"Oh God. Oh God, my heart is beating so fast."
The Estádio do Dragão held about fifty thousand people, and as the venue for a Champions League final, every single one of those tickets had been strictly allocated.
Nineteen thousand went to Barcelona. Another nineteen thousand went to Chelsea. Between them they made up the bulk of the crowd, most of them fans who had travelled out of Spain and England for this, the rest of them supporters scattered across other countries, and a fair number who lived right here in Portugal.
Five thousand went to neutrals. Most of those to the host nation, and the rest to people from all over the world who had won ticket ballots and had been walking around Porto all week barely able to believe it.
Another five thousand were held back by the governing body for themselves. Executives, their families, media, sponsors. Two of those seats had gone to the overall winner of the UEFA Fantasy competition, who had spent the last month telling everybody he knew.
And the rest were given to celebrities.
It was not as star-studded as a Super Bowl. It was never going to be. But a Champions League final still packed the boxes out, and this one had gone further than most. Selena Gomez and Khalid were both here to perform before kick-off. Marshmello was somewhere in the stands. So was Gordon Ramsay. Stormzy. Jeremy Clarkson. Lewis Hamilton. Usain Bolt. A dozen more besides.
And then there were the legends.
Both clubs had made absolutely sure their own came out for this.
Ronaldo Nazário was there. So was Ronaldinho, and Rivaldo, the same three who had sat together at the Wanda for the Atlético game, and this time they found themselves sitting near Carles Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, Eto'o, Abidal, Mascherano, and Patrick Kluivert. An entire era of a football club, in one block of seats.
Chelsea were not going to be outdone.
Sitting right in the middle of their own group was Didier Drogba. Around him were John Terry, Petr Čech, Michael Essien, Claude Makélélé, Ashley Cole, Gianfranco Zola. And Frank Lampard was there too.
None of that was an accident.
UEFA had gone out of their way to make sure the great names of both clubs were in that stadium tonight, and they had done it for a very specific reason. After everything that had happened this season, after the whole circus of the Super League, they wanted the entire planet to look at that stadium and understand exactly how big this competition was. What it meant. What it had always meant.
They wanted the very thought of trying to replace it to look like a joke.
The last three thousand tickets went to the two clubs themselves. Their VIPs, their sponsors, their executives.
And, more importantly, the relatives of the players.
Oriol Cerdà, who had fallen into that final category, could not at this exact moment find it in himself to appreciate the privilege.
He was sitting in the family section this time. He had made sure of it. He was not going to let what happened at the Atlético game happen to him again.
Not that any of that was on his mind right now.
Because right now, Oriol Cerdà was sweating through his shirt.
He wiped a palm across his forehead and it came away wet. He wiped it on his trousers. He looked at the pitch. He looked at the clock. He looked at the pitch again.
He let out a huge breath, and then he stood up.
"I am coming back," he said to his side, without even checking who was sitting there.
Nora watched her husband go, said nothing, and let him go.
He made his way down to the railing.
The match was minutes away now. Minutes. And Oriol's nerves at this moment were every bit as bad as anything happening in either dressing room, the difference being that the men down there had spent their whole lives training to handle this, and Oriol had not. Oriol was just a fan. A very, very big fan. And right now he genuinely felt like he was having a heart attack.
He dragged his palm down his face again, and it was so wet it did nothing.
Thank God Nora and the rest of them had convinced him, or more accurately forced him, not to wear the face paint for this one.
He gripped the railing.
All around him the stadium was going, the songs coming up out of both ends, the drums, fifty thousand people who had waited weeks for this, and Oriol could not enjoy a single second of it.
Because as a Barcelona fanatic, Oriol could not keep calm.
The rest of his family were nervous too, of course they were. But they were nervous for Mateo. Oriol was nervous for Mateo as well, and he was also nervous for something else.
Six years.
It had been over five years now, six, since Barcelona last won this trophy.
And of course, for a competition like this one, six years is not a long time. There are giants of the game who have gone thirty years without touching it. Sixty. There are clubs who have never touched it at all.
But Oriol had watched the prime. Oriol had been alive and in the room for all of it. And for a man who believed, wholeheartedly and without any argument, that Barcelona was the greatest club that had ever existed, six years did not feel like six years.
Six years felt like decades.
Six years felt like a disgrace.
We have to win.
And couple all of that with the simple fact that no supporter on earth is calm when their team is in a final, especially one this size.
Oriol Cerdà was a mess.
He stood at the railing and looked down at the pitch, where a woman was singing something in front of thousands of people under the lights, and he did not take in one note of it.
His face scrunched up.
His stomach had started turning over.
And then, from somewhere to his side, he heard a small laugh.
Oriol turned his head.
There was a man standing a little further along the railing, watching him, and smiling.
"First time?"
Oriol looked at him. Then he looked back out at the pitch, at the stadium, at the whole enormous thing.
"No."
He paused.
"Yes."
He shook his head at himself, not sure which of those was true.
"HAHAHA."
The man laughed properly at that, and then reached into his jacket and brought out a pack of gum, and held it out.
"Here. Take it. Helps with the nerves."
"Oh." Oriol took a piece. "Thanks. Thank you."
He put it in his mouth and started chewing, and almost immediately his hands had something to do that was not gripping metal.
He offered his hand.
"Oriol Cerdà."
The man smiled and shook it.
"Rodrigo Messi."
Oriol was not the only member of Mateo's family going through it.
A few rows away, Aina and Olivia were sitting side by side.
Aina let out a long sigh. Then another one. Then she groaned and let her head fall back.
"Okay. This is not good for my health."
"Tell me about it," Olivia muttered beside her.
"No, but seriously." Aina lifted her head and gestured helplessly at the pitch. "I cannot believe Selena Gomez is standing right there, right in front of me, and I cannot even enjoy it. At all. Not even a little bit. Because of these fucking nerves."
Olivia groaned, a proper whining one.
"Oh, tell me about it."
Aina turned and looked at her, and then her whole face went soft, and she wrapped both arms around Olivia's arm and hugged it like a koala, resting her cheek against her shoulder.
"I really hope they win this," she muttered.
Olivia leaned her own head over onto Aina's.
"Me too," she said softly.
As for grandma Núria, hers was simple.
Before the players had come out, before her little one walked onto that grass, Núria Cerdà had her eyes closed and her hands folded together in her lap and her head bowed, and she was praying.
Properly praying. Not the quick sort.
Lord. Please listen to an old woman for a moment.
In a few minutes my grandson is going to walk out onto that field, in front of all these people, and he is going to play the biggest game of his young life. He is seventeen years old, Lord. Seventeen. He is still a boy. Whatever he looks like out there, he is still a boy.
So please be with him. Stay with him. Keep him safe out there tonight, keep his legs strong and his body whole, do not let anyone hurt him and do not let him hurt himself.
And if it is Your will, help him. Help him do what he has worked for. Help all of them.
And if it is not Your will, then hold him afterwards. Because he will need it, and I cannot get down there to do it myself.
Her lips were moving, silently, her thumbs pressed together.
And then her voice changed inside her own head, because she was not talking to God any more.
My dear.
My dear, are you watching this?
Our little king is going out there tonight.
Look at him. Look where he is. You always said it, you told everybody who would listen and plenty who would not, and here he is. He is here.
So go with him. Stay beside him out there. You always knew how to talk to him better than I ever did.
Go on. Go and be with our boy.
Beside her, Nora reached over and put a hand flat on her mother's back, and rubbed it once, and said it softly.
"Amen."
A few seats along, Isabella King was not praying.
Isabella was crushing her husband's hand.
She had David's fingers gripped in both of hers, squeezing so hard that anybody else would have said something about it, and David had not noticed at all, because David was staring at the pre-match performance with the absolute concentration of a man who was not seeing any of it either.
Isabella's leg was going. Her whole knee, bouncing, fast.
And then she felt a hand on her back.
She startled and turned.
Antonella Roccuzzo was standing there.
"Mrs Roccuzzo." Isabella's voice came out of her before she could stop it.
Antonella laughed, warm, and put a hand up.
"Haha. I have told you. You can call me Antonella."
"Yes. Yes, sorry. Antonella."
"I saw you sitting over here." Antonella smiled. "So I thought I would come and say hello. It is nice to see you again."
"Oh, of course, of course." Isabella was already trying to get up, still holding David's hand, half-turning in a seat that did not have the room for it. "Let me. Sorry, let me just."
