"I AM THE KING OF THE WORLDDDDDDDDDD!"
Yep.
He was wrong.
It could get pretty wild.
Mateo King was standing on the top deck of a moving bus with both arms straight up above his head and his shirt off and his medal round his neck, screaming it at a city.
And the city screamed back louder.
Considerably louder.
The noise that came up off that street when he did it went through him like weather, and it did not stop, because it had not stopped for forty minutes and it was not going to.
The bus was doing about four miles an hour.
That was all it could do.
Because the road in front of it was not a road any more. It was people. Thousands and thousands of them, packed shoulder to shoulder from one shopfront to the other, filling every inch of it, moving with the bus like water going round something.
They were on the traffic lights. Two of them were on a bus shelter. There was a man twenty feet up a lamp post with one arm hooked round it and the other one waving a flag the size of a bedsheet, and the police below him had given up entirely and were now just standing underneath in case he came down.
There were flares going off in about nine different places at once, red smoke rolling up between the buildings and hanging there under the streetlights.
Every balcony on both sides of that street had people on it. Every window. Somebody had brought a speaker out onto a fourth-floor terrace and was playing something nobody could hear over the noise.
Kids on shoulders. Old men with scarves round their heads. Whole families out at midnight in the middle of a road.
And running alongside the bus, sprinting to keep up with it, hundreds of them, hands out, jumping, screaming names up at the deck.
"MATEOOOO!"
"PEDRIII!"
"MESSIIIII!"
Shirts were coming up from the crowd, thrown at the bus, some of them making it and most of them not. A scarf landed on the rail. Somebody threw a rose.
Mateo brought his arms down.
And he looked at it.
Properly looked, leaning forward against the rail with both hands on it, taking in the whole of it.
And right now, standing there, Mateo King felt high.
He had never taken a drug in his life. He had not had a drink. There was nothing in his body except adrenaline and two goals and about nine hours of noise.
But he was high. There was no other word for it and he did not have another one to reach for.
He looked further out.
Past the crowd right below him, up the length of the street, at the streetlights going away in a line into the distance and every single space underneath them filled. Cars abandoned. Flags on every surface. Red smoke drifting between buildings that had been standing there since before his grandfather was born.
Mateo had never taken anything, so he could not tell you how high a person can actually get on those things.
But he was fairly sure that nothing on this earth gets you here.
Because this was not chemical.
This was the city he grew up in. His home. The streets he had walked to school on and been driven through in the back of his father's car and cycled around at eleven years old with his friends.
And every single one of them, tonight, was in pure ecstasy.
Hundreds of thousands of people.
You can use whatever words you want. It will not be enough. There is no arrangement of them that gets anywhere close.
This was beautiful.
An arm came across his shoulders.
"So."
Jordi Alba had come up beside him, absolutely buzzing, his own shirt gone and his medal swinging.
"How is it?"
Mateo turned his head and he was smiling and he could not do anything about it.
"It is insane."
He looked back out at the street.
"Honestly. It is insane."
And Alba started laughing.
Not at him, exactly. Just laughing.
And a few feet away Busquets was laughing too, and so was Piqué, and Roberto had turned round.
"What?" Mateo looked between them. "What?"
"Kid." Alba squeezed his shoulder. "You have not seen anything yet."
Mateo's face changed.
"Wait."
He pointed at the crowd. At all of it. At a hundred thousand people in a street.
"It gets BIGGER than this?"
And Busquets came in on the other side of him and put an arm across his shoulders too, so that Mateo was now wedged between the two of them.
He did not say anything for a second.
Then he nodded at the road ahead.
"The night is just starting."
They had not wasted a minute.
Showered, dressed, out of that stadium, straight to the hotel. Bags that had been packed by staff before the final had even kicked off. Thirty minutes, start to finish, and then a private jet lifting out of Porto in the middle of the night with a European Cup strapped into a seat like a passenger.
And when they landed, it had already started.
There were people at the airport. Thousands of them, behind barriers, at one in the morning. There were people on the road out of the airport. There were people at every single junction between there and the city.
