"DUDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
It came through everything.
Through fifty thousand people. Through the songs and the flares and the noise coming down out of that stand, through a stadium that had not stopped making sound since the whistle.
Mateo was mid-handshake with Messi when he heard it.
His head turned.
And there was Pedri, coming across that grass at him with his arms already going and his whole face lit up.
Mateo started grinning.
He let go of Messi's hand and turned to face him properly, and Messi stayed exactly where he was and watched the two of them, smiling.
Mateo started walking toward him.
And he was wobbling. Not badly, not falling, but there was a hitch in it and the right leg was going down carefully every second stride, and Pedri saw it and did not slow down for a fraction of a second.
"DUDEEEEEEEEEE!"
"BROOOOOO!"
Mateo's whole body was shaking with the laugh, his chest going, hands out.
"DID WE?" Pedri was shouting it, pointing at him, at the pitch, at everything. "DID WE?"
"WE FUCKING DID!"
"ARGHHH! DUDEEEEEEE!"
Pedri was bouncing. Actually bouncing on the spot, both fists going, absolutely gone.
"BROOOOOO!"
And they hit each other.
Full speed, both of them, arms going all the way round, and they staggered sideways together with Pedri screaming into the side of Mateo's head and Mateo screaming back and neither of them saying one word that could be identified as a word.
And Lionel Messi laughed.
Properly, out loud, head going back.
"HAHAHA."
Because he had done that. Exactly that. In Rome in 2009 with a boy from Argentina hanging off his neck, both of them nineteen and twenty-one and completely out of their minds, screaming nothing at each other on a pitch.
You only get to be that person once.
They came apart.
Both of them were breathing hard, properly hard, chests going, faces soaked, a hundred and twenty-three minutes of football sitting in both sets of legs.
And it did not slow either of them down at all.
They looked at each other.
And they did it.
One clap. High-five straight into a brief finger-lock. Pull in, light shoulder bump. Step back.
And a snap.
"HAHAHA!"
And then Pedri jumped on him again.
Straight up, both arms round his neck, both feet off the floor.
And Mateo caught him.
And his right leg went.
Not all the way. He did not go down. But the leg buckled under the weight and his whole body lurched sideways and he had to plant the other foot hard to keep them both upright, and there was a hiss between his teeth that Pedri was close enough to hear.
Pedri came down immediately.
He got both feet on the grass and stepped back, and he was still grinning, still buzzing, still gone.
"Sorry. Sorry, man, I was just."
He waved a hand at his own head.
"I was too."
He could not finish it.
Then his face changed a little.
"Are you good?"
Mateo laughed at him.
"Yeah, I am good."
He rolled the ankle once and put his weight back onto it.
"Just a bit sore, is all."
Pedri looked at him for about half a second.
And then his whole face went again.
"DUDEEEEEEEEE!"
"HAHAHAHA!"
Celebration.
That is what everybody knows comes next. It is not a mystery to anybody. Barcelona had just won the Champions League final and there is a shape to what happens after that, and every single person in that stadium could have told you exactly what it was.
The players celebrate on the pitch with each other first. The hugs, the shouting, the pile-ons, men who have known each other for a decade grabbing each other's faces.
Then they go to the supporters. All of them, over to that end, arms up, taking it in.
Then the coaching staff and the bench players come and join them, and it becomes a much bigger and much louder thing.
And then, after a while, the families come down onto the grass. Wives. Girlfriends. Parents. Brothers and sisters. Children in shirts too big for them, being carried around a pitch by men who cannot stop crying.
And then the ceremony. The podium, the ribbons, the medals, the lift.
It is a cliché. It is the same every single year and everybody has seen it a hundred times.
But even knowing that, even seeing it coming from a mile away, not one person in that stadium could stop smiling about it.
Because after all, Barcelona had just won the Champions League final.
And right now, down on the sidelines, that fact had just hit Ronald Koeman very hard indeed.
He had not moved since the whistle.
He was bent over at the edge of his own technical area with both hands on his knees and his head down, and he had been in exactly that position for a while now.
His shoulders were going.
"Gaffer."
Somebody had a hand on his back.
"Gaffer. We did it."
"Ronald. Ronald, we did it."
His assistants were all round him now, shouting it, gripping his shoulders, one of them shaking him.
"WE DID IT, GAFFER!"
And Ronald Koeman could not answer any of them.
Because he had been here before.
That was the thing. He had stood on this exact ground before, in a different body, twenty-nine years ago.
Wembley. 1992.
