From La Masia: Was Always Destined for Greatness Chapter 144 144: Even Him

"Barça sí! Laporta no!"

The chant had been going for two hours.

Not weakening — if anything finding new energy as more people arrived, the crowd outside Camp Nou having grown from the initial gathering of several hundred to sothing that now stretched the length of the main facade and spilled around both sides, the blue and red of scarves and shirts and flags moving with the agitated, purposeful energy of people who had co sowhere because staying ho was not an option.

"We want our football back!"

"No to the Super League!"

"Football is for the fans!"

"Stop killing the ga!"

The banners were everywhere — handmade ones, the kind that get produced in the hours between reading sothing that enrages you and deciding that words on a screen are insufficient. Sharp words in Catalan and Spanish and English, because the English mattered tonight, because the English would be photographed and shared and seen in the cities where the other eleven clubs were also being protested.

LAPORTA TRAIDOR.

EL FÚTBOL NO ESTÁ EN VENTA.

SUPER LEAGUE = MORT DEL FÚTBOL.

Placards moved erratically above the crowd. Soone had produced a large photograph of Laporta with a red cross over it that was being held up near the main gates. The noise was constant — not the noise of a matchday, the specific noise of people who had co not to celebrate but to object, the sustained, righteous volu of a crowd that had sothing to say and intended to say it until soone heard.

At the edges, the Mossos d'Esquadra had set up a barricade — not confrontational, the precautionary presence of a police force that had read the size of the gathering and had made sensible decisions about crowd managent. Officers stood at intervals, watching, the professional calm of people doing their job and hoping the job stayed manageable.

Not even Twenty-four hours ago, these sa fans had been in the other cities of Europe watching their club qualify for the Champions League final for the first ti in six years, singing Piqué's na and crying in corners of English stadiums. The distance between that feeling and this one was the distance a single press conference could travel in a single night.

High above it all, Joan Laporta stood at the side window of his office.

He was looking down at the crowd — at the banners, at the chanting mouths, at the placards bearing his na with things written beneath it that he chose not to read too carefully. His hands were clasped behind his back. His expression, for a man being called a traitor by several thousand people directly beneath his window, was remarkably composed.

There was sothing in it that was almost — if you looked carefully, and you had to look carefully — a smile.

Not triumphant. Not callous. The smile of a man whose calculation had produced the result he expected, which was its own kind of satisfaction even when the result looked, from the outside, like chaos.

The Super League announcent had done exactly what he needed it to do. The journalists who had been circling the club's finances for weeks — the ones who had been making calls, filing requests, sitting outside offices with the patient persistence of people who sensed sothing large beneath the surface — had redirected entirely. Every investigation, every inquiry, every column inch that had been moving toward the question of how FC Barcelona had arrived at a debt that would make most governnts blanche had been consud by the question of the Super League. The financial situation was still there. The crisis was still there. But the light was elsewhere.

Almost entirely elsewhere.

There were still a few — the stubborn ones, the ones who separated the stories and understood that football clubs did not make decisions of this magnitude in isolation from their financial circumstances. He had identified them. He was managing them.

But the situation was considerably better than it had been seventy-two hours ago.

He watched the crowd for another mont.

The Super League was also, it should be said, real. This was not rely a cover — the project had its own logic, its own financial projections, its own genuine case to be made about the future of elite European football and where the money needed to co from. The Goldman Sachs loan was secured. The conversations with Pérez had been happening for longer than anyone outside this building knew. The plan existed and had been built seriously.

Managing it would require everything he had.

"President."

Ferran Reverter, the club's CEO, appeared at the door — the quiet, composed arrival of soone who had been managing logistics for the last four hours and had arrived at the next item on the agenda.

"The room is ready."

Laporta took one last look at the crowd below. At the banners. At the people who loved this club enough to stand outside it in the dark and shout his na.

He adjusted his jacket. Straightened.

"Let's go," he said.

The boardroom of FC Barcelona was a room designed to communicate seriousness, and tonight it was succeeding.

The long table. The high-backed chairs, most of them occupied. The suits — dark, well-cut, the professional armour of people who operated at the level where clothes were a statent of intent. The faces above the suits were doing sothing considerably less composed than the clothes.

The board was not happy.

These were n — and they were mostly n — who had been in their positions through the transition from Bartou's presidency to Laporta's election, so of them holdovers from the previous administration, so of them Laporta's own appointnts still finding their footing. The Super League announcent had reached all of them the way it had reached everyone else — through their phones, through news alerts, through calls from people in their networks who had questions they could not answer because they had not been told.

That, specifically, was the problem.

At the far end of the table, Ferran Reverter's empty chair waited beside the one reserved for Laporta. Around it: Rafael Yuste, vice-president; Juli Guiu, head of marketing; Jordi Cardoner, vice-president; Eduard Rou, financial vice-president — the man who knew the numbers better than anyone in this room and whose face tonight said more than his words would. And others, distributed around the table, each with their own specific relationship to what had been announced.

Elena Fort, the institutional vice-president, was speaking when the door was still closing behind the last arrival.

"Can soone explain to ," Fort said, with the asured precision of a woman who was genuinely asking and also genuinely furious, "at what point in the decision-making process the board was going to be consulted? Because I was under the impression that decisions of this magnitude—"

"We should wait for the president," soone said.

"I've been waiting for the president," Fort said. "I waited for the president yesterday when this was announced. I'm waiting now."

Across the table, voices layered over each other — the specific, overlapping quality of a room full of intelligent people who had all arrived at their grievances through different routes but had converged on the sa destination.

"The naming rights alone—" Eduard Rou, financial vice-president, was saying to the person beside him, his voice low and precise. "If this is structured the way I think it is—"

"My concern is the Pérez relationship," Yuste said. "Working with Real Madrid on anything creates a dynamic that this board has not discussed and has not approved—"

"Don't be childish," said one of the older board mbers — one whose tenure predated Laporta's election, whose loyalties were distributed in ways that were not always fully legible. "If the financial projections are what they're being described as, the question of which club we're partnered with is secondary—"

"It is not secondary," Fort said flatly.

"What I want to know," said Cardoner, "is whether the UEFA situation has been factored in. Because if Čeferin follows through on what he's been suggesting—"

"He will," soone said.

"Then we're looking at exclusion from European competition, and I would like to know how that intersects with the Goldman Sachs structure—"

At the far end of the table, removed slightly from the main current of the conversation, Deco sat quietly.

