The week that followed was ordinary.
Deliberately so.
No matches. No highlights. No moments that would find their way onto anyone's screen or into anyone's conversation beyond the walls of La Masia itself.
Just training. Recovery. The quiet repetition of work that never announced itself.
Azul had come to understand that these were the weeks that actually mattered.
Not the match days.
Not the performances that people remembered and replayed and attached adjectives to.
The weeks in between.
The ones that built the foundation underneath everything visible.
---
Monday began with fitness work.
Long runs around the outer perimeter of the facility. Structured intervals on the track. Body weight circuits in the gym that left legs heavy and lungs burning in the particular way that reminded you the body was still being shaped, still being made into something capable of sustaining what the mind demanded of it.
Azul moved through it without complaint.
He had learned early — earlier than most, perhaps — that complaining about the difficult parts of preparation was simply a way of admitting you didn't fully want what you said you wanted.
He wanted it.
All of it.
Even this.
Especially this.
Marcos ran beside him for the final interval stretch, breathing hard, face tight with effort.
"Tell me," Marcos managed between breaths, "that this gets easier."
"It doesn't," Azul said.
"That's a terrible thing to say."
"You get stronger," Azul added. "That's different."
Marcos considered that for approximately three seconds before his lungs demanded all available attention and conversation ended entirely.
---
Tuesday brought technical sessions.
Individual and small group work. The coaches moving between players with quiet observations, adjustments, corrections delivered without drama.
Azul was paired with one of the younger midfielders — a thirteen year old named Dani who had recently moved up from the lower age group ahead of schedule. Small for his age. Left-footed almost exclusively. Eyes that processed the pitch quickly but hands — or rather feet — that sometimes couldn't yet execute what the mind had already seen.
The gap between vision and execution.
Azul remembered that gap intimately.
He still visited it sometimes.
They worked on receiving under pressure. The body shape before the ball arrived. The half-turn that allowed options to open on both sides rather than committing too early in one direction and surrendering half the pitch.
Dani was impatient with himself.
Azul recognised that too.
After a particularly frustrated moment — a touch that rolled away badly, Dani's jaw tightening visibly — Azul picked up the ball and held it.
"What did you see before it came to you?" he asked.
Dani frowned slightly. "What?"
"Before the pass arrived. What did you see?"
"The defender on my left. Space on the right."
"Good," Azul said. "So your reading was correct."
"But the touch—"
"The touch comes from the body position. Your hips were square when they should have been angled." He demonstrated slowly, without the ball first. "Set yourself here. Open this side before it arrives. Then when it comes — you're already facing where you want to go."
Dani tried it.
Better.
Not perfect. But better.
"Again," Azul said.
They stayed twenty minutes past the end of the official session.
Neither of them noticed the time passing.
---
Wednesday was different.
Miravet gathered the group for a longer tactical session than usual. Video first — forty minutes in the meeting room, the projector showing clips from their recent matches alongside footage of opposition patterns they would encounter in upcoming fixtures.
Azul watched carefully.
He always watched the spaces rather than the ball during video sessions. The movement of players without possession. The shapes that formed and reformed as the game shifted. The triggers that caused defensive lines to drop or press. The moments — tiny, easy to miss — when a team's structure opened like a door that hadn't been properly locked.
Miravet paused the footage at one such moment.
"Who sees it?" he asked the room.
Silence first.
Then Azul spoke.
"The left centre-back steps forward to press but the right side doesn't adjust. There's a lane in behind on that side if the ball is switched fast enough before they recover."
Miravet looked at him for a moment.
"And what's needed to use it?"
"Speed of pass," Azul said. "Not speed of run. The ball has to move before they can think."
Miravet nodded slowly.
"Exactly."
He unpaused the footage.
The sequence played out — another team, a different match — finding precisely the lane Azul had identified. The goal that followed was almost inevitable once you understood the structure.
Ferran leaned toward Marcos beside him.
"How does he see it that fast?" he murmured.
Marcos glanced toward Azul across the room.
"He watches everything," he said quietly. "All the time."
---
The outdoor session that followed was sharp.
Shape work. Positional play. Miravet drilling the principles from the video into physical habit, making the body learn what the mind had just been shown so that eventually no thought would be needed at all — only instinct shaped by understanding.
Azul moved through it with particular focus.
But something else was present too.
A slight heaviness.
Not physical.
Something underneath.
He recognised it eventually for what it was.
The absence of the feeling.
The clarity he had carried into the match two weeks ago — that alignment, that sense of the game moving through him rather than in front of him — it wasn't there today.
Miravet had warned him.
*It comes and goes.*
He knew that.
He accepted it.
But acceptance didn't mean the absence felt comfortable.
It simply meant he didn't stop working because of it.
---
Thursday brought rain.
The kind that arrived in the morning and made no promise of leaving. Heavy and consistent, turning the training pitches a deeper shade and filling the air with that particular smell of wet grass and earth that Azul had come to associate with La Masia more than almost anything else.
They trained through it.
There was never a question of whether they would.
By midway through the session, boots were soaked, jerseys heavy, the ball skidding differently off the wet surface — demanding constant small adjustments in weight and touch and timing.
Azul found that he loved training in the rain.
Not because it was comfortable.
Because it removed everything unnecessary.
There was no room in wet weather training for anything decorative. Touches had to be decisive. Passes had to be precise. The margin for error tightened in a way that sharpened focus automatically.
In the 45th minute of a possession drill, Ferran attempted a flicked backheel that skipped away off the wet turf and out of play.
Some laughter from the group.