"Oh, no." Antonella put a gentle hand on her shoulder. "No, please. You do not have to do any of that. Sit. Sit down."
"Oh." Isabella sat back, flustered. "Sorry. Sorry, I was just."
She stopped. She let out a breath and laughed at herself, a small helpless laugh, because there was nothing else she could do with it.
And Antonella looked at her, and she smiled, and it was the smile of a woman who had sat in stands exactly like this one for the better part of twenty years.
"Do not worry," she said.
She said it with complete peace, and complete conviction.
"They are going to be all right."
...
Antonella's conviction was not something that came from having been here before.
That was not it at all.
Because anybody who had watched her through the years would tell you the truth, which was that when Leo was involved, Antonella Roccuzzo could not be calm. She never had been. Not at the Camp Nou, not in Berlin, not in Rome, not once. She had spent whole matches unable to look at the pitch. She had a hundred photographs of herself in stands with her hands over her face.
So no. It was not experience.
The reason she was so certain this time, the reason she was not falling apart despite everything that this one match represented, was much simpler than that.
It was because she had seen him.
All week, she had seen him.
She had seen the way he smiled. Not the polite one. The other one, the one that started in his eyes and took a second to reach his mouth, the one she had known since she was thirteen years old.
She had seen him on the floor of the living room with the boys crawling on his back, letting Ciro pull his hair, laughing at something Thiago had said, completely gone into it, not looking at his phone once.
She had walked into the gym on Tuesday morning with a drink for him, and he had been mid-set, and he had looked up at her in the mirror and smiled at her. Just smiled. Not the tight, distracted, thinking-about-something-else smile that came with the weeks before big matches. A real one. He had put the weight down and taken the drink and said thank you, my love, and gone back to it.
She had seen him sleep properly all week. That was the one that convinced her.
Because Antonella had lived through the other version. She had lived through the weeks where he did not sleep, where he sat up in the dark with his hands together, where he came home from training with his shoulders somewhere up around his ears and did not put them down until Monday. She knew exactly what her husband looked like when a match was eating him.
This week, nothing had been eating him.
And she had watched it happen and she had thought, quietly, to herself, he is not carrying it.
That was where her calm had come from. She had not invented it. She had caught it from him.
And that, as it happened, was exactly how Lionel Messi really felt.
He was standing in the middle of the dressing room floor, with every man in that room looking at him, minutes away from walking out to play in the biggest match not just of this season but very possibly of a good number of their careers.
And he still felt it.
He did not understand it himself.
He knew what this match represented. He knew precisely what he had said into a microphone yesterday, and what those words were going to be worth if this went wrong. He knew what the pressure was supposed to feel like, because he had felt it before, in rooms exactly like this one, more times than he could count. He knew that there were people all over this planet, right now, sitting down in front of televisions, waiting to see whether he could still do it.
And it was not that he was underestimating Chelsea. He would never. He was far too experienced to make that mistake and he loved this game far too much to disrespect it that way.
But.
But there was nothing sitting on his chest.
Nothing.
He looked around the room, at all of them, and he could not find the weight anywhere.
"It's time, boys."
He said it, and a smile came onto his face, and it would not go away.
"I am going to be quick. I am not really a speech man. You all know that."
A few of them laughed, low.
"But I want to say something to you before we go out there. Because if I do not say it now, I do not think I will get another chance to say it, not like this."
He looked at them.
"Do you know what we did this year?"
He let that sit for a second.
"Do you actually know? Because I do not think all of you do. I do not think all of you have stopped for long enough to look at it."
He turned slowly, and he started going around the room with his eyes.
"In August, this club was on the floor. On the floor. Everybody in this room knows it, so let us not be polite about it. We had just been humiliated in front of the whole world. Half the people in this building thought we were finished. Half of you probably thought we were finished. Every newspaper in Spain wrote it. Every single one."
He paused.
"I thought about leaving."
Nobody moved. Nobody made a sound.
"You all know that. It was in every paper on earth. And I am saying it out loud in this room because you all deserve to hear me say it, and because I want you to understand what happened next."
He put a hand out toward them.
"You made me stay."
His voice did not rise. It just got warmer.
"Not the club. Not the president. Not the fans, and I love the fans. You. This room. You made me want to come to training. Do you understand what that is worth to a man who has been doing this for seventeen years? You made me want to come to training again."
He looked at Piqué.
"Geri. You have been here as long as I have. You have taken more shots at your character this season than any player in that squad, and you never once let it show in front of the young ones. Not once. I saw it. I want you to know I saw it."
Piqué's jaw moved. He looked at the floor.
Messi's eyes went along the row.
"Busi. Twelve years. Twelve years you have been cleaning up after all of us and nobody has ever written a single word about it. Nobody ever will. And you have never once complained. Not once in twelve years."
Busquets, sitting up on the treatment table now, gave the smallest nod.
"Jordi. You have run that line since 2012 and you were still running it last week in the ninetieth minute at the Wanda with your lungs gone."
"Marc." He looked at Ter Stegen. "Half the goals we have not conceded this season, nobody even knows about, because you got there first and made it look easy."
Ter Stegen looked back at him and did not blink.
"Ousmane."
Dembélé lifted his head.
"Two years," Messi said. "Two years of people saying harsh words about you. Two years. And I watched you come in every morning of it. And last week you scored the goal that won us a league."
Dembélé's chest went, once, hard.
"Pedri." Messi smiled properly now. "Eighteen years old. And you took the ball in the last minute of a title decider with the whole country watching and you did not pass it. You just ran."
Pedri went red to his ears.
And then Messi turned.
And he looked at Mateo.
Mateo looked back at him.
Messi did not say anything for a second. He just looked at him, at this boy sitting there in a Barcelona shirt with his boots planted flat on the floor.
"And you."
He tilted his head.
"You walked into this club when it was broken. Seventeen years old. And you played like you did not know it was broken."
He shook his head slowly.
"I have played with a lot of players. A lot."
He tapped his own chest.
"You made me remember why I started playing."
Mateo's throat moved and he did not say anything at all.
Messi looked back up at the whole room.
"Every one of you." He spread both hands. "PSG. In Paris. Do you remember what everybody said about us before that night?"
"Bayern. After what they did to us last year. In their house."
"City. City, of all the teams in the world. The team nobody in Europe wanted. And you beat them."
He let his hands fall.
"And then last week. Last week you went to the Wanda Metropolitano and you took a league title off Diego Simeone with ten men on the pitch."
He shook his head, and he was laughing now, softly, at all of it.
"Ten men."
He looked around at them.
"I want to tell you what I have been feeling this week, because I do not think I have felt it in a very long time and I want you all to hear it."
He put a hand flat on his own chest.
"I am not nervous."
He said it plainly.
"I have thought about it. All week I have been waiting for it to arrive, because it always arrives, it has arrived before every big match I have ever played in my life. And it has not come."
He looked down at his own hand, and then back up at them.
"And I worked out why."
He looked around the room, one man at a time, all the way around.
"Because I am not walking out there on my own."
The room was completely silent.
"For a long time." He stopped. He breathed. "For a long time, I have felt like I had to carry this. All of it. Every game, every year. And I never said that to anybody, and I am not saying it now to complain about it, because it was mine to carry and I was happy to carry it."
He shook his head.
"But this year, I put it down."
He gestured at all of them, the whole room.
"Because I looked up and there were ten other men carrying it with me."
Something moved across his face and he had to stop for a second.
"That is what you gave me."
He let it sit.
"That is what you all gave me this year, and none of you even knew you were doing it."
He looked at them.
"So tonight, I am not scared. Not even a little. Because I have already got the thing I wanted."
Then he smiled, and it was enormous, and it took over his whole face.
"But we are still going to go and win this."
The room breathed out at once.
"We are going out there and we are taking it. Not for me. Not for one man. For this room. For every single person who did not think we could be here."
He pointed at the door.
"There are ninety minutes on the other side of that wall. Ninety. That is all that is left of this entire season. Nine months of your lives, all of it, comes down to what happens in the next ninety minutes."
He looked around one final time.
"So go and enjoy it."
He nodded.
"Go and enjoy it, boys. That is all I am asking. Play like you have played all year. Play like you are not afraid of anybody, because you are not, because you have already beaten everybody. Go out there and have the best night of your lives."