He had been quiet since he arrived. Not the quiet of soone who had nothing to say — the quiet of soone who was reading the room and finding more information in what was not being said than in what was. As the new sporting director he was the most recently arrived person in this room, his appointnt still carrying the fresh-paint quality of sothing that had not yet been fully absorbed into the institution's body. He had been brought in to manage football operations — contracts, transfers, the structural decisions of the squad. He had been navigating the ssi renewal situation, had been told enough to understand the financial constraints, had built his early assumptions around the general picture that had been presented to him after the whole double contract situation with Mateo king and his agent.

He had the dossier in front of him now.

FC Barcelona: Financial Recovery and Strategic Plan (2021–2025).

Prepared by Reverter. Distributed without announcent.

He was reading quickly — his eyes moving through the pages with the efficient absorption of soone who processed docunts professionally, pulling the numbers, the projections, the structural commitnts, the liability columns—

He stopped.

Went back.

Read it again.

The number was the number. It didn't change on the second reading. It sat there on the page with the flat, indifferent certainty of a figure that did not require anyone's agreent to be true.

He looked up from the page.

Around him, the conversation was still going — Fort and Rou, Cardoner and Yuste, the overlapping voices of n and won who were unhappy and intelligent and had been given partial information for too long. He looked at them. At the ones whose expressions carried sothing less than surprise — the ones who had known, or had known enough, or had understood the shape of it without the specifics. The n from Bartou's ti, the ones who had been here when the decisions that produced these numbers were being made.

He felt, very specifically, disgusted.

He looked back at the dossier.

What the fuck was he reading.

The door opened.

Laporta ca in first, Reverter a half-step behind — the entrance of two n who had prepared for this room and were walking into it prepared. Before Laporta had reached his chair, the voices converged.

"President — the naming rights structure, can you explain—"

"Joan, the UEFA exposure alone—"

"We need to understand the Pérez arrangent before we can have any aningful discussion—"

"Why were we not inford before the announcent? The board has a right—"

Reverter raised one hand.

The room did not imdiately quiet — it took a mont, the specific resistance of people who had been building toward sothing and were not prepared to release it on request. But Reverter's authority in this room was not Laporta's authority — it was the quieter, more administrative authority of a CEO who controlled information flow and eting structure and the specific logistics of everything that happened within these walls. When he raised his hand people eventually, unhappily, found their way to silence.

"One at a ti," Reverter said. "We'll get through everything."

The room settled.

Into that settling, one voice ca.

Quiet. Controlled. But sothing underneath it that was not controlled at all — the very specific quality of a man who had just read sothing that had reorganised his understanding of where he was standing.

"Is this real?"

Deco.

He was not looking at Reverter. He was looking at Laporta — directly, across the full length of the table, the dossier held loosely in one hand, his eyes doing what eyes do when the question behind them is not rhetorical.

The room registered the shift. The conversations that had been continuing in undertones went quiet. Heads turned.

Deco's hand moved — a slow wave, the gesture of soone indicating a docunt, or perhaps indicating everything the docunt contained. His face carried the specific, unguarded expression of disbelief that had not yet hardened into anything else. He was still in the mont of reading. Still absorbing.

"Is this real?" he said again.

The room was quiet.

Laporta looked at him.

He did not look away. He did not look at Reverter, or at the board mbers around the table, or at the dossier, or at the window behind which the crowd was still chanting his na in a specific tone.

He looked at Deco.

He closed his eyes.

Opened them.

"Yes," he said.

...

Deco did not move at first.

He sat with the dossier still in his hand and the word sitting in front of him on the air of the room, and his face did the thing faces do when the body has not yet decided which response to commit to. His jaw worked once, soundlessly. His other hand ca up — not gesturing, just rising, the small involuntary movent of soone who needed to confirm that he still had hands.

"You—" He stopped. Started again. "You — wait."

He looked at the page in front of him.

He looked at the page beside it.

He flipped back two pages, his fingers moving with the fast, slightly disorderly speed of soone who was still hoping the docunt would resolve into a different docunt if he checked carefully enough. The numbers did not move. They were the numbers they had been ninety seconds ago when he had first read them and they were the numbers they would be tomorrow morning when he read them again.

"This—" He held the dossier up. The page he had reached was visible to anyone who wanted to look at it. "This number. This — this top line. President. President, this—"

The words were not arriving in the order he intended.

He could feel that. He could feel himself losing the specific composure he had been carrying since he walked into this room, the careful institutional steadiness of a man who had been brought in to manage football operations and had spent the last four months learning the shape of his new club. That composure was now being asked to absorb a number that he had not been told to expect, and it was discovering, in real ti, that it could not absorb the number.

"You're telling —" He looked at Reverter. Then back at Laporta. "You're telling that when I sat with the ssi camp three weeks ago — when I looked Jorge ssi in the face and discussed paraters — you're telling the paraters I was working from—"

"Deco."

Laporta's voice. Not raised. The opposite — quieter than the room expected, carrying the specific weight that quiet voices carry when the person speaking has decided that volu would be a form of weakness.

Deco did not stop.

"I had a number in my head," he said. "I had a number, President, that I built a negotiation on. That number — this — this is not within the sa universe as that number—"

"Deco."

"The wage structure I was operating from was already constrained — I understood it was constrained, I understood we were not in a position to compete with the offers his camp could attract elsewhere — but this—" He held the dossier higher, as though the room had not yet understood what he was holding. "This is not constraint. This is collapse. We are — President, do the people in this room understand what this number ans? Do they understand the implications for the wage cap, for La Liga compliance, for the registration windows that are about to co around in—"

"Deco."

Laporta's hand had co up.

Slowly. Without aggression. The flat of it visible across the long table, the gesture of a man who had asked twice and was not going to ask a third ti.

Deco stopped.

He looked at the hand. Then at the face above the hand. The room had gone quiet in a way it had not been quiet at any previous point in the evening — not the strategic quiet of people listening for an opening, the genuine quiet of people who had just watched soone discover sothing they had not known and were absorbing the spectacle of it alongside the substance.

Deco lowered the dossier.

His face was still doing what it had been doing — the unguarded, slightly stricken expression of a professional who had been given partial information and had built professional decisions on the partial information and was now seeing the rest of it.

"I'm sorry, President," he said. The voice quieter now. "I'm sorry. I just—"

"I understand." Laporta's voice had not changed. "I understand. Please — sit. Take a mont."

Deco sat back.

Laporta watched him for a second longer. Then he turned his head — slightly, deliberately — and let his eyes move across the table.

Not all of it. A specific portion of it.

The n whose tenure in this room predated his. The ones who had been here through the previous administration. The ones whose phones had not been buzzing with surprise tonight because the numbers in the dossier were not, in their cases, news.

His gaze landed on each of them in turn.

He did not say anything.

He didn't need to.

