"Wait — is it like Volta?"
The tactical room at the Joan Gamper training facility was not, at this particular moment, being used for tactics.
It had been arranged for that purpose — the chairs in their rows, the large screen at the front ready to display whatever the coaching staff intended to display, the whiteboard clean and waiting. The room had the prepared quality of a space expecting to be used seriously. What it had received instead, in the gap between the players arriving and the coaches doing the same, was approximately fifteen men who had just come off a light training session and had the collective energy of people who had been given somewhere to sit and had decided that sitting quietly was not the most interesting available option.
Small clusters had formed naturally — the way clusters always form when a group of people who know each other well are put in a room without an immediate agenda. Two players near the window talking about something on one of their phones. A group of three near the back that was mostly Busquets listening while two others spoke. A couple of the younger squad members near the door who appeared to be in a mild disagreement about something that would probably resolve itself without anyone else needing to be involved.
The largest cluster was at the front — the section near where Pedri and Mateo normally sat, the gravitational centre of the room on most days. Today that cluster had expanded outward to include Umtiti and Araujo on one side, Frenkie de Jong and Griezmann on another, and at the middle of it, doing most of the talking with the particular energy of a man who had been waiting for the right audience for an idea and had decided this was sufficiently right — Piqué.
He had been talking for a few minutes already. Not pitching exactly — more thinking out loud, the way people do when an idea has been developing privately for long enough that it needs air.
The idea did not have a name yet. That much he had made clear at the start, with the slight self-consciousness of someone who knew that nameless things were harder to take seriously and was asking for the effort anyway. What it had was a shape — an outline, the preliminary architecture of something he had been moving toward in conversations with a small team he had begun assembling around it, people whose specific expertise he was borrowing to fill in the parts that were outside his own competence.
The basic concept: a new kind of football. Not recreational. Not amateur. Professionally organised, properly produced, but built around a different set of values than the traditional game — entertainment first, structure second, the spectacle itself being the point rather than the container for it.
Something pure, he said. Pure entertainment.
"So it's like Volta?" Griezmann asked.
Piqué paused. Thought about it — genuinely thought, not performing consideration. His jaw shifted slightly, the expression of someone locating the precise distinction.
"Not exactly — it's ehm—" He moved his hand, a gesture that was trying to sketch something the words weren't quite capturing yet. "Volta is more about the flair, the tricks, the individual skill side of things. What I'm thinking is different. It's — the whole thing is engineered for entertainment. Not just the play — the structure, the format, everything." He nodded to himself. "Pure entertainment. Different."
"Okay," Griezmann said. "Different how?"
Piqué straightened slightly — the posture of someone moving from the preamble into the thing itself.
"Seven players," he said.
De Jong looked up. "Seven?"
"Seven a side. Not five, not eleven. Seven." He said it with the certainty of someone who had already had this particular debate internally and arrived at a settled position. "Enough to have shape and tactics, not so many that the game loses its pace. You want the pitch feeling alive the whole time."
De Jong tilted his head, processing it.
"The match format—" Piqué continued, and something in him accelerated slightly, the way people accelerate when they get to the part of an idea they are most excited about. "Thirty, maybe forty minutes. Around that range — we're still working on the exact number. But short. Punchy. You don't want it to drag. Every minute has to feel like it matters."
"That's short," Umtiti said.
"That's the point." Piqué looked at him. "You know how a ninety-minute match has twenty minutes that everyone actually watches? This is just those twenty minutes. The whole thing is those twenty minutes."
Umtiti made a sound of acknowledgment that was somewhere between agreement and continued uncertainty.
"Now — the format itself." Piqué put both hands on the back of the chair in front of him, leaning forward slightly. "It starts 1v1. Before the teams are full, before anyone else is on the pitch — you start with one player from each side. Then players enter progressively. The teams build. It creates a different kind of opening — more exposed, more individual, the pressure is completely concentrated."
"How do they enter?" Araujo asked.