Ferran accepted it easily, grinning, shaking his head.
But Miravet's voice cut through from the sideline.
Not angry.
Measured.
"Ferran. What was the right decision there?"
Ferran wiped rain from his face.
"Simple pass. Keep it moving."
"And?"
A pause.
"I complicated it."
Miravet said nothing further.
He didn't need to.
The lesson was already delivered.
After the session, pulling off wet training gear in the changing area, Ferran sat quietly for a moment. Azul noticed.
He didn't offer words immediately.
Sometimes silence was the right companion for a lesson being absorbed.
After a while, Ferran spoke without looking up.
"I do it when I'm bored," he said.
"Do what?" Azul asked.
"Overcomplicate things. When the game feels too easy I start adding — flair, tricks. Like I need to feel it more."
Azul dried his hands slowly.
"That's not boredom," he said.
Ferran looked at him.
"What is it then?"
Azul thought about it carefully before answering.
"Impatience," he said. "You want the big moment before the right moment arrives."
Ferran was quiet.
"Is that bad?"
"It's human," Azul said. "But you have to learn to trust the simple pass. The simple pass is what creates the space for the moment you're actually waiting for."
Ferran considered that for a long time.
Then nodded once.
Not the quick nod of someone dismissing a conversation.
The slow nod of someone filing something away.
---
Friday was lighter.
Recovery focused. Activation work. Small-sided games that were competitive but not demanding. The coaches allowing the week's accumulation to ease slightly, the body given permission to consolidate what it had absorbed.
Azul used the afternoon for something he had been thinking about since Tuesday.
He went back to the video room alone.
Not to review his own footage.
He pulled up clips of players Miravet had never specifically assigned — older footage, a different era, faces and names that lived in the history of the game rather than its present.
He watched for two hours.
Not taking notes.
Not analysing tactically.
Simply absorbing.
The way a certain kind of movement had been used to create space that shouldn't have existed. The way timing — not pace, not power, but pure timing — had separated certain players from everyone around them regardless of quality. The way great players seemed to slow the game in their vicinity while everyone else experienced it at normal speed.
He thought about what Miravet had told him once, early in his time at La Masia, in a conversation that had seemed minor at the time but had grown larger in his memory as months passed.
*The players who last,* Miravet had said, *are not always the most talented. They are the ones who become students before the game demands it of them.*
Azul had been a student since that day.
He intended to remain one long after anyone expected it of him.
---
Saturday.
No match this weekend.
A rare open afternoon that the academy offered without structure.
Most players dispersed. The city called to some. Others retreated into screens and music and the ordinary social life of teenagers living away from home.
Azul walked.
Not with purpose.
Not toward anything.
Just through the quieter parts of the facility grounds, hands in his jacket pockets, the air cooler now as afternoon tilted toward evening.
He found himself near one of the smaller auxiliary pitches at the edge of the complex.
Completely empty.
A ball left near the corner flag — abandoned, slightly deflated, sitting in the grass like a forgotten thought.
He picked it up.
Pressed it between his palms until it gave slightly under the pressure.
Then dropped it.
And began.
No structure. No drill. No objective.
Just him and the ball and the empty pitch and the fading light.
He moved freely. Following no particular pattern. Letting his feet decide without consulting anything above them. The touches slow sometimes, fast others. Turns for no reason except the pleasure of the turn. Passes played to no one, rolling across the pitch and coming to rest in the quiet.
It reminded him of being very young.
Before any of this had weight or meaning or consequence.
Before La Masia. Before coaches and tactics and performance reviews and the particular pressure of being watched and evaluated and compared.
Before all of it.
Just a boy and a ball and time that felt infinite.
He stayed until the light was nearly gone.
Then left the ball where he'd found it.
And walked back slowly, hands back in his pockets.
Feeling something he hadn't expected.
Gratitude.
For all of it. The difficult parts and the ordinary parts and the exhausting parts and the parts like this one — unscheduled, unobserved, belonging entirely to him.
---
That night, he called his father.
Not to report anything. Not to share news.
Just to talk.
His father's voice carried that particular warmth that distance sharpens rather than dulls — the sound of someone who knew you before you became anything and loved you regardless of what you became after.
They spoke about small things.
Home. Weather. A neighbour's dog that had apparently developed an opinion about the garden fence. His mother's cooking. His younger sister's school project about the ocean.
Normal things.
Beautiful in their normality.
Before they ended the call, his father asked the question he always asked.
"How are you feeling?"
Azul leaned back against the wall of his room, looking at the ceiling.
"Grateful," he said.
A pause.
"For what?"
Azul thought about the empty pitch. The deflated ball. The fading light. The two hours of footage in the video room. Dani's improving touch. Marcos running intervals beside him. Ferran absorbing a lesson quietly. Rain on the training pitch. Miravet's measured voice.
All of it.
"For the ordinary week," he said finally.
His father was quiet for a moment.
Then — and Azul could hear the smile in it:
"That's when you know you're growing."
---
He opened his notebook after the call.
The week sat in him fully now. Processed. Settled.
He wrote:
*The match is the examination.*
*But the week is the education.*
*Don't confuse the two.*
He paused. Then added:
*The feeling will return. It always does. But only to the player who kept working honestly while it was gone.*
He closed the notebook.
Set it on the desk.
Boots by the door.
Everything in its place.
He lay down and closed his eyes, and for the first time that week — the heaviness was gone.
Not replaced by the clarity of match day.
Something quieter than that.
Something more durable.
The deep, unhurried satisfaction of a week spent entirely in the right direction.
Sleep came quickly.
And this time, it stayed.