Carles Tusquets — the technical interim president from the months before Laporta's election, kept on in an advisory capacity for the transition, his hand currently flat on the table in front of him — found a point on the wood and looked at it. Two seats down, an older board mber whose loyalty had been sufficiently elastic to survive several administrations adjusted his cuff. A third — Joan Oliver, who had been part of the financial committee under Bartou — opened a folder in front of him that did not need to be opened.

The wincing was not visible to anyone who was not looking for it.

Laporta was looking for it.

He let his eyes move on.

"This—" He turned his attention back to the room as a whole. His voice had not risen. If anything it had gone lower, the specific lower that authority arrives at when the person carrying it does not want to share it with the air. "This is not the mont for this."

He said it once.

Then again, slightly softer:

"This is not the mont for this."

He let it sit.

"We are not — at this table, in this room, on this night — going to begin from the position of who knew what and when. We are not going to apportion responsibility for decisions that were made in this building before the current administration took office. We are not going to perform the theatre of discovery for the benefit of any individual person's record." His eyes flickered, very briefly, back toward the n he had looked at monts ago. "We can have those conversations. We will, eventually, have those conversations. But not here. Not today."

He paused.

"This club," he said, "is in the greatest crisis of its existence."

The words landed differently from anything else that had been said in the room.

"I want to be clear with everyone in this room about what that ans. I am not using the word loosely. I am not deploying it for emphasis. I am using it because there is no other word in any of the languages we speak that adequately describes the position FC Barcelona currently occupies, and I would rather we begin from honesty than from the more comfortable alternatives."

He moved his hand. Slowly. Indicating the dossier in front of Deco.

"What you have read, sporting director, is not an opinion. It is not a projection. It is the audited financial position of this club as of three weeks ago, prepared by the team Mr. Reverter has assembled, verified by external counsel, and signed off on by people who do not have a professional interest in exaggerating it." He looked around the table. "Every figure in there is real. Every commitnt is real. Every liability is real. There is nothing in that dossier that has been added for effect."

He paused.

"If I had a less accurate number to give you, I would give it to you. I do not have one."

The room sat with this.

"What we have," he said, "is each other. We have the work in front of us. We have the ti available to do that work, which is shorter than any of us would prefer. And we have a fan base outside this building tonight — you can hear them — who do not currently understand that the announcent they are protesting may be one of the only things keeping this institution alive."

He let that sit too.

"I know that is uncomfortable. I know how it sounds. I am not asking anyone in this room to be comfortable with it. I am asking everyone in this room to be clear about it. We will deal with the uncomfortable parts of this in their proper order. Tonight we deal with the clear parts."

He looked at Reverter.

Reverter was already opening his folder.

"Ferran," Laporta said. "Take us through it."

Across the table, Patrick Kluivert sat very still.

Patrick had not spoken since he arrived. He was the director of La Masía and an academy director in this kind of eting was the lowest of the senior attendees, included tonight not because his role required it but because Reverter had drawn the boundaries of "senior staff who needed to hear this" generously. He had assud, walking into the building, that this might be the eting in which the shape of his employnt changed.

He had not been called in for a one-on-one in these weeks. He had been keeping a low profile. He had been, at the back of his mind, preparing for a conversation he was not yet sure how to have.

He had not been brought into this conversation tonight to be sacked.

He understood that now.

He looked at the room — at the dossier, at the faces around the table, at the very specific quality of crisis that filled a room when the crisis exceeded the available administrative bandwidth — and he understood with the clean, slightly shaful clarity that arrives in monts like this:

They have bigger fish to fry.

A small, private part of him exhaled.

Which ans I still have ti.

He knew, even as the thought ford, that it was not the most flattering thought a person could be having in this room. He was aware of it. He filed it, quietly, alongside the other thoughts he kept filed, and he composed his face into the appropriate expression of professional gravity, and he turned his attention to Reverter who was beginning to speak.

He was not, it should be said, the only person in the room having that kind of thought.

You could see it if you looked carefully — and Laporta was looking carefully, because looking carefully was a thing he did even while doing other things. The marketing director was already calculating which of his current sponsorship targets would survive a Super League fallout and which would need to be reapproached on different terms. One of the legal team was considering whether the indemnity clauses in his own contract would hold if the club entered a regulatory dispute with UEFA. A senior comrcial executive was thinking about a job offer she had received two weeks ago and had not yet responded to. The institutional vice-president was thinking about how this conversation would land in the press if any portion of it leaked.

It was not personal failure. It was not even particularly cynical. It was simply the truth that people in rooms like this one had been trained, over the long course of their careers, to identify their interests inside any situation and to track those interests in parallel with whatever else they were doing. It was the only mode of operation most of them had. It was how they had arrived in rooms like this in the first place.

Laporta knew this.

He had counted on it.

It was, in fact, easier to manage a room of self-interested professionals than a room of true believers, because self-interest was predictable and could be addressed structurally, while belief was unpredictable and could turn on you without warning.

He gestured to Reverter.

Reverter began.

The next hour moved.

It moved the way etings of genuine consequence move — not in dramatic beats but in a kind of accumulating, technical, unglamorous gravity, the language professional and dense, the participants doing the specific work of taking a problem of impossible size and breaking it into pieces small enough to be assigned to individual people.

Reverter took them through the financials in the order he had constructed for the dossier.

Total liabilities: in excess of one billion euros, distributed across a structure that included club debt, deferred wages, transfer instalnts owed to other clubs, infrastructure financing for the partial stadium works that had been undertaken before being suspended, tax obligations being negotiated with the Spanish authorities, and a category Reverter described, neutrally, as miscellaneous.

The miscellaneous category was nearly a hundred million euros.

Rou, the financial vice-president, walked them through the cash flow position. Wages currently exceeded revenue by a margin that would not be sustainable beyond the end of the current fiscal year. The Goldman Sachs facility — the loan Laporta had been negotiating for the past several weeks and which had been confird at preliminary terms three days before the Super League announcent — would address the imdiate liquidity problem. It would not address the structural one.

"What it buys us," Rou said, "is twelve months. It buys us the ability to pay wages this sumr and et the most pressing of our outstanding instalnts to other clubs. It does not solve the underlying imbalance. We will be back in this room with similar conversations within the year if we do not address the wage structure."

"Which is not optional," Laporta said.

"Which is not optional," Rou confird.

Yuste, the vice-president, asked the question that the room had been collectively waiting for soone to ask:

"What number are we targeting for wage reduction?"

Rou did not look at his folder.

"Forty percent," he said.

The room received this.

"Forty percent of the current wage bill," Rou continued, "would bring us to the regulatory limit imposed by La Liga's salary cap frawork, which we are currently in violation of and which has consequences for player registration that I do not need to explain to anyone in this room. Anything less than forty percent and we cannot register the squad we plan to field next season."

