Young love.
It is a beautiful thing. Genuinely, one of the most beautiful things there is.
It is also completely ridiculous, and everybody who has ever been inside one knows it. It is enormous feelings in people who have no idea what to do with enormous feelings. It is saying things you cannot possibly promise and meaning every word of them. It is two people learning what they are by learning it on each other.
It is beautiful. And it is precious. And it does not last, most of the time, and that is not a tragedy either. That is simply what it is for.
But young love, at the end of the day, is also very unstable.
It does not have the stability of the old couples, the ones who have been through everything twice and have stopped needing to talk about most of it. It does not have the responsibility of the middle-aged, the mortgages and the children and all the other things that hold people in place whether they feel like being held or not.
Young love has none of that.
Young love is volatile.
And then you add the circumstances.
A budding pop star. A seventeen-year-old boy who had just become one of the most talked-about athletes on the planet.
Whatever else you want to say about Mateo King and Olivia Rodrigo, their romance was never going to be ordinary.
And the second she jumped on him in the middle of that pitch, the entire internet had an opinion about it.
Instantly. Thousands of them. Within about ninety seconds.
@notyourguy_ yeah of course he has a beautiful girlfriend. of course he does. please kill me right now. actually please who is this guy like actually, is he Gods illegitimate son 😭
@culerfromlagos wait. WAIT. wasn't this girl also at the la liga celebration?? she was! she was there!
@thatsmyboyy i love this for him honestly. kid just won the champions league at 17 and ran straight to his girl. cinema 🥹
@RealTalkFooty and here it is. the beginning of the downfall. mark this post. every single time it's the same story, a woman shows up and the career starts going sideways
@ohno_hedidnt replying to @RealTalkFooty brother he scored twice in a champions league final forty minutes ago
@messiah10_ mateo is SEVENTEEN. are you people actually serious right now. why does a 17 year old have a girlfriend and why are we all watching him hug her on live television
@notthatdeep genuine question does anyone actually know who she is?? like at all??
@barcagirl_x i would say she's his sister but that hug was NOT sisterly 💀 idk if mateo dating this early is a good thing tho
@ElRey36 you people are insane. mateo king is a 17 year old boy who is now one of the best players in the world with fame money and everything a person could want. why are you acting strange about the fact that he has a girlfriend. this is the most normal thing that has ever happened
@fckthelot lol here comes the gold digger. right on schedule 🤡
@SIUUUdaily anyone want to guess how long until we get the iconic "i didn't even know who he was" interview 😂😂
@whenisgta6comingout WE WON THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE. WE WON THE FUCKING CHAMPIONS LEAGUE. THIS IS WHAT WE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT. WHY IS ANYONE TALKING ABOUT A HUG
@softlaunchcity what if they're childhood friends 🥺 what if they've known each other since they were kids and she's been there the whole time 🥺🥺
@AmosIsAP are you people serious. is this actually what we're discussing. we can all literally SEE the boy limping. i'm significantly more worried about whether he's okay
@Asensii20 an acl and a girlfriend at 17. my hatewatching has finally started paying dividends 😌
@lauren_xoxo replying to @notthatdeep wait hold on isn't that the girl from high school musical??
Supporters. Haters. Neutrals. Incels. Whatever anybody wanted to call them.
Every last one of them had an opinion about it.
And the strange thing was, this was not even the first time. Olivia had come onto the pitch after the Atlético match. She had been there, in front of everybody, in exactly the same way.
The difference was that one had been an impulsive, innocent, very long hug at a league celebration nobody outside Spain was paying attention to.
This was a Champions League final in front of four hundred million people.
And no matter how many times it gets said, no matter how many campaigns and interviews and pleas there are about it, very few people on this earth can genuinely separate a footballer's personal life from his professional one.
So the opinions kept coming.
And away from all of the fans, there was somebody else who was extremely concerned about that hug.
For entirely different reasons.
"Ssss. Tss."
Luis Enrique was standing about four feet from his own television with his face screwed up.
"Tsss."
On the screen, Mateo King was putting a girl back down onto the grass.
And Luis Enrique's hands came up.
Both of them, out in front of him, like a man reaching to catch something four hundred miles away.
"No. No, no, no. Careful. Careful, kid, careful."
He winced.
"Tsssss."
He put a hand over his own eyes and then immediately took it off again because he had to keep looking, and then he started chewing the side of his own thumbnail without noticing he was doing it.
On the screen, Mateo took a step.
And it was there. Small, but it was there. The right leg going down carefully, the weight shifting.
"Hiss."
Enrique turned away from the television entirely.
Then turned back to it.