A free kick from outside the box and a football club's first ever European Cup and a stadium full of people in red and blue who had waited their entire lives for it, and a young man in a Barcelona shirt who had put it there.
He had thought about that night more times than he could count.
And what was happening to him now, bent over on a touchline in Porto, was that he could not work out which one of them was heavier.
He genuinely could not.
Winning it as a player. Standing on that grass at Wembley at twenty-nine years old with the ball still leaving his boot in his memory.
Or this. Standing on a touchline at fifty-eight, in a season that half the world had told him would end with him being sacked before Christmas, with eleven men out there that nobody had believed in.
He did not know.
He could not put them side by side and pick one, and he had been trying to do it for about ninety seconds and it was not working, and everything else in his head was somewhere at the back of it and out of reach.
And through all of that, one thing was clear.
He kept going back to that night.
To a pitch at Wembley, and the ball going in, and turning round to run, and looking for the touchline.
And a man standing there in a tracksuit and glasses.
Johan.
Is this how you felt?
That was the thought. That was the only thing in Ronald Koeman's head that had any shape to it at all.
Is this it?
Is this what it was like for you, standing there, watching us do it?
Because I did not know. All those years and I never asked you and I never thought about it once, and now I am here, and I do not know how you stood up.
He stayed bent over for a moment longer.
Then he pushed himself upright.
He took an enormous breath in through his nose and let it out, and he was smiling, and his face was completely wet, and he did not do anything about either of those things.
He looked out at his own players on that grass.
And Ronald Koeman said it, choked and thick and barely out loud at all, to a man who had been dead for five years.
"Gaffer."
He nodded once.
"We did it."
While the celebrations were getting underway, not everybody on that pitch could be happy.
That is what a final is. There is a winner, and because there is a winner, there has to be a loser.
"Good job, boys. Good job."
Thomas Tuchel was moving down the line of them.
He was going one at a time, every single player, a hand on a shoulder, a hand on a back, a grip on the back of a neck.
"Good job. Good job, eh?"
And it was not pretty.
The Chelsea players were standing around their own half in ones and twos, waiting, most of them not looking at anything. Some had their hands on their hips. Some were staring at the grass. There were red eyes everywhere in that half of the pitch and nobody was hiding any of it.
Christensen was sitting down on the turf with his shirt pulled up over his face.
Kanté was standing completely still.
Mendy was on his knees in his own six-yard box and had been for a while.
Tuchel got to Mason Mount, who was bent double with both hands on his knees and his head hanging, and the boy was crying and not making any attempt to stop.
Tuchel put a hand on the top of his head and rubbed it once, gently, the way you would with your own kid.
He did not say anything to him.
He moved on.
And then he came to Antonio Rüdiger.
Rüdiger was standing upright. He had not sat down and he had not bent over and he had not put his hands anywhere.
He was just standing there, looking at nothing at all, and his eyes were completely bloodshot.
Tuchel put a hand on his shoulder.
And he paused.
He stood there for a second, and then he said it quietly, only to him.
"You did good."
Rüdiger did not answer.
Tuchel gripped the shoulder once, hard.
Then he turned round to face all of them.
"HEY."
Heads came up.
"You all heard that?"
He looked at every single one of them.
"You all did good."
He was nodding as he said it, going round the whole group with his eyes, and his own voice had started to go.
"I am proud of every one of you. Every single one. What you did out there tonight, what you did for a hundred and twenty minutes against that football team."
He stopped.
He started clapping. Just clapping, standing there in the middle of his own beaten players, applauding them.
And then he said it one more time.
"You all did good."
But at the end of it, that was all they were going to be.
The backdrop.
Chelsea Football Club, with all of their grit and all of their organisation and all of their refusal to lie down, had come into this final and got within a breath of it.
One more minute. If they had held on for one more minute.
If Werner scores.
If Kovačić does not have to foul him.
If Mendy is not caught off his line.
If, if, if.
And none of it mattered any more. The match was over, and the moment a match is over every single if inside it stops being worth anything at all.
It was not their story now.
Winner takes all. That is not a football thing, it is not a modern thing, it is not something anybody invented. It has been true from the first day there was anything to win, and it will be true for as long as there is.
And from this moment on, there was only one thing that mattered in the Estádio do Dragão.
FC BARCELONA. THE 2020/21 CHAMPIONS LEAGUE WINNERS.
...
"WOOOOOOW."
They stood in front of that end shoulder to shoulder.
Marc-André Ter Stegen.
Jordi Alba.
Gerard Piqué.