"Which players," Cardoner said, "are we talking about?"

Reverter looked at Deco.

Deco — who had recovered the composure he had lost twenty minutes ago, who was sitting forward now with the dossier open in front of him and a pen in his hand — answered.

"Several," he said. The voice steady. The voice of the man Laporta had hired, restored. "I will be honest with the room. The wage reduction we need cannot be achieved through trimming. We are not going to find forty percent through reduction in non-essential costs. The reduction has to co from the squad."

He looked around the table.

"Coutinho. Pjanić. Vidal — are not here but the residual obligations remain. Griezmann is the most complicated case. His wage is significant. His performances this season have not justified the wage. His resale value is depreciating. We are looking at all options, including a return to Atlético on terms that would absorb a portion of the wage. I am in early conversations."

He paused.

"ssi is the case I have been managing personally."

The room went very still.

"The wage envelope I was working from," Deco said, "before — tonight — was already constrained. I had been operating on the assumption that we could offer a reduced renewal in the range that the family had indicated they would consider. The actual envelope, as I now understand it, is below that range." He looked at Laporta. "Significantly below."

Laporta nodded once. "Continue."

"I will need to return to Jorge with revised paraters." Deco's voice carried no editorial. He was reporting. "I do not know what the family will accept. I do not know what offers they have from elsewhere. I will be candid with the room — there is a aningful possibility that what we can offer is not enough."

"Then it is not enough," Laporta said. Quietly. "We will not destroy this club to keep one player. " he said his voice dropping deeper his decision already made but coming out for the first ti as he then said "Even him."

Deco nodded.

"I want it on the record," Laporta added, "that I have personally instructed the sporting director to begin renewal conversations and to make a serious offer within the constraints we have. We are not — as so are going to suggest in the coming weeks — using the financial situation as cover for pushing him out. We are doing the work. The work may not produce the result we want. That is a different statent."

Reverter made a note.

The conversation moved to economic levers.

This was the section of the dossier that Reverter had labelled, with so delicacy, Strategic Asset Monetisation. In practical terms it ant the sale of future revenue streams — television rights, branding rights, a portion of the club's dia subsidiary Barça Studios — to investnt vehicles in exchange for imdiate liquidity.

"Mortgaging the future," Yuste said. The phrase he had been holding for the entire eting.

"Buying the present," Rou said. Not unkindly. "There is no version of this where we do not pay a price sowhere. The question is which price we pay and over what horizon."

"And the long-term implications—"

"Are real," Rou said. "Are not negligible. Are also better than the alternative, which is the loss of this club's competitive position for a generation. We can recover from selling future TV rights at a discount. We cannot recover from the loss of our players because we cannot register them."

Laporta listened to this exchange and let it run.

Then he intervened.

"I want to be clear about the levers," he said. "All of them. Because I think there has been so looseness in how this has been described in this room and the public conversation, and I want us to operate from the sa vocabulary."

He held up one finger.

"Lever one. Sale of a portion of La Liga television revenue rights for a fixed term. CVC, Sixth Street, similar structures. We are in conversations with multiple parties. The numbers being discussed in the public press are inaccurate in both directions. The actual envelope is — Eduard?"

"Between two hundred and two hundred and seventy million," Rou said, "for a twenty-five-year stake in a defined percentage of broadcasting revenue."

Two finger.

"Lever two. Sale of an external stake in Barça Studios. The dia subsidiary has been undervalued internally for years. We have the opportunity to bring in a partner — a serious partner, with capital and distribution capacity — and recapitalise the entity in a structure that allows us to retain control while accessing significant investnt. I have been in conversations with Socios on one track and a separate Arican group on another."

Three finger.

"Lever three, and the most sensitive. Branding and naming rights. The Camp Nou na has been carried by this club without sponsorship since the stadium opened. There is institutional resistance to changing that. I understand the resistance. I share elents of it. But we are operating in a market where Munich, Madrid, London, and every major English club has comrcial naming arrangents that are generating revenues we are not generating, and the question is no longer whether we can continue to absorb that gap. The question is which arrangent we accept."

He looked around the table.

"I will not pretend that selling the naming rights to Camp Nou is a small thing. It is not. I understand what it ans to the socis. I understand what it ans to the people outside this building tonight. But the math of refusing to discuss it has a cost that is also borne by those sa people, and I would rather be honest with them about the trade-off than perform a protection of identity while quietly going under."

He paused.

"Spotify."

The na landed in the room.

"Conversations are at a preliminary stage. They are advanced enough to be substantive. The structure under discussion would combine stadium naming with kit sponsorship in a unified package. The numbers, if the package closes on the terms we are pursuing, would aningfully change the financial picture I have just described."

"How aningfully," Cardoner asked.

"Significantly," Reverter said. "The combined package, if it lands at the upper end of the range, would replace and exceed the Rakuten arrangent that is currently coming to its end."

"Rakuten itself—"

"Will not be renewed at anything resembling the current level," Rou said flatly. "We have communicated through back channels. The conversations have been polite. The number they have indicated would not justify the disruption of the current relationship continuing. We will treat the Rakuten ending as a clean transition rather than a negotiation."

Juli Guiu — head of marketing, the person whose desk this transition would land on — straightened slightly.

"I want to flag sothing," he said, "that has not yet been raised. Our current revenue from kit sponsorship sits at — round numbers — fifty-five million per year. Bayern's current Adidas and main shirt arrangent, combined, generate north of one hundred and ten. PSG, between Accor and Nike, are at approximately one hundred and eighty. United, even in their current state, generated north of one-twenty last reported year. We are — I want to be careful about how I phrase this — we are under-monetised."

"Spectacularly under-monetised," Rou said.

"Spectacularly under-monetised," Guiu confird. "And I will say this directly to the room because soone needs to. We are about to play in our first Champions League final since 2015. We have just demolished Manchester City over two legs in a manner that has reset the global perception of this team. We have a seventeen-year-old who, if the marketing analytics I am reviewing this week are accurate, is currently the second most-followed account growth among footballers globally on a thirty-day rolling basis, behind only Mbappé during last World Cup season. We are in a position of comrcial leverage that we have not occupied in five years."

He looked around the table.

"If we are not prepared to use that leverage to demand market-rate sponsorship arrangents, we will not be able to lay this situation at the door of the wider market. We will have failed to do our job."

Laporta nodded. "Agreed."

"And the question of inbound sponsor confidence," Yuste said. "Given the Super League uncertainty—"

"Is a real question," Guiu said. "Is also one that I believe, on the basis of conversations we have had this week, is overstated. The major sponsors we are speaking to are not pulling out. They are renegotiating. They are using the Super League announcent as leverage in their negotiations with us, the way leverage is always used. We are responding by using our own leverage in return. The Champions League final is a useful piece of leverage. So is Mateo King."

