"Uh uh."
Oriol Cerdà had come forward in his seat.
He had watched Messi go across the grass at Reece James and take that ball clean off his foot, and the sound that came out of him at that was somewhere between a grunt and a prayer.
"Ah."
He came further forward.
Messi was up. Messi had it. Messi was already looking.
"Ah. Ah, ah, ah."
Oriol's hands had found the rail in front of him without him noticing.
And then Messi's head came up and his body opened and Oriol saw it before the ball had even gone, and he was already moving.
"AH!"
He was up out of the seat entirely now, pressed forward into the rail, both hands gripping it.
The ball went up.
Diagonal. Over the top. Dropping out of the black sky.
And Oriol saw the boy running underneath it.
"Ah, ah, ah, AH."
His whole body was leaning. He was up on his toes with his chest against the rail and his mouth already open, and he watched his sister's son turn his back to that goal.
"Ah."
The shoulders came round.
"Ah."
The weight went onto the left foot.
"AH!"
And Mateo King threw himself backwards into the air.
Oriol's hands came off the rail.
They went straight up above his head, both of them, and stayed there, swaying, his mouth wide open and no sound coming out of it at all.
The boot came through.
The ball left it.
Mendy went, and Mendy was diving, and Mendy was stretching, and the ball went over the top of his hand.
And Oriol Cerdà's eyes went enormous.
Before that ball had even settled into the net.
"GOALLLLLLLLLLLL!"
The whole stadium erupted.
Everything went at once. Thirty thousand people jumping in the same second. Rows going over. Arms up everywhere. Flags spinning. Noise coming down out of that stand like something falling.
Oriol was screaming with both arms waving above his head, turning in a full circle, roaring at nobody and everybody.
And he turned.
And a few yards along the rail, an old man in a jacket was screaming too.
Rodrigo Messi had both hands buried in his own hair, squeezing fistfuls of it, his face completely gone, and the two of them found each other at exactly the same instant.
"GOALLLLLLL!"
"GOALLLLLLL!"
They were shouting it directly at one another from six feet away, both of them out of their minds, neither of them hearing a single word.
"GOALLLLLL!"
And all around them the Barcelona supporters had come apart completely.
Mateo King has scored.
Mateo King has scored.
Mateo King has scored.
And everywhere descended into madness.
If Messi's goal had rekindled the hope, this one had blown everything up.
"OOOOHHHH! WHATTT!"
In an apartment in Germany, both of them were on their feet.
Jude Bellingham had both hands out in front of him, shaking them, doing a little half-turn away from the screen and back again.
"OOF. OOOF."
Erling Haaland's mouth was wide open and he was laughing.
"What the fuck was that?" He turned to Jude. "Did he actually do that? Did he ACTUALLY do that?"
"Bro." Jude was still shaking his hands out. "Bro, that was. WOW."
He put both hands on top of his head.
"Damn. Just, that. You cannot." He shook his head. "You cannot."
Haaland was still smiling, but his eyes had started moving now, darting round the room.
"Man, forget that."
He started patting the sofa cushions.
"Where is my phone? Where is it? Where is my phone?"
He was up, looking behind cushions, genuinely excited.
"I need to post that. I need to post that right now. WHAT."
"GOALLLLLLLL!"
ishdafish5 had gone down onto his knees in front of the television and was pumping both fists at it, over and over.
"GOAAAAL! GOAAAAL! AHHHHH!"
He was screaming his heart out, his voice completely shredded, and his chat was going so fast that the messages were a solid moving blur.
He turned and looked straight down the camera.
He brought both hands up in front of his own face and shook them at it.
"WHO IS GOING TO PENALTIES WITH YOU? WHO IS GOING TO PENALTIES WITH YOU?"
He shook them harder.
"MATEO! MATEO! MY KING! MY KING! MY KING!"
Then he sat back on his heels and threw both arms out at the screen and started fake sobbing, his whole body rocking with it.
"WALLAHI! WALLAHI! WALLAHI!"
He was pointing at the television now, at a boy at the bottom of a pile of bodies.
"MATEO, TAKE MY LIFE! TAKE MY LIFE! YOU ARE THE BEST! YOU DESERVE IT ALL! I LOVE YOU! COME AND TAKE MY MOTHER! TAKE IT ALL!"
"WALLAHI! WALLAHIIII!"
"AHHHHHH!"
In the CBS studio, Thierry Henry was up out of his chair with both arms above his head.
"AHHHHHH!"
"No way." Jamie Carragher had both hands on top of his head and was laughing, actually laughing, shaking his head from side to side. "No way he did that. NO WAY he did that."
"YESSSSS!" Micah Richards was screaming. "WOWWWW! WHATTTT!"
And Kate Abdo, who had spent an entire evening being the only adult at that desk, had come completely out of her seat.
"GOAL! GOAL! GOAL!"
Everywhere.
Everywhere.
India.
A viewing centre, packed to the walls, four hundred people standing.
The place went off like a bomb. Plastic chairs went backwards. Men climbed on tables. Somebody's drink went straight up into the air and came down on about six people and not one of them noticed.
The noise did not stop for two full minutes.
Ghana.
A woman of about forty-five was standing on her own sofa.
She had a Barcelona flag in one hand and she was swinging it round above her head in enormous circles, jumping, laughing, her whole face lit up.
"AHHHHHH! AHHHHHH!"
And then she started singing.
She sang it at the top of her lungs, alone, in her own living room, four thousand miles from Porto, dancing on her sofa cushions with a flag going round and round above her.
Argentina.
A whole family had come apart in one small room.