"Working on that still. But the idea is that it creates this building tension — more and more players coming in, the game becoming more complex as it goes. The viewer is watching the shape change in real time."
Araujo was leaning forward now, his elbows on his knees. "Okay. What else?"
"Wildcard goals." Piqué said it like he had been saving it. "Designated zones or moments in the match where a goal scored counts for more than one. Could be a specific area of the pitch, could be a specific window of time. Changes the tactical calculation completely — suddenly there are moments where a team that's behind can close a gap instantly, and a team that's ahead has to defend differently." He paused. "It keeps the match alive at any scoreline."
"That's actually—" Griezmann started.
"And the president penalty."
A brief silence.
"The what?" De Jong said.
"Each team has a president. Not a player — someone in the stands, a figure connected to the team. And at a designated moment in the match, that person gets to order a penalty. For their team." He waited.
The group processed this.
"You're serious," Griezmann said.
"I'm serious."
"That's insane."
"I know."
"I mean that in a good way," Griezmann clarified.
"I know that too."
Araujo laughed — a short, sharp burst, the involuntary kind. "Dude. That sounds completely insane."
"Thank you," Piqué said, with great sincerity.
"No, I mean—" Araujo was still laughing, shaking his head. "Who decides when the president uses it? Is it strategic? Can you save it? Can the other team see it coming?"
"All of those are things we're working through," Piqué said, with the untroubled energy of a man who was comfortable not having every answer yet. "That's the work. But the concept — the concept is there. The idea that there's this external element, this unpredictable factor that someone outside the pitch controls — that changes how people watch it. Viewers at home, they're invested in the president's decision too. It's not just the players on the pitch."
De Jong had his arms folded, leaning back, the expression of someone running calculations. "And you're actually doing this? This isn't just—"
"The groundwork is being laid already," Piqué said, straightforwardly. "Investors. Initial partners. We're over a year away from anything public — probably more — but the structure is being built."
"Investors?" Umtiti raised an eyebrow. "Real ones?"
"Real ones. And—" Piqué smiled slightly, the smile of someone about to say something they have been looking forward to saying. "Streamers."
"Streamers?" Griezmann repeated.
"Content creators. The people who already have the audience we're going for — the young audience, the people who consume sport completely differently from how their parents did. The PR team has been very clear about this. This format is built for that generation. The short, high-intensity, high-entertainment version of football, with formats and rules that feel more familiar to people who grew up with gaming and content and—"
He stopped.
He had been looking at the group as he spoke — moving from face to face, checking engagement, gauging the room the way someone does when they are invested in how their idea is being received. And his gaze, arriving at the far end of the cluster, found something that brought the whole monologue to a complete halt.
He looked at Mateo.
Then at Pedri.
Then at Mateo again.
They were both present — physically present, seated, eyes forward — in the way that objects are present in a room. The lights were on but the quality of it suggested that nobody was particularly at home. Mateo had the specific expression of a person whose face had agreed to show up and had declined to commit to any further involvement. His eyes were doing the minimum — open, oriented in roughly the right direction, occasionally blinking at the appropriate interval. Beneath them, a darkness that suggested the night had not been as restful as a Tuesday morning required. Pedri was marginally more present but operating in the same postcode — upright, technically attentive, his hands folded on the table in the pose of a man whose body had agreed to the meeting and whose mind had submitted a counter-proposal.
Piqué looked at them both.
His face recoiled slightly — the involuntary expression of someone encountering something unexpected and finding it mildly alarming.
"What's — what's up with them?" he said.
De Jong, who had apparently already done this assessment and filed it, made a small sound of amusement. "Didn't seem to sleep well last night."
"Both of them?"
"Both of them," Griezmann confirmed.
Piqué opened his mouth — the beginning of a question that had a very clear direction and would have arrived there in approximately four more words—
"Sorry I'm late."
The door opened.