The door opened.
Rafel Pol came in with a phone in his hand and shook his head.
"Nothing, gaffer."
Enrique put a hand flat on top of his own head.
"Nothing at all. Nobody is saying anything. It has been forty minutes and there is not one word out of the club, not one word from the federation contacts, nothing on any of the wires."
Enrique did not take his hand off his head.
He turned round.
"Find a way to contact them."
"The club?"
"Anybody. Somebody in the medical department, somebody in the delegation, I do not care who. I want to know what we are dealing with and I want to know tonight, not in three days when they get round to putting out a statement."
He pointed at the screen.
"Because if there is something in that leg, then we need to start preparing for it right now. Not next week. Now."
"Yes, gaffer."
And Robert Moreno, over by the window, groaned and put both hands on the back of a chair.
"How could this even happen? Honestly, how? Do you know how many of our plans for this thing are built around—"
"Do not."
Enrique had turned round.
"Gaffer—"
"Do not say it."
He pointed at him.
"Do not put that kind of energy out into the world. We do not know anything. Nobody in this room knows one single thing about what is or is not wrong with that boy's leg, so nobody in this room is going to stand here and say it out loud."
Moreno shut his mouth.
Enrique turned back to the television.
And after a moment, Joaquín Valdés spoke up from the sofa.
"He is right, though. It could very well be nothing." He shrugged. "The boy has just played a hundred and twenty-three minutes of a Champions League final. He got kicked about forty times. He is probably just sore. Everybody out there is sore."
Nobody answered him.
The room went completely quiet.
And Luis Enrique stood in front of his own television with his arms folded and watched a seventeen-year-old boy being hugged by his own mother, and he said it very softly, mostly to himself.
"We need him this summer."
He shook his head once.
"He cannot be injured."
Unaware of any of that, the celebration on the pitch carried on exactly as it should have.
After the hug, Mateo had his family.
All of them, one at a time, and it took a very long time indeed.
His mother got him first and did not let go for about forty seconds, both arms round his neck, saying things into his ear that were half Spanish and half nothing at all. His father hugged him and then held him at arm's length by the shoulders and looked at him and could not say a single word, and settled instead for putting a hand on the top of his head and patting it, twice, exactly the way Andrew had patted his own back an hour earlier.
Oriol picked him clean off the ground.
Actually off the ground, both arms round his ribs, shouting into his face.
"THAT IS MY NEPHEW! THAT IS MY NEPHEW, EVERYBODY!"
"Uncle. UNCLE."
"MY NEPHEW!"
Nora kissed both of his cheeks and then his forehead. Andrew King shook his hand, formally, the way he shakes everybody's hand, and then completely abandoned it and pulled him in.
And grandma Núria took his face in both of her hands and would not let him move.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she kissed his forehead, and said something in Catalan that only he heard, and let him go.
And then there were the other families.
Because that is what that pitch had become. Thirty families all mixed together in one place, children running everywhere, wives being introduced to wives, grandparents being carried through the confetti.
Mateo got hugged by three women he had never met. Somebody's four-year-old handed him a piece of confetti with enormous ceremony and then ran away.
Piqué's boys had found Antonella's boys and there were now five children running in a large chaotic loop around the trophy while several adults tried and failed to slow them down.
And a few yards away, Mateo found something a great deal funnier.
Aina Cerdà, standing very upright, meeting Pedri's parents.
"It is so nice to. Very nice. To meet you." She put out a hand. Then took it back. Then put it out again. "Sorry."
Pedri had a hand over his own face.
"I have heard so much about." She stopped. "Not so much. Some. A normal amount."
Mateo started laughing so hard he had to bend over.
Hugs from his mother.
A hand on the head from his father.
Shouting from his uncles.
Fussing from his aunt.
A kiss on the forehead from his grandmother.
His girlfriend's hand finding his and staying there.
And a Champions League medal round his neck.
Mateo King, at seventeen years old, had finally experienced pure and undiluted ecstasy.
And then the legends came out.
They came down onto the pitch in a group, all of them, and the noise from that stand went up again.
Puyol got to Piqué first and the two of them nearly took each other off their feet. Xavi and Iniesta went straight for Busquets and the three of them stood there in a huddle with their heads together for about a minute and did not let anybody else in.
Rivaldo shook every hand he could find.
Ronaldo Nazário laughed at everything anybody said to him.
And Ronaldinho found Mateo King.
He came across that grass with both arms already out and that enormous, impossible, world-famous smile, and he did not shake his hand.
He grabbed his face.
Both hands, one on each cheek, and he shook the boy's head gently side to side while laughing at him.
