"AHHHHHHHH!"
Olivia Rodrigo was screaming.
The whole family area was screaming. Everybody, all at once, every single person in that block on their feet with their arms up and the noise coming out of them.
But Olivia had gone somewhere else entirely.
She was jumping on the spot with both hands in fists and her whole face lit up, and then she turned and simply threw herself at the person nearest to her.
Aina caught her.
Barely.
"OOF."
Olivia had gone up high, both arms round her cousin's neck, both feet completely off the floor, and Aina staggered backwards two steps trying to hold all of her and only just managed it.
"HAHAHA!"
"He won!"
Olivia had her face right next to Aina's ear.
"He won! He WON! HE WON!"
"I know!" Aina was laughing, still trying to keep them both upright. "I know he did!"
"HE WON!"
She let go and dropped back onto her feet and spun round, absolutely glowing, and there was Nora, and Olivia did not think about it at all.
She jumped on her too.
"OOF."
Nora caught her.
"HAHAHA!"
Nora was laughing so hard she could barely get the words out, one arm round the girl's back, patting it.
"Yes. Yes, he did. He did, my love."
And then she tilted her head and looked sideways at Aina with her eyebrows up.
"A few weeks over here." She was grinning. "And she is already a full culer."
"HAHAHA!"
Olivia peeled herself off Nora's shoulder immediately.
"I. That is not."
She stepped back and pushed her own hair off her face, going red.
"I was just."
And Nora just laughed harder.
Olivia turned away from her, still flustered, and Aina came in behind her and wrapped both arms round her from the back and rested her chin on her shoulder, and the two of them stood there like that and looked out at the pitch.
At a stadium coming apart.
At eleven men in red and blue in the middle of it.
Aina let out a breath.
"They did it."
And Olivia smiled.
"Yes, they did."
"Snff."
"Snff."
Isabella King had been jumping.
She had been screaming and jumping with the rest of them and clapping her hands above her head, and then she turned to the side.
And her husband was crying.
David King was standing beside her with both hands half up in front of him and his face completely gone, fighting it, jaw clenched, blinking hard at the pitch and losing.
"Oh." Isabella's voice went soft immediately. "Oh, honey."
"No." He shook his head, fast. "No, I am fine. I am fine, I am good."
His voice broke clean in half on the last word.
"Hnnng."
And that was it.
He put both hands over his face and it came out of him all at once, his shoulders going, and he sat back down heavily into his own seat with his hands still over his eyes and cried.
"Oh, honey."
Isabella sat down beside him and got both arms all the way round him and pulled his head into her shoulder.
"I know. I know. I know."
And on the other side of him, Andrew King was smiling.
He reached over and put a hand on his brother's back and patted it, twice, the way you would pat a child.
"There, there."
David did not lift his head.
Andrew kept patting.
"Five years, eleven months and twenty-three days."
Drury's voice had come all the way down.
"After such a very long wait, the quest is over. The Champions League is finally going back to the Camp Nou."
"And what a journey it has been."
He let it breathe.
"Years of defeats. Years of watching great men leave through the front door and not be replaced. Years of decline, of humiliation, of nights this football club would rather forget and cannot. And then a summer where every single person on this earth wrote them off entirely, and a season that began with nobody expecting a single thing from them."
"And look at what they have done with it."
"They went to Paris and turned it over. They stood toe to toe with Bayern Munich and did not blink. They dismantled Manchester City, the finest football team on this continent, and sent them home."
"And tonight, in this final, in a stadium where all hope had gone, where for fifty-three minutes there was nothing at all left for them."
"They came back."
"What a football team. What an absolute testament to perseverance, to stubbornness, to the plain refusal to lie down and accept what everybody else has already decided about you."
"The very definition of never giving up."
"And here they are."
A pause.
"Ladies and gentlemen, with what is now most definitely done."
"Give it up for FC Barcelona."
"Your 2020/21 Champions League winners."
Inside the VIP room, Joan Laporta was not thinking about money.
That was the strange part.
He was the president of a football club that was over a billion euros in debt. He had spent every waking hour of the last three months thinking about numbers, about wage bills, about sponsorship structures and television rights and a stadium reconstruction that had to be paid for somehow.