Koeman's voice arrived before he fully did — the particular quality of a voice that has been doing this for long enough that it fills a room before its owner crosses the threshold. He came in behind it, his assistants with him, and the room performed the collective, automatic rearrangement of a group of people who have been doing one thing and are now preparing to do another.
Conversations ended. Chairs adjusted. Postures shifted.
The cluster at the front dissolved quietly back into rows.
Piqué sat down.
The room settled.
....
BANG.
DING.
The sounds moved through Mateo's head with the particular persistence of things that had decided to stay. He stared at the front of the room where Koeman had begun talking, and pressed both palms against his eyes — not briefly, but for a sustained moment, the full pressure of someone attempting a manual reset on a system that had not received adequate maintenance.
He lowered his hands.
Koeman was still talking. The room was still here. This was still happening.
A groan came from his immediate left.
He looked over.
Pedri was performing a version of the same operation — head slightly bowed, jaw set, the specific expression of a man applying willpower to a situation that willpower alone was not going to fully resolve. He shifted in his seat, straightened, blinked twice in the deliberate way of someone trying to convince their eyes to do their job.
Mateo looked at him for a moment.
And despite everything — the tiredness, the weight behind his eyes, the general state of a person who had seen 2am from the wrong side — he felt a smile come through.
There was something specifically, privately comforting about the fact that someone else in this room looked exactly as bad as he did. Misery did love company. It was not a cure but it was something.
The night had not ended on the beach.
After the rocks and the water and everything that had happened there — the conversation and the stars and the moment that had settled into him quietly without announcement — they had been rejoined by Aina and Pedri, who had arrived back along the waterline looking like two people who had been somewhere and had not entirely returned from it yet. Nobody asked. Nobody needed to.
They had stayed on the beach for another twenty minutes or so — the four of them together, talking about nothing in particular, the kind of conversation that exists primarily as a vehicle for being in a place with people you are glad to be in a place with. Then, because Mateo and Aina had decided simultaneously and without discussion that they were hungry again, they had gone back to Uncle Hugo's truck for a second visit that Hugo had received with the exasperated warmth of a man who had been expecting this and had kept the grill going accordingly.
Another twenty minutes there. More talking. More laughing. Hugo telling a story about Mateo at nine years old that Aina had apparently been holding in reserve for exactly this kind of occasion and now produced at full volume. Mateo defending himself inadequately.
By the time the apartment complex appeared at the end of the road and Pedri had parked the Cupra and they had all gone their respective floors, it was somewhere around 2am.
Mateo had slept. He had definitely slept — he was aware of having been unconscious for a meaningful stretch of time. But 6:30 had arrived with the particular brutality of early mornings after late nights, and training had followed, and now here he was in the tactical room with the specific quality of a person whose body was present and whose mind was somewhere approximately fifteen minutes behind it, trying to catch up.
Koeman had moved into the pre-match talk.
The tone was measured — not the full emotional investment of a pre-match address in the dressing room tunnel, but the professional, detailed register of a coach setting context in a tactical session. City. The second leg. A few days away. Everyone in this room understood the stakes without being told them, but Koeman said them anyway — not for drama but for focus, the way repeating a truth out loud keeps it from becoming abstract.
Then, with the directness of a man who had already done all his thinking and was now simply communicating its outcomes:
"I'm going to start with the lineup."
The room shifted.
Not dramatically — a slight change in quality, the particular attentiveness that arrives when information is about to be distributed that some people want and others have been hoping for. Almost everyone in the room had a reasonable private estimate of what was coming. Almost everyone still held, beneath that estimate, the small and unkillable hope that the estimate was wrong.
"We're going back to our 4-3-3."
Ter Stegen. No surprise. The goalkeeper's position was as settled as anything in the squad — there had been no real conversation about it for months.
The defensive line: Alba at left back. Piqué and Lenglet centre backs.
Koeman paused very slightly.
"Piqué." He looked at him directly. "Please — don't get another red card."