"You."
"HAHAHA."
"You. That thing you did to that man." Ronaldinho let go of his face and did an approximation of a snake bite with his own foot on the grass, badly. "That thing. Where did you get that? WHERE?"
"I learned it from you, sir."
Ronaldinho stopped.
Then he put both hands on his own chest.
"HAHAHA! From ME?"
"From you."
"You hear this?" He was turning round, looking for anybody. "You hear what this kid is saying?"
He grabbed Mateo's head again and pulled him into a hug and did not let him go for a long time.
There were photographs.
Hundreds of them. Legends with players, players with families, Xavi and Iniesta and Busquets and Pedri and Mateo all in one line, which somebody somewhere immediately understood was going to be an important photograph one day.
Ronaldo Nazário with the trophy. Puyol with the trophy. A photograph of about forty people that nobody was arranged for and everybody is in.
And through all of it, thirty thousand people in that end never stopped.
They sang the whole way. Every player who went near that stand got their own name chanted at them. Somebody threw a shirt into the crowd and about eleven people tried to catch it.
And eventually, finally, after a very long time, the players left the pitch.
They went in a slow, straggling, laughing line down toward that tunnel, most of them with somebody's hand in theirs or somebody's child on their shoulders, and the last of them turned round at the mouth of it and put both arms up at that stand one more time.
And the stand roared back at him.
Fortunately, the celebration did not end there.
...
The dressing room was a war zone.
There were shirts on the floor. Shorts on the floor. Socks in places socks had no business being. The floor itself was soaked, half from showers and half from whatever had been sprayed around in the first four minutes, and there was confetti in absolutely everything.
Somebody's boot was on a table.
The music was going through the speaker at a volume that made conversation a theoretical concept, and about nine of them were singing over the top of it anyway.
"CAMPEONES, CAMPEONES, OE, OE, OE!"
And in the middle of that floor, in nothing but boxer shorts, five men had linked arms.
Piqué. Araújo. Dembélé. Pedri.
And Mateo King.
Arms across each other's shoulders, in a line, kicking their legs up in front of them in something that was very approximately in time, moving in a slow circle around the middle of the room and roaring it at the ceiling.
"CAMPEONES, CAMPEONES, OE, OE, OE!"
"CAMPEONES, CAMPEONES, OE, OE, OE!"
Araújo could not do the kicks and was doing them anyway.
Dembélé's timing was a full beat behind everybody else's and had been since the start.
Piqué was singing it directly into the side of Mateo's head from about four inches away.
And around them the rest of the room was gone. Ter Stegen had both arms up, conducting. Alba was standing on a bench. Somebody threw a dirty sock into the middle of the line and it hit Araújo in the chest and he did not break stride for a fraction of a second.
Then somebody threw another one.
Then four more.
"HEY! HEY!"
"STOP IT!"
"CAMPEONES, CAMPEONES, OE, OE, OE!"
And in the corner, the documentary crew had a camera up and had not moved it in eleven minutes.
The operator was grinning behind it.
You do not get this. You spend an entire season getting press conferences and training-ground drills and carefully worded interviews, and then once, maybe, if you are extremely lucky, you get eleven minutes of this.
He kept the camera on the line of them.
And Mateo King saw the camera.
He broke off the end of the line.
"OOOOOH."
He came at that lens with both arms out, singing, absolutely committed, and the room caught it about a second later.
"OHHHHH!"
"GO ON! GO ON, KID!"
He got right up in front of it, close enough that his whole face filled the frame, and belted the chorus straight down the barrel with his eyes shut and his fist against his own chest.
"CAMPEONES! CAMPEONES!"
"WOOOOO!"
Somebody wolf-whistled.
"WOW! WOW! WOW!"
Alba was hammering a bench with both hands.
And over on the far side, Lionel Messi had thrown his head all the way back and was laughing at the ceiling with a towel round his neck.
Mateo held the last note for about four seconds longer than any human being should.
Then he stopped.
He looked directly into the lens.
And he winked.
The room exploded.
"AHHHHHH!"
"NO! NO, HE DID NOT!"
"WHAT IS THIS BOY DOING?"
Half of them were on their feet. Somebody was screaming. Piqué had both hands on top of his own head.
And Mateo turned round and started bowing.
Properly bowing, from the waist, in his boxers, in every direction, one hand on his own chest.
"Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much."
"SIT DOWN!"
A shirt hit him in the face.
"THANK YOU."
A sock hit him in the shoulder. Then a towel. Then somebody's entire training top, which went over his head and stayed there, and he carried on bowing underneath it.
"THANK YOU. YOU ARE ALL TOO KIND."
