"Mr. Albert! A genuine pleasure, as always." Johansson's smile was so wide it looked like it might strain a facial muscle
The UEFA president was in his element, swimming in a sea of billionaire handshakes and self-importance.
Tonight was the Champions League final, his biannual moment to shine for the people who actually owned the planet.
Albert offered a smile that was more of a polite, social algorithm than a genuine expression. "Mr. Johansson. I spotted you earlier, but you seemed… deeply embroiled in a vital work."
Johansson, a man who'd climbed to the top of the world's most bureaucratic sports organization, was a connoisseur of subtle insults.
He felt the chill from Albert's tone, but what could he do? The man was a walking, talking stimulus package for UEFA. So, he just smiled wider. It was the international language of 'I hate you, but I love your money'.
Their scintillating chat died a quick death as the match kicked off. Albert's gaze drifted to the pitch, but his mind checked out completely.
He was having one of his episodes.
The game was Bayern Munich versus Manchester United. A classic, he knew. The match that would cement United's legacy in the history books.
For everyone else, this was peak drama. For Albert, it was a surreal flashback. His own personal, high-definition memory, playing out live.
A decade. It had been a full ten years since he'd woken up in this new, younger, suspiciously more German body.
He'd gone from a journalist who could barely afford his streaming subscriptions to a certified MIT genius, and then from 2025 to 1988—a forty-year leap backwards.
His first thought had been panic. His second, sheer, unadulterated opportunity.
The initial steps were simple. He dropped out of MIT after one semester, using a modest family inheritance as seed capital for a global crime: knowing the future.
He placed sports bets with the confidence of a man reading from a pre-written script. That horse with the broken leg that miraculously wins?
Albert bet the farm. That World Cup final decided by a phantom penalty only a time-traveler would remember? Albert almost gambled all his tow years saving too.
He was, by his own conservative and utterly smug estimation, the richest man under 30. At least, the richest one who hadn't inherited a secret island and a blood feud.
"Wow!" Johansson's voice interrupted his thoughts. "Bayern really got a good free kick there!"
The other suits in the luxury box nodded in sycophantic unison. Albert's eyes refocused on the game.
His memory of this night was crystalline: United would score two goals in stoppage time, snatching victory from the jaws of a German victory party.
But there was a problem. A big, flapping, butterfly-shaped problem.
He distinctly remembered Bayern scoring their first goal just four minutes in, a sneaky free kick from Basler on the right side.
Yet here they were, clock ticking past seven minutes, lining up for a free kick on the left.
A slow, wicked grin spread across Albert's face. He wasn't surprised. Not even a little.
You can't parachute a billionaire from the future into the past without causing a few ripples. And Albert hadn't just caused ripples; he'd caused tsunamis.
He'd bought companies that should have died, funded tech that shouldn't have existed for another decade, and probably, inadvertently, altered the career of some third-division midfielder's second cousin, who was now a yoga instructor in Majorca instead of a part-time coach for Bayern's youth team.
The fact that these two teams had even found their way to the same final was a statistical miracle.
The fact that the timeline hadn't completely unraveled and resulted in, say, a final between FC Dynamo Sheepfarm and AC Where-The-Hell-Is-That was a testament to sheer, dumb luck.
Back to the game, Bayern Munich had not one, but two certified set-piece sorcerers.
First, Mario Basler, a man who could apparently contend for the title of German best free kick taker. And second, Mehmet Scholl, the "free-kick specialist," who was currently parked on the bench, probably sipping a latte.
So, naturally, it was Basler who stepped up.
Schmeichel, Manchester United's mountain of a captain, was arranging his defensive wall with the frantic, meticulous energy of a man trying to build a sandbag levee against a tsunami.
From his seat, Albert—a Dortmund fan by birth, but for these two precious hours, a fiercely committed Bayern sympathizer (it's for Germany's honor, relax)—could almost smell the nervous sweat through the big screen.
Honestly, if you weren't at least a little nervous, you were either Sir Alex Ferguson, whose face was permanently set to "grim granite," or you were clinically dead.
The referee's whistle blew. Basler inhaled like a man about to dive into the Mariana Trench. He took his run-up and unleashed hell.
The ball wasn't so much kicked as it was launched from a tactical cannon. It started low, skimming the grass like a pissed-off hornet, then rapidly evolved into a shoulder-seeking missile.
It cleared the wall at kneecap-level, and by the time it reached Schmeichel, it had developed a personal vendetta against the crossbar. BWOONG!
The sound echoed across the Nou Camp, a metallic clang of pure, unadulterated violence. The ball rebounded into the chaos of the penalty area, where Denis Irwin, with the reflexes of a man who'd just seen a spider on his toast, managed to boot it clear.
Albert sighed and took a long, philosophical sip of his beer.
"So close," he muttered to the ghost of German efficiency, which had just stubbed its toe.
What followed was a period of United dominance that had Albert excitedly watching the game.
Bayern seemed to have forgotten they were in a Champions League final and were instead practicing a new, avant-garde formation called 'Let's All Watch United Play'.
It took them a solid half-hour to remember they were a football team.
But watching this 1999 final was like a warm, violent bath for Albert's soul. This was real football.
This was before the game was sanitized into a non-contact sport where a stern glance could earn you a yellow card.
There was no VAR to interrupt the flow for a 10-minute forensic study of an armpit hair being offside. It was just… glorious, unadulterated, natural chaos.
And it was this beautiful, brutal purity that hardened his resolve. He wasn't some old fart screaming at a cloud; he understood progress especially things like VAR.
But he also knew what was coming. He'd seen the future, and it was a bloated, corrupt, money-printing monstrosity.
UEFA and FIFA would soon transform from footballing bodies into full-blown, Bond-villain-level syndicates, trading in bad whistles, blatant favoritism, and stolen Ballon d'Ors.
They were turning the beautiful game into a cynical game of interests, and they had no idea what they were trifling with.
These suits in their glass towers didn't get it. They couldn't comprehend the raw, stupid, beautiful importance of this sport in people's lives.
His mind, the cursed archive of a football reporter, flickered through the headlines he'd collected like morbid trading cards.
A diehard Messi fan in Kerala read Argentina's 3-0 loss to Croatia as his personal eviction notice from life. His suicide note was heartbreakingly succinct: "My dream team has lost. I cannot live anymore."
A British bloke, moments from being wheeled into heart surgery, told the doctors to hold his scalpel until after the Champions League final. Priorities.
Meanwhile, legions of his countrymen were signing their paychecks over to loan sharks just to afford a season ticket, treating debt spirals like a mandatory subscription fee for pain.
A Brazilian fan, mid-heart attack during a World Cup match, refused to leave his seat until the final whistle. He got his wish. He died in the ambulance, a true fan to his last, gasping breath.
And then there was the pièce de résistance, the statistic so chilling it could freeze hell over: The FIFA Sudden Death Registry.
A study so obscure FIFA pretends it doesn't exist that cataloged 617 instances of footballers just… dropping dead across 67 countries in a five-year span. 142 survived.
Do the math. That's roughly 95 players a year, collapsing in training or in a game.
The beautiful game, indeed. It wasn't just a sport. It was a matter of life, debt, and death.
And it was this beautiful football that makes Albert's heart beat faster and faster, now that he has money and the ability, why not try to make football as pure as his ideal?