The Real Madrid story ran for forty-eight hours before the next one replaced it.
Manchester City this time. A different source, a different publication, the same careful language — monitoring, interested, sources close to the club. The piece was longer than the Madrid one and included a reported fee that was significantly larger than anything previously mentioned, a number that generated its own separate conversation across platforms that had nothing to do with football journalism and everything to do with the specific human fascination with large numbers attached to young people.
Then Chelsea. Then PSG. Then a piece in a Catalan newspaper that was shorter than the others and more carefully written and used the word admirers rather than interested and mentioned Barcelona's long-term project in the context of a generation of young players reshaping European football.
Richard read the Barcelona piece twice.
Then put his phone face down.
Chidi noticed.
He noticed the way he noticed most things involving Richard — not immediately, not loudly, from a slight angle, the observation arriving after enough time had passed that it felt like a natural part of the conversation rather than a confrontation.
They were in the car on the way to training. Thursday morning. Six days before Arsenal.
"The Barcelona piece," Chidi said.
Richard looked out the window.
"You read it twice," Chidi said.
"I read everything twice."
"You put the phone down after the Madrid piece in four seconds," Chidi said. "The Barcelona piece you read twice and then sat with it."
Richard said nothing.
Chidi drove for a moment.
"I've known you since you were fourteen," he said. "I remember the poster."
Richard looked at him.
"On the wall of your room in Lagos," Chidi said. "Above the desk. You had it up for three years."
Richard turned back to the window.
The poster. The Camp Nou at night, floodlit, the specific blue of the seats visible even in the photograph, the pitch below it the greenest green, a match in progress, the stadium full, the whole image communicating something that a fourteen year old boy in Lagos had understood immediately and completely — that this was the place, that this was where the football he loved lived, that if everything went correctly and every piece of the journey aligned this was where it was supposed to end up.
He had taken it down when he left for Belgium.
Not because the dream had ended.
Because it had become something too serious to be a poster.
"It's too early to think about it," Richard said.
"I didn't say think about it," Chidi said. "I said I remember the poster."
They drove in silence for a moment.
"Real Madrid," Chidi said. "Seriously though."
"No," Richard said.
One word. Flat. Final. The tone of someone who had considered this question and closed it.
Chidi glanced at him sideways. "That's — "
"No," Richard said again. Same tone. Same finality.
Chidi looked at the road. Nodded slowly. "Okay," he said. "I won't ask again."
"Thank you," Richard said.
They drove the rest of the way to Brackel in comfortable silence.
The training session that Thursday was the last full intensity session before the taper.
Schmidt had structured the week carefully — Monday and Tuesday high intensity, Wednesday moderate, Thursday full intensity one final time, Friday light, Saturday the match.
Thursday's session was everything the preparation had been building toward.
The Arsenal shape had been replicated so many times in the preceding week that Dortmund's players moved through it with the ease of complete familiarity — the press triggers, the channel run, the setup movement before it, the specific adjustments required when Ødegaard's positioning activated the press and when it didn't.
Richard moved through it cleanly.
Not perfectly — twice Schmidt stopped the drill to correct the timing, once to adjust Guirassy's movement, once to address a spacing issue between Can and Brandt that had been recurring since Tuesday. But cleanly. The shape working. The picture opening the way it needed to open.
At the end of the session Schmidt gathered the squad briefly.
He did not speak for long.
"Tomorrow is light," he said. "Saturday — everything." He looked around the room. "Arsenal are excellent. Arteta has built the best pressing system in this competition. Ødegaard is one of the finest players in the world. Saka and Martinelli will cause problems from both sides simultaneously." He paused. "We have been here before. Not against Arsenal specifically. But here — against excellence, against preparation, against quality that demanded everything from us." He looked at Richard briefly. "We know what we are capable of. Saturday we show it again."
He left.
The squad dispersed toward the changing rooms.
Jobe appeared beside Richard.