A father shoved his own son so hard the boy went sideways off the arm of a chair. An uncle was on his feet screaming at the ceiling. Two cousins were jumping on the spot holding each other's shoulders. Somebody's grandmother had both hands over her mouth.
And in the middle of all of it, a boy of about fifteen had sat down on the floor and started crying.
Nobody stopped to ask him why.
His father just reached down without looking and put a hand on the top of his head and kept screaming.
United States.
It was the afternoon there.
A couple in a small apartment had come off the couch together.
They were both screaming. She was jumping, both fists going, and he had both arms up, and they came together in the middle of the room and grabbed each other and jumped on the spot, still screaming, still laughing.
He picked her up.
She kissed him.
And he could not hold it, and both of them went straight down onto the couch and then off the side of it and onto the floor in a heap.
There was about a second of silence.
And then both of them started laughing so hard that neither of them could get up.
Everywhere on this earth that had a Barcelona supporter, something like that was happening.
And then there was Spain.
Barcelona, in fact.
"GOALLLLLL!"
The city came out into the street.
Doors came open all over Barcelona and people fell out of them, instantly, still holding whatever they had been holding, running out into the road to find somebody else who had also just seen it.
The outdoor viewing centres detonated. Thousands of people in public squares, all of them up at once, chairs going over, tables going over, complete strangers grabbing each other by the shoulders. Men climbing onto each other's backs. Whole crowds jumping in unison with their arms round each other's necks.
Car horns started. And once they started they did not stop.
Flags came out of windows. Somebody let off a firework and then somebody else did.
Out at Oriol's farm, the workers had gathered around one television in the main building.
And they came off the floor as one.
Shouting, clapping, grabbing each other, one man doubled over laughing with his hands on his knees, two others jumping and slapping each other on the back over and over.
"HE DID IT! HE DID IT!"
"THE BOY! THE BOY!"
Across every part of that city it was the same thing.
And in a bar packed to the walls, with smoke in the air and broken glass somewhere on the floor and forty men crammed into a room built for twenty, Nico Barrera climbed up onto the counter.
He stood up on the bar with both arms out.
And the president of the Boixos Nois roared it down at all of them.
"LA SEXTAAAAAAAA!"
And forty men roared it back at him.
"LA SEXTAAAAAA!"
King's Palace.
David King was in Porto. He had not been in his own restaurant in three days.
He was not going to miss this either way, and so he had told the staff to open it.
The place was packed. Absolutely full, wall to wall, people standing in the aisles between the tables, every seat taken, more of them crowded round the door.
And when that ball went in, the whole building shook.
Chairs went over. People climbed onto the benches. The staff were screaming with the customers, arms up, one of the waiters spinning a towel above his head like a flag.
And one of them got to the microphone.
"FREE DRINKS! FREE DRINKS FOR EVERYBODY!"
The place went absolutely feral.
And another member of staff got a fistful of his shirt and dragged him back.
"Dude. DUDE. What are you doing?"
He was looking at him like a man watching a car crash.
"If the boss finds out."
And the one who had said it just looked around at the room, still grinning, absolutely gone.
"Dude." He gestured at the television with both hands. "His son just scored a freaking bicycle kick to win the fucking Champions League."
He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"Do you actually think he is going to care about a few drinks?"
And every last piece of reason left the boy's head at once.
He stood up on a chair.
"FREEEE DRINKSSSSS! VISCA BARÇAAAAA!"
And the whole place went wild.
And that same scene was playing out in restaurants and bars and cafés all across that city.
Barcelona was different.
There were fans in every corner of the world who loved that football club just as deeply, and some of them more. That is simply true, and anybody who says otherwise has never met a Barcelona supporter in Jakarta or Lagos or Kerala.
But as the home of the team, it just felt purer. A bit more intense. This was by far the highest concentration of fanatical Barça supporters anywhere on this earth, and it showed.
They had watched every step of it. They had lived the whole of this final in their own bodies, all hundred and nineteen minutes of it, and now the second goal had all but confirmed a sixth Champions League trophy.
The celebration was something else entirely.
But very soon, even that changed.
Because in among all of it, quieter things had started happening.
Couples standing in living rooms holding onto each other, not jumping any more, not shouting, just holding on. A man with his face pressed into his partner's shoulder. A woman looking at a screen with tears coming down and a smile she could not get off her face.
Friends sitting on the arms of sofas with an arm round somebody who had gone.
Because plenty of them had gone.
Grown men crying in front of televisions all over that city, and the friends next to them saying nothing at all, just gripping the back of their necks and letting them.
A man in a kitchen with a phone pressed to his ear.
"Are you watching? ARE YOU WATCHING? Did you see it?"
His voice broke halfway through.
"He is seventeen. He is SEVENTEEN."
And in a hospital, in a room with the lights turned low and a machine going somewhere quietly beside the bed, a young man was sitting forward in a plastic chair with his phone in one hand.
His mother was in the bed.
She had been in that bed for a while now.
He had been showing her the match on his phone all night, holding it up where she could see it, talking her through everything she could not follow any more.
And he was crying now. Properly, and smiling at the same time, and he took her hand and squeezed it.
"Mamá."
He held the phone up.
"Mamá, they did it. Barcelona have done it. They have done it."
And for some people, that goal was more personal than any of it.
Óscar López was sitting alone in his office.
He had not moved from his chair.
He had watched a boy he had coached at La Masia, a boy he had shouted at across a training pitch a hundred times, a boy he had watched cry once at fourteen because he had not been picked, throw himself backwards into the air in a Champions League final.
His eyes had gone red at the edges.
And he could not speak.
He was just sitting there with a hand half raised in front of him, making a small sound and then stopping.
