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The national team's official documentary was filmed in the training center lounge. De Paul took the center of the sofa, Paredes and Dibu flanking him on either side. Under the lights, three large men sitting shoulder to shoulder made a generous sofa look suddenly undersized.
"Just be yourselves," the PD said. "Locker-room energy. Exactly as you are."
He should never have said that.
---
"De Paul — we have to start with the nickname, of course. 'The Captain's Bodyguard.'"
"Bodyguard, please." Paredes snorted his way into the conversation. "He's a kept man."
"It's true." Dibu nodded, chin tipping toward De Paul. "There's a leash on him. You just can't see it."
The PD laughed and angled the microphone toward De Paul. "No objection? That doesn't feel unfair to you?"
De Paul took a sip of water. Then he answered with a perfectly straight face.
"If one person is going to hold the leash, someone has to be willing to wear it."
"...I'm sorry?"
"And a dog on a leash is a happy dog. It all depends on who's holding the other end."
Silence took the lounge for a moment. The PD looked down at his question cards, back up at De Paul, then over at the camera operator, as if one of them might explain. Paredes waved a practiced hand.
"He's always like this."
"You'll acclimate quickly," Dibu added, unbothered.
---
"There's a story going around that the captain plans every away trip himself."
"Every detail." Dibu counted them off on his fingers. "Recovery sessions, the walking route, the estimated duration of the walking route. The man is a spreadsheet with a jawline."
"Honestly, though—" the PD leaned in, mischief rising. "Doesn't that get exhausting? If it were me, I'd want a little free time on the road."
"No."
The answer arrived before the question had fully landed. De Paul looked directly into the lens and continued.
"Leo makes extraordinarily wise decisions. In my entire life, I have not once been disappointed by one of them."
"Not once?"
"No. Statistically zero."
Paredes sighed at the ceiling.
"Still..." The PD proceeded carefully, the way one approaches an unfamiliar dog. "There must be one thing the captain isn't good at."
"Stocks." Paredes and Dibu said it in unison.
"Stocks?"
"He bought something last year," Paredes said, delighted, scooting forward on the sofa. "Still in the red. You open the captain's lock screen, the graph looks like a ski slope. Black diamond."
"On the pitch, the most clinical man alive." Dibu was fighting a smile and losing. "In front of a stock chart? A hopeless romantic. Once he buys, he never sells. He holds out of loyalty."
"Off the pitch, honestly, kind of a mess." Paredes cackled. "But that's exactly why everyone loves him more. Turns out he's human."
"A man needs a flaw or two," Dibu concluded, nodding sagely. "It's only decent."
"I'd frame that differently, if I may." De Paul raised a hand. It was a very serious hand. "That particular stock — anyone else buys it, it's minus ten. Because Leo bought it, it is holding, miraculously, at minus two."
Silence. Considerably longer than the first one.
"...Wow." Paredes ran both palms down his arms. "Genuinely frightening, at this point."
"I've seen this somewhere." Dibu snapped his fingers. "A documentary. The one with the cult."
"I stated a fact."
---
"Last question. We've received a report that at the most recent team dinner, you peeled every one of the captain's prawns for him."
"That's not a report. That's the record." De Paul accepted the charge without a flicker.
"Then hypothetically—" the PD's eyes gleamed. "A team dinner you can't attend. Another player peels the captain's prawns instead. How does that sit with you?"
For the first time all interview, De Paul hesitated. A shallow crease settled between his brows.
"...Honestly? I think I'd be a little jealous."
Paredes and Dibu let out a chorus of jeers. The PD was already savoring his follow-up when De Paul's expression shifted into something strange.
"Wait."
"Yes?"
"If I'm not there, and nobody peels them — then Leo doesn't get to eat the prawns at all."
"Well, that's—"
De Paul's back left the sofa entirely. He jabbed a finger past the camera lens, at some point behind it — at the entire future team who would one day watch this footage.
"If Leo isn't eating because he doesn't want his hands dirty, you read the room and you peel them for him — what are you all standing around for, you useless bastards!"
The PD sat frozen, question cards in hand, visibly calculating how much of that sentence could survive broadcast standards.
"This is not a one-time thing," Paredes whispered to him, in the voice of a very tired man. Dibu was already shaking his head.
