The fallout from the Super League was enormous.
You could measure it in the simplest available way. A Champions League semi-final between Chelsea and Real Madrid was happening at this very moment, the second leg of a tie that Determined who among this two would challenge for the pinnacle of club football this season, and it was not the most-discussed thing on the internet. The thriller of Barcelona in England the day before, with all the records broken and the seventeen-year-old standing in the centre of the Etihad pitch and the standing ovation that nobody had stopped writing about, that was even further down the discussion. Both of those things were happening, both of those things mattered, and both of those things were sitting in the second and third tiers of the conversation while the Super League dominated everything above them.
The opinions were, predictably, varied.
Some hated it. Some understood the reasoning. Some were indifferent in the way only football-adjacent people could be indifferent, the kind who watched a final every two years and didn't carry the rest of the season with them and therefore did not have the same attachment to the structures the project was attempting to dismantle.
But the dominant opinion was hatred.
This was, when you thought about it long enough, not surprising.
Comfort was a powerful drug. People liked their routines. They liked the slow shape of the season, the small accumulations of weekend results, the way the league table moved by inches in October and by feet in February and was, by April, finally beginning to mean something. They liked the fixtures they grew up with. The away days they had inherited from their fathers. The pub their grandfather had watched matches in before the pub had even installed a screen. They liked the Champions League as a thing they had been told, since childhood, was the pinnacle, the thing the players cared about most, the trophy that proved you were really one of the great clubs of Europe.
They liked saying we can win it this year.
They liked saying next year, we just need to get the defence better.
They liked the fifteen years of disappointment leading up to the one year their team made the quarters and got knocked out in extra time and broke their hearts and was, in some indescribable way, the best thing that had happened to them all season because it had happened to them with their family, in their living room, on the same sofa they had watched football on for thirty years.
Many of them did not understand exactly what the Super League was proposing. Even fewer had watched the video that the founding clubs had released on the same night the announcement had gone out, the slick, professionally produced explanation of the financial and structural reasoning behind the project, the talking heads and the graphics and the carefully chosen words designed to land the message through the noise.
It did not matter that they had not watched the video.
What they knew was that something they loved was being attacked. Their childhood. Their weekends. The thing their father had taught them to care about when they were six years old. They knew enough to know that someone was trying to change it, and they did not like that, and they responded the way football fans had always responded to something they did not like, which was to fight it.
Football fans were not a docile group. They had never been a docile group. The history of the sport was, more than the history of most sports, a history of supporters as active participants, as institutional shapers, as people who pushed back when the people running their clubs forgot who the clubs were actually for.
An attack on their sport.
Yep. Ggs.
The Super League, twenty-four hours after the news had broken, was cooked.
It had not yet been buried. The eulogies were still being written, the obituaries still being drafted, the clubs themselves still publicly holding the line. But the people who had been watching this thing carefully, the people whose job it was to read the signals in the noise, knew. The thing was already in the ground. The next forty-eight hours were just the formal pronouncement.
In an office building in Italy, several hundred kilometres from the room where the project had been discussed, the first formal hit was about to be reported.
The office was busy.
It was always busy. The lights were on in every room of the floor, the desks were occupied, the phones were ringing in the staggered, overlapping rhythm of a workplace that did not stop and did not particularly want to. People were on calls. People were typing with the fast, slightly hunched intensity of journalists working multiple stories simultaneously. Papers stacked on desks. Coffee cups cold on most of them. The hum of a printer somewhere in the back.
A large television was mounted on the far wall.
Chelsea against Real Madrid. The second leg. Seventy-fifth minute. The score was still one-one, which meant the aggregate was still 3-1, Chelsea was running away with it. If no surprises were had it would be Chelsea vs FC Barcelona for the 20/21 champions league final.