The na landed in the room differently from any other na that had been said.

Not because of him personally. Because of the very specific comrcial reality he represented in a room that was talking about comrcial reality.

Laporta tilted his head slightly.

"On that subject," he said. "I want to formally minute sothing for this group, because I think it has not been fully appreciated by everyone present and it should be."

He looked at Deco. Then at Guiu. Then at the room.

"Mateo King is, as of this conversation, the single most valuable sporting and comrcial asset this football club has acquired in the last decade. I am not stating an opinion. I am stating an institutional fact. He is the asset around which, if we are intelligent, we will rebuild the sporting structure of this institution over the next ten years. I want everyone in this room — particularly those of you who manage the comrcial relationships that intersect with him — to operate from that understanding. We will not — as so clubs have done with players in similar positions — we will not commodify him at his current age in ways that compromise his developnt or our long-term position. We will, however, treat his presence at this club as the foundational comrcial story we tell every partner we negotiate with from this day forward."

He paused.

"That is an instruction. Not a suggestion."

Guiu nodded once.

The conversation moved to costs.

This was the section of the eting that Laporta had been most personally involved in preparing, and the section that produced the most visible discomfort across the table, because it was the section that proposed to touch every person in the building and the institutions around it.

"I have a list," Laporta said.

He did not produce it from a folder. He had it in his head. He had been working on it for weeks, refining and revising, the specific list of operational expenditures that he had identified as either non-essential, excessive, or both.

He went through it.

The lunch arrangents at the training ground. The provision of full als at the offices for senior staff. The fleet of vehicles maintained for executive use. The number of consulting contracts that had accumulated under previous administrations and that, on review, were producing deliverables that no one in the building could clearly identify. The travel budget for non-essential staff attending away matches. The protocol arrangents for visiting dignitaries. The size of the executive box allocations. The stipends provided to certain eritus figures connected to the institution. The institutional relationships with vendors who had been operating on the sa terms for fifteen years without the relationships being subjected to any competitive review.

The list went on for several minutes.

He did not speak about it angrily. He spoke about it the way a man speaks about a list that he has lived with for long enough that it has beco familiar to him.

"None of these things on their own will save the institution," he said when he had finished. "I am aware of that. I want to be candid about it. The total annual savings from the items I have just listed, taken together, is approximately twenty-two million euros. In the context of the financial picture Eduard has just described, that is not a transformative number."

He paused.

"It is, however, twenty-two million euros."

He let that land.

"And it is a signal. It is a signal to the people outside this building, to the socis, to the players whose wages we are about to ask to reduce, to the partners whose contracts we are about to renegotiate, that this institution is prepared to begin its corrections at the top. We cannot ask the dressing room to take a wage reduction while the executive floor is still being served full lunches. We cannot ask supporters to pay higher mbership fees while consulting contracts of indeterminate value remain on the books. The signal is not optional. The signal is part of the work."

He nodded once.

"Which brings to the wider sporting structure."

The eting opened up.

The n's first team had been the implicit subject of every conversation up to this point, but the wider sporting structure of FC Barcelona — the won's team, the basketball club, the handball club, the futsal team, the academy, the youth pyramid — had its own set of considerations and its own specific officials in this room who were responsible for them.

The won's team was discussed first.

The performance had been transformational. The Champions League final the won's side had reached this season was its own comrcial story, distinct from the n's and increasingly significant in its own right. The wage and operational footprint, while a fraction of the n's, was growing as the success grew. Laporta was direct: the won's side would not be cut back. It would be invested in. The growth of the won's ga was, in his stated view, both a sporting and comrcial opportunity that the institution had been undercapitalising for years. There was no version of the financial restructuring that would touch the won's team's competitive resources.

The basketball club — Barça's basketball team being one of the most successful in European basketball — was the subject of more difficult conversation. The wage structure on the basketball side was disproportionate to its revenue generation. There would have to be reductions. The sporting director on the basketball side, who was attending by video link, took the conversation professionally.

The handball team — significantly more constrained even in its current form — would be left largely alone.

The futsal section's budget would be reviewed.

The academy — La Masía itself — would be fully protected. This was Laporta's phrase, used twice. The academy was the future and the future was the only thing this institution actually owned. Investnt would continue. Patrick, listening, made a small private note of the sentence.

The conversation moved to coaching.

This was where Reverter took the lead, because the coaching question intersected with the financial question in ways that needed to be precisely managed.

"Koeman's position," Reverter said, "is technically settled through the end of next season. We have honoured the existing contract. The discussion to be had — and I am putting this on the table, not advocating one position — is whether the trajectory of this season's results changes the strategic question of long-term coaching alignnt. If we win the Champions League and finish strongly in the league—"

"There is no question," Laporta said. "He stays."

The room turned.

"There is no question," Laporta said again. "I will be very direct. I have not been Koeman's loudest advocate. He was the appointnt of the previous administration. There were stylistic questions about his football. There was a public perception, going into this season, that the chemistry between him and the dressing room was not optimal. I ca in expecting that this would be a one-season arrangent and we would move forward from there."

He paused.

"What he has done with this team this season has changed my view. He has stabilised a dressing room that lost Suárez in the worst possible way. He has integrated Mateo into the first team with more sensitivity than I would have credited him with. He has navigated ssi's situation with discretion. He has produced a Champions League final and is on the verge of a league title we should not, in honesty, have been competitive for."

He looked at the table.

"He stays. Through the end of his current contract, with a renewal conversation to be had at the appropriate mont based on results. I will not have it suggested in the press over the next month that we are exploring alternatives. We are not."

Reverter made a note.

"On the longer-term coaching question," Laporta added, "I have been having conversations with one person privately. I will na him in this room because the room needs to know, but the na does not leave this room until I am ready to make it public. Xavi."

The room received this.

"Conversations are exploratory. He is at Al Sadd. He is committed there for a further period. He has indicated openness, in principle, to a return when his current obligations permit and when the institutional conditions are right. I have not made him a formal offer. I do not intend to make him a formal offer until and unless we are in a position to do so cleanly and at a mont that respects Koeman's tenure. I am telling the room because if any of you receive press inquiries on this subject in the coming months, I want you to understand the actual state of the conversation rather than the imagined state."

Cardoner nodded.