"Ah. Ah."
That was all he had.
Inside La Masia, four boys had gone completely feral.
"A BICYCLE KICK!" Balde had both hands on his own head. "A FUCKING BICYCLE KICK!"
"How did he even think of it?" Casadó was laughing. "How does that even come into your head? In that moment?"
"That dude is actually insane." Fermín was pointing at the screen. "He is actually, properly insane. There is something wrong with him."
They were all talking over each other and none of them were listening.
And on the other side of the room, Gavi was not saying anything at all.
He was sitting on the arm of the sofa, looking at the television.
And his eyes had gone a bit moist.
He was just smiling.
And a few feet away, out in the corridor, three members of staff had gathered around one more.
Alejandro had both hands over his face.
He was crying and he could not stop, and he kept wiping at his eyes with the heel of his hand and it kept not working, and one of the others had an arm round his shoulders.
"It is fine. It is fine, man."
And Javi, the gateman, stood in the doorway with his arms folded, grinning at him.
"So." He tipped his head. "You do have emotions."
Everybody laughed.
And Alejandro laughed too, wet and broken, still wiping at his face, still watching that screen.
And in a small restaurant, in a quiet street, Manuela was on the floor with the two children.
They were running in circles round the tables, both of them shrieking.
"They scored! They scored! HAHAHA!"
"They SCORED!"
And Manuela was chasing them, laughing, catching one and letting them go again.
Across the room, old man Francisco was standing in front of the television.
He had not moved.
He was looking at the screen, at the replay, at a boy who had sat in his restaurant nine days ago and eaten his wife's food and held a girl's hand across one of these tables and promised him something on his way out of that door.
And Francisco smiled.
His eyes had gone watery and his voice, when it came, was completely choked.
"The kid actually did it."
...
The stadium was not any less ecstatic.
And not just the fans.
Lionel Messi had not moved after he hit the pass.
He was standing exactly where the ball had left his boot, forty yards away, with his mouth open and his eyes locked on the flight of it, watching the boy turn his back to goal and throw himself into the air.
The contact.
The ball.
Mendy.
And in.
"AHHHHHHHH!"
The scream tore out of him.
Both fists came up and started pumping, hard, over and over, and he was running without any idea where he was going, screaming at nobody, at everybody, at the roof.
"AHHHHHHH!"
He turned toward the Barcelona end and pumped both fists at them, roaring, his whole face gone.
And then his legs went.
He dropped straight down onto both knees on the grass and stayed there, still pumping his fists, and the tears had already come.
"WE DID IT! WE DID IT! WE DID IT! WE DID IT!"
He was screaming it at the sky with his arms going.
"WE DID IT!"
And then he fell forward onto his front, flat out on the grass in the middle of a Champions League final, face down, both fists closed in the turf.
Three years.
Three years of carrying a promise he made to those people in front of the Camp Nou.
He pushed himself up onto his hands, and his face was completely wet, and he got up.
And he turned.
Because every single Barcelona player on that pitch was running in one direction.
Toward Mateo King.
Mateo's eyes had never left the ball.
Not for a fraction of a second.
He hit it and his body kept going backwards and his head stayed turned, chin tucked, eyes locked, and he was still watching that football when he came down.
He landed badly.
He did not brace, because bracing would have meant looking away. His right leg took the ground first, hard, at an angle it was not supposed to take, and there was a sound.
A small, sharp, unmistakable sound.
Crack.
Mateo did not notice.
He was on the grass, twisted, still looking, watching Mendy dive, watching that enormous arm go up and back, watching the ball go over the top of the glove.
The bar.
Down.
In.
And his eyes went enormous.
And before the stadium made a single sound, before one person in that ground had processed it, before anybody anywhere on this earth had reacted at all, Mateo King was already screaming.
"GOAAAAAALLLLLLLL!"
His whole face came apart with it, mouth wide, everything twisting.
He was up off the floor before he had decided to move.
And he ran.
He did not know where. He had no idea where he was going and he was not thinking about it, he was simply running, arms out, face soaked, screaming the same word over and over into a stadium that had finally caught up and was now coming down on top of him.
"GOAAAAAALLL! GOAAAAALLL!"
And he found himself near the corner.
There were a lot of celebrations Mateo King could have done.
He had a whole catalogue of them by now. The calma, both hands down, telling a hostile stadium to be quiet. The dance he had done at the Wanda. The thumb to the head. The shirt over the face. The point at the badge. The arms out to the crowd.
But there was only one that could fit this.
Only one celebration on this earth that could reach a moment like this one, when a man scores what is most likely the winning goal in a Champions League final.
What the fans have long since given a name.
The passion celebration.
Called that because it has no mark and no symbol and no style. There is nothing designed about it. It is not a message to anybody. It is simply what comes out of a human being when the thing inside them is too big to stay in.
And Mateo King's came out in the most basic form there is.
The knee slide.
He hit the deck at full speed with both arms out and went, screaming, grass spraying up on either side of him, the whole corner of that stadium coming down at him as he came.
"AHHHHHHHHHH!"
He was gone. Completely gone.
He slid all the way to the advertising boards at the corner and came off the slide swinging, and his fist went straight into the hoarding.
The board cracked and jumped out of its frame and went flying sideways.
Mateo did not look at it.
He was already up, on his feet, both arms flying above his head, screaming into thirty thousand people.
"AHHHHHHH!"
BANG.
Pedri hit him at full speed.
He came in from behind and landed on his back and got both arms around his neck, screaming directly into the side of his head.
"YOU DID ITTTTT! YOU DID ITTTTT!"