This is what a room full of men who have just won the Champions League looks like.
Not the podium. Not the photographs. Not the medal round the neck in front of four hundred million people.
This. Half-dressed, soaking wet, throwing socks at each other, singing a song they have all known since they were six years old.
"I hope I am not interrupting anything."
Every head in that room turned.
Joan Laporta was standing in the doorway in a suit.
"BOSSSSS!"
"HEY! BOSS MAN!"
"PRESIDENTE!"
The noise went up about forty percent.
And Laporta had absolutely no chance.
Piqué got to him first, because of course he did, and simply took him by both arms and dragged him into the middle of the floor.
"NO. No, no, no, boys, I am not—"
"COME ON, PRESIDENT!"
"I am in a SUIT."
"NOBODY CARES!"
And the line reformed around him.
Piqué on one side, Alba on the other, both of them with an arm across his shoulders, and Joan Laporta, president of FC Barcelona, found himself in the middle of a chorus line of half-naked footballers being made to kick his legs up in a dressing room in Porto.
"CAMPEONES, CAMPEONES, OE, OE, OE!"
"HAHAHA!"
He was going.
He was actually going, jacket flapping, one shoe half off, kicking his legs up with the rest of them and singing at the top of his voice.
"HIGHER, PRESIDENT!"
"HIGHER!"
"THAT IS NOT A KICK!"
"CAMPEONES, CAMPEONES!"
Somebody's phone was out. Several phones were out.
And behind the camera in the corner, the documentary operator was laughing so hard that the shot went wobbly for about six seconds, and every single person who ever watches that footage will see it wobble and know exactly why.
Eventually Laporta got both hands up.
"Okay. Okay! OKAY!"
He was still laughing. His hair had gone completely.
"Okay, let me. LET ME TALK."
The room came down.
Somebody turned the music off. Men sat down on benches, on the floor, on each other.
Laporta pushed his own hair back into something like a shape and looked around that room.
"I am not going to keep you."
He was breathing hard.
"I am not. I know what you all want to do right now and I am not going to stand here and take it from you."
He looked round all of them.
"I just want to say one thing."
He put a hand on his own chest.
"I am proud of you."
Somebody started clapping and he waved it down.
"No. Listen. Listen to me for one second, because this matters."
He let it settle.
"Nine months ago people were laughing at this football club. At us. At the badge. There were people in this city, our own people, who were writing us off, and there were people all over Europe who thought this club was finished."
He shook his head slowly.
"And tonight you went out there, in front of the whole world, and you showed every single one of them exactly what Barça is."
His voice came up.
"THAT is what you did tonight. You did not just win a football match. You reminded this planet what this shirt means."
He spread both arms.
"You showed them why we are BARÇA."
"AHHHHHHH!"
The room came off the benches.
"VISCA BARÇA!"
"BOSSSS!"
Somebody was banging a locker door with the flat of their hand, over and over.
Laporta was laughing again, pumping one fist above his head.
"AND."
He shouted it over the top of them.
"AND! One more thing!"
They quieted a fraction.
"The preparations at home are already finished."
He pointed at the door.
"Tonight, you are all going back to Barcelona."
He grinned.
"And you are going back in style."
He raised his voice one last time.
"Like HEROES."
"AHHHHHHHHH!"
That did it.
Shirts came off heads and went round above them like flags. Men were up on the benches. Somebody put the music back on and it came in halfway through the chorus and the entire room was screaming.
And Joan Laporta stood in the middle of it in a ruined suit with both fists in the air.
Off to the side, Ronald Koeman had been leaning against a wall with his arms folded and a smile he had not managed to remove in about an hour.
He pushed off the wall.
"Okay!"
He clapped twice.
"OKAY. You all heard the man."
He waved a hand at the showers.
"So let us get moving. Hit the showers, get yourselves sorted, so we can go and get you ready for this welcome."
Then he pulled a face.
"And I am saying this with love, boys."
He sniffed the air, theatrically, and winced.
"Some of you are RIPE."
"HAHAHAHA!"
"OHHHHH!"
The room went up.
And Mateo, in his boxers with a training top still half over one shoulder, put a hand up.
"To be fair, gaffer."
He pointed.
"I was standing next to Piqué for most of it, so."
"HAHAHA!"
"OHHHH!"
Piqué shoved him hard enough that he had to grab a bench.
"You little—"
"IT IS THE TRUTH!"
"I will END you, kid!"
The whole room was howling.
"Coach."
The noise carried on behind them.
Laporta had come over to the wall where Koeman was standing, and he put his hand out first.
Koeman took it.