There had not been a gap since.
Not one. Not a single stretch of road anywhere between that runway and this street where there were not people standing at the side of it screaming at a bus.
"Dude."
Pedri arrived, arm across his shoulders, half hanging off him.
"Dude. This is insane."
He was turning his head from side to side, looking down both ends of the street.
"There is no end to them. Look. LOOK. It just keeps going."
"I know."
"It just KEEPS GOING."
"I know, man."
The two of them stood there for a second.
Then Pedri leaned back a bit.
"How is the leg now?"
"Oh." Mateo waved a hand. "It is fine. I told you, it was just sore."
He rolled the ankle and shrugged.
"Honestly. Right now I do not feel anything at all."
"Good."
"HAHAHA."
"What?"
"Nothing." Pedri grinned at him. "Nothing. You are just very stupid."
"HEY! EVERYBODY! COME UP HERE!"
Somebody was shouting from the front of the deck.
"ALL OF YOU! COME ON!"
They ended up in a square.
The bus came off the street into it and simply stopped, because there was nowhere else for it to go, and it parked right in the middle of the open space with the crowd closing round it on all four sides.
And that square was full.
Completely. To the edges and past them. Every entrance, every side street feeding into it, all of them solid with people as far back as anybody could see.
There were people on the fountain. There were people on the steps of the buildings and on the low walls and on the base of a statue that had somebody's flag tied round its neck. There were people on rooftops. Actual rooftops, six storeys up, standing at the edges with their arms out.
Speakers had been set up on both sides. Somebody had hung an enormous painted banner down the entire front of a building, four floors of it, a mural of a badge.
Police were everywhere and were mostly, at this point, decorative. They had rings of officers at the pinch points and they were doing what they could, and beyond that they had accepted their evening.
And the noise in that square did not come in waves.
It just was. Constant, from every direction, one solid unbroken wall of it.
Mateo made his way to the middle of the top deck.
And he stopped.
Because he could see the front of it now.
There, up at the very front, held up above the rail where the entire square could see them.
Two trophies.
The 2020/21 La Liga trophy.
And the European Cup.
Both of them, side by side, in front of a hundred thousand people.
That was what these men had done this year.
Mateo looked at the two of them and did not say a single word.
Ronald Koeman had a microphone.
He came to the front of the deck with it, and he looked out at the square, and he shook his head slowly at what he was seeing.
Then he turned round to the players.
"Good. You are all up here."
He grinned.
"Let us get this started."
He turned back.
And Ronald Koeman put that microphone to his mouth and roared into it.
"CITY OF BARCELONAAAAAA!"
The square came apart.
The sound that came back at that bus was physical. It hit the vehicle. It went up between the buildings and came back down again off the walls, and the flags went up all across the whole square at once, thousands of them, and the flares went off again in six places.
Mateo turned to Pedri.
Pedri was already looking at him.
And both of them just started laughing, absolutely gone, because there was nothing else to do with it.
"HAHAHA!"
"WHAT IS THIS?"
"WHAT IS THIS, MAN?"
Down at ground level the police had gone from decorative to actively working, three of them pushing back at a crush point near the front, hands up, shouting things nobody could hear.
Shirts were coming up onto the bus from every side now. Scarves. A hat. Somebody threw an entire flag, pole and all, and it clattered onto the deck and four players dived out of the way and then all of them laughed.
"CITY OF BARCELONAAAAAA!"
Koeman went again, louder.
"WE ARE BACK!"
He punched the air.
"THE CHAMPIONS ARE BACKKKKK!"
The players on that deck went insane.
Piqué had both arms above his head. Alba was screaming with his shirt swinging round in circles. Araújo and De Jong had grabbed each other. Ter Stegen was jumping. Dembélé was up on something he should not have been up on.
Mateo had both fists in the air and was roaring at a crowd he could not see the end of.
Koeman brought a hand down and the square came down about ten percent, which was all it was going to do.
"I am going to be short!"