And then he stopped.
And he looked around that room, at every single face in it, at all of them looking back at him.
And what he felt was not pressure. It was not fear. It was not the weight he had been carrying up and down that pitch for the better part of two decades.
He felt free.
He felt happy. He felt unburdened.
He felt alive.
And Lionel Messi, standing in the middle of a dressing room in Porto, minutes from a Champions League final, put his hand on his own chest and said the last thing he had to say.
"Thank you."
...
Mateo had heard every single word of it.
He had sat there through the whole thing with his boots flat on the floor and his hands hanging between his knees, and he had not moved once.
And somewhere in the middle of it, without him noticing exactly when, the thing in his chest had come down.
Not gone. Not all the way. But the hammering had eased off, and his hands were still, and he could breathe properly again for the first time since the bus.
He opened his mouth to say something.
He did not get the chance.
"YOU HEARD THAT, EVERYONE?"
Koeman came off the wall like a shot, crossing the floor in three strides, and threw an arm around Messi's shoulders, gripping him, tapping his chest with the flat of his other hand.
"You heard that? EH? HAVE YOU HEARD YOUR CAPTAIN, EVERYONE?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah, gaffer."
Mateo muttered it too, half under his breath.
Koeman's head came round.
"I SAID. HAVE. YOU. HEARD. HIM."
And the room came up off the benches.
"YESSSS!"
All of them at once, on their feet, the whole thing detonating in half a second, hands going, voices going, the sound bouncing back off the concrete walls at them.
Araújo grabbed Dembélé's hand and pulled him in, chest to chest.
"Yeah! Come ON!"
"COME ON!"
Somebody hit the wall. Somebody else was clapping, hard, over and over. Alba was shouting something in Catalan that nobody could hear over the top of anybody else. Ter Stegen had both fists up above his head.
Koeman stood in the middle of it and nodded, once, slowly, at what he was watching.
"Right." He clapped his hands together. "Let's go and do this."
Mateo turned.
Pedri was already turning toward him.
They gripped hands, hard, and pulled into each other.
"Let's do this, bro."
"Come on, man." Pedri was bouncing on his toes. "COME ON."
Then they both started laughing, foreheads almost touching, and Pedri shook his head.
"Dude. My heart is beating out of my chest."
Mateo was laughing at him.
"Mine too, bro."
"No, I mean it. Out of my chest."
And then a weight landed across Mateo's back, and both hands grabbed his shoulders from behind and shook him hard enough that his head went with it.
"LET'S GOOOO!"
De Jong, hanging off him, shaking him like a doll.
"Frenkie."
"LET'S GO!"
Mateo was laughing properly now, laughing and being shaken at the same time.
And the room was moving.
They were going for the door in a mass of blue and red, shoving each other, grabbing each other, all of them talking over each other at once.
"COME ON!"
"Let's do this, guys. LET'S DO THIS."
"Let's go and win this thing!"
"Come on, come on, COME ON."
Busquets caught the back of Pedri's neck as he went past and squeezed it once. Piqué smacked Araújo's chest with the back of his hand. Somebody slapped the door frame on the way out. Roberto had his hand on Dembélé's shoulder and was saying something into the side of his head that made Dembélé nod, hard, twice.
Koeman did not move.
He stayed exactly where he was in the middle of the emptying room and let them go past him, and he watched them, and his eyes were shining.
Nine months.
He watched them go and there was nothing on his face but pure, uncomplicated joy.
They reached the front of the room, and the corridor beyond it, and the noise of the stadium coming down it to meet them.
And at the head of them, Messi stopped.
"Wait."
He put a hand up.
Every single one of them stopped dead behind him. The shouting cut out. The whole group went still and serious in the space of a second, all of them looking at their captain's back.
Messi turned around.
And he was smiling.
He looked at them, at all of them, at every face in that corridor.
And then he threw his fist in the air and roared it.
"VISCA BARÇA!"
And the whole room exploded.
"VISCA BARÇAAAAAA!"
...
"Oh, finally. It is really happening."
And this time it was not a tease.
"It is so good to be back here, isn't it, Peter."
"You can say that again."
Peter Drury looked out from the commentary position and let his eyes go around the whole of it. The two ends already standing. The flags coming up. The colour, the noise, the sheer physical size of the thing sitting in front of him under the lights.
"I will tell you something, Jim."
"Yeah?"
"I have been to a great many matches, and I have commentated on a great many more. Cup finals. Enormous league games. Derbies where the two sets of supporters genuinely hate one another."
He was smiling now.
"And there is nothing. Nothing on this earth. Like a Champions League final."
Jim Beglin smiled too, and took his own look around.
"No arguments from me, Peter."
Drury paused, listening to a voice in his earpiece, and then his tone changed and lifted.
"And now, coming out."
A beat.
"The twenty-two men who are about to do battle for European supremacy."
"Now, there was a lot of chatter this week about Koeman changing part of his lineup," Jim said. "It seems it was all just rumour."
"Trust the winning formula," Drury said.
"And Koeman certainly has."
Jim looked down at his sheet.
"He is playing the shape most synonymous with this football club. A four-three-three. And a lineup that any Barcelona fan or Barcelona watcher will find very familiar indeed."
"In goal, Marc-André Ter Stegen."
"Then the defence. Starting from the left, Jordi Alba. Then Piqué, back from suspension after a red card, and who scored in the very match he returned in, paired alongside Ronald Araújo. And what a season that man has had. He has not just made his mark at Barcelona, he has made it across Europe. He is now a certainty for that side and one of the most closely watched defenders in the game. And to the right, Sergi Roberto."
"Then the midfield. Which has been, by some distance, Barcelona's most stable department all season."
"And no surprises there either. Sergio Busquets leading the pack, alongside Frenkie de Jong. And the eighteen-year-old who scored that last-minute goal at the Wanda Metropolitano to win his club a league title. Pedri."
"What a player, Jim." Drury cut in over the top of him. "What a player. Just a special type of talent, that one."
"He is."
"Special type of talent."
Drury let a small pause hang.
"And speaking of special types of talent."
Jim smiled.
"At seventeen years of age. Leading the attacking line for FC Barcelona in a Champions League final. Becoming, tonight, the youngest player ever to appear in a Champions League final in the entire history of this sport."
He looked up.
"Whilst also being the top scorer in this season's competition. Ten goals."
Drury laughed out loud.
"Jim, the more you talk, the more I simply cannot bring myself to believe it."
"Well, you had better believe it."
Jim went on.
"And to his left, none other than Ousmane Dembélé. Who has been, I would say, one of the most unexpected turns of events of this entire season, considering everything that has happened in his time at that football club."
Beside him, Drury had started bouncing.
Jim glanced across at him, saw it, and chuckled.
"And to the right."
"THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME."
Drury just went, straight over the top of him, at full volume.
Jim lost it completely. He put a hand over his own mouth and folded forward in his chair, his shoulders going, wheezing into his headset, and every single person in that commentary box could hear him doing it.
Drury did not care in the slightest. He carried straight on.
"Six Ballon d'Ors. A man of a thousand moments of magic. A man who has rewritten what it is that this sport is even capable of."
Jim was still gone beside him.
Drury came down a little, and his voice softened, and the delight in it turned into something warmer.
"What wonders he has in store for us tonight remains to be seen, as he goes out onto this grass to try to add one more glowing gem to a list of achievements that already has no equal anywhere in the game."
His voice went heavy.
"The very embodiment of the love of football."
A pause.
"Lionel Messi."
Jim finally got himself back.
"Well." He was wiping his eye. "That is certainly one way to introduce a footballer."
He started laughing again.
"It seems to me you have been waiting all week to do that."
"Jim." Drury was laughing too now. "You have absolutely no idea. HAHAHA."
The two of them went for a few seconds, the way people do when neither of them can be the one to stop first.
Jim shook his head, still smiling.
"Moving on. Moving on."
He turned his sheet over.
"On the Chelsea side, we do have a few changes."
"They are switching things around. Tuchel is moving away from the three-one-four-two that has been his go-to for most of this season, and for this final he has gone with a three-four-two-one."
"In goal, the goalkeeper with the most clean sheets in this season's competition. The revelation of this Chelsea squad. Édouard Mendy."