The match was different from the one the day before. Yesterday at the Etihad had been a goal-fest, a wave that started at the fourth minute and never fully receded, a Barcelona side that had taken control of the match early and held it almost to the end before City had pulled two back in the closing stages. This was not that. This was a slug-fest. Both teams hitting each other, going forward, getting hit on the counter, having to absorb, going forward again. It looked like either side could score at any moment, and the room watched it the way you watched something you could not turn away from, the conversations in the office wrapping around the screen in the periodic glances and the quick comments tossed across the desks.
It had its own charm. It was tense in a way yesterday had not been tense, because the result was not yet decided, because the next ten minutes were going to determine which of these two clubs played FC Barcelona in Porto.
Then the shout.
"Man City have left."
The room paused.
It was not a complete stop. The television was still on. The phones were still ringing. The match was still happening. But every person who had heard the shout, which was every person on the floor, looked up from what they were doing.
Fabrizio Romano had been standing in the middle of the room with one hand in his pocket and his eyes split between the television and the laptop on the nearest desk, monitoring the match and a feed of breaking news at the same time. He was the kind of person who could do that. He had been doing it for years.
He paused too.
"How sure?" he said.
The voice came from the desk on the left, where one of his sourcing team had a phone pressed to his ear and the slightly elevated grin of someone who was about to deliver something good.
"Basically confirmed, sir."
"Time?"
"They're going to announce it in about thirty minutes."
Fabrizio let the information settle. He looked at the screen on the wall. He looked at his team.
He smiled.
"Okay," he said. "Let's get the tweet ready now. I want to be the first one out with this on every platform. Twitter, Instagram, the website, the Telegram channel, all of it. Draft it now, send it to me, I want to approve the wording. The moment they confirm we go."
A small wave of energy moved through the floor. People sat up straighter. Two of the writers were already pulling up the tweet drafts. Someone called out, "I'll handle Instagram," and someone else, "I've got the Telegram." The team did the thing the team did when something good was coming, which was to find its rhythm in about four seconds and start moving.
Fabrizio nodded.
"Yes," he said. The word small, satisfied. "Let's go."
They got to work.
He stood in the middle of his office for a moment and watched them.
He should be feeling better than he was.
The mood had been off for the past few hours, since the Super League broke, and he had been pretending it was not as off as it was. Fabrizio had built his career on getting news first. On being the fastest. On the specific reputation of having sources where other people did not have sources, of knowing things before they were known, of being the name that broke the story before anyone else even understood there was a story to break.
The Super League had destroyed all of that.
It was not just that he had missed it. It was the scale of what he had missed. Twelve clubs. Twelve of the biggest institutions in European football. Months of planning. JP Morgan involvement. Lawyers. Communication strategy. Coordinated press releases. The amount of human activity that had gone into setting that project up was, when you actually thought about it, absurd. Hundreds of people across multiple countries had been working on it. Phone calls had been made. Documents had been signed. Meetings had been held in places where journalists like Fabrizio had sources.
And he had not heard a thing.
Whispers, yes. He had heard whispers for months. The vague shape of something. Conversations at industry events that hinted at restructuring, at the ECA, at frustration with UEFA's revenue distribution. He had filed all of it. He had not connected it. He had not understood that the whispers were the surface of a thing this size.
It was the story of the year. It was probably the story of the decade in club football. Twelve, well now eleven, of the world's most significant clubs deciding, in coordination, to backstab UEFA and pull out of the existing competition framework. If he had been the one to break that, his reputation with the public would have moved into another category. His relationships with the executives whose phone numbers he depended on would have hardened into something even more solid than what he currently had.
He had missed it.
He sighed.
There was no point thinking about it now. Done was done. The story had broken without him and the only thing left was to be the best second on every angle of it that mattered, which was what he was doing, which was why his floor was the loudest journalism floor in Italy at this hour and would be for the next several days.
He turned to one of his desk leaders.