The room laughed — immediate, the laughter of people who had been waiting for exactly this reference and were glad it had arrived. Piqué smiled, the smile of a man who had made his peace with being the punchline to this particular joke for the remainder of the season.
"Don't worry about a thing, boss," he said, with the specific confidence of someone who was fully aware that confidence was the only available response.
"Better," Koeman said, and the laughter came again, shorter this time, already folding back into attention.
Roberto at right back.
This was the one that moved through the room differently — not the polite, expected silence of confirmed assumptions, but the slightly uncomfortable quiet of hopes being extinguished. The right back position had been genuinely contested. Dest had put in time there. Araujo, more recently, had been making a case with his minutes. Both of them had been sitting with the possibility that today might be their name.
It was not their name.
Roberto received it with the clean, uncomplicated pleasure of a man who had been waiting and was glad the wait was over — a smile that he did not particularly attempt to contain, because there was no policy requiring him to contain it and the room had seen worse.
Dest and Araujo received it in their own ways. Neither said anything.
The midfield: Busquets, De Jong, Pedri.
This landed without resistance. These three had been the spine of what worked when things worked this season — the distribution of responsibilities between them so established that calling it out had become more formality than news. Busquets received his name with the expression of someone registering a fact. De Jong nodded once. Pedri, still operating slightly below full capacity, produced a version of the same nod that indicated he had heard and would continue to function.
Forwards.
"Messi — right wing."
Settled. Done.
"Mateo — you'll be up front this game."
Mateo looked at Koeman.
Koeman was already looking at him — not waiting for a reaction, just making sure the information had arrived at the correct destination. Mateo nodded. Koeman continued.
"Left wing—"
The tension arrived in the room before the name did.
It settled specifically over two people — Griezmann and Dembelé — with the precision of something that knew exactly where it belonged. Both of them had known this moment was coming. Both of them had been sitting with the knowledge of it in different ways since the session started.
Dembelé had his hands pressed together in his lap, fingers interlocked, the knuckles carrying the faint pallor of a grip that had been held slightly too long. He was twenty-three years old and had cost this club a hundred and five million euros and had been told, when he arrived, that he was the heir to the position Neymar had left — the next great Barcelona wide forward, both feet deadly, pace that caused problems before contact, the next thing. He had believed it. He had come here believing it. The injuries had come and the form had wavered and the promise had remained stubbornly more promise than delivery, and now he was sitting in a tactical room finding out whether he was starting a Champions League semi-final second leg.
Griezmann's hands were pressed together too, but differently — the hands of someone focusing pressure rather than containing anxiety, a meditation pose almost, the posture of a man who had won a World Cup and finished third in the Ballon d'Or and had come to Barcelona as the proven article, not the potential one. He had not expected to be Barcelona's primary star — Messi was here, that was the reality, you accepted the reality. But second. He had expected to be clearly, comfortably, definitively second. And instead he was sitting here competing with a twenty-three-year-old for the last starting spot in a forward line, and the seventeen-year-old who was meant to be the future had already overtaken both of them in the pecking order so thoroughly that nobody was even having that conversation anymore.
Two hundred and fifty million euros, roughly, between the two of them.
One position.
"Dembelé," Koeman said. "Left wing."
The breath Dembelé released was not audible. But the release of it was visible — something in his shoulders, something in the set of his jaw, the microscopic deflation of tension that had been held for longer than it should have been held.
Griezmann's hands tightened once, briefly, and then relaxed. His face did not move. He was a professional. He had done this before and he would do it again and none of that made the moment any easier, but he was not going to give the room anything more than was necessary.
Koeman had already moved on.
"Mateo."
"Yes, Gaffer."
Koeman looked at him with the focused directness of a man delivering a specific instruction that he wanted received specifically.