"And what a story that is," Drury came in. "A man who, not so very long ago, was without a club entirely. Without a club. And tonight he stands in the goal of a Champions League final as the most miserly goalkeeper in the entire tournament. Football does not always reward the people it should. Occasionally, just occasionally, it does."
"Beautifully put."
Jim went back to it.
"The back three, then. Rüdiger, no change in his position. Thiago Silva, also no change. But here is our first change of the evening. Christensen drops out, and in comes Azpilicueta, a man who has spent a large part of this season playing further up the pitch in midfield."
"In front of them, in that four, we have Ben Chilwell, N'Golo Kanté, and Reece James, who has pushed up into midfield, alongside Jorginho."
"And then, in the two just behind the striker, Chelsea's own star boy, Mason Mount, paired with the German wonderkid Kai Havertz."
"And leading the Chelsea line tonight, another German. Timo Werner."
"So there it is."
Drury let the noise of the stadium come up underneath him for a moment before he spoke again.
"Thirty-two teams entered this competition. Thirty-two. From every corner of this continent. Champions of their countries, giants with cabinets full of these things, clubs who had never been near one in their lives."
He paused.
"And now, after nine months, after everything, there are two."
"Two."
"FC Barcelona. And Chelsea."
"And, Jim, I do not think you could have designed a more perfect final than the one we have in front of us tonight. Because these two football teams sit at absolute opposite ends of this sport."
Jim picked it straight up.
"You could not have said it better. Because on the one side, you have this Barcelona. A team that has scored for fun in this competition. A team that went to Paris and won a thriller, that went toe to toe with Bayern Munich, that knocked out Manchester City. A team that attacks you until you fall over."
"And on the other."
"And on the other, you have this Chelsea. The meanest defence in Europe. A side that Thomas Tuchel has turned, in four months, into something almost impossible to break down. They do not concede. They simply do not concede."
Drury's voice came up.
"The unstoppable force."
He let it hang.
"Against the immovable object."
Jim turned and looked at him.
"Perfect analogy, Peter. Perfect." He shook his head. "What happens when the sharpest spear in the world meets the strongest shield in the world?"
"Well."
Drury smiled.
"Thank goodness we do not have to wait to find out any longer."
"No," Jim said. "We do not."
He took a breath.
"Because it is finally time."
"The 2020/21 Champions League final is upon us."
...
"Come on, boys."
"Let's do this."
"You got this."
"Vamos. VAMOS."
The tunnel was too small for everything that was in it.
Mateo stood in the line with his hands hanging at his sides and looked around at all of it, because there was too much to take in and he could not stop his eyes from moving.
Ball boys, four or five of them, lined along the wall in their bibs, whispering to each other and staring at the players like they had been told not to. One of them caught Mateo's eye and immediately looked at the floor.
A UEFA official with a clipboard, walking the line, counting.
Two men in suits by the tunnel mouth talking about something that was clearly not the football.
The banner already going up ahead of them, the enormous one, the anthem starting to bleed back down the concrete from out there.
Somebody's hand landed on Mateo's shoulder from behind and squeezed and was gone before he could turn round. Somebody else's fist bumped his. Alba, going past, slapped his own chest twice at him and did not say anything at all.
Mateo's heart was going.
Okay.
Okay, okay, okay.
He was smiling. He could feel that he was smiling and he did not know when he had started. He was terrified and he was so happy he could barely stand still, and the two things were happening in the same body at the same time and neither of them was winning.
He looked back down the line.
Pedri had both hands over his own face.
Just standing there, in a Barcelona shirt, in the tunnel of a Champions League final, with both palms pressed flat over his eyes, breathing.
Mateo huffed a laugh through his nose.
He turned the other way, and there was a camera pointed directly at him.
The documentary crew. Two of them tucked into the side of the tunnel, one with a handheld rig, the lens aimed straight at his face from about four feet away.
Mateo froze for a second.
Then he did the only thing he could think of, which was give the camera an extremely awkward closed-mouth smile and a thumbs up.
He put his hand down immediately and looked away.
Why did I do that. Why did I do THAT.
And then his eyes went across the gap.
The Chelsea players were lined up on the other side.
Mateo looked at them. He did not really mean to. He just did, one at a time, all the way down the line.
Werner, bouncing on his toes, staring straight ahead at nothing.
Kanté, completely still. Smallest man in the tunnel. Utterly calm.
Mount, jaw working, chewing something, eyes flicking.
Thiago Silva with his eyes closed.
Reece James rolling his neck.
And then Rüdiger.
Rüdiger was half turned away, saying something to one of the kit men, laughing at whatever it was.
And then he stopped laughing, and his head came round, and he caught Mateo looking at him.
Neither of them looked away.
They held it. Two, three seconds. A long time, in a tunnel.
And then Rüdiger smiled.
It was not a normal smile. It went too wide and it went up at the corners and it did not go anywhere near his eyes at all, and he held it there, looking directly at Mateo, the way a cartoon villain in a children's programme smiles at the camera right before the music changes.
Then he tilted his head. Slightly. Still smiling.
Mateo turned his face away with his own expression completely scrunched up.
What.
What was that. What the hell was that.
He could still feel it on the side of his head.
Okay. That was so weird. That guy is so weird.
And then a small hand slid into his.
Mateo actually jumped.
He looked down.
The mascot. His mascot. A little boy, maybe seven, in a kit two sizes too big for him, staring up at him with an enormous serious face and gripping Mateo's hand with both of his own.
Mateo blinked at him.
"My mummy says," the boy announced, "that when you are scared, you just have to hold somebody's hand. And then you are not scared any more."
He kept holding on.
"So I am holding yours."
Mateo looked down at this child.
And something in his chest came loose.
"Thank you," he said.
He reached down and ruffled the boy's hair, hard enough that the kid ducked and laughed and swatted at his arm.
Mateo was grinning now. Properly.
"PLAYERS. MOVE IN."
The shout came from the front of the tunnel.
The line tightened. Boots started moving. Somebody blew out a long breath. Somebody else said vamos under their own breath about four times in a row.
Mateo's mascot gripped his hand tighter.
Mateo took the deepest breath of his entire life.
And he stepped out.
It hit him.
All of it. At once. Like walking into weather.
The light came down on him from four sides and the sound came up at him from every direction there was, and for about a second and a half Mateo King could not think a single word in any language.
"BAR-ÇA! BAR-ÇA! BAAAAAR-ÇA!"
"WHO IS HE?" / "MA-TE-O!"
"CHELSEA! CHELSEA! CHELSEA! CHELSEA!"
"MESSI! MESSI! MESSI!"
"CAMPIONES, CAMPIONES, OLÉ, OLÉ, OLÉ!"
"BLUE IS THE COLOUR!"
Five, six songs at once, coming from different parts of the bowl, all of them fighting each other, the drums underneath it all, fifty thousand people who had been waiting for this for weeks and had just seen twenty-two men walk out into the light.
The noise went up when they appeared. It got louder. He had not known there was room for it to get louder.
Mateo kept walking.
His body would not stay still. His shoulders were rolling. His free hand kept opening and closing. He was moving his head from side to side, walking a straight line and looking everywhere except straight ahead.
They lined up on the halfway line and the anthem came on, and the whole stadium sang it back, and Mateo stood there in a line of men with a small boy's hand in his and did not hear one note of it.
He was looking up.
He was scanning the stands, section by section, running his eyes along row after row of faces, and he had no idea what he was looking for except that he knew exactly what he was looking for.
Where are you.
Come on. Where are you.
Somewhere up there was his mother. Somewhere up there was his father, and Aina, and his grandmother, and Uncle Oriol, and Olivia.
And there were fifty thousand people between him and them, all of them shouting, all of them moving, all of them one colour.
He could not find a single one.
He looked for maybe eight seconds and then he made himself stop and carried his eyes back down to the grass.
Then the handshakes started.
The two lines walked past each other and it was all hands and half-hugs and nods and the same three words over and over.
"Good game."
"Good game, man."
"Good game."
Kanté, small and polite, both hands. Mount, quick and hard. Chilwell, a nod. Jorginho with a hand on his shoulder. Havertz, who was so much taller than Mateo had expected up close.
And then Rüdiger.
Mateo put his hand out.
"Good game."
Rüdiger took his hand.
And started chuckling.
Not a laugh. A low, private, unhurried little chuckle, right in his face, while shaking his hand, looking directly into his eyes.
He let go, and moved on down the line.
Mateo stood there for half a beat.