"You saw the transfer pieces," he said.
"Everyone saw the transfer pieces," Richard said.
"The Barcelona one specifically," Jobe said.
Richard looked at him.
Jobe had the expression of someone who understood something without having been told it — the specific intelligence of a player whose own family circumstances had made him fluent in the language of clubs and ambition and the dreams that existed underneath the professional surface of a footballer's life.
"The Camp Nou," Jobe said quietly.
Not a question.
Richard walked for a moment.
"Six days to Arsenal," he said.
"I know," Jobe said. "I'm not asking about the future. I'm just — " he paused — "I understand it. That's all." He paused again. "My brother had his version of it. Every player has a version of it. The place that exists in your head before you've ever been there." He looked at Richard. "Yours is the Camp Nou."
Richard said nothing.
"There's nothing wrong with that," Jobe said simply. "It doesn't make you less committed to what's in front of you. If anything — " he paused, finding the right words — "if anything it means you know what you're building toward. That's not a distraction. That's a direction."
They reached the car park.
Chidi was waiting.
Richard looked at Jobe for a moment.
"Six days," he said.
"Six days," Jobe agreed.
That evening Richard went to Krause's.
Not planned — he had been walking past, the May evening warm enough to walk rather than drive, and Krause's kitchen light was on and the gate was open in the way it was sometimes open when the old man was in the garden even if the garden was empty now.
He knocked.
Krause opened the door and looked at him with the expression of someone who had been expecting a visit without knowing when it would come.
"Coffee," Krause said.
They sat at the kitchen table.
Richard had been to this kitchen enough times now that it felt familiar — the specific arrangement of things, the football books on the shelf in the corner, the old photographs on the wall that he had started to be able to place in their historical context. A Dortmund squad photo from 1995 that Krause had pointed out once, identifying himself in the crowd rather than the players — a younger man, thinner, the same expression essentially, the expression that some people carried their whole lives because their face had found its form early and kept it.
"The transfer stories," Krause said.
Richard looked at him. "You read them."
"Ella reads them and tells me," Krause said. "Which is the same thing." He drank his coffee. "Real Madrid."
"No," Richard said.
Krause looked at him over his mug. Studied him for a moment with the unhurried attention of a man who had watched football for forty-one years and had developed the ability to read the difference between a considered position and a reactive one.
"No," he said, confirming it rather than questioning it.
"No," Richard said.
Krause set his mug down. "Barcelona," he said.
Richard looked at him.
Krause smiled slightly — the small, private smile of a man who had seen enough of the world to recognize a boyhood dream when it was sitting across his kitchen table wearing a straight face.
"I was not always a Dortmund supporter," Krause said. "When I was young — very young, before the identity of this city took hold of me completely — I had a phase." He paused. "Every boy in Europe in the nineteen seventies had a phase where they watched Dutch football and understood for the first time that the game could be played a certain way." He looked at the wall. "Cruyff. Ajax. Total football." He paused. "That was my version of it. The thing that showed me what football could be when it was everything it was supposed to be."
Richard listened.
"I never played for Ajax," Krause said. "I was never going to play for Ajax. I was a Dortmund supporter who had his moment of understanding because of Ajax and then came back to Dortmund with that understanding intact." He looked at Richard. "The dream of a place and the life you actually live are not the same thing. Sometimes they meet. Sometimes they don't. But the dream teaches you something about what the game is for you. What it means. What you're reaching toward."
He picked up his mug.
"Barcelona is a good dream," he said simply. "A very good dream. And you are seventeen and you are in a Champions League semifinal and you have six days to think about Arsenal and nothing else." He looked at Richard directly. "Yes?"
"Yes," Richard said.
"Good." Krause stood. "More coffee."
Richard walked home through the Dortmund evening.
The city was warm and yellow and carrying the week the way it carried important weeks — quietly, with the specific accumulated energy of a place that had learned over the course of a season to trust what it was watching.