Ronald Araújo.
Sergi Roberto.
Sergio Busquets.
Frenkie de Jong.
Pedri.
Ousmane Dembélé.
Antoine Griezmann.
Mateo King.
Lionel Messi.
Eleven men and a substitute, in a line, in front of thirty thousand people who had come from every corner of the earth to be in this stadium tonight.
And that stand sang at them.
The whole of it. Arms round shoulders the entire width of the tier, scarves up, flags going, thirty thousand voices coming down onto that grass, and the men on the grass just stood there and let it happen.
Because whatever else was going to happen to these twelve men in their lives, wherever they ended up, whatever clubs and whatever countries and however many years, this was going to be theirs.
All of them. Together. Forever.
They looked at each other along that line and they were all grinning. Somebody said something and four of them laughed. Alba had an arm round Roberto. Busquets was shaking his head at nothing at all.
And then they bowed.
All twelve of them, at the same time, down to those supporters.
And the noise that came back down was the loudest thing that had happened all night.
Mateo straightened up.
"Wooooow."
He said it under his breath, to nobody.
"Haha."
He was laughing. He could not stop laughing. He had one hand on his own head and he was just looking up at all of it.
At the fanaticism in it.
Because that is what it was. There were men up there with their faces completely soaked. There was a woman about four rows back holding somebody's shoulders and screaming with her eyes shut. There were people who had not stopped jumping in twenty minutes. There were kids on their fathers' shoulders. There was a man who had climbed onto a barrier and had both arms out like wings and was doing nothing at all except standing there with his mouth open.
Thirty thousand people, and every single one of them had waited six years for exactly this.
I finally reached it.
That was the thought.
I actually did it.
He had imagined this. Not once. Hundreds of times, over years. Lying in a bunk at La Masia at thirteen with the lights off. Sitting on a bus. Standing in a shower. He had run this exact moment through his own head so many times that he had thought he knew the shape of it.
The grandeur of it. The noise. What it would feel like.
He turned his head and looked down the line.
Pedri was right beside him, and Pedri caught him looking and grinned at him, and Mateo grinned back.
Further along, Messi was laughing at something Piqué had said, his whole face open.
And Mateo King looked at all of it.
I did not even get half of it.
And the day just kept getting better.
The staff came running out with the podium.
It went up fast, the way it always does, men in polo shirts moving with the practised speed of people who have done this in eight different countries. The blue carpet. The steps. The stand. Two men carrying a case.
And then the voice came over the stadium.
"Ladies and gentlemen."
The whole ground came up.
"Please welcome your 2020/21 UEFA Champions League winners."
"FC BARCELONA!"
Pedri got both hands onto Mateo's shoulders from behind and squeezed them, hard, shaking him.
"HAHAHA!"
"Come on, man!"
And they walked.
They went up in a line and every man went past the officials one at a time.
Koeman got there first and every single player took his hand and most of them did not let it go at just a handshake. Piqué hugged him. Busquets said something into his ear that made him nod. Ter Stegen gripped the back of his neck.
And Joan Laporta had gone completely.
He was bouncing. Actually bouncing on the spot, slapping backs, gripping forearms, laughing at every single one of them as they came past.
"YES! YES! What a night! What a NIGHT!"
He got hold of Alba's face with both hands.
"Nine years! NINE YEARS!"
And then Mateo arrived.
And Laporta stopped bouncing.
He took the boy's hand in both of his and held onto it and looked at him.
"You."
He was shaking his head slowly.
"Do you know what you are, kid?"
"Sir."
"You are special. I am telling you now. I have been around this club my whole life and I have seen a lot of players walk through that door and I am telling you, right now, to your face."
He gripped the hand harder.
"You are special."
And Mateo laughed and pushed his own hair back with his free hand.
"One of many, sir."
Laporta's face lit up completely.
"HA!"
He pointed at him with his whole hand.
"Yes. YES. That. That is what I want. I love that. I LOVE that mentality, kid."
He clapped him on the shoulder twice.
"You are special."
And then Aleksander Čeferin.
He was professional about all of it. A handshake, a small nod, a word, and the medal.
He put it over Mateo's head and it dropped onto his chest.
And Mateo stopped.
He looked down at it.
He picked it up off his own shirt with two fingers and turned it over, and there it was, sitting in his hand, the actual physical object.
And something came up in his throat that he had thought he was finished with.
His eyes went hot immediately.
Oh, come on.
He blinked hard, twice, and swallowed, and pressed his lips together.
Then he moved to walk on.
And his leg went.