What. Is. This. Guy's. DEAL.
He shook his head and moved on.
"And here they are. The two teams, side by side, at the Estádio do Dragão. Nine months of football. Thirty-two clubs. Two hundred and something matches. And it comes down to these twenty-two men, standing on this grass, right now, in front of the whole world."
"You can feel it through the screen, Peter."
"You can. Look at the young ones. Look at their faces. Some of these men have done this before. Some of them have not, and will never do it again. That is what a final is. There is no next week. There is no second leg. There is one night."
The mascot was leaving.
Mateo caught him by the shoulder before he could go.
"Hey. Hey, wait."
The boy turned around.
Mateo crouched down onto his haunches so they were level.
"Thank you, man. Seriously." He was grinning. "You really helped me out there. I mean it. You did more for me in that tunnel than anybody has done all week."
The little boy's whole face lit up.
Mateo put a hand on top of his head and ruffled it again.
"Do not tell anybody, alright? That is between us."
The kid nodded about nine times.
Then he started walking backwards off the pitch, waving with one hand, still nodding.
"Good luck!"
Mateo waved him off, laughing.
"Thanks, man."
On the touchline, the two managers met.
Koeman came out of his technical area first. Tuchel came the other way, hands already out of his pockets.
They shook. Briefly. Two seconds at the most.
"Good luck, Ronald."
"And you, Thomas."
Tuchel held it half a beat longer than he needed to.
"Enjoy it."
"You too."
And that was it. They let go, and both of them turned away at exactly the same time, and neither one looked back at the other, and the whole thing had the temperature of two men being polite about something they intended to take from each other.
"Dude."
Pedri had drifted over next to him.
"Dude, my heart will not stop."
Mateo looked around. At the stands. At the flags. At the whole enormous roaring bowl of it.
"Tell me about it," he said softly.
Out in the centre circle, the referee had the two captains.
Daniele Orsato held the coin flat on his thumb and looked at them both.
"Okay. Heads or tails."
He looked at Messi.
"Heads," Messi said.
"Hea." Azpilicueta had started saying it at the same time.
They both stopped.
There was a small, extremely awkward pause in the middle of a Champions League final.
"No, no." Azpilicueta put a hand up, smiling. "No, it is fine. I will go tails."
"You are sure?"
"Tails. Tails is fine."
Orsato looked between them.
"Okay. So." He pointed. "You, heads. You, tails."
Azpilicueta nodded.
"No problem."
"Okay. Okay."
Orsato flicked it.
The coin went up, turning, catching the floodlights, and both captains' heads went up with it and their eyes followed it all the way.
He caught it out of the air and slapped it onto the back of his hand.
He lifted his palm.
Both of them stared down at it.
"It is."
A beat.
"Heads."
Messi's mouth moved, barely. Azpilicueta looked at the coin for one more second and then looked away across the pitch.
Orsato did not waste any time.
"Which end do you want?"
"Left," Messi said. Straight away. No thought at all.
Orsato nodded and turned to the Chelsea captain.
"That means you are on the right."
Azpilicueta nodded.
"No problem."
Orsato nodded back, and then turned to Messi again.
"Are you taking the opening kick."
He had not even finished the sentence.
"Yes."
"And so we are ready. The coin has gone Barcelona's way, Messi has chosen his end, and Barcelona will kick off this Champions League final."
"Everything, Jim. Everything, for both of these football clubs, everything for the next ninety minutes, everything that this entire season has been building toward."
"It all starts. Now."
Mateo stood over the ball.
The referee was moving around the circle, shouting, his arms going, pointing at people.
"Right. All of you. I want a clean game. A GOOD, clean game. Eh? You come to me, you do not come to each other. You hear me?"
He pointed at two of them.
"Back. Back. Out of the circle. OUT."
His voice went right past Mateo without touching him.
Because Mateo's heart was going so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
He could not stand still. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other and back again, over and over, rolling his shoulders, shaking out both hands, moving for the sake of moving.
He looked up.
And the stadium looked back.
From here, from the exact centre of that pitch, it went all the way up and all the way around him. Fifty thousand faces stacked into the dark, tier on tier on tier, red and blue at one end and blue and white at the other, flags going, scarves going, phones going, everything moving at once. The floodlights sat above it all in four white blocks and turned the grass under his boots into something that did not look real.
This.
This is a Champions League final.
And I am standing in the middle of it.
He looked across the halfway line.
The Chelsea players were set. Every single one of them. No bouncing now, no talking. Werner crouched, hands on his thighs. Kanté completely still. Rüdiger with his jaw set and his eyes forward.
He looked back at his own.
Pedri, a few yards behind him, face like stone.
Busquets, hands on hips.
Dembélé wide left, boots planted.
And Messi.
Messi was already looking at him.
He lifted a fist.
Mateo lifted his own and bumped it, and muttered it, low and hard, with everything he had in his chest.
"Vamos."
His whole body was shaking now. Not fear. Something else. Something with nowhere to go.
The referee looked up.
"Ready? READY?"
And Mateo did not know what came over him.
He did not decide to do it. It came up out of him from somewhere underneath everything, all the nerves and all the noise and all nine months of it, and it came up fast and it came up loud.
He jumped.
Straight up off the grass, both feet, and slammed his hands together over his head.
"ARGHHHHH! LET'S DO THIS! COME ON!"
He landed and jumped again, spinning, both fists going.
"COME ON! COME ON, BOYS!"
He smacked his own chest, twice, hard, and turned toward the Barcelona end, and he screamed it at the top of his lungs.
"VISCA BARÇAAAAAA!"
Fweeeeeep!
...
"THAT is what I am talking about!"
Peter Drury was up out of his chair in the commentary box.
"Look at the boy! LOOK at him! Mateo King is ready for a Champions League final, ladies and gentlemen. That is the spirit. That is EXACTLY the spirit."
"Well, that is certainly one way of getting rid of your nerves." Jim was laughing. "HAHAHA. I have never seen anybody do it quite like that."
"And FINALLY."
Drury's voice rose over the top of the whole stadium.
"The 2020/21 UEFA Champions League final. Is. UNDERWAY."
Up in the legends' row, Ronaldinho had both hands on his own head.
"What has got into that kid?" He was laughing, his whole face open with it. "What has GOT into him?"
Beside him, Xavi and Iniesta were both shaking their heads, and both of them were grinning.
"Seventeen," Xavi said.
"Seventeen," Iniesta agreed.
Puyol just folded his arms and smiled at the pitch like a man who recognised something.
Paris.
"Babe! The match has started!"
A voice came back from somewhere down the hall, muffled through a door.
"Serious?"
"Yeah! It just started!"
"I am coming, I am coming, I am coming."
There was a thump, and then hurried footsteps, and then Kylian Mbappé came through the doorway at a jog, grabbing a bowl of popcorn off the counter on his way past without breaking stride.
He dropped onto the sofa, pulled his legs up, and looked at the screen.
The stadium. The noise. Fifty thousand people. Twenty-two men.
"Nice," he said.
Munich.
Robert Lewandowski sat in the middle of his own sofa with a child under each arm.
"Who is that one?" his daughter asked, pointing.
"That is Messi."
"I know Messi."
"Then why did you ask?"
She giggled.
His wife came in and sat on the arm beside him and looked at the screen.
"Barcelona are going to win this," she said.
Lewandowski made a face.
"Hmm."
"What?"
"Chelsea do not concede," he said. "People keep forgetting that part."
Somewhere in a studio.
Micah Richards was bouncing on his seat, both fists going.
"LET'S GO! LET'S GO! COME ON!"
He started singing something that was not quite a song.
Kate did not even look at him any more. Jamie had his arms folded, watching the screen with the intensity of a man who has money on something.
Thierry Henry leaned forward, elbows on the desk, eyes never leaving the monitor.
"Oh," he said quietly. "I have a feeling this is going to be one hell of a match."
Porto. Somewhere in the away end.
Four college kids stood shoulder to shoulder in a block of blue, three of them in Chelsea shirts and one of them very much not.
"Why the fuck is Mateo jumping around like that?"
"Yeah, I do not like it." The one who had bet his tuition had both hands on top of his head. "I do not like it. My entire school fees are riding on this. What is making that little devil so hyped up?"
Amos, in the middle of them, in Barcelona colours, started laughing.
"HAHAHAHA."
He spread his hands.