He walked past the bakery. Closed at this hour, the shutters down, but the smell of the morning's bread still faintly present in the air around it, which was the specific quality of good bakeries — they left something behind even when they were closed.
He thought about Krause's story. About Ajax and Cruyff and a young man in Dortmund finding in Dutch football the thing that showed him what the game could be.
He thought about a boy in Lagos and a poster on a wall above a desk.
He thought about the Camp Nou at night, floodlit, the specific blue of the seats, the pitch the greenest green.
He thought about Yamal — seventeen, Barcelona, already doing things at the Camp Nou that the poster had only promised were possible.
He thought about what it would mean to play in that stadium. Not to visit it. To play in it. To be one of the people on the pitch below the photograph rather than the person looking at the photograph.
He thought about it for as long as the walk home allowed.
Then he got home.
Put his keys on the counter.
Looked at the shelf.
Fifteen awards. The empty wall.
Picked up his tactical notebook.
Opened it to the Arsenal page.
Six days.
The Camp Nou was not six days away.
Arsenal was six days away.
He wrote two more lines of notes.
Then closed the notebook.
Went to bed.
And dreamed, without meaning to, of a stadium that was blue and red and enormous and waiting.
Rome — A Television Studio
Thursday Evening
The panel had been arguing for twenty minutes.
The show was one of the most watched football programs in Italy — three former players, a journalist, a host who managed the chaos with the specific skill of someone who had been doing it for fifteen years and had learned that the chaos was the product.
The topic was the Golden Boy.
"Yamal," the first panelist said, for the third time. "Yamal has been doing this all season. Not four appearances. A full season. Consistency over time is what the award is supposed to recognize."
"Blake's numbers per appearance are historical," the journalist said. "There is no comparison available. The youngest hat trick scorer in Champions League history. In four appearances."
"Four appearances," the first panelist repeated.
"Eight goals," the journalist said.
"Against Madrid," the second panelist said, who had been quiet for several minutes, "he was the best player on the pitch. Not the best young player. The best player. I have been watching this competition for thirty years. That does not happen at seventeen."
"Yamal — " the first panelist started.
"Yamal is excellent," the second panelist said. "If Blake didn't exist Yamal wins this without any debate at all." He paused. "Blake exists."
The host looked at the camera.
"Yamal or Blake," he said. "The Golden Boy. We'll be asking this question all summer." He paused. "But first — Arsenal. Six days. If Blake performs in the semifinal the way he has performed in every knockout match this season — does the conversation end?"
Silence.
The second panelist looked at the camera.
"The conversation," he said slowly, "ended the night he went down on one knee at Signal Iduna Park with his arms spread and eighty thousand people giving him everything they had."
He paused.
"We just haven't all admitted it yet."
Lagos — Akinsanya Street
Thursday Night
Richard's mother was on the phone with her sister.
They had been talking for forty minutes — about family, about the neighborhood, about the cousin's wedding in August, about the woman from church whose son had also gone to Europe to play football and had not done as well as hoped and what the family was doing about it.
Then her sister said: "The transfer stories."
"I've seen them," Richard's mother said.
"Real Madrid."
"No," Richard's mother said.
Her sister paused. "You sound very certain."
"I am very certain," she said. "He is very certain. He has been certain about this since he was fourteen years old." She paused. "He had a poster."
"What poster?"
She smiled at the wall of her living room. "Ask him when you see him," she said. "He'll tell you."
She changed the subject.
But after she hung up she sat for a moment in the quiet of the house on Akinsanya Street — the wall where the poster had been above the desk clearly visible from where she sat, the slight mark in the paint where the tape had been removed, still faintly present after three years.
She looked at it for a moment.
Then she went to bed.
And across the continent in a Dortmund house with a shelf of awards and an empty wall and a succulent on the windowsill her son was already asleep, already dreaming of something blue and red and enormous, already six days from the next step on a road that was going somewhere specific and had been going there since before either of them had the words for it.