neither of them had spoken in about two minutes.
David had both hands on the rail in front of him.
And Isabella King was staring down at the pitch, at one small figure in the middle of it, and her lips were moving without any sound coming out.
"Mateo."
She said it to nobody.
"Mateo."
But wishes and football have never mixed.
What you want does not matter in here. What you deserve does not matter. What your mother is whispering in a stand four hundred yards away does not matter at all.
Football has never been that kind.
108th minute.
Chelsea came.
And they came properly.
Kovačić won it in the middle and drove, and Pulisic peeled off the shoulder, and James was already running down the right, and for the first time in the entire match Barcelona were genuinely stretched.
Kovačić to James.
James down the line, first time inside.
Pulisic took it in his stride, twenty yards out, in the middle of the pitch, and he did not look for anybody.
He hit it.
Absolutely leathered it, low and hard and rising.
The whole stadium came up.
And Marc-André Ter Stegen got both hands to it.
He went down and across and got everything behind it and held on, dragging the ball into his chest and rolling with it, and he came up onto his knees with it locked against him.
"TER STEGEN! Ter Stegen holds it! And that was a strike!"
The Barcelona players went to him.
Piqué got a hand on his head. Araújo pulled him up by the arm. Busquets was pointing at him and shouting something.
"GOOD! GOOD, MARC!"
"THAT IS IT!"
109th minute.
Mateo picked it up, drove twenty yards, beat Jorginho, and rolled it back to Pedri.
Pedri hit it first time from the edge.
Outside of the boot, curling.
It went wide.
"FUCK!"
Pedri turned away with both hands on his head.
"How are we getting through this? HOW? How are we supposed to get through them?"
And Mateo, who was the one who had given him the ball, put a hand on his shoulder as he jogged past.
"We will."
Pedri looked at him.
Mateo did not stop moving.
"We will."
111th minute.
Chelsea tried to break again.
Kanté took it forward and looked for Pulisic.
And Pedri got in front of it.
He came from behind and read the whole thing and took it off Kanté's boot, and the entire stadium changed direction at once.
"And Chelsea's break is broken! Pedri! And now BARCELONA go!"
Pedri to Messi.
And Messi went.
He came inside off the right with the ball glued to him, and something had come into him that had not been there for the last twenty minutes.
Fifteen minutes.
No. Not penalties. Not that.
I am not letting this go to penalties.
I said I would bring it home.
He beat Kovačić. He beat Jorginho. He drew Rüdiger two yards out of the line and slid it wide.
Griezmann took it.
You can do this. You can do this. Come on, Antoine. This is the one.
He turned into the box.
And Chelsea's defence did not care about anything Antoine Griezmann was telling himself.
Christensen stepped. Azpilicueta came across. Silva filled the gap behind them. There was no lane, no angle, no shot, nothing at all, and Griezmann had to roll it backwards out of the area.
To Pedri.
And Pedri did something nobody in that stadium expected.
He hit it first time.
Not a shot. A pass. A fast, driven, flat ball straight through the middle of the entire Chelsea defence, into a gap that had been open for about half a second, and it tore that back line completely in half.
"OH! OH, WHAT A BALL! IT IS THROUGH! IT IS THROUGH THEM!"
Every single player in that stadium turned at once.
Because that ball was rolling into the box.
To the one man everybody in the building believed could do something with it.
MATEO KING.
But Rüdiger was still there.
Of course he was. He had been there all night.
Mateo got to it first, moving fast, and the German did not dive in and did not fall for anything. He got his body across and he did what he had been doing for two hours: he took the boy's angle away, walking him, steering him, forcing him further and further round until Mateo had his back completely to the goal.
"Nothing for you." Rüdiger's voice was low and right at his ear. "Nothing. You are not going anywhere. Nothing for you."
And Mateo, chest heaving, back to goal, with a two-hundred-pound German pressed against his spine, said it without turning round.
"If you wanted to win."
He shifted the ball once.
"You shouldn't have let us score at all."
And then he hit it.
A back-heel.
Not a flick. A strike. He got the heel of his boot through that ball with his back to the goal and eight yards from Mendy, and it spun off him and went.
Rüdiger's face went ashen.
"No."
"WHAT? WHAT HAS HE DONE?"
Mendy came across and got a glove to it and could not hold it and could not push it away, and the ball flew up off his hand and smashed against the underside of the crossbar.
Reece James arrived at a dead sprint and hammered it out of the box.
"HOW? HOW CAN YOU EVEN TRY THAT? At this stage of a Champions League final, with a defender in your back, EIGHT YARDS OUT? Mateo King, ladies and gentlemen. Just, wow. WOW."
"So close, Peter. So, so close."
And the match got hotter.
113th. Messi took one from twenty-two and Mendy palmed it away.
114th. Jorginho hit an outside-of-the-boot effort from twenty-five that curled and dipped and went a yard wide, and Ter Stegen did not move.