"I told you all to pick Barcelona."
And online, the whole thing detonated.
ESPN FC ✓ The wait is over. Barcelona vs Chelsea. UEFA Champions League final. #UCLfinal
Sky Sports Football ✓ KICK-OFF IN PORTO. 🏆 Barcelona's attack against Chelsea's defence. Something has to give.
rioferdy5 ✓ Sat here ready. Barcelona vs Chelsea. Let's go 💪🔥 #UCLfinal
@notyourguy_ lmaooo why is mateo king jumping up and down like he's about to fight someone 😭😭 calm down bro the games not even started
@bluesince07 COME ON BLUES. LET'S FUCKING DO THIS. 🔵🔵🔵
@kingofthenorth10 😂😂 i cannot WAIT for this match to end. Messi winning his 5th champions league. what are ronaldo fans gonna say next 😂
@SIUUUdaily replying to @kingofthenorth10 first of all if he wins this he has FOUR. it's crazy that you lot still want to count 2006 when he barely even played in it
@kingofthenorth10 replying to @SIUUUdaily messi played 6 games that season and only missed the rest because he got INJURED. cope harder 😂 when this match is over just tell me what ronaldo has more than messi
@SIUUUdaily replying to @kingofthenorth10 more goals? more champions league goals? more champions league assists? whatever happens tonight messi is still nowhere near him. imagine trying to use the champions league in this argument when messi needs a 17 year old to carry him there. shameful
@kingofthenorth10 replying to @SIUUUdaily 😂😂😂 all of this ends when they both have 5. just answer the question. by tonight what does ronaldo have over messi again
@SIUUUdaily replying to @kingofthenorth10 warra international trophy for messi 🥴😂
Hundreds of millions of people. Professional footballers. Broadcasters. Lifelong fans. People who had never watched a full match in their lives and had turned it on because everybody else had.
Every single one of them, in that moment, was looking at the same thing.
Back on the pitch.
"Mateo! BACK HERE!"
Mateo laid it off without looking and kept moving.
Barcelona were not rushing. Not one bit. The ball went across the back, Piqué to Araújo, Araújo to Roberto, Roberto inside to Busquets and straight back out again.
Mateo dropped a few yards into the space between the lines.
Reece James came with him.
He came the whole way, close enough that Mateo could hear him breathing, and Mateo had to take another step back just to get the ball under control.
"¡AQUÍ!" Alba was screaming for it down the left.
Mateo shaped to turn, hard, like he was going to spin out of it.
James bit.
And Mateo swept it out to Alba with the outside of his boot instead and kept moving.
He looked up at the middle.
And there was nothing there.
"And it is the second minute of this football match, and already, ALREADY, you can see exactly what Chelsea's plan is tonight."
"They have parked the bus, Peter. Completely."
"I will not lie to you, Jim. Knowing this Barcelona side, that is a very risky plan indeed."
"The question is a simple one. Can Chelsea stand up to the onslaught that is about to be unleashed on them?"
From the very first whistle, Chelsea had not let anything flow. Not one thing.
The whole shape had gone backwards. Reece James and Ben Chilwell, who were listed as midfielders on the team sheet, were in practice a fourth and fifth defender, tucked in alongside the back three the moment Barcelona had the ball. That made it five across.
And the midfield in front of them was not open either. Mount and Havertz had both dropped in. Jorginho sat.
And Kanté.
Kanté had started running the second the whistle went and he had not stopped since.
"¡AQUÍ! ¡AQUÍ!"
"¡SOLO! ¡ESTÁS SOLO!"
"¡ATRÁS, ATRÁS!"
The shouts came constantly from the Barcelona shirts, the ball moving between them, Alba to De Jong, De Jong to Pedri, Pedri square, Pedri back.
Kanté arrived every single time. He closed De Jong and De Jong moved it. He closed Pedri and Pedri moved it. He was covering ground that should have taken two men.
But Barcelona did not panic. Not for a second. They had spent nine months doing this. They passed, and they moved, and they waited.
And then, on a pitch containing Lionel Messi, the first man to actually try something was somebody else entirely.
Alba to De Jong.
De Jong to Pedri.
Pedri looked up, and slid a through ball past Kanté's outstretched leg, and past Jorginho who lunged at it and got nothing.
And the ball came to the feet of a seventeen-year-old boy.
"And King has it."
Mateo rolled it under his sole, once, and lifted his head.
He was scanning. Left, right, middle. Reading the whole shape of it in about a second and a half.
He moved.
Slowly, at first. Just walking it forward, the ball glued to him. He knocked it wide to Dembélé, took two more steps, and got it straight back.
And then Mateo King stopped walking.
Reece James was in front of him.
And James was serious. Bent low, hands out, chest heaving, eyes locked onto the ball and not on Mateo's face, weight on the balls of his feet, refusing to dive in.
Behind him, Kanté had already turned and was coming back at full sprint.
These men knew exactly what they were doing. They had studied this. They had been coached for this exact moment for two weeks.
Mateo did not care.
"King, twenty-five yards, looking for a way through, James in front of him, Kanté arriving from behind, and Barcelona have absolutely nowhere to go here—"
Kanté closed the last three yards. And.
Mateo moved.
He dropped his shoulder, opened his hip, and slid the ball straight through N'Golo Kanté's legs.
Then he shoved off him, spun round the outside of his own body, collected it on the other side, and used Kanté as a wall to block Reece James off completely.
The Estádio do Dragão came off its seats.
"OHHHH! OH, HE HAS GONE THROUGH HIM! HE HAS NUTMEGGED KANTÉ AND HE IS AWAY! MATEO KING!"
"WHAT?"
Thousands of people were on their feet in one movement, and not all of them were in red and blue. Barcelona fans, neutrals, and a decent number of people in Chelsea shirts, all of them up, all of them making the same noise.
"WOOOOOOOOOO!"
They had come for this.
And Barcelona flew.
The whole team came alive at once. Pedri broke from deep. Dembélé went outside. Alba was already ripping up the left touchline. And Messi peeled in off the right, and the second he did it, Chilwell and Azpilicueta both had to move with him, and a gap opened up in the middle of the Chelsea box that had not been there half a second earlier.
Mateo drove into the space.
Thiago Silva came across, roaring.
"¡FUERA! OUT! OUT! CLOSE HIM! CLOSE HIM!"
Rüdiger stepped. Azpilicueta was caught between Messi and the ball. The referee was sprinting to keep up with it. Bodies were converging from four directions at once.
"And Barcelona are IN. King, into the area, this is going to be—"
Mateo shifted it into the middle.
And then he did not move again.
His body just stopped.
Everything about him had been going forward and then his centre of gravity dropped and locked and his standing foot planted, and it happened so fast that the three Chelsea defenders closing him down were still moving in the direction he was not.
They saw it. All three of them saw it.
None of them could do a single thing about it.
"He—"
HE SHOT IT.
On the touchline Koeman lurched forward off the line, both eyes wide open.
The ball came off Mateo King's boot like something fired out of a barrel.
Thiago Silva was a yard away and his head snapped sideways and he muttered one violent word into the noise.
"Shit."
He turned his face and left his skull in the way anyway, because if it hit him it hit him, and he would take that.
It did not hit him.
It went past his ear at a speed that made his hair move.
Mendy Moved.
Édouard Mendy was the only human being in that entire stadium who reacted to that shot.
He was already down. He was already going. His whole enormous frame came off the line and stretched flat out across the goal, arm out at full extension, everything in him thrown at one piece of air.
The ball hit his palm.
It hit it so hard that the sound of it carried, and Mendy grunted, out loud, the impact ripping his hand backwards.
But he got it.
"MENDY! MENDY! HE PALMS IT! HE PALMS IT AWAY!"
"THE BALL IS LOOSE! DEMBÉLÉ!"
Dembélé pounced.
He was on it in two strides, the ball sitting up in the six-yard box in front of him, the goal wide open behind it.
Thiago Silva got there first.
The old man threw his body across the line of it and blocked, and the ball cannoned off him and back into his own feet, and he did not hesitate for a fraction of a second. He hammered it sideways to Rüdiger.
Rüdiger looked up.
And saw Lionel Messi coming at him.
BANG!
He did not think about it. He did not try to bring it down, he did not look for a pass, he swung his boot through it and put it as far away from his own goal as it was physically possible to put it.
"And it is cleared! Chelsea have survived it!"