And then the rest of them arrived, all of them at once, and Mateo King disappeared underneath a pile of red and blue.
"HAHHHHHAH!"
Peter Drury was standing up.
And Peter Drury would not lie. Not to anybody, and certainly not to himself.
A commentator is supposed to be neutral. That is the job. He had been doing this job for thirty years and he had always understood that part of it and had always held it.
But there was one team he had wanted to win this football match.
Perhaps it was because he had watched most of this extraordinary story with his own eyes. Perhaps it was because of what that club had been in August, and what it was now. Perhaps it was because of the boy.
He had tried to keep it in check all night.
And what came out of his mouth now was anything but.
"BARCELONAAAAA! BARCELONAAAAAAA!"
"OH, BARCELONA!"
"SIX YEARS! SIX YEARS they have waited for this! Six years since they last held it, six years of being knocked down and knocked out and told it was over, six years of being told this club was finished!"
"And on the night they finally come back to it."
"On the NIGHT."
"A boy born in this city. A boy raised in that building. The absolute embodiment of everything FC Barcelona has ever said it is, everything that badge has ever claimed to stand for, has just walked out onto this grass and handed them the crown jewel on a platter."
"In the ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEENTH MINUTE."
Drury's voice broke and came back.
"You are in the stands, Ronaldinho."
"Watch him, Rivaldo."
"You assisted him, Messi."
"A testament to his name, King puts Barça in front!"
"THE CHOSEN SON IS HERE TO TAKE THE UCL TO THE BLAUGRANA ONCE AGAIN!"
He stopped.
He had to.
And when he came back his voice had dropped all the way down, and it was thick, and every single word of it was true.
"Barcelona are winning the Champions League."
The Barcelona bench emptied for the second time in two minutes.
Every substitute, every coach, every physio, all of them pouring across the touchline and onto the grass.
And Ronald Koeman went backwards.
He did not fall so much as let go. He went straight over onto his back on the edge of the technical area and rolled, once, in the grass, with both hands coming up over his own mouth.
And he stayed there.
Flat on his back beside a football pitch with both palms pressed over his mouth and his eyes open and his chest going.
The tears came very quietly.
They did not pour. They came softly, small, running down the sides of his face into the grass, and he did not wipe them and did not seem to know they were there at all.
He was looking up at a floodlight.
Nine months.
He had walked into that club in August with a squad half the country had written off, a president who was about to be forced out, and a captain who had already sent the fax asking to leave. He had been told he would be sacked before Christmas. He had been told it by people who liked him.
And he had believed them.
He had believed them in November, and he had believed them again in March, and he had believed them thirty minutes ago on this exact touchline.
Ronald Koeman took his hands off his mouth.
And he pushed himself up off the ground.
They did it.
It is over.
And that thought went through Thomas Tuchel too.
He was standing exactly where he had been standing when the ball went in, hands still half raised, and for about three seconds Thomas Tuchel was frozen solid.
It is over.
But by now everybody should know exactly what kind of man Thomas Tuchel was.
He spun round.
"GET ZIYECH! GIROUD! ALONSO! GET THEM READY!"
His assistants were looking at him. All of them. Nobody moved.
"NOW!"
In the family area, there were tears.
Grandma Núria had both hands over her face and she was sobbing.
Properly sobbing, her whole body going with it, her shoulders shaking, and Nora had both arms round her and was talking into her ear.
"Mamá. Mamá, please. Please, sit down. Please calm down, you will make yourself ill."
The rest of them had turned to look.
Olivia and Aina were watching her with their hands still together, both of them with tears in their own eyes and enormous smiles on their faces, not knowing whether to laugh or cry and doing a little of both.
"Mamá."
Isabella had come down the row.
She crouched in front of her mother and took both of her wrists gently and brought her hands down off her face, and her own eyes were completely wet.
"Mamá, this is a happy moment. This is the happiest moment. Why are you crying?"
And Núria shook her head, hard, trying to stop and completely failing.
"Your father."
Her voice went to pieces on the word.
"Your father. If he was here. If he was."
She could not get to the end of it.
Her mouth kept moving and nothing else came out.
And Isabella pulled her mother into her chest and held her.
"I know, Mamá."
She pressed her cheek against the top of her head.
"I know."
And a few feet away, Oriol Cerdà stood on his own with his hands on the rail, watching his mother and his sister holding onto each other, and did not say a single word.
Back on the field.
It was chaos and it did not stop.
"YOU ARE MAD! YOU ARE ACTUALLY MAD!"
"WHAT WAS THAT? WHAT WAS THAT?"
"CHAVAL! CHAVAL!"
They had Mateo up on his feet and they would not let go of him. Alba had both hands on his face. Araújo was rubbing the top of his head with his knuckles. Roberto had him by the shoulders and was shaking him. Somebody was slapping his back so hard it was audible over the stadium.
Piqué grabbed his head with both hands and pressed their foreheads together.
"You beautiful, insane little animal."
Busquets, who says nothing, said nothing. He just took a fistful of Mateo's shirt at the shoulder and gripped it and looked at him and nodded, once.
De Jong had both arms above his head. Griezmann was screaming. Ter Stegen had run seventy yards and arrived last, laughing, out of breath, and got both arms round him from behind.
Dembélé, in his bib, was jumping on the spot.
And Mateo was laughing.
Laughing and crying at the same time, his face completely wet, being shoved and grabbed and shouted at from six directions at once, and he could not get a single word out.
And then the pile parted.
Because Messi had arrived.
Mateo turned toward him, still laughing, mouth already opening to say something.
And Messi did not say anything.
He came straight in and got both arms all the way around him and pulled him in and held on.
Tight.