He was shouting it into the mic.
"Because you did not come here to listen to a Dutchman talk!"
"HAHAHA!"
"Nine months ago, some people said this club was finished."
He let that sit for exactly one second.
"Those people are watching this right now."
The roar came up and he had to wait through it.
"And they are watching a league trophy and a European Cup standing on the front of this bus."
He pointed down at the front of the deck.
"AHHHHH!"
"So I am only going to say one thing to you tonight."
He looked out at all of them.
"Thank you. For every single game, for every single one, when it was going well and when it was not going well at all, you never once stopped."
He put a hand on his own chest.
"This is yours as much as it is ours."
Then he lifted the microphone again.
"AND NOW."
The square knew.
They started before he had finished.
"NOW, YOUR CAPTAAAAAIN!"
And the square went somewhere else entirely.
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
It started in three places at once and took the whole thing in about four seconds.
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
A hundred thousand people, in a square in Barcelona, at half past midnight.
On the deck, the players had turned round.
They were all doing it too.
Piqué had both hands on Messi's shoulders from behind and was pushing him forward. Alba was shouting in his ear. Busquets was tapping his chest with the back of his hand. Somebody was slapping his back.
And Mateo King was clapping with his hands above his head and shouting with the rest of them.
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
The whole bus. Every player, every coach, the staff at the back.
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
Koeman handed him the microphone.
And then he hugged him.
Properly, one arm round the back of Messi's neck, pulling him in, saying something into the side of his head that nobody else heard.
Then he stepped back and gestured at the square.
All yours.
Lionel Messi came to the front of that bus.
And he looked out.
At a hundred thousand people. At the flags. At the flares and the smoke and the rooftops and the balconies and every single window on every building in that square with somebody hanging out of it.
He put the microphone to his mouth.
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
He opened his mouth to speak.
And the square got louder.
He tried again.
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
And it got louder still, and Lionel Messi started laughing and took the microphone away from his own mouth and just stood there.
He put a hand up.
They did not stop.
He shook his head, grinning, and lowered the mic completely, and let them have it.
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
It went on for a very long time.
Eventually it started to come down.
And he lifted the microphone again.
"Okay."
His voice came out of every speaker in that square and it was small and it was quiet, because it always is.
"Okay. Okay."
He was still smiling.
"Thank you. Really. For coming out here tonight, at this time, all of you. Thank you."
He paused.
"It has been a very hard few years."
The square listened.
"For all of us. For you and for us. I know what people said about this club, and I know what people said about me, and I am not going to stand here and pretend I did not hear any of it."
He looked down at his own hand on the rail for a second.
"Three years ago I stood in front of you and I promised you something."
Somebody in the crowd screamed.
"And I could not do it. Not that year. Not the year after that either."
He looked up.
And then Lionel Messi turned his head, and looked back down the deck at the front of the bus, at two trophies standing there in the lights.
And he looked back at that square.
And he said it.
"We did it, though."
He shrugged.
"Did we not?"
The square detonated.
It was not a cheer. It was not a roar. It was the sound of a hundred thousand people all doing something different at exactly the same time, screaming, jumping, crying, grabbing each other, flags going up everywhere, flares going off, the whole thing coming up off the ground and hitting the buildings.
And Messi waited about four seconds.
Then he lifted the microphone one more time and put everything he had into it.
"THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE IS BACK AT THE CAMP NOUUUUUU!"
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
The bus went up.
Every player on that deck was jumping. Piqué had somebody in a headlock. Alba was screaming into the sky. Araújo and Dembélé had both arms round each other and were bouncing on the spot. Ter Stegen had his shirt over his head.
Mateo King was jumping with both fists above his head and screaming something that was not a word at a hundred thousand people who were screaming it back.
Busquets was right.
That was just the start.
They spent another thirty minutes going round that city.
It was after midnight and it did not matter even slightly. There were people on every route, at every junction, on every corner. Streets they had not announced. Roads the bus had not been supposed to take.
Some of them had been standing there for four hours.