And right now, in this room, none of it was in his head.
There was one thought.
We won.
A great deal has been said about Joan Laporta over the years, and a great deal of it is true, and some of it is worse than true.
But there is one thing that not even his enemies have ever said about him.
Nobody has ever once doubted that Joan Laporta loves FC Barcelona.
He would put the business into this win soon enough. He would be doing it by tomorrow morning. He would sit in a room with Ferran Reverter and turn a Champions League trophy into leverage and revenue and a better negotiating position, because that is the job and he is good at it.
But right now, in this moment, Joan Laporta was not a president at all.
He was a boy from Barcelona watching the team he grew up with reach the top of the sport.
The room had come alive around him.
Executives on their feet. Hands being shaken. Somebody had opened something.
Laporta's eyes had gone red at the edges and he was not hiding it in the slightest, and he was moving through that room shaking every hand that came at him.
"Congratulations, Presidente."
"Congratulations, Joan."
"What a night. What a night."
He was laughing at all of it, gripping forearms, slapping shoulders, saying thank you over and over.
And then he saw Ferran Reverter standing slightly off to the side.
"Ferran."
"President, congrat—"
"No, no. Come here."
"I am fine, I—"
"COME HERE."
And Laporta simply took hold of him and dragged him into a hug, both arms round him, thumping his back, while Ferran Reverter stood there with his own arms half raised and an expression on his face like a man being embraced by a bear.
"Get in here, man!"
"Yes. Yes, President."
Laporta let him go, still laughing.
And then the room quieted a little.
Because somebody had crossed the floor toward him.
Roman Abramovich did not look up straight away. His eyes were down, his whole face heavy, and when he did lift them there was nothing performed about any of it.
He put out his hand.
"Congratulations."
Laporta took it.
And he tried, he genuinely tried, to bring the smile down to something respectful.
He failed.
"Thank you. Thank you very much." He shook the hand warmly with both of his. "And a wonderful match. Really. Sorry about the."
He gestured vaguely at nothing.
Abramovich smiled a small, tired smile.
"It is fine. The better team won."
And Laporta's mask went completely.
"Yes, we did."
He said it quickly and quietly and immediately heard himself say it.
"Oh. Ehm."
He blinked.
"That is. What I meant was, it was very close, and your team were."
And then a laugh came from a few feet away.
Laporta turned.
Aleksander Čeferin was standing there with his hands together in front of him.
"Congratulations, Joan."
"Aleksander."
The two of them shook hands.
They both smiled at exactly the same moment, and both of those smiles arrived from somewhere a very long way from either man's eyes, and both of them held the shake for precisely the correct length of time.
"A magnificent occasion," Čeferin said.
"It was."
"Enjoy your evening."
"Thank you."
And they let go.
On the field.
They were all over him.
"CHAVAL! CHAVAL!"
"TWO! TWO OF THEM!"
There were nine of them around Mateo King and every single one had a hand on him somewhere. Alba had an arm round his neck. Araújo was gripping his shoulder and shaking him. Somebody was rubbing his head with a full palm, back and forth, hard.
Piqué got both hands onto that head and rubbed it like he was polishing something.
"You know." He was grinning at him. "It seems I am going to have to shave your head before every single Champions League knockout tie from now on."
"HAHAHAHA!"
The whole group went.
"He is right!"
"It is the head! It has always been the head!"
"Every round! Every round, kid!"
Alba had both hands on Mateo's face.
"Do you know what you have done? Do you actually know what you have done?"
De Jong was pointing at him from three feet away and just laughing, saying nothing at all.
And Pedri came in and tapped him on the chest with the back of his hand.
"Dude."
He shook his head.
"Two goals. In the Champions League final."
He said it slowly, like he was reading it off a page.
"Two goals. In the Champions League FINAL."
"HAHAHA!"
Mateo could not stop laughing. He had a hand up trying to fend off whoever was still rubbing his head and he was not managing it and he did not want to.
And around them, the whole team was gone. Griezmann was doubled over. Busquets was actually smiling. Ter Stegen had somebody in a headlock. Roberto and Dembélé had their arms round each other, jumping.