The ball dropped forty yards up the pitch.
Werner went for it, chest out, trying to take it down on the run with Piqué arriving into his back and leaning on him the whole way. He got his chest on it. He brought it down. He was reaching for the second touch.
And Busquets, from nowhere, poked it clean off his toe.
One touch. Just a poke. He turned with it, took two steps, and rolled it out to Sergi Roberto on the far side, and the whole thing reset, and the Barcelona end let out a sound that was half a roar and half a laugh.
"Mateo King."
"Mateo KING."
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Champions League final. And if Mateo King had been given his way just then, we would already be off to the most extraordinary start you could possibly have wished for. It is the THIRD MINUTE of this football match. THREE MINUTES. And the boy, the king, has already struck at the heart of the meanest defence in Europe and forced the finest goalkeeper in this competition into the save of his life."
A beat.
"Ladies and gentlemen."
"Welcome to the Champions League final."
...
As if Mateo's knock at the door had turned something up, the Barcelona attack came on in full.
If you had walked into that stadium cold, with no scoreboard and no context, you would not have believed you were watching a Champions League final. You would have thought you were watching a slaughter.
Sixth minute.
Alba went down the left and did not stop going. He took it past Reece James on the outside and reached the byline, and his cross came in low and hard across the six.
Mateo attacked the near post.
So did Thiago Silva.
The two of them arrived at the same time and Silva got his boot in front of Mateo's by about four inches and turned it behind for a corner, and immediately turned around and started roaring at his own back line.
"¡ARRIBA! UP! UP! HOLD THE LINE!"
Absorbed.
Seventh minute.
The corner came out to Pedri, twenty-two yards, and Pedri did not take a touch. He hit it first time.
The strike was clean and low and hunting the bottom left, and it was going in.
Mendy went across and got two hands on it and pushed it round the post.
"Oh, that is another one. That is ANOTHER one from Mendy."
Absorbed.
Ninth minute.
This one was different.
It started with Messi, who had drifted into the middle of the pitch and just stood there with the ball at his feet, and Chelsea did not know what to do about it.
Jorginho stepped. Messi went past him.
Mount came across. Messi went past him too, not fast, gliding, the ball moving with him like it had been magnetised.
Kanté arrived.
Messi did not beat Kanté. Nobody beats Kanté every time. But he did not have to, because he had already seen the picture two seconds before it happened, and the pass was gone before Kanté's foot got anywhere near it.
It went between two red shirts to the edge of the box.
Where Mateo King was standing in between Antonio Rüdiger and César Azpilicueta.
Two of them. One of him. And that did not stop him for a second.
He got his body across the ball as it arrived, and Rüdiger came into his back hard, forearm across his shoulder blades, and Mateo took the whole weight of it and did not go down. He leaned into it. He let Rüdiger push him and he used the push, tilting, rolling his hips, and dragged the ball away from Azpilicueta's foot with his instep.
Rüdiger reached round him for it.
"OH, he is caught, he is caught—"
He was not caught.
Even in that position, with two men on him and the ball behind his own standing leg, Mateo flicked it.
He got his toe under it and lifted it up and over Rüdiger's outstretched boot, and it hung there, floating, dropping into the space behind them both.
"WHAT? WHAT WAS THAT? Rüdiger and Azpilicueta both had him, both of them, and he has flicked it out of a telephone box—"
"Peter, that is a SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD—"
Dembélé.
He was already running. He had read it the moment it left Mateo's foot.
Reece James came across at full sprint, arm out, shoulder into him, and the two of them ran side by side into the box shoving at each other with the ball dropping in front of them.
Mendy came off his line.
"DEMBÉLÉ, DEMBÉLÉ—"
Dembélé did not take a touch.
He did not have time and he did not want one.
He swung his left boot through it on the half-volley and BANGED it, everything he had, the ball coming off his laces and rising, and Mendy went the wrong way, Mendy was beaten, Mendy was already twisting in the air knowing he was beaten.
The whole stadium came up off its feet.
Fifty thousand people, on their feet, at the same time.
And the ball flew about eight inches over the bar.
"AHHHH."
Dembélé's hands went straight onto his own head and stayed there. His mouth was open. His eyes were wide and staring at the goal like it had personally cheated him.
On the touchline Koeman had come three yards out of his area with both fists already halfway up, and his voice tore out of him.
"NOOOO! NO, NO, NO!"
He turned in a circle, both hands in his hair.
The sound in the ground was extraordinary. It was not a cheer and it was not a groan. Fifty thousand people had stood up to celebrate a goal and had to put it away again, and what came out of them was a single enormous strangled noise that went on for four full seconds.
"THE WHOLE STADIUM. Not the Barcelona crowd. The WHOLE stadium cannot believe that did not go in."
"Barcelona, by every measure, by every single measure of this football match, should be one nil up right now. They should be TWO."
Absorbed.
Mateo stood with his hands on his hips, chest going.
He was breathing hard already. Nine minutes in and he was breathing hard, because he had not stopped moving since the whistle and neither had anybody in a blue shirt.
He looked over at Dembélé, who was still standing there staring at the crossbar.
Messi jogged past both of them, clapping his hands together, up at head height.
"Good job. GOOD job. Next one. Come on. Next one."
Mateo pulled the front of his shirt up and dragged it across his face, and let it drop.
He looked at the Chelsea goal.
Then he looked at the Chelsea players.
They were bumping chests. Rüdiger had Thiago Silva by the back of the neck. Azpilicueta was clapping and pointing at people. Mendy was shouting something and slapping his own gloves together. Every single one of them was fired up, alive, gesturing, organising.
They had just been battered for nine minutes and they looked like they were winning.
Mateo carried his eyes away and jogged back into position.
Twelfth minute.
De Jong drove through the middle and slipped it wide to Sergi Roberto, and Roberto whipped it in first time, and Mateo peeled off the back of Azpilicueta into the space.
He got there.
He got his head on it.
And so did Kanté.
Kanté, who is five foot six, had tracked forty yards back into his own box and got up above nobody and got a piece of it anyway, just enough, a flick of the top of his skull, and the ball skidded off wide.
"KANTÉ. Of course it is Kanté."
Absorbed.
Barcelona were throwing everything they had at them.
And the thing was, none of this was outside Chelsea's plan.
None of it.
"Come on, guys."
Tuchel was on the edge of his technical area with both hands together in front of his mouth, muttering into his own knuckles.
When he had drawn this up, he had known exactly what it was going to look like. He had known what Barcelona's firepower was. He had sat in a room and watched them do this to Paris and to Munich and to Manchester, and he had built a plan that accepted, from the first minute, that his team were going to spend large parts of this final under siege.
That was the plan. Absorb it. Take the punches. Do not break.
His heart was hammering.
"Just hold on," he muttered. "Just hold on. Hold on."
And the onslaught did not stop.
Not enough.
Not enough.
NOT ENOUGH.
Over the next five minutes Barcelona rushed them again and again. This was the Champions League final and it was all Barcelona, every second of it, one team playing and one team surviving.
And the best chance the match had produced was still Dembélé's, up over the bar in the ninth minute.
Now the ball sat in front of the Barcelona half at the feet of Gerard Piqué, who had pushed thirty yards up the pitch to get it, and that alone told you everything about how this match felt. A centre-back, in a Champions League final, standing in the opposition half with all the time in the world.
Barcelona had finally slowed it down.
They were regrouping. Circulating it across the back, taking the pace out, letting everyone breathe, taking a moment to look at the shape in front of them and work out where the door was.
"Huff. Huff."
Messi had his hands on his hips, breathing.
The ball came out to him from Roberto.
Kanté came at him instantly, from thirty yards away, sprinting.
Messi did not even look up. He took one touch away from the pressure and rolled it back to De Jong and kept walking.
Huff.
He looked up at the clock.
18:04.
This is it.
This is actually it.
We got here.
Something went through his chest that was not quite pride and not quite relief and was somewhere in between the two, and he let himself have it for exactly one second before he put it away again.
The ball went De Jong to Pedri.
Pedri got squeezed by Mount and Havertz at once and lost it.
Busquets won it straight back, one leg out, the ball popping up into his own possession as if he had asked it to.
Out to Alba. Alba inside to Mateo, who had dropped deep again to get on it. Mateo took it, turned, saw nothing, and rolled it back to Messi.