"Marco. The match. When it ends, we go fast. I want the first goal write-ups out within ninety seconds of the final whistle. Reaction from both dressing rooms within the first hour. Agent calls for the player movements that are going to come out of this, because Madrid will reshuffle if they win and Chelsea will reshuffle if they win, and we should be the first ones to have the names. Get the team ready. Especially at Madrid we are getting whispers that Perez is looking to hit the window hard next window, i need someone on that since yesterday"
"Yes, boss."
"And keep an eye on the City announcement. I want us to be at least three Minutes Earlier'"
"Yes, boss."
The floor was already humming with it. The match. The City announcement. The aftermath of the announcement that was about to cascade into the other Premier League clubs in the next hours and days. Fabrizio could see, on three different desks, the lists his team had built of the next likely withdrawals. Chelsea's name was on it. Tottenham. United. The English contingent, all of them, in various stages of preparation to leave.
He was watching it happen in real time and he had not been first on any of it.
He was about to ask Marco something else when one of the assistants came up beside him with a phone held out in her hand.
"Sir. It's Wayne."
Fabrizio took the phone.
Wayne was the journalist he had sent to Barcelona weeks ago, Since the Mateo contract renewal period on the strength of a feeling that he had not been able to fully articulate even to himself at the time. Something at the club. Something that did not feel right. The kind of low-grade signal he had learned to trust over the years even when he could not explain it.
He pressed the phone to his ear.
"Wayne. What's the Sitch."
The voice on the other end was tired. Not the productive tired of a journalist working a story. The other tired. The tired of a journalist who had been trying for several days to crack something and had not been getting anywhere.
"Sir. I'm sorry. Everything has been a bust."
Fabrizio walked to the corner of the room where the noise was thinnest, away from the desks, and listened.
"I tried getting in contact with Mateo's agent. After the first day, nothing. Calls go to voicemail, emails get acknowledgments and no follow-up. Access to Mateo himself is even harder. I have tried the cousin's family route, the friends route, the academy route, everything. Tight closed."
"And the club."
"The club is locked down, sir. The contacts I do have at Barcelona are tight-lipped in a way I had not seen from them before. Not the usual tight-lipped where they will not give you a name but they will hint at the shape of the story. Properly tight-lipped. Like they had been told."
"By Reverter?"
"Almost certainly Reverter. Or above him. Whatever has come down from the top has been comprehensive. The contacts I have who are still talking are not the ones with the information. They are mid-level people who never get the actual brief, and they are telling me only what they would tell me on any normal week."
Fabrizio listened.
"If only I could have gotten something from there," Wayne continued. "Anything that suggested the shape of what they were planning. We could have broken the Super League first."
The line sat there between them.
"Wayne. Stop. It is not your fault. Nobody had it. Nobody. I had ten people working leads on different angles and none of us got it. You are not failing because you missed it. You are failing because the operation that was running was the most secure operation any of these clubs has ever run. That is on them, not on you."
A breath on the other end. The voice quieter now. "Thank you, sir."
"How are you doing."
"I am okay. I am tired. I am about to book my ticket back."
"No."
The word came out automatic. Fabrizio caught himself on it. He glanced sideways at the assistant who had brought him the phone, who was still standing nearby in the way assistants stood when they were not sure whether to leave or wait. She was looking at him with mild confusion.
On the other end, Wayne paused.
"Pardon?"
"Don't come back yet."
The pause on the other end lasted slightly longer this time.
"Boss. I appreciate the confidence. But I have been here months. I have nothing. I am burning through expense budget on a story That's already out. The Super League story I was supposed to find. There is not anything else here."
"There is."
Fabrizio took a breath. He had said the thing now and he was going to have to find the rest of the sentence to back it up.
"There is something else there. I can feel it. I want you to stay. I want you to push harder. I want you to get more aggressive. The contacts who are tight-lipped, push them anyway, promise them anything, player movement signalling, Tone control anything. The ones who refused to meet, find ways to make the meeting happen. If the executives will not talk, find someone the know. Work the academy from a different angle, their executives aren't as out the lope as it appears. Also The boy is seventeen years old. Seventeen-year-olds have school friends. They have ex-classmates. They have girls they used to like and girls who used to like them. There is a route somewhere in there that we have not tried yet. Try it."