116th. Alba and Mateo went down the left again and got a cross in and Silva headed it clear and Araújo hit the rebound over.
Bodies were going into bodies now. Every challenge had something extra in it. Two men squared up near the halfway line and had to be pulled apart by four others.
Both benches were standing.
Both crowds were standing.
Nobody in that stadium had sat down in twenty-five minutes.
Penalties.
The word arrived in fifty thousand heads at roughly the same time.
Four minutes left. And that was the natural conclusion of all of this now, and everybody in the building knew it.
On the touchline, Thomas Tuchel had already started.
Jorginho first. Jorginho always. Then Mount, no, Mount is off. Then who? Kovačić. Then Christensen, he will take one. Rüdiger will want one. Azpilicueta will take one.
Mendy. Édouard. He has read every single one of them tonight already.
And twenty yards away, Ronald Koeman had his arms folded and was staring at nothing.
Messi first. Obviously Messi first.
Then Pique. He will not miss.
Griezmann. Alba.
He stopped.
Wait.
Is Mateo good at penalties?
He genuinely did not know.
Have I ever seen him take one?
118th minute.
De Jong slid one into Griezmann on the edge of the box.
Griezmann turned in one motion and fired it.
Mendy punched it.
Both fists, straight up, out and away, and it went over the top and behind for a corner.
And the corner came in.
Messi stood over it.
And this was it.
He knew it and every single man on that pitch knew it. There were two minutes left and there would not be many more of these, and Barcelona committed absolutely everything to it. Piqué went up. Araújo went up. Busquets went up. Even Roberto came all the way from the right.
Nine red shirts in that box.
Messi struck it.
The ball came in hanging and the whole box went up at once, and Mateo climbed with Christensen hanging off his arm and got his head to it.
And Mendy punched it again.
Straight out, hard, over everybody.
And the ball dropped to Reece James on the edge of the area.
James took one touch and started running.
Because there was nobody in front of him. Barcelona had put nine men in a penalty box and Chelsea had one man breaking out of it and forty yards of empty grass.
"AND CHELSEA ARE AWAY! JAMES! THERE IS NOBODY THERE!"
No. No, no, no.
Lionel Messi turned and went.
He came out of that box at a sprint that a thirty-three-year-old man should not have had left in him after a hundred and eighteen minutes of football, and he ate the ground between them, and he got there.
He slid.
Full length, boot out, and he took the ball clean off Reece James's foot and out of his stride, and the two of them went down in a tangle.
And the ball came loose.
And Lionel Messi got up first.
No.
No. I am doing this.
I am doing this.
He was on the ball before James had got off the floor, and he was already looking up, already turning, already moving forward with his head coming up out of the tangle.
This is it. If I can just.
If I can find.
And he did not know why he saw it.
He could not have told you afterwards. He had been playing this game for a very long time and there were things his eyes did that his brain was not involved in at all, and this was one of them.
He saw the line.
Diagonal. Over the top. Past three blue shirts and into the space behind a Chelsea defence that had every single man out of position because they had all just committed to a counter-attack that had lasted four seconds.
And running into it, from the left, in red and blue.
There.
That is the best position for a cross in if only.
And Lionel Messi smiled.
Figured it would be you, Mateo.
BAM.
He hit it.
And as that ball left his boot, as his body came all the way through the swing and his head came up to watch it go, Lionel Messi was smiling with his whole face.
Oh, how I love you, Mateo.
A garden in Barcelona. Thirteen years ago.
"No! I am the winner! I AM!"
A small girl with blonde hair shoved a small boy in the chest with both hands.
Mateo, four years old, staggered backwards two steps and started laughing at her.
"No, you are NOT. I am the footballer. You are just a girl."
He puffed his chest out.
"I am the one who won."
"MATEO!"
"Girls cannot even play, everybody knows th—"
Aina shoved him again, harder, and this time his feet actually left the floor and he sat down in the grass, and he came straight back up with both hands out to shove her back.
"Mateo."
The boy stopped dead.
He turned round.
And a man was standing at the back door of the house with his arms folded, looking at the pair of them.
"Avi."
Aina was already running.
"AVI! Avi, he said girls cannot play football and he said I am not the winner and he pushed me!"
"I did not push her! She pushed ME! Twice!"
"Because you SAID."
"Uh uh." Mateo pointed at her, absolutely outraged. "I am the one who is going to win the Champions League for football. Not you. You do not even know how to play."
"AVI!"
Guillem did not raise his voice once.
He came down off the step and crouched in the middle of the two of them, and put a hand on his granddaughter's shoulder.
"Aina. Aina, listen to me, I need help. It is getting dark and I cannot carry the telescope on my own. Will you help me bring it out?"
Aina's entire face changed.
"I am coming!"
And she was gone, running for the house, all of it forgotten in about a second and a half.