Messi took it and looked up.
And as he stood there in the middle of a Champions League final with the ball at his feet, one thought was sitting in the front of Lionel Messi's mind.
This match had mobilised his entire pitch.
Every single one of them.
Piqué, thirty-four years old, playing in the opposition half like a man twenty-five, having spent an entire season being ridiculed and never once letting it reach the young ones.
Busquets, who had just taken the ball off two international midfielders with one leg and would never be mentioned in a single report of this match.
Alba, who had run that touchline every game for nine years and was still running it in the eighteenth minute of a final with the same legs.
Pedri, eighteen years old, who had lost that ball and had already turned around and started sprinting back to win it again, because nobody had ever needed to tell him to.
Dembélé, two years of being written off, who had struck one over the bar nine minutes ago and had not stopped running once since.
And the boy.
Seventeen. Number 36. Who had spent eighteen minutes of a Champions League final personally attacking the meanest defence in Europe and had been hit and shoved and doubled up on and had not gone down once.
Messi looked around his own pitch.
He was not alone.
He was not back there any more. He was not in those years. He did not have to carry every single thing on his own back and he did not have to be the answer to every single question, because there were ten other men out here who had walked through PSG and Bayern and Manchester City to get to this exact patch of grass with him.
FC Barcelona was not a one-man team.
Not now.
And he hoped not ever again.
He knew exactly how much pressure had been sitting on his shoulders for the last decade. He had felt every ounce of it.
And he had put it down.
Everything he had said in his speech before the match wasn't meant to simply hype them up, lift their spirits, or get them fired up.
No.
He meant every single word he had said.
He was not alone.
He was unburdened.
But.
But he was still Lionel Andrés Messi.
And the big moments were still his.
The squad could carry it now. He could breathe now, he could trust now, he could stand in the middle of a final and feel light. All of that was true and all of that was new and he was grateful for every second of it.
But it did not change what he was.
The ability to go past a man. To turn a match on its head with one movement. To make something out of absolutely nothing at all, out of a closed door and four defenders and no angle and no space.
Those things had never been because he was alone.
Those things were because he was Messi.
And that could not change.
It would not change because he was not alone. It would not change because this was a Champions League final. It would not change because Chelsea were defending brilliantly, and they were, they were defending as well as any team he had faced in years.
It was a habit. It had been a habit since he was thirteen years old and it had never once left him and he honestly did not know if he could stop it even if somebody asked him to.
And in the nineteenth minute of the 2020/21 Champions League final, that habit came out of him.
"¡PEDRI! ¡PEDRI, AQUÍ!"
Messi's voice cracked across the pitch and Pedri did not question it. The ball came into his feet immediately.
And Lionel Messi went.
"Messi turns—"
He came off the right and drove infield, and the first man to reach him was Jorginho, and Jorginho was gone in half a second, the ball rolled under Messi's sole and taken the other way before the Italian's weight had even finished shifting.
"One—"
Mount came flying across.
Messi dropped his shoulder and Mount's whole body committed and Messi took it the other side of him and left him standing there facing the wrong way.
"TWO—"
Chilwell came out of the back line to meet him.
Messi went past him on the outside without breaking stride.
"THREE! IT IS MESSI! IT IS MESSI! IT IS MESSI, IT IS THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FINAL, AND IT IS STILL MESSI!"
They swarmed him.
Four of them, converging at once, Kanté arriving from behind, Azpilicueta stepping, Rüdiger coming across, Jorginho recovering, hands going out, shirts being grabbed, bodies leaning on him from three directions.
"¡CIÉRRALO! CLOSE HIM! CLOSE HIM! CLOSE!"
"GET IT! GET IT OFF HIM!"
They had him. In a box of four bodies, twenty-two yards out, no angle, no space, nowhere to put it.
And in the middle of all of it, with hands on his shirt and boots at his feet, Messi's head came up and he looked to one side.
And he saw it.
A pocket. Far post. Nobody in it.
Nobody in it at all, because every single Chelsea player on that pitch had come to stop the small man with the ball.
Perfect.
"He shoots. No, he passes it round the—"
He did not blast it.
He wrapped his boot around the outside of it and floated it, up and over the top of four men, a ball that hung in the air of the Estádio do Dragão and dropped, out of the lights, into a completely empty piece of grass at the back post.
"Round the back, in behind, there is nobody there—"
"MATEOOOOOO!"
I am hitting this.
He was already coming.
He had started his run three seconds ago, when Messi's head had first come up, because he had known. He had just known. He had read it out of the back of Messi's shoulders the way he had read it thirty times this season on a training pitch at Sant Joan Despí with nobody watching.
He was clean through. Nobody within four yards of him.
The ball was still in the air.
Mendy was coming out, arms wide, eyes wider, the whole enormous frame of him charging out to cut the angle down to nothing.
And Mateo did not slow down and he did not wait for it to land.
His body had already turned. His shoulders had squared. His standing foot was planting and his hips were opening and his striking leg was coming back, the whole machine of him assembling itself in mid-stride around a ball that had not touched the ground yet.
He was going to volley it.
Everybody in that stadium knew he was going to volley it.
That is the name he had built for himself. That is what Mateo King did. He did not take a touch. He did not need one.
BLAM!!!!
"AHHHHHH! HOW DID HE GET THERE? HOW DID HE GET THERE?"
"Rüdiger came out of nowhere, a missile in blue"
He came from somewhere behind and to the left, from a position where he had absolutely no business being, having turned and sprinted thirty yards on the diagonal from the instant that ball had left Messi's foot, and he threw his entire body into the ground at full speed and slid.
Everything went at once. The ball. Mateo's standing leg. Mateo's whole body.
Rüdiger got the ball.
He got the ball first, clean, absolutely clean, and then two hundred pounds of German centre-back travelling at full sprint went through everything that was left.
Mateo went up into the air sideways.
He came down on his hip and his shoulder, and he rolled twice, and he stayed down.
"ARGHHHH!"
The ball skidded thirty yards away and out for a throw.
"HE HAS TAKEN HIM DOWN! HE HAS TAKEN HIM DOWN, BUT HE HAS GOT THE BALL! THE REFEREE IS NOT BLOWING! THE REFEREE IS NOT BLOWING, IT IS A CLEAN TACKLE, IT IS A CLEAN TACKLE!"
"RÜDIGER HAS JUST SAVED CHELSEA."
"RÜDIGER HAS JUST SAVED CHELSEA! It does not GET better than that! It does not get better than that in a football match! Messi over the top, King in behind, the volley loaded, the goalkeeper beaten, and Antonio Rüdiger has come from THIRTY YARDS to take the ball off his boot at the last possible instant that it was physically available to be taken!"
"WHAT a match. WHAT is this? Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Champions League final. THIS is the Champions League final."
"Are you enjoying what you are seeing? ARE you? Is it worth the wait? Is it? IS IT?"
"ARE YOU ENTERTAINED??? ARE YOU???"
"Argh."
Mateo was on the grass on his side with both hands going to his leg.
There was a small sharp pain running up the outside of it, from just above the boot all the way up toward his hip, a bright thin line of it, the kind that comes when somebody has taken your standing leg out from under you at speed.
He got his fingers around it and squeezed and grimaced and rolled onto his back.
Above him the sky was black and the floodlights were white and the noise was enormous.
And ten yards away, the Chelsea players had lost their minds.
They came at Rüdiger from every direction.
"COME ON, MAN! COME ON!"
"FUCK YEAH! FUCK YEAH, TONI!"
"BROOOO! YES, MAN! YES!"
Azpilicueta got to him first and grabbed his head with both hands. Thiago Silva was slapping his back so hard it was audible. Kanté came in and jumped on him. Mendy had come fifteen yards off his own line, screaming, both gloves in the air. Reece James was pointing at him and shouting something nobody could hear.
Rüdiger was up on his feet in the middle of it with his arms out wide, roaring, his whole face lit up, the veins standing in his neck, four men hanging off him.
And the Chelsea end was making a noise that a stadium usually only makes for a goal.
Rüdiger came out of the pile still shouting.
And then he turned.
And he saw the boy on the floor.
Mateo was sitting up now, one hand still on his leg, looking up at him.
And Rüdiger smiled.
That smile. The same one from the tunnel. Too wide, up at the corners, nowhere near his eyes.
He tilted his head.
And he said it.
"You good, little man?"
A/N
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