"On the broader sporting strategy," Laporta said, "I will be brief, because the work on this has been ongoing in conversations between Deco, Patrick, and the football operations group, and I do not need to litigate it from the chair. The headline is this: we will rebuild around La Masía. We will rebuild around Mateo, around Pedri, around Araujo, around the players we have produced and will produce. We will be selective about external acquisitions and we will pay attention to wage profile and resale value in a way that this club has not, in recent years, paid attention to either. We will not — as so have done — chase aging stars at peak wages in order to compensate for a lack of structural patience. The Coutinhos and Griezmanns of the last cycle will be examined in the audit Reverter is producing, and the lessons will be implented institutionally."

He looked at Deco.

"On Mateo specifically, I want to put one further thing on record."

The room turned.

"He is not for sale. He will not be for sale. There will be approaches. So of those approaches will, in the next twelve to eighteen months, exceed any transfer fee that has ever been paid in the history of this sport. I am telling the room now, in this eting, that no number from any club in any structure will move him while I am president of this institution. I am instructing the sporting director and the legal team to begin work on finalizing the renewal of his current contract in the coming months. I will expand on that in the appropriate forum. I am putting it on this record now."

Deco nodded once.

"And the sa protection," Laporta added, "applies — within reason and with respect to the realities of squad balance and individual circumstance — to Pedri, and to the other academy graduates we are building around. We are not in the business of selling our own future to fund our past mistakes. We will do better than that."

The conversation moved to the Super League.

This was the section the public was most aware of and, paradoxically, the section the room had the least appetite to extend, because the room had spent the last forty-eight hours absorbing the political fallout and the operational discussion was, in the end, narrow.

"My position on the Super League," Laporta said, "is this. The project is a credible response to a real problem in European football's revenue distribution, which is heavily skewed in favour of UEFA's central administration and against the clubs that produce the actual sporting product. The financial guarantees, in the structure that has been negotiated, are significant and would, if they materialise, address a substantial portion of the gap we have just been discussing."

He paused.

"That is the case for it."

Another pause.

"The case against it is that we are operating in a regulatory environnt in which UEFA holds enormous structural leverage. Čeferin has indicated he is prepared to use that leverage. La Liga has indicated similar. The Premier League clubs, under dostic political pressure, are wobbling. The English participation, on which much of the project's comrcial logic depends, is — frankly — unlikely to hold. As of this conversation tonight, my private estimate of the project's viability in its currently-announced form is around fifty percent, and falling."

The room received this.

"Which ans," Laporta continued, "that anyone in this room who is currently treating the Super League announcent as the load-bearing elent of our financial recovery strategy is making a strategic error. We treat the Super League as one possible lever among several. We do not —do not — restructure the institution around its success. We restructure the institution around a recovery plan that holds up if the Super League fails entirely, and treats any Super League proceeds, if they materialise, as additional capital."

He looked around the table.

"Čeferin is not soone I will underestimate. He has shown, repeatedly, that when his back is to a wall he is prepared to use the regulatory tools available to him in ways that surprise the institutions he uses them on. We will not be one of those institutions. We will not assu the Super League holds. We will, internally, plan for its failure. We will, externally, defend its premises and our participation while it remains in negotiation. And if it falls — and it may fall — we will already be operationally positioned for that outco."

Reverter wrote this down precisely.

"On that subject," Laporta added, looking at Yuste, "I want a contingency communication plan prepared in the next forty-eight hours for the scenario in which any other teams participation collapses. I want to be ready to communicate clearly to socis and to dia in the mont that happens. We will not be caught with our ssaging unprepared."

Yuste nodded.

The clock had moved.

The room had been at this for over two hours and the dossier had been worked through to a level of granularity that exceeded anyone's initial expectation. Pages were marked. Notes were taken. Specific assignnts had been made. The branding portfolio reorganisation had been allocated to Guiu's team with a four-week deliverable. The wage reduction model had been allocated to Rou and Deco jointly, with an eight-week deliverable. The Espai Barça financing structure had been allocated to a sub-committee. The Super League contingency planning had been allocated to Yuste.

Sleeves had, at various points in the eting, been rolled. Jackets had co off. The tie at Cardoner's collar had loosened. Coffee had been replenished twice. The room had moved from the controlled hostility of its opening minutes to the dense, professional, almost intimate working concentration of a senior team that was, despite itself, beginning to operate as one.

Laporta watched it happen.

He had, throughout, said less than he expected to. The structure of the eting had been designed to allow the people in the room to arrive at the necessary conclusions through their own professional reasoning, and the eting had, by and large, done that. The board mbers who had been most resistant at the opening had beco, over the course of two hours, the most engaged in the operational planning. The new appointees had earned their seats. Deco had, after his initial difficulty, perford exactly the way Laporta had hoped he would.

The man was a hire. The man was the right hire. He had needed to know the truth before he could be the right hire, and he now knew the truth, and the cost of his knowing the truth had been a small and tolerable scene at the start of an evening.

That was acceptable.

Reverter looked at Laporta.

Laporta nodded.

He pushed his chair back slightly.

The room registered the motion and adjusted. The note-taking finished. Pens were set down. The professional concentration of the last two hours found its way to a pause.

Laporta stood.

He did not move from his place at the head of the table. He did not gesture broadly. He stood, simply, with his hands resting on the back of his chair, and he looked at the room.

"I am going to keep this short," he said.

His voice had sothing in it that had not been in it earlier. Not the calm authority of the opening. Not the technical precision of the middle. Sothing quieter, and older, and more difficult to na.

"What we are doing — what we have started doing tonight — is not work that can be done by any one of us alone. It is not work that can be done by a president, or a CEO, or a sporting director, or a marketing departnt, or a financial committee. It is work that can only be done by all of us, together, in a coordination that this institution has not, in recent years, demonstrated it is capable of."

He paused.

"I am asking you to demonstrate it."

He looked around the table.

"Every one of you in this room holds a portion of this institution's future in your hands. The socis outside this building tonight — the ones chanting my na in a tone I would prefer they did not — they do not know that. They do not know that this room exists or that the people in it are deciding things that will determine what their grandchildren inherit. They will never know it the way you know it. That asymtry is part of what it ans to do this work. We bear knowledge they do not have, and we bear it on their behalf, and we do not get to ask them for the recognition of it."

He let that sit.

"I am not interested in your gratitude. I am not asking for your loyalty to personally. I am not, in the dium term, even particularly interested in whether you continue to like , because the next several months will, in honesty, contain decisions that no one in this room will entirely like, and I would rather we be honest about that now than discover it together later."

He paused.

"What I am asking for is your work. Your professional, focused, undivided work for the next twelve to eighteen months. I am asking you to set aside the calculations so of you have been running this evening about your own positions, your own contracts, your own next moves — and I see you, and I do not bla you for running them, but I am asking you to set them aside — and to give this institution the work it requires."

He looked at the dossier in front of him.