This was a football team that had just confirmed they were winning the Champions League.
The referee did not try to hurry any of it.
He stood off to the side and let them have it, all of it, for as long as they wanted.
And the Chelsea players did not push for a restart either.
At three-one, with barely anything left on the clock, every single person in that stadium and every single person watching anywhere on this earth had finally come to the same understanding.
Barcelona had won.
Whatever delusions of hope had still been alive, whatever fear there had been of one more impossible minute, all of it had cleared. The Chelsea players had accepted it. The coaching staff had accepted it.
And eventually the supporters accepted it too.
In the away end, twenty thousand people had simply stopped.
Some were sitting down. Some had turned away from the pitch entirely. There were men crying openly in that stand and nobody was saying anything to them about it.
"FUCK this club."
One man had both arms out at the pitch, his face red, shouting at eleven men who could not hear him.
"YOU WERE WINNING! YOU WERE WINNING IT! You had it! You HAD it and you have thrown it away!"
Nobody around him told him to stop.
And a few rows down, another man was not looking at his own team at all.
He was looking across the pitch, at the far end, at thirty thousand people in red and blue bouncing and singing and holding onto each other.
And he let out a long breath through his nose.
One minute.
They had been one minute away.
That would have been them.
"Okay, boys."
Messi had come into the middle of them, clapping his hands.
"Come on. Let us go and wrap this thing up and collect our trophy."
"WOOOOO!"
"YESSSS!"
"LET'S GO!"
The whole group broke up shouting, shoving each other, jogging back toward their own half with their arms in the air.
De Jong and Araújo went arm in arm, both of them singing something at the top of their voices that neither of them was in tune with.
Piqué smacked somebody on the back of the head as he went past.
And Mateo King was laughing so hard he had to wipe his own eye.
He turned to follow them.
And he took one step.
"Ssss."
It went straight up the outside of his right leg.
Sharp, and quick, and gone again almost immediately, but it made him stop moving and it made his face change for about half a second.
And Messi saw it.
He was already three yards away and he turned straight back round.
"Hey."
He came back.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah." Mateo smiled at him and put his weight back onto it. "Yeah, I am fine. It is just a small."
He waved a hand at it.
"It is nothing."
Messi did not move.
"Let me tell the coach to get somebody to look at—"
"No, no, no." Mateo was already laughing, both hands up. "I am good. Honestly. It is not paining me that much. I think I probably just twisted it a bit when Mendy caught my leg back there."
Messi was still looking at him.
He did not say anything.
He just stood there with his eyes on that leg and then on the boy's face.
And Mateo laughed properly this time and gave him a shove on the arm.
"Come on, man."
He started walking.
"There is no way on this earth I am missing being on that pitch when we officially win this."
"And they are going to restart this football match."
"And you have to feel for them, Peter. You genuinely do."
"You do. Because look at those Chelsea players walking back to their positions right now. Look at their faces. Look at the way they are moving."
"For the third time tonight, this football team has to go and restart a match they had already won."
"They were three minutes from lifting it. Then they were thirty seconds from lifting it. And now they are walking back to a halfway line at three-one, with heavy hearts and heavy legs, to play out the last few seconds of the biggest night of most of their lives."
"That is a hard thing to watch."
"It is. And they will have to live with it for a very long time indeed."
FWEEEP.
FWEEEP.
Giroud rolled it back.
And even though every single man on that pitch already knew exactly how this ended, they still moved.
That is the job. The whistle goes and you move, and you keep moving until somebody tells you to stop.
"And so we play out the final seconds of the 2020/21 Champions League final."
"And let me bring you one thing you may have missed in all of that, Peter, because in the middle of the celebrations Édouard Mendy was shown a yellow card."
"He was. For the challenge on Mateo King in the build-up to the third goal. And that is a harsh way to end a night in which that goalkeeper has been utterly magnificent."
"Six saves. Six world-class saves in a Champions League final and he finishes it with a booking and a three-one defeat."
"Football can be a cruel game."
"And a few numbers, while we have a moment. Lionel Messi ends this campaign as the leading assist provider in the competition. Seven of them."