It was very obvious, by about one in the morning, that Barcelona was not going to sleep tonight.
And then the bus turned toward the Camp Nou.
The club had opened the doors for free.
They had announced it while the team were still in the air, and it had taken under twenty minutes to fill.
Under twenty minutes.
Ninety-nine thousand seats.
And then they had kept coming, because of course they had, and now there were people standing in the aisles and sitting on the steps and packed into the concourses watching on screens because there was physically nowhere else to put them. There were people up on things that were not designed to be stood on.
The stadium was over capacity and everybody in the building knew it and nobody was going to be the person who said so.
In a control room somewhere under the stand, a police chief was standing in front of a bank of monitors with his arms folded and a headset on.
"Section fourteen. FOURTEEN. Talk to me."
"It is fine, sir."
"It does not look fine to me."
"They are just standing on the seats."
"I can see they are standing on the seats." He rubbed his eye. "Get two more units to the north concourse. And I want the ones on the perimeter to stop the flow at the gates, we cannot take any more of them, tell them we cannot take any more."
"Yes, sir."
He looked at eleven screens showing eleven views of the same thing.
Thank God, he thought, that they had planned for this.
They had. Properly. Three separate contingency plans depending on the result, drawn up two weeks ago in a room with the club's security people, because it had been extremely obvious to everybody that if Barcelona won tonight, this city was going to do exactly this.
He let out a long breath through his nose.
"Right," he said, to nobody in particular.
"Tonight is going to be a long one."
Inside the stadium, the announcer's voice went up over ninety-nine thousand people.
"BARÇA! BARÇA! BAAAARÇA!"
The music was already going. The fireworks had already started off the roof, gold coming up on all four sides.
And the trophies came out first.
Both of them, carried out into the centre circle and set on a stand under the lights, and the noise that went up in that bowl when they appeared was the loudest thing that had happened in that stadium in six years.
Then the players.
One at a time.
"MARC-ANDRÉ TER STEGEN!"
"JORDI ALBA!"
"GERARD PIQUÉ!"
Each one came out of that tunnel on his own into a wall of sound, arms up, going the length of the pitch to the middle.
"RONALD ARAÚJO!"
"SERGI ROBERTO!"
"SERGIO BUSQUETS!"
"FRENKIE DE JONG!"
"PEDRIIII!"
And then.
"AND NOW."
The announcer paused.
"YOUR NUMBER THIRTY-SIX."
The stadium already knew.
"MATEO KIIIIIIING!"
"AHHHHHHHHHH!"
Ninety-nine thousand people.
It was the second loudest reception of the night and it was not close to anything else, and the only man who would get louder was the one still waiting in the tunnel.
"KING! KING! KING! KING! KING!"
They were doing it in unison. The whole bowl. One word, over and over, coming down out of every tier.
"KING! KING! KING! KING!"
And Mateo came out of that tunnel bouncing.
He was jumping as he ran, both arms out, turning in circles, and then he stopped in the middle of the pitch and flexed, both arms down, every muscle he had going, roaring up at the stand.
"KING! KING! KING! KING!"
Somebody handed him a microphone.
He looked at it. Then at the stadium.
And he put it to his mouth and screamed into it.
"WOOOOOOOW!"
"LET'S GOOOOOO!"
"LA SEXTAAAAAAAAA!"
And ninety-nine thousand people lost their minds.
And the night continued.
...
"Yes. The pendulum."
"I know the pendulum."
"The pendulum, yes."
Ronaldo Nazário was sitting on the arm of a sofa with a glass in one hand, drawing on the air with the other one.
"Now listen to me. Everybody does the elastico wrong. Everybody. They do it here." He flicked his wrist out flat. "Out, in, out, in, like a windscreen wiper. That is nothing. A goalkeeper sees that all day."
Mateo was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and had not blinked in about ninety seconds.
"The pendulum is different. The pendulum is here."
He tipped his whole hand over, slow, and then snapped it.