"Again,This is the greatest crisis in the history of FC Barcelona. I will not tell you that it is anything else, because it is not anything else. But it is also a crisis we are, as of tonight, equipped to address. We have a plan. We have begun to allocate the work. We have the people in this room who are capable of doing the work."

He raised his eyes.

"What we do in this building over the next year will determine whether, fifty years from now, FC Barcelona is still a serious football institution or whether it is a museum to one. That is the actual stake. I am not exaggerating it. I am not deploying the sentence for effect. It is the literal description of where we are."

He paused.

"And I am telling you, with the full weight of what I am telling you — we are going to do this. I do not know yet how all of it works out. I do not know which of the levers will close at which numbers. I do not know how the Super League resolves. I do not know what the wage structure will allow us to register in the autumn. I do not know who, among the players we love most, we will be able to retain."

He stopped.

"But I know this room. And I know what this room can do. And I know what this club has been through before and survived, and I know what this club is, underneath all of the noise outside the window, and I am telling you tonight that we will get this institution through this period and we will hand it on to whoever cos after us in better condition than we received it."

He looked at the table.

"That is the work. That is the only work."

The room was completely silent.

He let it be silent for a mont longer than the room expected.

Then he straightened.

"Thank you," he said. The voice quieter again, returning to its working register. "I will be in my office for the next two hours if anyone wishes to follow up on any of the items we have discussed. Mr. Reverter will circulate the action points by morning."

He looked at the table one final ti.

"You all can leave now."

Chairs moved.

The room began the slow, professional dispersion of a eting that had ended without anyone feeling, exactly, that it had ended — the participants gathering papers, exchanging brief words with the colleagues nearest them, shaking hands across the table in the small acknowledgnts that mark the end of difficult sessions.

Deco passed Laporta as he moved toward the door.

He did not say anything.

He did not need to.

Laporta watched him go.

Then he looked at Reverter, who had remained at the table, and the two of them shared the single, brief, understood look of two n who had just done the first hour of a year's worth of work and knew what the rest of it was going to cost.

Outside the window, the chanting continued.

It was not going to stop tonight.

Laporta turned away from the table.

Walked back to the window.

Looked down.

..

Down below, the protest had moved.

Not in scale — the crowd was still the crowd, still stretching the length of the facade, still spilling around both sides of the building. But the quality had shifted in the way crowds shift when they have been at sothing for long enough that the original grievance has compounded with the simple physical accumulation of standing in one place too long with too many other unhappy people. The chanting had a different edge to it now. The placards were being held with more aggression. Near the main gate, two figures were pushing against the Mossos line and being pushed back, the controlled professional pressure of a barricade absorbing the kind of contact that had not been there ninety minutes ago.

A bottle had landed sowhere near the front of the gathering. Laporta could see the spot where it had broken, the small wet mark on the paving, the cluster of people that had briefly redistributed around the impact and then closed back over it.

It was nothing yet. It was sothing on the way to being sothing.

He watched it.

His face did not move.

I'm sorry for what I am about to do.

The thought arrived clean and honest, the way thoughts arrived to him when he was not performing them for anyone. He let it sit. He did not refuse it and he did not soften it.

He was sorry. That part was true. He was sorry for the people he had just watched standing in the dark for hours chanting his na in a tone he had earned. He was sorry for the socis who had not been told and would not be told and whose love for this institution was about to be used as a load-bearing elent in a structural repair they would never see the blueprints for.

He was going to do it anyway.

That part was also true.

You should have explained tonight, the thought continued — not accusatory, just informational, the small interior voice he reserved for monts when he was checking his own work. You should have told them. The board. Not the technical version. The real version.

He had told them the technical version.

He had told them the version Spanish corporate practice required him to tell them, which was not — and this was sothing he had checked carefully with the institutional lawyers two weeks ago — the sa as the version a fully discretionary executive would have given a fully consultative board. FC Barcelona was mber-owned. The board structure was its own particular hybrid. But the directors he reported to operated under the broad umbrella of Spanish corporate-style governance norms, and those norms imposed real expectations — disclosure of material financial issues, presentation of strategic plans of consequence, the kind of structured transparency that produced minutes and signatures and a paper trail that survived auditors and, in the worst cases, prosecutors.

He had needed to be on the record with the board.

Not because he respected them — he respected so of them and viewed others as exactly the kind of resident incumbents whose continued presence was part of the institution's problem — but because the next several months were going to require him to make decisions that would, at so later date, be examined by parties who were specifically looking for grounds to attack him on. The press. Rival candidates already positioning for the next election cycle. Whichever board mbers in this room were already considering what they would say to investigators if any portion of what was about to happen produced one. The journalists he had already identified as the stubborn ones, who had not been fully redirected by the Super League announcent and would keep digging.

He could not give them the gift of having concealed the situation from his own board.

It would have been easier. It would have spared him this evening. It would have spared him Deco's face during the first twenty minutes of the eting, which he had felt physically across the table and would think about later when he was alone. But it would have been a gift to his eventual enemies and he was not in a position to be giving gifts to anyone right now.

So he had told them.

The technical version. The version that satisfied the disclosure obligation and produced the paper trail and put the board on notice. Not — not yet — the version that included every line he had personally drawn and every line he had personally chosen to cross.

Above board, he thought. That is the phrase. Above the line you can be seen above.

He let the words sit. He did not particularly enjoy them.

The chanting outside picked up again — a new song starting, the rhythm of it carrying up through the glass.

He was still standing at the window when the door behind him opened.

He did not need to turn around to know.

He turned anyway.

Deco was in the doorway.

He had not knocked. The door had simply opened and he had co through it the way a man cos through a door when he has decided that whatever he is about to say is significant enough that the ordinary courtesy of being announced is a delay he is not prepared to absorb. He was holding the dossier in one hand. His tie had loosened slightly since the eting. The composure he had recovered during the second hour of the boardroom session was still on him, but it was the composure of a man who had used a great deal of energy maintaining it and was beginning to find it expensive.

Laporta exhaled.

A small, almost-smile crossed the side of his mouth — not warm, not unwarm, the specific resignation of a man who had been waiting for this and was glad, in a way he could not have explained, that the wait had been short.

"I was expecting you," he said.

Deco closed the door.

He did not move further into the room. He stood just inside it, the dossier in his hand, his eyes on Laporta with the directness of a man who had used the walk over here to settle exactly what he was going to say.

"We have sothing to talk about."

"Yes," Laporta said. Quietly. "We have."

Deco ca forward. Not all the way — he stopped at the edge of the desk, the dossier coming down onto the surface of it with the small definite sound of an object being placed rather than dropped.