"And how many of those seven went to one man?"
"Five."
"Five. Out of seven. And speaking of that man, Mateo King finishes this Champions League with twelve goals. Twelve."
"And it all began in the second leg of the round of sixteen."
"It did. A boy nobody outside of Catalonia had heard of at Christmas. And I do not think I am overstating it when I say this may be one of the greatest individual campaigns this competition has ever seen from anybody, let alone from somebody who cannot legally buy a drink."
"Not overstating it at all."
"And, oh. It looks as though something is happening in the stands."
"BURNING HIGHER THAN THE STARS!"
"BARCELONA!"
"RISING!"
"EVERYBODY KNOWS WHO WE ARE!"
"CHAMPIONS!"
"CHAMPIONS!"
"CHAMPIONS FOREVER!"
"HEAR THE WHOLE WORLD SCREAM OUR NAME!"
"WOAAAAHHH!"
"WOAAAAHHH!"
"WOAAAAHHH!"
"BARÇA RULES THE GAME!"
"HEY!"
"HEY!"
"HEY!"
"BARÇA RULES THE GAME!"
Thirty thousand people had stopped watching the football.
The whole end had gone up as one, arms round shoulders, scarves above heads, whole blocks bouncing in time, and the song was rolling round that stand and coming back on itself.
Flares had started going off. Somebody had smuggled a firework in and it went up somewhere in the middle of the tier and nobody made any attempt to stop the next one.
And high up in the family area, Oriol Cerdà was singing with them.
Both arms above his head, eyes shut, roaring every word of it out over that pitch.
Whatever was happening on the grass was no longer any of their concern.
On the pitch.
Chelsea still came.
Ziyech got it wide and drove at Alba, and Alba stayed with him and stayed with him and then went down and took the ball off him with a slide that put it out for a throw.
"And Jordi Alba does what Jordi Alba has done for nine years."
He got up and jogged it out wide with it, taking his time, and when the throw came back he took the ball down the line into the corner and simply stood over it with his body between the ball and everybody in blue.
Twenty seconds went past.
Somebody in a Chelsea shirt shoved him. He staggered, kept the ball, and shrugged.
The referee waved it on.
And out in the middle, two men were moving without really moving.
Mateo King was jogging in slow, careful arcs, weight going onto his left, keeping himself between the ball and his own goal without ever getting close enough to have to sprint.
And Lionel Messi was doing the same thing about thirty yards away.
Neither of them was chasing anything.
Both of them were waiting for a whistle.
Us three forever.
Neymar had said it with a Champions League medal round his neck and champagne in his hair and both arms round Luis's shoulders, laughing, shouting it into a dressing room in Berlin.
"US THREE! FOREVER!"
And Messi had laughed at him and believed him completely.
"Oscar. OSCAR. Did you see that?"
A boy of eleven, in a corridor at La Masia, running backwards to keep talking to a coach who had already told him twice to go and get changed.
"Did you see the touch? Did you see it?"
"I saw the touch."
"And then I went, and he did not even—"
"Mateo. Showers."
"But did you SEE it?"
"Why are you leaving?"
A room. Two men. One of them not looking up.
"Ney. Look at me. Why?"
"You know why."
"No, I do not know why. Tell me why."
"Leo."
"Is this about being the best player? Is that it? Because if that is it, then stay, and I will make you the best player. I will do it myself. I will give you every single ball for the rest of my career and you will win it."
And Neymar had looked at him with the saddest face Messi had ever seen on him.
"I am sorry, Leo."
A common room. Twenty boys. One television.
2015. Berlin.
And when the whistle went, every single one of them came off the sofas at once, and an eleven-year-old with a shaved head was jumping on the arm of a chair screaming with his hands above his head.
"MSN! MSN! MSN!"
"ROMA HAVE RISEN FROM THEIR RUINS!"
Standing on grass in an away shirt with his hands on his hips, hearing a stadium that was not his own come apart around him.
Three goals.
Three.
And Luis had come over afterwards with an arm round his neck.
"Do not. Do not do that. Next year. We do this next year."
A hospital corridor.