"You take it across your body. All the way across. And the weight goes with it, all of the weight, so he has to go with it, because if he does not go with it then you are gone."
"And then?"
"And then." Ronaldo grinned. "And then it comes back. And he is already on the floor."
He tapped the boy's knee with the back of his hand.
"That is the whole thing. When you do it properly it kills the keeper completely. Dead. None of this business where he gets up and chases you down and you have to go round him again like a fool."
"Right."
"One movement. He goes. You go. It is finished."
"Right."
"Try it in training. Not in a match yet. In training, six hundred times, until your body does it without you."
"Six hundred."
"Six hundred." Ronaldo sipped his drink. "Minimum."
Laporta had not been joking.
The preparations really had been made.
It was a private club somewhere in the middle of the city and it had been taken over entirely, top to bottom, every floor of it, and there were probably four hundred people inside it. The music was coming out of a system that had cost more than most cars. There were lights going across the ceiling and a bar down one whole wall and the doors had not stopped opening since half past two in the morning.
The legends had come.
All of them. After the Camp Nou they had gone their separate ways for about forty minutes and then simply turned up here, some of them off private jets, some of them in cars together, all of them arriving in a group and being absorbed into it.
They had had the parade. They had had the square. They had had ninety-nine thousand people and speeches and fireworks and a trophy held over a centre circle.
Now it was time to party.
Griezmann had pulled up a chair to Ronaldo's conversation about ten minutes ago and had not said a word since.
"He is right, you know." He finally spoke. "About the weight. Everybody teaches the feet and nobody teaches the weight."
"Exactly." Ronaldo pointed at him. "Exactly this. Thank you."
Mateo took a drink of his Coke and put it back on the table.
"Six hundred times, though?"
"HAHAHA."
"He is serious," Griezmann said.
"I am extremely serious."
Across the room, Pedri was standing between Xavi and Andrés Iniesta with an arm round each of them, grinning at a phone camera while somebody counted to three.
"One more!"
"No, that one was good."
"ONE MORE."
"HAHAHA."
It was, without any exaggeration, one of the greatest collections of human beings ever put in one building.
Old legends. Current champions. Men who had won this trophy in three different decades standing in a circle arguing about something from 2009.
There were people there who had nothing to do with football at all. Two Spanish actors nobody had expected. A director. Somebody's cousin who had talked his way in and was having the night of his life.
Rosalía came at about three and the entire room noticed and then very politely pretended it had not.
There were models. There are always models. Nobody knows who invites them and they are always there.
The music was enormous and there was a small crowd of people dancing near the DJ who had been there since the start and were not going to stop.
And in the middle of all of it, Lionel Messi was extremely drunk.
Beautifully, gently, harmlessly drunk, sitting sideways on a couch with his tie gone and his phone held about four inches from his own face.
"Where are you?"
"I am at the hotel, Leo."
"But where."
"At the hotel."
"But which one."
Antonella's face on that screen was completely delighted.
"The one you are staying at."
"Oh." He nodded seriously. "That is good. That is a good hotel."
"Leo."
"It is a very good hotel, Anto."
Jordi Alba appeared over the back of the couch and leaned into the frame upside down.
"HELLO, ANTONELLA!"
"Hello, Jordi."
"Do not worry about him." Alba put a hand flat on the top of Messi's head. "I will watch over him. Personally. All night."
Antonella laughed properly.
"Thank you, Jordi."
"It is my honour."
"Get off my head."
"No."
Over by the far wall, Gerard Piqué was talking to a woman.
She was not Shakira.
They were standing close and she was laughing at something and he had a hand on the wall beside her shoulder, and about six people in that room noticed at various points during the night and every single one of them looked away again immediately and said nothing at all to anybody.
And in a booth in the corner, three men were sitting together.
Xavi. Iniesta. Busquets.
They had ended up there about an hour ago and they had not moved, and every so often somebody had come over and been welcomed and had then, after a while, quietly understood that they should probably leave the three of them to it.
They were watching the room.
Specifically they were watching a small Argentine man on a couch trying to get his wife to tell him the name of a hotel.