"This game — I don't want you going at Walker repeatedly. Even when you beat him." He paused, making sure the next part landed clearly. "When you beat him, you waste time. The recovery is fast, the double team arrives, and by the time you're through the moment has passed." He shook his head slightly. "I need you looser. More unpredictable. Wait for the cross, wait for the through ball — don't go hunting the ball deep. Move around up there. If someone is marking you, move them out of position." He let a beat pass. "Like the Bayern second leg. I need you more offensive. More in the box. That's where you hurt them."
The room was quiet.
Mateo held Koeman's gaze.
The instruction sat between them — clear, direct, reasonable — and something in Mateo was already doing the work of receiving it, running it through, finding where it fit.
After a moment, he nodded.
"Yes, Gaffer." He said it cleanly. "No issues."
Koeman's face broke into a smile — the full version, brief but genuine, the smile of a man who had been braced for more resistance than he received. He clapped his hands once, sharp and satisfied.
"Yes. Good." He looked at the room. "Okay — let's continue."
Mateo sat back.
The tiredness was still there — the dark weight behind his eyes, the slight lag between thought and action that a handful of sleep hours had not been enough to fully clear. But underneath it, sharper than it had any right to be given the circumstances, something else.
He thought about the last two games.
The wing. The dribbling — the ball at his feet, defenders in front of him, the specific pleasure of going at someone and winning that exchange with pace and movement and the kind of close control that he had developed in ways he had not entirely expected. Creating. Being involved in the full sweep of an attack rather than just its conclusion. He had felt something there — a completeness, a version of himself on a pitch that felt richer and more dimensional than the version that simply waited for the ball to arrive in dangerous areas and finished it.
He had started thinking, genuinely, that maybe the wing was where he belonged long-term. Maybe the striker mould, the one he had grown up in, was something the old Mateo had fitted. The new one — the one shaped by everything that had happened in these months, by training and matches and the specific development that had occurred in ways he could feel but not always articulate — maybe that Mateo was something different. Something that could do more.
He had liked that thought.
And yet.
He sat in the tactical room with Koeman's instruction still fresh, and he reached for the part of his mind that had changed — the part that had arrived with the Johan Cruyff award and the shift in how he understood the game, the part that could look at a tactical problem not just as a player inside it but as something more like a student of it.
He thought about City. About their defensive structure, their press triggers, their transition speed. Walker specifically — the athleticism, the recovery pace, the ability to get back into position in windows that most full backs simply could not match. Going at him repeatedly was not just a waste of energy; it was giving City's system exactly what it was designed to handle. Width, directness, isolated one-on-ones. They had an answer for all of it.
But central movement — unpredictable positioning, a striker who was in one place and then another, who didn't commit to areas early and didn't give the defensive line time to settle into its shape — that was a different problem. That was the problem Koeman was asking him to be.
He thought about the Bayern second leg.
He thought about what it meant to be in the right place at the right time, consistently, game after game — not because you could do everything but because you were the most efficient possible version of the one thing you did better than almost anyone.
The goals. The records. The way the ninety thousand had chanted.
He thought about what Koeman was actually asking him to do and found, when he stripped away the slight sting of it — the small, honest disappointment of being moved back from something he had been enjoying — that the reasoning held.
The team needed goals. Not chances. Not performances. Goals. And the most reliable route to goals, given everything they had and everything the opposition would bring, was Messi creating and Mateo finishing, the mechanism clean and simple and extremely difficult to defend against.
He was not happy about it in the way you are not happy about medicine that works.
But it was right. He felt it was right even as he felt the small resistance to it, and the feeling of rightness was cleaner and more settled than the feeling of resistance.
Koeman continued talking at the front of the room.
Mateo looked at him — at the board, at the shape being drawn out, at the game being mapped before it existed — and the tiredness in his face was still there, the dark marks still present, the eyes still carrying the accumulated weight of a late Barcelona night.
But somewhere in those tired eyes, if you knew to look for it, was something else entirely.
Sharp. Focused. Hungry.
At the end of the day, beating City was all that mattered.
A/N
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