"Congratulations, Ronald."
"Thank you, President."
"No." Laporta shook his head and gripped harder. "No, listen to me. Congratulations. Genuinely."
"Congratulations to you too, sir."
Laporta laughed at that, properly, head going back.
"HA! Yes. Yes, alright."
He let the hand go and shook his own head.
"I cannot believe you did it."
And Koeman smiled and looked past him, out at the room.
"I did not do it, sir."
They both looked.
At thirty half-dressed men in a wrecked dressing room, shouting at each other, laughing, somebody spraying something at somebody else, Piqué chasing a seventeen-year-old around a bench.
"Hmm," Laporta said.
He watched it for a moment.
Then his tone changed, only very slightly.
"There is still one thing."
Koeman did not look away from the room.
"About Mateo. Is he—"
"We have had the physios look at him already."
Koeman said it before the sentence was finished, because he had known exactly what was coming from the first two words.
"They did not find anything immediate. Nothing obvious, nothing that made them stop what they were doing."
He paused.
"But they want him in a lab. They said they cannot tell me anything real until he has had scans, and they cannot do scans in a dressing room in Portugal at one in the morning."
Laporta nodded slowly.
"So."
"So."
And Ronald Koeman looked out at that room.
Out at where six of them had got hold of Mateo King and hoisted him up off the floor, all of them shouting, swinging him about a foot in the air while he screamed and laughed and tried to grab at somebody's head, and somebody else threw a sock at him mid-air.
Koeman smiled.
"We just want him to have tonight."
He shrugged one shoulder.
"He can go to the lab tomorrow."
Joan Laporta looked at the same thing Koeman was looking at.
And he nodded.
"You are the coach."
He clapped him on the shoulder twice.
"Congratulations again, Ronald."
And he left.
Mateo came out of the shower with a towel round his waist and another one over his head, rubbing at his own face with it.
He got to his locker and pulled the towel off and shook his hair out and started looking for a shirt.
Pedri was in the next stall along, already half dressed, sitting on the bench with his phone propped up in front of him.
He was laughing.
"She does that to everyone. Everyone. My aunties, my cousins, the postman. Do not read into it."
He listened.
"No, seriously. She hugs the postman."
Then he glanced up and saw Mateo, and his whole face went.
"Oh. Mateo is here."
He turned the phone round.
"Olivia is on the call too."
"Hey!"
Olivia's voice came out of the speaker before the picture had even settled.
Mateo grinned at it.
"Hi."
He carried on getting dressed one-handed while leaning into the frame, which meant that for the next three minutes he was mostly a shoulder and half a face.
"So." Olivia's voice again. "What is the plan for the champ?"
Mateo stopped with a shirt half over his head.
"Hm."
He pulled it down.
"The champ. Yeah. I like that. That is good, actually, we should keep that."
"Do not encourage him," Aina said.
"What is your schedule?" Mateo asked. "Are you two coming with us or?"
"We are flying in the morning." Aina was doing something to her hair in the corner of the frame. "We are at the hotel now. They have got us on a flight at some horrible hour."
"Ah."
"So you two are on your own tonight."
Pedri looked up from the phone with an enormous grin.
"You know what we should do."
"No."
"A bus parade. When we get back."
"Pedri."
"An open-top bus. Through the whole city. All of it."
"You have won it once."
"I have won it ONCE, exactly, that is the point—"
"HAHAHA."
Pedri waved a hand at the room.
"And the guys are talking about doing something anyway. Getting together somewhere, a restaurant probably, once we land. Just to celebrate properly."
He shrugged.
"And then we go home after that."
"You all deserve it."
Aina had come back into frame properly, and her voice had gone soft.
"Honestly. Both of you. I am so proud of you. My two boys."
And she reached out and mimed patting the top of the screen, twice.
Mateo pulled a face.
"We are not dogs."
"You are a little bit dogs."
"We are NOT."
And then he glanced sideways.
Because Pedri was just sitting there smiling at his phone. Not saying anything. Not arguing. Just looking at that screen with a completely unguarded expression on his face.
Mateo reached over and tapped him on the arm with the back of his hand and gave him a look.
Pedri's face immediately reorganised itself.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"WHAT?"
"HAHAHA."
"Okay, you two."
Olivia's voice came in over the top of them.
"You should just stay safe."
"We will be fine," Mateo said.
He was pulling a sleeve down over his wrist, only half paying attention, looking at the room behind him where somebody had just started a chant that about fifteen men had immediately joined.
He shrugged.
"It is just a parade and a hangout with the guys."
He looked back at the phone and grinned.
"How wild can it get?"
A/N
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