Properly tight, one hand on the back of Mateo's head, his own face pressed into the boy's shoulder.
Mateo froze for a second.
He had not expected that.
And then he brought his own arms up and held on too.
And Lionel Messi said it into his shoulder, over and over, and only Mateo could hear it.
"Thank you."
He gripped harder.
"Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."
The others had gone quiet around them. Piqué stopped shouting. Alba stopped moving. Nobody said anything and nobody came in and nobody touched either of them.
They just stood there and watched.
And then Messi let him go.
He held him at arm's length by both shoulders.
His eyes were completely full and he did not care in the slightest, and he was smiling at this boy with his whole face.
"We did it."
And Mateo King smiled back at him.
"We did it."
And that went on for a few more minutes.
Mateo King, seventeen years old, scoring in the one hundred and nineteenth minute of a Champions League final with a bicycle kick.
One of the greatest moments in the history of this competition.
And the game was not over yet.
"Well, Peter."
"I know, Jim. I know."
"And though the goal has taken all of the attention, and deservedly so, I have to ask you about that cross."
"Ah."
"What a beauty that was. Honestly. Were you not shocked by that ball?"
Drury laughed.
"Who crossed it?"
Jim started laughing too.
"Messi."
"There you go."
"HAHAHA."
"There you go, Jim. There is your answer. Nobody else on this earth sees that ball, let alone hits it."
"And what a football match this has been."
"What a football match. Timo Werner in the forty-third, and for fifty-three minutes Chelsea had one hand and then two hands on this trophy. They defended like men possessed. Édouard Mendy has had the game of his life."
"And then Lionel Messi, in the ninety-sixth minute."
"In the ninety-sixth. And every single person watching thought that was the story of the night."
"And now the boy has gone and copied him. In an even more spectacular fashion."
"When everybody, EVERYBODY, in this stadium had accepted we were going to penalties."
"And Thomas Tuchel is betting the house now."
"He is. Look at this. Three changes at once. Hakim Ziyech is coming on for Jorginho. Olivier Giroud for N'Golo Kanté. And Marcos Alonso for Antonio Rüdiger."
"He is throwing every attacking player he has left onto that pitch."
"Every single one. That is a manager with nothing left to lose and no reason on this earth to hold anything back."
A pause.
"But it just might be too late."
Mateo was walking back.
He was on his own now, coming slowly across the grass toward the halfway line, and his chest was still going and his face was still wet.
And then he stopped.
He crouched down.
He went all the way down onto his haunches in the middle of that pitch and put both hands over his face and stayed there.
Fifty thousand people were still screaming.
"And look at this. Look at the boy."
"He has gone down. He is just taking a moment."
"And do you know what that is, Jim? That is eleven goals in this competition. ELEVEN. And that puts him alone at the top of the scoring charts for this season's Champions League."
"Above Erling Haaland."
"Above everybody. And what a start to a career this boy is having. Honestly, what a start."
Drury paused.
"Ordained."
"Peter."
"No, I mean it. Sometimes you wonder whether miraculous things happen. Not in sport. In the world. And then you get a moment like this one, and it simply confirms it for you."
"Mateo King. Already one for the books."
"HAHAHA." Jim was laughing. "Well, considering the boy's name is King, I would hate to disagree with you on this one, Peter. The coincidences are getting a bit much for me."
The referee jogged over.
"Hey. Hey, come on. Are you ready? We have to go. Come on, get to your position."
Mateo took his hands off his face.
He stood up slowly.
And he did not hurry.
He looked around the whole stadium, at all of it, turning as he walked, at thirty thousand people in one end still going out of their minds, at the flags, at the lights.
He shook hands with Griezmann on the way past. He clapped Roberto on the arm. He waved a hand up at the stand and the noise went up again.
And the Chelsea players did not say one word to him about it.
Not one of them came over. Nobody shouted at him to move. Nobody pointed at the centre circle or waved him along.
They just let him have it.
Mateo reached his position.
And then he crouched down again, on his haunches, hands on his knees, and looked at the grass for a second.
The referee did not bother with him a second time.
He turned instead to the Chelsea players, to the substitutions still being finished, and pointed.
"Are we ready? Ready?"
Olivier Giroud, freshly on, nodded at him.
And the referee nodded back.
And he blew his whistle.
Game restarted.
...
The moment that whistle went, Chelsea came.
They threw every last piece of caution they had into the sky and attacked, all of them, and for the first time since the opening whistle of this football match the situation had completely changed.
Chelsea were chasing.
120th minute.
Alonso launched it long down the left and Pulisic went after it, and Ziyech was already tearing infield, and Giroud was pulling off the back of Piqué.
The ball came in.
And Piqué got there.
He came across in front of Giroud and got his head to it and put it forty yards up the pitch, and he did not stop to admire it.
"¡FUERA! ¡FUERA! OUT! PUSH OUT!"
And on the touchline Ronald Koeman was Ronald Koeman again.
Whatever had put him flat on his back in the grass two minutes ago had been packed away and locked, and he was up on the edge of his area with both arms going and what was left of his voice tearing out of him.
"DEFEND! DEFEND IT! NOBODY GOES! NOBODY GOES FORWARD!"
Twenty yards down the line Tuchel was doing the opposite.
"UP! UP! ALL OF YOU! ZIYECH, INSIDE! INSIDE! CÉSAR, GO! GO!"
"And Chelsea have gone to a back two. They have gone to a back two in a Champions League final."
"Three more minutes, Jim. Three more minutes and FC Barcelona are crowned champions of Europe."
"Or do we get one more miracle in a night that has already given us two?"
And Chelsea came again.