A boy of thirteen with his back against a wall and his knees up and his face in his own arms, and a woman with her arms round him, and an older woman standing a few feet away looking at absolutely nothing at all.
"Mi amor. Mi amor, come here. Come here."
"He said. Mamá, he said he would."
"I know."
"He said he would watch me."
"I know, mi amor. I know."
"We promise that this season we will do everything possible so that this beautiful, much desired trophy returns to the Camp Nou."
A microphone. Ninety thousand people. A man in a suit saying goodbye to a football club.
And Messi standing behind him, clapping, and thinking one thing.
Who is left?
"Papá. If Luis goes, I go."
"Leo."
"I mean it. I am telling you now. If they do this to him, then I am finished with this club, I am finished with all of it."
"Leo, sit down."
"They have taken everybody. Every single person. Ney. Xavi. Andrés. Now Luis."
"Sit down."
"There is nobody left, Papá."
"WHO IS THIS KID? WELL, WHOEVER HE IS, HE HAS COME OFF THAT BENCH AND SCORED THREE GOALS TO TURN THIS GAME ON ITS HEAD, AND BARCELONA HAVE BEATEN HUESCA!"
Suspended. Watching on a screen in the lockeroom on his own with a red card in his pocket and no reason at all to be interested.
And Lionel Messi had sat forward.
"I have to. I have to what?"
"You are to report to the first team on Monday."
"To."
"Monday, Mateo."
"To the FIRST team?"
"Hi. Hello. Hi."
A boy standing in front of him with his hand half out and his whole face gone, saying hello about four times.
"Me. I. Messi. Me. Hi."
And Messi had smiled at him, and taken his hand.
"Mateo, no?"
And the boy had made a sound like a kettle.
The first ball he ever put into that boy's feet.
A little clipped pass, nothing, a training-ground thing, and the kid had taken it and turned and buried it into the top corner and then turned round and looked at him with an expression that Messi did not have a word for.
Like a boy who had just been handed something.
Paris.
The first time Messi had looked up in a football match, in real trouble, with a stadium screaming, and thought: give it to the kid.
And it had worked.
A backyard. Two chairs. A boy who had eaten everything on the table.
"So what do you want?"
"What?"
"You. What do you actually want? Out of all of it."
And Lionel Messi had looked at his own hands for a moment.
"I want to win the Champions League."
"...."
"That is it. That is the whole thing. I have won it before, I know, and people think that means it goes away. It does not go away."
"Do not worry."
The boy had said it with his mouth still half full.
"We will win the Champions League."
And he had said it like a man confirming the weather.
A small restaurant. An old woman shouting from the kitchen. An old man laughing at something one of them had said.
Two of them at a table, and somewhere in the middle of that evening it had stopped being a footballer and a teammate.
A balcony. Two nights ago. A city underneath them and an envelope in a boy's hand.
"She never once said I might make it. She said I would."
On the pitch.
Mateo lifted a hand.
"Aquí. AQUÍ."
Busquets rolled it out to him and Mateo took it into the corner and stood over it, back to the field, absolutely no intention of doing anything with it at all.
Kovačić came and shoved him.
Mateo shrugged him off and kept his body over the ball and let another eight seconds go.
And in his own head there was one thing.
Blow it.
Come on. Blow it.
Blow the whistle.
Thirty yards away, Messi had come to a complete stop with his hands on his hips and his eyes on the referee.
Blow it.
I would have liked to see you play in a Champions League final.
Who is left?
He said he would watch me.
It does not go away.
We will win the Champions League.
Do not worry.
We will.
We will.
FWEEEEEEP. FWEEEEEEP.
"IT IS OFFICIAL! IT IS OFFICIAL! THE GAME IS OVER!"
"BARCELONA ARE YOUR 2020/21 CHAMPIONS LEAGUE WINNERS!"
"AFTER SIX YEARS! AFTER EVERYTHING! AFTER A NIGHT THAT NOBODY WHO HAS WATCHED IT WILL EVER FORGET FOR AS LONG AS THEY LIVE!"
"IT IS COMING HOME TO CATALONIA!"
Mateo King's legs went out from under him.
He did not fall. He simply stopped holding himself up.