The line was quiet.
"Sir. With respect. The Super League was probably what they were hiding. It is the most logical answer. It explains the lockdown."
"It is one of the things they were hiding. I will give you that. They were certainly part of the project. But Wayne, listen to me carefully. Every team was secretive about the Super League. That is the nature of the operation. None of the twelve broke the news. Not one. So there was a coordinated discipline across all the clubs about that specific project."
He paused.
"Barcelona was something else. Barcelona was tighter than the rest. I tracked down the former sporting director a few weeks ago, before this all blew open, and he was tight-lipped too, but the feeling was wrong. He was not protecting a coordinated cross-club secret. He was protecting something specific to Barcelona. A problem at the club, or a situation at the club, or something that was eating the building from the inside. I do not know what it is. I have not been able to pin it down. But the texture of it is not the same as the rest of the Super League secrecy."
Wayne was listening.
"It might be nothing," Fabrizio said. "I want to be honest with you. It might be that I am wrong, that the Super League explains everything, that I am wasting one of my best people chasing a dead end. I know it is not logical. I know I cannot explain it. I am asking you to stay anyway."
The words sat on the line.
"You know how this works, Wayne. This is not the first story a journalist has chased on nothing but a gut and a hope. It will not be the last."
Another breath on the other end. Wayne was thinking.
"The instinct that built this place," Fabrizio said, "is the same instinct telling me there is something there. I would not ask you to stay if I did not believe it."
A pause.
"No problem, boss."
The voice was steadier now. The decision made. Wayne had a thing he did when he had committed to a hard assignment, a certain settling of the voice that Fabrizio had heard before and recognised.
"Thank you, Wayne."
A burst of noise from the other side of the floor cut across them. Someone shouted, "Goal!" and someone else, a beat later, "Wow, what a goal." A third voice, Marco's, called out, "Yeah, that is insane, I am putting that in the write-up."
Fabrizio's eyes moved to the screen on the wall. He could not see it from the angle he was standing at, the corner he had walked to for the call.
"Boss," Wayne said, the smile audible in his voice now. "Do not worry about me. This is the job. I am going to find something. Even if it takes me to the end of the season, I am going to find something. Even the colour of Laporta's boxers, if I have to."
Fabrizio laughed.
"Wayne."
"Yes, boss."
"Just stick to the hardcore news, please."
Wayne laughed on the other end, and Fabrizio laughed with him, the small good laugh of two people who had been working together long enough to have a few jokes and to use them when the moment needed it.
"Okay, boss."
"Stay safe."
"Stay safe."
He cut the call.
He handed the phone back to the assistant, who took it and disappeared back toward the main floor without saying anything, the slight residual confusion still on her face. Fabrizio did not register it. His eyes had already gone back to the screen on the wall. The match had restarted. The replay was just finishing, the slow-motion of a finish that he could see from here was a good one, a header maybe, a body in white rising at the back post.
He stared at it.
The room around him was alive. His team was working. The City news was thirty minutes away from being formally announced and he was going to be the first one out with it. Wayne was staying in Barcelona. The instinct was still there, the small persistent feeling that had been with him for weeks now that something at FC Barcelona was off, that the lockdown was not just about the Super League, that there was a story underneath the story and he had not yet found a way in.
The replay finished. The screen cut back to the live picture. A celebration was already happening on the far end of the pitch, a player surrounded by teammates, the ball back in the net and the score now changed.
He had not been watching when the goal went in.
He looked at the corner of the screen. The score readout. The player's name was on the lower third now, in the small white text the broadcaster used.
He squinted.
Who scored?
A/N
I know i know no Mateo this chapter again please don't skin me alive,he is appearing next chapter 😭😭😂
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