Ziyech got it wide right and whipped one in first time.
Araújo headed it clear.
Again.
Kovačić drove through the middle and slipped it out to Alonso, and Alonso crossed, and Busquets got in front of it.
Again.
James down the right, cutting inside, laying it into Giroud, and De Jong got a leg across it.
Again.
And this time it came all the way to the edge of the Barcelona area, and Kovačić took a touch and looked up, and a small figure came flying in and took it clean off him.
Lionel Messi.
He put a foot through it and hooked it away and got up and started shouting at his own defenders.
"And that is LIONEL MESSI, tracking back and making a tackle in the one hundred and twenty-first minute of a Champions League final."
"That is what this means, Peter."
"That is exactly what this means. There is nobody on this pitch who is not defending. Look at it. Mateo King is inside his own eighteen-yard box. The boy who scored that goal ninety seconds ago is standing on his own goal line."
Chelsea threw crosses in.
That was all they had left. Get it wide, get it high, put it into the box and let Giroud and Silva and Christensen go at it, and every single time the ball went up.
And every single time it came back out.
Piqué headed one clear and turned and screamed at his own back line.
"¡VAMOS! ¡OTRA VEZ! AGAIN! AGAIN!"
Then he turned round and screamed at the stand behind him too, both arms going, whipping thirty thousand people up.
In the stands.
The Chelsea supporters had gone quiet.
Twenty thousand of them, standing, all on their last breath, not one of them singing.
They were just watching.
Because that is what football does to you. It always gives you hope, no matter what the scoreboard says, no matter how impossible it looks, and every single one of them stood there in silence with their eyes on that pitch believing something might still happen.
They had watched Timo Werner score.
They had watched their team defend for fifty-three minutes.
They had watched it all get taken away twice.
And they still could not look away.
And the Barcelona end was not calm either.
They were tense. All of them. Nobody was celebrating and nobody was relaxed, thirty thousand people with their hearts going, watching cross after cross come into their own penalty box.
But some of them had found somewhere to put it.
And in the middle of one of those blocks, Marisol, a middle-aged woman who had declared herself Mateo King's number one supporter to anybody in Barcelona who would listen, had both arms round the shoulders of the two people next to her.
And she was singing.
The Cant del Barça.
They had started it somewhere in the middle of that stand and it had spread out in both directions, and now whole sections of that end had linked arms and were swaying and singing their club's anthem at the top of their voices while their team defended for its life.
Marisol had her eyes shut.
She was singing every word of it and her heart was hammering and underneath the words, in her own head, she was saying something else entirely.
Please do this.
Please. Please win this.
Please.
And her mouth kept going, and the song kept going, and the whole end sang it out over that pitch.
Up in the legends' row.
"AHHHHH! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!"
Ronaldinho was on his feet with both arms out, screaming at a Barcelona defence four hundred yards away as though they could hear him.
Because you can take a man out of that football club, but you will never get the club out of the man.
"CLEAR IT! CLEAR IT!"
Beside him Xavi and Iniesta were both complaining at the referee.
"Three minutes." Xavi threw a hand at the pitch. "Three minutes for WHAT? What is he adding three minutes for? There was nothing! What was there?"
"The substitutions," Iniesta said.
"THREE?"
"I know."
"He better blow it the second it hits," Ronaldinho muttered, sitting back down and immediately standing up again. "The very second. I am telling you now."
Every single one of them had a heart going like a drum.
122nd minute.
Chelsea came again.
Kovačić found Ziyech on the right and Ziyech went at Alba, and Mateo came all the way back to help, closing him down, angling him toward the line.
Ziyech went past him anyway.
He got a yard on the outside and reached the byline and got the cross away.
"And another ball into the box—"
It came in high.
And Ronald Araújo went up.
He went up with Olivier Giroud, a man four inches taller than him, and he simply bullied him out of the way. Forearm, shoulder, hips, the whole of it, and the Frenchman came off him and Araújo got the middle of his forehead onto that ball and put it out to the edge of the area.
"And Araújo dispatches it!"
"But not far enough."
Because Reece James was standing there.
And Reece James is Chelsea born and bred. That academy. That club. His whole life.
If a local boy could do that for Barcelona in the one hundred and nineteenth minute, then a local boy could do it here.
He did not take a touch.
BANG.
"He shoots!"
The strike was perfect.
It came off him low and hard and spinning, dipping late, curling in toward the bottom corner with everything Reece James had in his body behind it.
And Marc-André Ter Stegen threw himself across his goal.
Full length, both hands, and he got a strong palm on it and pushed it wide of the post and out for a corner.
"TER STEGEEEEEN!"
"WHAT A SAVE! WHAT A SAVE FROM THE GERMAN! Reece James thought he had it! Everybody in this stadium thought he had it!"
The Barcelona players came at their goalkeeper from every direction.
Piqué got a hand on his head. Araújo hauled him up. Alba was slapping his back and screaming.
And Ter Stegen shoved them all off.
"NO! NO! It is not over!"
He was pointing at the corner flag, both arms going.
"THE CORNER! THE CORNER! Get in there! Let us END THIS!"
The last chance.
Thomas Tuchel knew it.
Everybody on that touchline knew it.
He came all the way out of his area and started screaming at the pitch, and then he turned and screamed at his own goalkeeper.
"ÉDOUARD! GO! GO UP! GO UP, NOW!"
Mendy was already going.
"And here he comes. Édouard Mendy is coming up for this corner."
"And why on earth would he not, Peter? This is almost certainly the last kick of this football match. Chelsea have nothing to lose and nothing at all to protect."