"I know we talked about paraters," he said. "Earlier. With the ssi camp. I know what you said, and I know the instruction you gave, and I want to be clear that I am not — I am not refusing the instruction."

He paused.

Laporta turned back toward the window.

The crowd was still there. The bottle's wet mark on the paving still visible from this height. Two new figures had arrived at the front of the line and were being managed by the Mossos.

He did not interrupt.

"But, President—" Deco's voice was steady. "I have to be honest with you about what I am being asked to do. With the numbers I saw tonight. With the actual envelope I am now operating from."

A pause. A breath taken.

"It will not work."

He said it simply.

"It will not work. I want to say it directly, and I want to say it in this room while it is just us, because I think we did not say it in the eting and I think we did not say it because none of us — including , including the room — wanted to put the sentence into the air. We talked around it. We talked about paraters and offers and making a serious offer within the constraints we have. We did not say what the constraints actually an."

Laporta closed his eyes.

He did not turn back from the window. He simply closed his eyes, and his head dropped forward by perhaps half a degree, the small private acknowledgnt of a man receiving confirmation of sothing he had already known.

He had known.

He had known for weeks. He had known when he sat with Reverter the first ti and the actual numbers ca out of the audit. He had known when he had looked at the offer envelope his finance team had built out and had, very carefully, not asked Deco to put a precise figure on what Jorge ssi had indicated the family would consider, because he had not wanted to be the man who had to write the gap down on a piece of paper.

The whole room had been doing the sa dance. He had watched it happen. The euphemisms — the constraints we have, the realities of the wage envelope, the honest possibility that what we can offer is not enough — had been chosen by intelligent n to allow them to discuss the thing without naming it. Even the directors who had sat through all of it, the ones who had heard every figure Rou had walked them through, had collectively avoided the simple sentence Deco was now putting on Laporta's desk.

It was a sentence too cold for a room that contained any quantity of love for what FC Barcelona had been.

It needed to be said sowhere by soone, eventually.

Deco was saying it now.

"With those numbers," Deco continued — quieter, but steady — "there is no version of a renewal offer that the family will sign. To be honest There is nothing we can even offer. Not a discount. Not a deferral. Not a creative structure with image rights and a longer term and a back-loaded escalation. None of it. The gap between what we can offer and what we are allowed offer him is not a gap we can paper over. It is — it is the whole docunt, President. It is everything."

Laporta opened his eyes.

He kept looking at the window.

The protesters. The bottle. The two figures at the gate. Sowhere in the middle of all of it, the love of an institution that had been built across a hundred and twenty years and was, at this specific mont in its history, looking for a man to bla for what was happening to it.

He had volunteered for the job.

He had run for the job specifically because the job needed soone to volunteer for it.

He thought, briefly, about Cruyff — the conversation they had had years ago, the man's specific way of saying difficult things without flinching from them. He thought about his father. He thought about the night he had decided to run the second ti, when his wife had asked him whether he understood what it was going to cost, and he had said yes, and they had both known he was lying about the size of the yes but not about the direction of it.

He thought about ssi.

He thought about ssi very specifically — about the boy who had arrived at La Masía at thirteen on a paper napkin, about the player who had carried this institution on his back for fifteen years, about the man who would tomorrow morning hear about a renewal offer that was not really an offer and would understand, in the precise way that he understood everything, exactly what was being said to him underneath the words.

He thought about whether he was the person who should be doing this.

He thought, with the specific clarity that arrived only at this hour of this kind of evening, that the question was no longer interesting. He was the person doing this because he was the person who had been given the position, and the position required soone to do it, and there was no other version of him available to be a different person inside the sa job.

He turned.

He looked at Deco.

When he spoke, his voice was the voice he used when he was not negotiating with the room or with himself. It was the voice he used when he had arrived at the centre of a decision and was reporting the decision rather than building toward it.

"I have told you," he said. "I will not let anyone be above the club."

A pause.

"Even him."

The words sat between them.

They did not need to be loud. They were not loud. The quality of them ca from underneath — from the specific weight a sentence carries when the person speaking it has already paid for the right to say it, has already decided what it will cost, and is no longer interested in pretending it will cost less than it will.

Deco felt it.

Anyone in the room would have felt it.

It was the sound of a man who had decided, sowhere across the last several weeks, that he would be the villain of this chapter of the institution's story if that was what the chapter required — that he would absorb the chants outside the window, the placards with his face on them, the columns and editorials and the eventual books that would, in their various ways, render their verdicts on him — and that he would do all of it because the alternative was a club that did not survive long enough to have anyone rember whether he had been loved or hated.

Hero or villain, the thought ran through him, in the particular shape it had been running for weeks now. They will decide later. That is not my decision. My decision is whether the institution survives the year.

He looked at Deco.

Deco looked back at him.

A long mont.

Then Deco — slowly, the small absorbed movent of a man who had walked over here for a confrontation and had instead received a confirmation — nodded.

Once.

"Then I would continue," he said, "the preliminary talks. As you instructed."

The phrasing was careful. The phrasing was very careful. He said preliminary, which was the technical word, which was the word that allowed the conversation to proceed without committing either of them to a more honest characterisation of what those talks would be. Laporta heard it. Deco heard him hearing it.

It was the closest the two of them were going to co, in this room tonight, to acknowledging out loud that the talks were not really renewal talks anymore. They were the formal procedural step that was required before the inevitable could be announced as the inevitable rather than as a choice.

Laporta nodded back.

"Thank you, Deco."

Deco picked up the dossier.

He looked at it for a mont — the docunt that had detonated sothing in him an hour and a half ago and had reorganised, in ways he was still absorbing, his understanding of where he was working and what was being asked of him.

He did not say anything else.

He turned. Walked to the door. Opened it. Closed it behind him with the quiet, deliberate care of a man who had absorbed sothing and was now going ho with it.

The room went quiet.

In the corner, Ferran Reverter — who had been there the whole ti, sitting at the small table near the bookshelf with a folder open in front of him, doing the specific professional work of being present without imposing on a conversation that was not his to enter — looked up.

He had not spoken in twenty minutes.

He had heard everything.

He was looking at his phone.

The screen was lit. A notification was showing. He read it. Read it again. He set the phone down, face up, and looked across the room at Laporta, who was still standing where Deco had left him.

Reverter's voice, when it ca, was the working register of a man who had a great deal of practice at moving difficult monts forward.

"Sir."

Laporta turned.

"It's ti for the call."

A/N

If you want to read chapters ahead with uploads and to support subscribe to my Patreon below There is also a picture of how mateo looks like posted and later there would be votes and all on the site so you wont need to pay to vote but you can if you want to support thanks

patreon/David_Adetola

Thank You your support is greatly appreciated thank you all