"We can... bleep that section. In the edit. We'll take care of it."
"No — run it." De Paul settled back against the sofa, entirely shameless. "That's an all-team announcement."
---
The uncut footage landed in the team group chat that same night, in its entirety, due to an error by the national team's editorial staff. That, at least, was Dibu's official position.
Messi had just finished his recovery stretches and was sitting on the edge of his bed checking his phone when he pressed play. Beginning to end, once. Then — unable to quite believe it — the leash section again, twice.
The group chat was already a festival. Beneath a dog emoji posted by Paredes, roughly a dozen identical dogs had lined up in solidarity.
"Rodri."
From the living-room floor, mid-foam-roll, De Paul turned only his head. "Hey, Leo."
"What exactly did you say in that interview."
"Hm? Which part?"
"The happy dog on the leash." Messi held up his phone. On the screen, De Paul was in the middle of expounding, with great sincerity, on canine contentment. "This. What is this."
"Ah." De Paul sat up off the roller. "That made the cut?"
"The uncut version is in the group chat. The entire squad has seen it." Messi set the phone down and pressed his fingers to his forehead. The heat had already climbed to the tips of his ears. "Rodri. People are going to think I actually have you on a string. I have never once ordered you to do anything. A leash — of all the metaphors. And why did the stocks come up. That's not me defending at minus two, that's just me being bad at stocks. That's the floor. I'm standing on the floor."
He had started the sentence intending to argue. And even while arguing, he knew: this wasn't anger so much as embarrassment, with a single spoonful of injustice stirred in. He could already see tomorrow's training ground — fifteen faces, every one of them fighting a smile.
De Paul sat on the floor and thought about it. Genuinely thought — the face of a man giving the matter honest deliberation. And then, instead of a correction, he offered something worse.
"The metaphor may have been strong. But it wasn't wrong."
"What?"
"Being next to you is my favorite thing in the world." He said it at no particular speed — not the tempo of a joke, not the tempo of an excuse. The tempo of a man remarking on a clear sky. "I just didn't know what to call it, so it came out like that."
Messi opened his mouth. He had material prepared, and he knew it was good material. Watch your words in front of a camera. It's the official channel. Sponsors watch that channel. Every point was correct, and every point quietly laid down its arms somewhere in his throat.
Against sincerity that flew that straight and that clean, there did not exist, anywhere in the world, a usable scolding.
"..."
What escaped first was a short breath through the nose, like air leaving a valve. Then his shoulders began to shake, minutely, and in the end Messi laughed without a sound, fingers still pressed to his forehead. The trouble with laughter born of sheer disbelief is that it lasts the longest.
"You are actually—"
"Not angry anymore?"
"I was never angry." Messi barely got his breathing back. "You can't be angry at this. It's not physically possible."
De Paul grinned, stood the foam roller against the wall, and rose. The face coming toward him was so utterly unrepentant that Messi nearly lost it all over again.
De Paul crossed the room. Straight into scolding range, without a trace of caution. Then he bent down and kissed him.
The lips that touched did not leave. It was a kiss with no hurry in it anywhere. De Paul's hand found the edge of the mattress and the bed dipped slightly toward him, and Messi, as if carried by that small tilt, closed his eyes a moment too late. How long it lasted was unclear. When their mouths parted, a low breath slipped out between them — and whose it had been, in the end, was impossible to say.
"...What was that." Messi opened his eyes a beat behind. "You think that settles it?"
"Yes."
It was outrageous, and the rebuttal came late. And the moment the rebuttal came late, the match was already lost.
Messi cleared his throat once, the heat not yet gone from his face, and turned his buzzing phone face-down — then, for no reason he could have defended, pushed it a little further out of reach.
"And about the prawns."
"Mm."
"I can peel my own prawns perfectly well. So tell them all to stand down." A pause. Then, a beat late and a shade quieter: "...I wasn't going to let anyone but you do it anyway."
It did not take long for De Paul's composure to collapse, helplessly, pleasurably, at the mouth.
"Now that sounds like an all-team announcement."
"Keep pushing and I'll show you what an actual dictator looks like."
Until the living-room lights went out, the laughter carried on for a good while longer.