"And what a night this goalkeeper has had. Six saves. SIX. He has been the best player on this pitch for the vast majority of this football match, and now here he comes, all the way up the field, into a Barcelona penalty box, looking for the goal that saves his football club."
"Wouldn't that be something."
The box.
It was war in there.
Every single Chelsea player was in it. Silva, Christensen, Azpilicueta, Giroud, Alonso, James, Ziyech, Pulisic, Kovačić, and Édouard Mendy standing at the back post in goalkeeper gloves in an opposition penalty area.
Bodies pressing everywhere. Shirts being pulled. Elbows going into ribs.
"GET OFF ME!"
"MOVE!"
"MARK HIM! WHO HAS GOT HIM?"
Ter Stegen was in the middle of his own six-yard box pointing at people and screaming names.
"PIQUÉ! THE BIG ONE! TAKE THE BIG ONE! ARAÚJO, FRONT POST! FRONT POST!"
And Lionel Messi was in there too.
He had come all the way back and put himself on Thiago Silva, and he was giving away eight inches and about twenty kilos and he did not care at all. Both hands into the Brazilian's back, leaning, shoving, doing everything he could to stop a man twice his size from getting a run at that ball.
Silva shoved him back.
Messi shoved harder.
On the touchline, Tuchel had both hands cupped round his mouth.
"SECOND BALL! WATCH FOR THE SECOND BALL! GIROUD, FRONT! ÉDOUARD, STAY BACK POST!"
And then he stopped shouting.
And he brought both hands together in front of his own mouth.
And Thomas Tuchel, who had spent an entire night believing in a plan, muttered one word into his own fingers.
"Please."
Ben Chilwell stood over the ball.
His heart was going so hard he could feel it in his throat.
The referee blew his whistle.
And Chilwell did not move.
He stood there for a second longer, looking at that box, at everything, at all of it, at a hundred and twenty-two minutes of football that came down to one delivery.
He took an enormous breath.
And he ran.
BOOM.
The ball went up.
And the whole world stopped.
"And here it is. Here it is, the last chance—"
Fifty thousand people held one single breath at exactly the same instant.
Up in the directors' box, Joan Laporta came straight up out of his chair.
In the family area, everybody was standing.
Olivia had both hands pressed over her mouth and her eyes were enormous.
"Please." She was saying it into her own palms, over and over. "Please, please, please, please."
And in the middle of the Barcelona end, the song stopped.
Just stopped. Thirty thousand people singing their club's anthem and it died in all of their throats at once.
That was how big the moment was.
And the ball came down.
And Thiago Silva went for it.
Thirty-six years old. A hundred and twenty-two minutes on those legs. And he came through that crowd like something coming off a hill, arms out, everything in him going up, and there was nothing in his whole life at that moment except a football dropping out of the sky.
His eyes did not close.
I have got it.
I HAVE GOT IT.
BANGGG.
And a glove came over the top of him.
Marc-André Ter Stegen came off that line and through a crowd of bodies with one fist punching up and out, and he got there.
He got the very top of his knuckles onto that ball a fraction before Thiago Silva's forehead arrived, and he knocked it up and away.
"TER STEGEEEEEEN! HE GETS THERE! HE GETS THERE AGAIN!"
Thiago Silva was still in the air.
His eyes went enormous and he was already twisting his head, already looking, already screaming before he had come down.
"GET IT! GET THE BALL! SHOOT IT! SHOOOOT IT!"
Because the referee had not blown.
The ball was still alive.
There was still a chance.
The ball dropped twenty yards from goal.
And Hakim Ziyech was running at it.
Every heart in that stadium went. Barcelona shirts turning, Chelsea shirts screaming, the whole of it collapsing toward one bouncing ball on the edge of a penalty area.
Ziyech got there.
And something enormous hit him.
Pedri came in from his blind side at a dead sprint and put his whole body through him, sweat coming off him, his face completely gone, and he did not go for anything except that football.
He got his boot to it.
And he hammered it.
"UGH."
The grunt came out of him with the strike and the ball went sixty yards up the pitch, and Pedri, on the floor, tangled with Ziyech, screamed after it.
"GOOOOOO!"
Thiago Silva landed.
And his eyes went straight up the pitch.
He saw the ball flying. He saw where it was going. He turned his head and looked for Mendy and Mendy was thirty yards from his own goal in a Barcelona penalty area, already turning, already starting to run.
And Thiago Silva's face went completely pale.
"NOOOOO!"
"And Pedri clears it away! Pedri gets there! And the referee has not blown! The referee has not blown, the ball is still alive, the ball is—"
"The ball is—"
"MATEOOOOOO!"
Mateo King got there first.
He came off the halfway line and took that ball in his stride and turned, and Reece James arrived at his shoulder at full speed.
Mateo shoved him.
One arm, straight into the Englishman's chest, and James went down onto the grass, and Mateo was gone.
James was up in a second and chasing.
And Mendy was running back.
He was sprinting the length of a football pitch in goalkeeper gloves and he could see exactly what was happening and he was not going to make it, and he knew it.
So he stopped.
Twenty-five yards outside his own box, he stopped dead and turned and set himself, and he made himself as big as he could possibly be, and when Mateo King came at him Édouard Mendy threw his entire body at the ball.
Mateo pushed it away.
He knocked it wide and to the right and turned and skipped past the dive.
And Mendy caught his right leg.
Not on purpose. A trailing arm, a shoulder, a leg, something, and it took Mateo's right leg from underneath him at the exact moment he was trying to run on it.
The pain went through him like a wire.
He kept going anyway. Two steps, three.
And then his leg folded and he went down.
Mendy hit the floor face first and immediately started scrambling, looking up, hands and knees, trying to get back onto his feet.