It happened fast, just a buckle, the right one going out from under him mid-step, and his whole body dipped sideways with a small sharp noise coming out of him.
And a hand caught his arm.
Messi.
He was right there, one hand under Mateo's elbow, the other coming across to his back, holding him up in front of a stadium and about four hundred cameras.
Mateo looked at him.
Messi did not say anything about the leg. He did not look at it, and he did not call anybody over, and he did not make a single thing of it.
He just smiled at him.
"Let us go."
And he kept a hand on him for the first three steps, and then took it away, and the two of them walked down together like nothing at all had happened.
The trophy was on its stand.
And the players were pushing each other toward it.
"Come on! Come on, let us do this!"
"Everybody in! EVERYBODY!"
"Where do I. Here?"
"Move up! Move UP!"
It was chaos. Thirty men trying to arrange themselves into two rows around a piece of silverware while photographers shouted at them and confetti was still coming down.
And then one of the cameramen out in front cupped his hands.
"MESSI! MATEO! CAN WE GET THEM AT THE FRONT? MESSI AND MATEO AT THE FRONT!"
And the entire squad picked it up at once.
"MATEO! MESSI!"
"GO ON! GO ON, GET IN THERE!"
"MA-TE-O! MES-SI!"
They were shoving both of them forward, clapping, chanting it, Alba pushing Mateo in the back with both hands.
The two of them went to the middle.
And Mateo King stood in front of the European Cup.
Close enough to touch it.
He had seen this trophy his entire life. On televisions. On posters. In a cabinet in a museum he had walked through as a boy with his father holding his hand. He had watched other men lift it and he had watched other men cry over it and he had sat on a common room floor at eleven years old screaming at a screen while three men he worshipped held it above their heads.
And now it was in front of him.
He reached out.
And he ran one finger down the side of it, slowly, all the way from the handle to the base.
He did not say anything at all.
And two feet away, Lionel Messi was doing exactly the same thing.
He was looking at it with his hands at his sides and his head slightly tilted, and there was something almost amused sitting on his face.
Six years.
Anfield. Lisbon. Rome. Every single night in between.
And Messi leaned in slightly toward the trophy and muttered it, to it, under his breath.
"You have not been easy to get to."
"OKAY!"
The cameraman had both hands up.
"OKAY, EVERYBODY! HOLD IT!"
"Wait."
Koeman had stepped forward.
He came in from the side, put a hand on the cameraman's shoulder, and leaned in and said something directly into his ear.
The cameraman started smiling.
He nodded, twice, and stepped back.
"Okay!"
He looked at the whole group, at thirty men and a trophy and a stadium behind them.
"Okay, on three. But when I get to three."
He grinned.
"VISCA BARÇA."
The whole squad lit up.
"HAHAHA!"
"YESSS!"
"Come on!"
And off to the side, Ronald Koeman stepped back out of shot and folded his arms and watched them, and the look on his face was something close to pride and something else that did not have a name.
"OKAY!"
The cameraman lifted the camera.
"ONE."
Arms went round shoulders.
"TWO."
Piqué's hand landed on top of Mateo's head.
"THREE!"
"VISCA BARÇAAAAAAA!"
The fireworks went off the roof of the Estádio do Dragão at the exact same instant.
Gold going up on all four sides, confetti coming down out of the sky in enormous drifts, thirty thousand people screaming, thirty men roaring at a camera with a European Cup in front of them.
And the shutter went.
They did all of them after that.
The full squad with the substitutes. The coaching staff shoved into the middle by their own players. The whole delegation, all sixty-something of them, kit men and physios and analysts pulled in from the sides by men who would not take no for an answer.
Then the stupid ones. Piqué doing something with his tongue out. Ter Stegen holding the trophy like a baby. Somebody lying flat on the floor in front of the whole group for no reason at all.
Alba took a photograph on his own phone of about fifteen of them while a professional photographer waited patiently.
Mateo was laughing so hard in about four of those pictures that his eyes are shut in every single one of them.
And it was about to get better.
"FAMILY COMING THROUGH! FAMILY COMING THROUGH!"
The security had opened the barrier.
They were bringing them out onto the grass, a stream of people down the side of the pitch, and the noise from the stand went up again as they came.
Oriol Cerdà was practically vibrating.
"Finally. FINALLY."
He was up on his toes trying to see over the man in front of him.
"Finally, come ON."
And Nora took his hand and squeezed it and laughed at him.
"Oriol."
"What? WHAT? I have been sitting up there for two hours."