"Look at him," Busquets said.
"I am looking."
"No, look at him."
Iniesta was smiling into his glass.
"I know."
Xavi shook his head slowly.
"I have not seen him like that in years."
"No."
"Genuinely. Not since." He thought about it. "Not since Berlin, maybe. Not properly."
Iniesta put his glass down.
"I did not think I would see it again," he said.
Nobody answered that.
The three of them sat there for a moment, watching a man be happy.
Then Xavi let out a long breath through his nose and turned his glass round on the table.
"I miss home so much."
Iniesta looked over at him.
And after a second he nodded.
"Tell me about it."
Out on the floor, something had gone very wrong with Pedri.
He was in the middle. Not near the middle. The actual middle, in front of the DJ, in a small clearing that a crowd had formed around him, and he was dancing.
Badly.
Enormously badly. Both arms going in different directions. A move that appeared to have been invented on the spot and immediately abandoned. He spun round. He pointed at the DJ. The DJ pointed back at him. The entire clearing went up.
And on the other side of the room, Mateo King put his Coke down very slowly.
"Wait."
He stood up.
"Wait. Is he drunk?"
He was already reaching into his pocket.
"Is he actually drunk?"
He got his phone out and got the camera up and got the whole thing in frame, and he was laughing so hard that the first eight seconds of the video are unusable.
"Oh, I am so getting this."
He zoomed in.
"Not so perfect boyfriend now, are we?"
Pedri did something with his shoulders that no human body should attempt.
"Not so PERFECT, are we?"
He had waited a long time for this.
"Wow."
A hand came down onto Mateo's shoulder.
And then reached past him and took the glass off the table.
Ronaldinho held it up. Sniffed it.
And his entire face collapsed.
"Cola?"
"Yes."
"Cola?"
"It is a good drink."
"It is a child's drink." He put it back down like it had offended him. "You are drinking cola. At this party. In this building. Tonight."
"I am seventeen."
Ronaldinho spread both hands wide.
"You are a Champions League winner."
"I am also seventeen."
"Listen to me." He crouched down next to the chair so he was at eye level, which was somehow much worse. "How long have you been doing this? Since you were how old? Six? Seven?"
"Something like that."
"Every day. Every morning. Every single one of your friends going out and you not going out, every birthday party you did not go to, every single thing you gave up. For years."
He gestured at the whole room.
"And tonight, at the end of all of it, you won the biggest thing there is."
He shrugged.
"So enjoy your celebration."
"Hey."
Ronaldo Nazário did not even look up.
"Leave the kid alone, Dinho."
He waved a hand.
"Not everybody is you."
Ronaldinho put a hand on his own chest, deeply wounded.
"Not everybody can be."
"HAHAHA."
"Fine." Ronaldinho stood up and put his palms out. "Fine. I am dropping it. Drink your cola, kid. I respect it."
He turned to go.
"No."
He turned back.
Mateo was looking at the table.
"One would not spoil anything."
And Ronaldinho's whole face lit up like a stadium.
"MY MAN!"
And that ladies and gentelmen was how Mateo King got taken
He came back with it about forty seconds later, and he did not tell Mateo what was in it, and Mateo did not ask.
Mateo looked at the glass.
Then he looked around the table.
Griezmann was watching him with an eyebrow up. Ronaldo had folded his arms and was already smiling into his own chest.
"Just one," Mateo said, to nobody.
"Of course," Ronaldinho said.
"One."
"One."
Mateo picked it up.
He looked at it one more time.
And he drank it.
It was hot.
That was the first thing. It was hot, and then it was bitter, and then it was extremely hot, in a way that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with going down the middle of his own chest like something being poured through him.
His eyes went enormous.
"Hnnngh."
He put the glass down hard and started coughing.
Properly coughing, one hand on his own throat, eyes streaming.
"AH. AH. AH."
"HAHAHAHAHA!"
Ronaldinho was gone. Absolutely gone, both hands on the table, head down, wheezing.