And Mateo was on the grass, and the ball was rolling on ahead of him.
Forty metres.
That was how far away the goal was.
Forty metres of empty grass with nobody in it, no goalkeeper, nothing between a football and the back of the net except distance.
And Mateo King was on all fours.
His right leg was screaming at him. It had been screaming at him since he landed on it a hundred and twenty seconds ago and he had not listened once, and now it had finally got loud enough that he could not hear anything else.
Get up.
Get up.
He got a hand under himself.
GET UP.
He did not think about the pain. He did not think about his leg or the two goals or the trophy or the ninety thousand things that were about to happen. There was no thought at all in Mateo King's head.
There was a ball.
That was it. That was all there was in the entire world. A football, rolling slowly away from him on the grass, and everything in him was pointed at it.
He got up.
And he ran.
He was wobbling.
That is the only word for it. He was not running properly, he could not, and every second stride came down wrong and made him lurch, and he kept going anyway.
He got to the ball.
And behind him, Édouard Mendy was coming.
The goalkeeper had got himself up off the grass and turned and started sprinting and he was closing, actually closing, because a boy running on one good leg is slower than a desperate man running on two.
Mendy came.
He threw himself.
Full length, both arms out, everything he had, launching his own body across the grass at a football and a seventeen-year-old.
And Mateo did not look at him.
He did not look at Mendy. He did not look at James chasing behind him. He did not look at the crowd or the bench or anything at all.
He looked at the goal.
Forty metres away, empty, waiting.
BANG.
He got his boot through it.
And Mendy hit him.
The two of them went down together, hard, tangled, the goalkeeper's arms across the boy's legs, both of them hitting the turf and both of them rolling.
And both of them came to a stop lying on the grass, side by side, facing the same way.
Watching the same ball.
It was travelling.
Low and fast and true, skidding across the surface, going away from both of them down the length of an empty pitch.
Reece James was still running.
He did not know why. He had no idea what he was going to do if he caught it. He simply kept sprinting after that football because his legs would not stop and his brain had nothing better to offer, and he was never going to get there and every single person in that stadium could see it.
Mateo King lay on the grass and watched it go.
Édouard Mendy lay six feet away from him and watched it too.
Up in the directors' box, Joan Laporta had come so far forward that he nearly went over the glass, and somebody had a hand on his jacket.
In the family area, Olivia Rodrigo's mouth was hanging open.
And on the grass, the goalkeeper who had made six world-class saves in a Champions League final lay on his front, propped on his forearms, and watched a football roll toward his own empty net.
"GOALLLLLL! GOALLLLLL! IT HAS ENTERED! IT HAS ENTERED! GOOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!"
"CHELSEA PUSHED EVERYTHING FORWARD AND THEY HAVE BEEN PUNISHED FOR IT!"
"MATEO KING GETS HIS SECOND OF THE NIGHT! MATEO KIIIIING!"
Thomas Tuchel closed his eyes.
He did not shout. He did not move. He stood on the edge of his technical area with his eyes shut and his head down, and that was all.
And twenty yards away Ronald Koeman was screaming.
"GOALLLL! GOALLLLL!"
And the entire Barcelona bench went past him onto the pitch.
All of them, again, every substitute and every coach and every physio, pouring across that touchline and sprinting up the field.
Mateo peeled himself off the ground.
He got up off the grass and away from the face-planted goalkeeper beside him, and he started running toward the side of the pitch, dragging that right leg, not caring about it at all.
And he raised his hands.
Both of them. Straight up above his head, arms out, chest up, exactly the way he had done it all season.
His iconic celebration.
And the Barcelona end came down at him.
They came forward, thousands of them, pouring toward the front of the stand, pushing into the barriers and against the security and against each other, arms wild, faces gone, screaming one word at a seventeen-year-old boy with both hands in the air.
"KING! KING! KING! KING! KING! KING!"
Mateo kept his hands up.
And he screamed.
For the third time that day.
The first had been before kick-off, and that had been nerves, everything in him that had been building for a week coming out of his chest so he could stand still.
The second had been after Messi's equaliser, and that had been frustration. Ninety-six minutes of hitting a wall.
This one.
This one was something else entirely.
Exhilaration.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
...
...
...
"And Barcelona have surely clinched it now."
Drury's voice continued on the tv in Turin.
"There is nothing left. There is no time and there is no way back and there is nothing at all that anybody in blue can do about it any more."
"The sixth. The sixth Champions League in this football club's history."
"It is coming home to Catalonia."
The house had gone very quiet.
Cristiano Ronaldo was sitting on the sofa with a child under each arm and one more leaning against his knee, and he was looking at the television, and he had not said anything for a while.
The screen showed a boy with both hands above his head and a stadium coming down at him.
"Turn it off."
Junior looked up at his father.
Cristiano did not look back.
"Turn it off, filho."
And Cristiano Junior picked up the remote, and pointed it at the screen, and turned it off.
Click.
A/N
Tomorrow is my birthday everyone 😁 (was meant to post this tomorrow but i read you guys comments 😂😂
This last few chapters, honestly, I really enjoyed writing them i hope you all also enjoyed reading it even half as much as I did writing it. Thank you ❤️
If you want to read chapters ahead with uploads and to support me subscribe to my Patreon below There is also a picture of how mateo looks like posted and later there would be votes and all on the site some you wont need to pay to vote but you can if you want to support me thanks
patreon.com/David_Adetola
Thank You your support is greatly appreciated thank you all
I've also created a Discord channel to make communication easier, where I'll post updates
https://discord.gg/RJ9uYADPS (New discord link)