He went down onto his knees in the corner of that pitch and then all the way forward onto his hands, and his head dropped, and everything he had been carrying for a hundred and twenty-three minutes and nine months and thirteen years came out of him at once.
He was sobbing.
Openly, on all fours on the grass, with his eyes shut and his shoulders shaking and tears going straight off the end of his nose into the turf.
Every single thing.
The dressing room this morning. The bus. The balcony. The envelope. The garden. An old man's handwriting. The hospital corridor when he was thirteen. Every training session, every early morning, every night he had lain awake at fourteen years old certain he was not good enough.
All of it, coming out through his hands into a football pitch in Porto.
And thirty yards away, Lionel Messi did not go down.
He straightened all the way up.
He put both hands on his hips and he tipped his head back and he looked up, past the roof of the Estádio do Dragão, at a black sky and the lights.
And he was smiling.
His eyes were completely full and not one tear came out of them, and his chest was going, and he was smiling with his whole face and starting to laugh.
Six years.
Three years since he stood in front of ninety thousand people and made them a promise he was not sure he could keep.
He laughed once, out loud, at the sky.
Done.
And then he brought his head back down and looked for the boy.
He walked over.
He did not run. He walked, across the grass, past his own teammates coming the other way, all the way to the corner of that pitch where a seventeen-year-old was on all fours crying into the turf.
And he crouched down beside him.
He did not say anything.
He put one hand flat on the middle of Mateo's back and left it there.
And they stayed like that, the two of them, in the corner of a football pitch, while fifty thousand people came apart above them.
Eventually Mateo lifted his head.
His face was completely destroyed, red and soaked and blotched, and he looked at Lionel Messi through all of it and he could not get a single word out.
Messi smiled at him.
"Hey."
He gripped the back of Mateo's neck.
"Hey. Look at me."
Mateo looked at him.
And Messi said it very simply, the way you say a thing that is finished.
"We won the Champions League."
And Mateo King let out a sound that was half a laugh and half something else entirely, and he nodded, hard, over and over, wiping at his own face with the heel of his hand and completely failing to clear any of it.
"We won the Champions League."
"Yeah." Messi's voice cracked once, right in the middle of the word, and he did not appear to notice. "Yeah. We did."
He stood up.
And he put a hand down.
Mateo took it.
And Lionel Messi pulled a seventeen-year-old boy up off the grass, and did not let go of his hand, and the two of them turned around together and looked out at the whole of it.
At their teammates running toward them.
At thirty thousand people singing.
At a stadium in Porto on the twenty-ninth of May.
Neither of them said anything else.
They did not need to.
...
...
...
...
...
A/N
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the 20/21 season for FC Barcelona.
We made it. Honestly, we actually made it.
Sorry for how long these last few chapters have been. I know I said "just one more batch" about four times and then handed you another five thousand words each time. But I could not cut it. I sat there with the outline in front of me and every single time I looked at something to trim, I thought about all of you reading that ninetieth minute with your hearts in your throats, and I left it in.
So how was it?
Genuinely, tell me. That match took me longer to write than anything else in this book and I want to know everything.
Did you believe Chelsea had it at 1-0? Be honest. Because I know some of you were in the comments calling for my head around the eightieth minute, and I want you to know I saw every single one of those and I enjoyed them very much.
What got you? Was it Messi in the ninety-sixth? The bicycle kick? Grandpa's letter? The two of them in the corner at the end?
And what about Chelsea? I did not want them to be cardboard. I wanted Tuchel and Mendy and Rüdiger and Werner to hurt when they lost, and if any of you felt even slightly bad for them at the final whistle then I did my job.
Thank you for sticking with it. Thank you for the theories, the arguments in the comments, the people who called the bicycle kick chapters ago and would not let it go. Thank you to everybody who has been here since Huesca.
Mateo King. Seventeen years old. La Liga and the Champions League. Twelve goals in Europe.
And he is only getting started.
Rest up. Get some water. Go and touch some grass.
Because the summer is coming, and there is a lot still to deal with. That leg. A certain contract. A certain someone leaving on the thirty-first.
See you very soon 😉
A/N
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
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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
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