Ronaldo had put a hand over his own eyes.
"HAHAHA! Look at his FACE!"
"WHAT IS THAT?"
"HAHAHAHA!"
"WHAT IS IN THAT?"
Ronaldinho straightened up, wiped his eye, and clapped him on the back hard enough to move him forward in the chair.
"Now."
He grinned.
"NOW the party is starting."
And it was LEGEN-wait for it.
Piqué danced. For a very long time. With a woman who was still not Shakira, and about forty minutes later with roughly nine other people in a circle, and by four in the morning with a chair.
Griezmann was on the dance floor by half past three doing something extremely committed and extremely rhythmic that a group of ten people had gathered around to watch and film.
Ter Stegen and Araújo got into an argument about something nobody could establish and it ended with both of them hugging.
Ousmane Dembélé did not drink one single thing all night. Not one. He sat with a bottle of water and a plate of food and talked to about thirty different people and laughed at absolutely everything and was, by the end of it, in a better mood than anybody else in the building.
Frenkie de Jong taught four people a Dutch song. None of them remember it.
Sergi Roberto fell asleep standing up at one point, briefly, and denied it.
Jordi Alba kept his promise. He genuinely did. He stayed within about eight feet of Lionel Messi for the entire night, and at one point physically removed a glass from his hand and replaced it with a bottle of water, and Messi drank the water without noticing.
Pedri made it until about four.
Then he was found on a chair in the corner, fully asleep, sitting completely upright with his head back and his mouth open, while a party went on around him at maximum volume.
Somebody put a jacket over him.
Mateo took eleven photographs.
And at some point, nobody is entirely sure when, somebody got a microphone.
It came out of nowhere.
There was a microphone, and there was a song coming out of the speakers that every single Spanish-speaking person in that building had known since they were four years old, and there were two men standing in the middle of the floor with the microphone between them.
Mateo King.
And Lionel Messi.
Neither of them could sing. That was extremely clear from about the second word.
It did not matter even slightly.
They were going for it with everything they had, both of them, absolutely committed, holding that microphone between them and bellowing into it, and about a hundred and fifty people had come off the walls and off the tables and out of the booths to watch.
Somebody turned the music down.
Not off. Down. Just enough.
And the room started clapping in time.
Every single person in that building. The legends, the champions, the actors, the models, four different generations of footballers, all of them clapping, all of them singing the chorus back at those two.
Mateo and Messi turned round.
And they went back to back.
Shoulder blades against shoulder blades, one arm each up in the air, heads tipped back, roaring it out at a ceiling in a private club in Barcelona at half past four in the morning.
Xavi had both hands on top of his head.
Iniesta was crying with laughter.
Busquets was filming.
Piqué was on a table.
And Ronaldinho, standing at the back of that crowd with his arms folded and a drink in his hand, was smiling at the pair of them with something on his face that looked a great deal like recognition.
Dary.
LEGENDARY.
May 29, 2021, came and went, and it was a night Mateo would remember forever. Nights like this are truly special—but even the most magical nights still have to come to an end.
...
"Huff."
Mateo King fell face first onto a very soft bed.
He did not take anything off. He did not get under anything. He simply went down onto the top of it from a standing position and lay there.
"Mmf."
He rolled halfway onto his side.
"I am still."
He got one arm underneath a pillow.
"I can still. No, I need to."
His eyes were already shut.
"I need. There is a thing. I have to."
He stopped.
"Sleepy," he explained, to the pillow.
And Mateo King, seventeen years old, Champions League winner, top scorer in Europe, passed out fully clothed on top of a hotel duvet with one shoe still on and a medal still round his neck.
He was smiling.
He was also, within about four minutes, drooling onto a very expensive pillowcase.
[DING]
[Reminder.]
[Host has unclaimed rewards pending.]
[Reward issued ]
[Season completion bonus has been calculated and issued.]
[Please review at your earliest convenience.]
[...]
[The Host appears to be unconscious.]
[Reminder will repeat.]
A/N
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