Behind them, Andrew King was pushing grandma Núria in a wheelchair, taking it slowly over the edge of the track, and the old woman had a hand flat on her own chest and had not stopped smiling since the whistle.
David and Isabella came through with his arm all the way round her and her head against his shoulder.
And Isabella looked to the side.
Antonella Roccuzzo was walking a few yards away with her three boys.
The two women caught each other's eyes.
And they both smiled.
Antonella gave her a small nod.
Isabella nodded back.
Behind them, Aina Cerdà was having a small crisis.
"Oh, God. Oh, God, is that them?"
She had grabbed Olivia's arm.
"Is that them? The two over there? Do you think that is them?"
"Aina."
"What if they. Oh, God, what if that is them, they look like him, do they not look like him?" She was craning her neck at a completely different couple. "That woman has his face. She has his exact face."
"Aina."
"While the match was going on I could not even think about it, I had other things to think about, but now I know that in about one minute I am actually going to."
"AINA."
Olivia took both of her shoulders and turned her round.
"Chill."
"I cannot chill."
"You can chill." Olivia was laughing at her. "Look at me. They are going to like you."
"You do not know that."
"I do know that." She raised her eyebrows. "Their son already does. And that is really the only bit that matters, is it not?"
Aina looked at her.
And she let out a long breath.
"Yes."
"Yes."
"Yes. Okay. Yes."
She straightened her own jacket.
"Okay."
And the security waved a hand.
"LET THEM THROUGH!"
Out on the grass, Mateo and Pedri were standing in a snowstorm of confetti.
It was in their hair. It was in the collars of their shirts. There was a piece of gold stuck to the side of Mateo's face and he had not noticed and Pedri had not told him.
Mateo had the medal in his hand.
He was turning it over, weighing it.
"You know." He looked up. "This feels heavier than the La Liga one."
Pedri started laughing.
"Who cares, man?"
He spread both arms out.
"We have got the two."
"HAHAHA."
"We have got the TWO!"
"MATEO!"
He turned.
And there they were.
All of them, coming across that grass toward him. His mother with both hands already up at her own face. His father. Andrew pushing his grandmother's chair over the turf. Oriol, five yards ahead of everybody, arms out. Nora. Aina.
And everything he had been holding down for the last twenty minutes came straight back up at once.
His face went.
"Dad."
He was already moving toward them, wobbling, not caring.
"Mom. Mom. Uncle Andrew. Uncle Oriol. Grandma."
His voice was going with every name.
"Aunty Nora. Aina."
He was laughing and crying at exactly the same time and there was confetti in his eyelashes.
"And."
Olivia Rodrigo had stopped walking.
Everybody else was moving and she had just stopped, about fifteen yards away, looking at him.
At a boy standing in the middle of a football pitch in a stadium in Portugal with gold falling out of the sky onto him and a medal round his neck and his face completely destroyed.
And it hit her all at once.
A farm. A boy confessing to her.
A car with two couples in matching outfits, and a boy who could not finish a sentence while she was looking at him.
An empty street a few buildings away from a room full of bankers, and a boy who knew her middle name.
A restaurant with an old woman shouting from the kitchen, and a boy holding her hand across a table.
A park. A swing. A phone ringing at the worst possible moment.
A doorway. Soft.
A video call at 7:59 and a word she did not finish saying.
And Olivia Rodrigo could not hold any of it.
She went.
She ran, across that pitch, past his mother and past his father and past every single member of his family, and none of them had time to say anything about it at all.
"MATEO!"
He turned.
"OOF."
She hit him at full speed and got both arms all the way round his neck and both feet came off the ground.
And Mateo caught her.
His leg screamed at him and he did not notice it and he would not have cared if he had.
He got both arms round her and held on.
And she was crying.
Properly, into his shoulder, her whole body going with it, and she was laughing at the same time and neither of those things was stopping the other.
"I am so happy for you."
She got it out into the side of his neck.
"I am so, so happy for you."
She gripped tighter.
"You did it."
And Mateo King, who had held it together in a dressing room and in a tunnel and through a hundred and twenty-three minutes and a medal ceremony and a photograph, stopped holding anything at all.
He melted.
He put his face into her hair and his arms went all the way round her and every single thing left in him came out at once.
And he said one word.
"Olivia."
Nothing else.
Just that.
And the two of them stood there in the middle of the Estádio do Dragão with the confetti coming down on top of them and thousands of people singing above them and his whole family standing ten feet away not saying a word.
And nobody interrupted them.
Not this time.
A/N
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