The two of them, as she went, stuck their tongues out at each other.
Guillem watched her go. Then he turned and sat down on the step and looked at his grandson, who was standing in the grass with his arms folded and his bottom lip out.
"Come here."
Mateo came, sulking, and sat down next to him.
"She pushed me."
"She did."
"Twice."
"She did that too." Guillem nodded seriously. "And what did you say to her first?"
Mateo did not answer.
"Mm."
They sat there for a moment.
"You know," Guillem said, looking out at the garden. "It is a very small thing, being the best in a garden. Anybody can be the best in a garden."
Mateo scuffed his shoe in the grass.
"I am not saying it to be unkind. I am saying it because you are going to be much more than that, and men who are going to be much more than that do not need to tell little girls they cannot play football."
"But I AM going to be a footballer."
"I know you are."
Mateo looked up at him.
"You do?"
And Guillem looked down at his grandson, and reached over, and messed up the whole of his hair with one enormous hand.
"Mi rey."
He smiled.
"I have known that since before you could walk."
Mateo's face came all the way open.
"Now." Guillem sat back on his hands. "Are you still going to win everything, or has your cousin put you off?"
Mateo shot straight up onto his feet.
"Of course I am!"
He puffed his cheeks all the way out and started counting on his fingers.
"The Ballon d'Or. And the World Cup. And the Champions League. I am winning all of it. ALL of it."
And Guillem laughed.
He put his head back and laughed properly, out loud, in a garden in Barcelona, at a four-year-old boy with his cheeks puffed out.
"All of it."
"ALL OF IT."
Back on the pitch.
Mateo was moving before the ball had left Messi's foot.
I am in behind.
I am in behind, nobody is with me, nobody is—
He turned his head.
If the ball comes.
If he can just.
And the thought did not get to finish.
Because it was already coming.
That ball was already in the air, dropping out of the black sky over the Estádio do Dragão on a diagonal that no other human being on this earth would have seen, let alone hit.
And Mateo King smiled.
'You really are perfect, Messi.'
Everything happened at once.
Rüdiger was coming. He had turned the instant that ball had left Messi's boot and he was sprinting, arms going, teeth showing, thirty yards behind and closing.
Christensen was turning. Silva was turning.
Mendy came off his line and stopped, caught, because the ball was still up and he did not know where it was going to land.
The whole stadium came up off its feet.
"MATEOOOOO!"
And the ball was still in the air.
Too high to take down. Too far in front to head. Dropping behind him and to his left at a height that meant there was only one thing in the entire world that could be done with it.
And Mateo King already knew what it was.
He turned his back to the goal.
"WHAT IS HE DOING? WHAT IS HE—"
His shoulders came round. His weight went onto his left foot. His right leg came up and his whole body started going backwards, and the sky came into view above him, and the floodlights, and fifty thousand people.
Now.
And somewhere in that fraction of a second, in a bedroom in Porto two nights ago, a boy in a towel had sat on the edge of a bed and opened an envelope.
My Mateo.
My rey.
If you are reading this then I am not there any more, and I am sorry about that. I am sorry more than I know how to write down. I wanted very much to be there. I wanted to see all of it.
But I am an old man and I have known for a while now, and so I am writing this instead, and you will have to forgive an old man his handwriting.
I want you to know some things.
The first is that I was never worried about you. Not once. Not on the days you came home and cried because a coach did not pick you. Not on the days you told me you were not good enough. Not on any of them. Everybody else in that house worried. I never did.
Because I knew what you were from the beginning. I knew it before you could walk. I used to sit and watch you in that garden and I would think, this one is going to go a very long way, and I am going to be lucky enough to see some of it.
And I was. I saw more of it than I ever expected to.
The second is that I am sorry I will not see the rest.
That is the only part of this that I cannot make peace with, mi rey. Not the leaving. I have had a long life and a good one and I am not frightened of it. The only thing that hurts me is that I know exactly what is coming for you and I will not get to watch it with my own eyes.
I would have liked to see you play in a Champions League final, the world cup.
I would have liked that very much.
The third thing, and this is the one I need you to hear, so put down whatever you are doing and hear it.
You are going to be the best in the world.
Not the best in your street. Not the best in your city. The best there is, in the whole world, and I am not saying that because I am your grandfather and I am supposed to say it. I am saying it because it is a fact and I have known it for years and everybody else is simply going to have to catch up.
So do not be afraid of it. When it comes, and it is coming, do not shrink from it and do not apologise for it and do not let anybody tell you it is too much for you.
It is not too much for you.
You were made for it.
And when you are standing out there one day, in front of all those people, with everything on the line and everybody watching and your heart going like a drum.
Remember that there was an old man who knew. Long before any of them. Long before you did.
Go and win everything, mi rey.
All of it. Exactly like you said.
I love you.
Avi.
...
...
...
BANG.