God Of football

Chapter 1017: Can’t Stop What You Love!

Izan watched himself as the system zoomed in on the face, on the eyes specifically.

And there it was, the thing he’d forgotten about that version of himself, the thing that these last few years of winning and records and magazine covers had gradually buried under everything else.

The kid’s shoulders were down.

His body language was the body language of someone who had just been told that he wasn’t going to be able to do what he loved in life.

But his eyes, they were doing something else entirely.

The eyes showed strength, hunger, and above all, fascination with the round object he had been kicking around.

[That],the system said, [is not a kid who is ever going to lose his love for the game.]

Izan looked at the fourteen-year-old on the patchy grass in Alboraya for a moment longer.

Then the image shifted, and the system added:

[The World Cup is also not going to be a breeze.]

He frowned at that, wondering what that could mean, but when he asked, no response came.

"Helloooo," Izan thought, but it still didn’t come.

He frowned a bit before calling out, "System," and it was only then that the icy bluish glass interface appeared, but when it did, the voice that answered was different.

It was the same thing that had been with him since he was 14, but the voice he had just talked with now was nowhere to be found.

He even turned on the chatty feature, seeing if it could replicate the fatherly tone the system had used with him a while ago, but that wasn’t even close.

The interface sat there behind his eyes and offered no more than it had already given.

"That was really weird," he muttered as he got to his feet, and if he was saying something was weird with all that was going through his head, then it was weird.

He stood in the bleachers in the Tennessee night and looked at the pitch one more time, and then he turned and started walking down the steps, and under his breath, barely audible, he said: "I must be hallucinating. I need to sleep."

He made his way back towards the complex, and just as he had guessed, most of the boys were still not asleep.

"These guys," he muttered with a smirk as he got close to the recreational area that had been set up for them, which was still noisy as ever.

: Atlanta

The Mercedes-Benz Stadium held seventy-one thousand people, and on the afternoon of the fifteenth of June, it was in the process of discovering what it felt like when all seventy-one thousand of them arrived at the same time, in the same mood, for the same reason.

"OOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH—"

The sound hit you before you got inside.

That was the first thing.

You could be in the car park, still a quarter mile from the gates, and the noise would still feel like a truck was hitting.

It got so much that the air itself behaved differently in the vicinity of seventy thousand people who had been waiting days for this specific afternoon.

Inside the lower bowl, the Spain supporters had taken their section and turned it into something that looked, from the upper tiers, like a red and yellow fire that kept rearranging itself.

Flags the size of small rooms.

Scarves.

Faces painted.

And the intense group in the corner of the section, who had the drums and had already begun using them to the fullest!

"ES-PA-ÑA. ES-PA-ÑA. ES-PA-ÑA—"

In a bar in Madrid, forty-seven people who had arrived at opening time and had not left were watching the pre-match coverage on three screens simultaneously, arguing about the starting lineup.

In Barcelona, a woman had set up a television on her balcony facing the street because her flat was too small for everyone who had shown up.

Across the whole country, shops all had the same thing looming at their front.

15 DE JUNIO. CERRADO POR ESPAÑA. [Closed for Spain on the 15th]

And even if those shops hadn’t put up those signs, no one was going to come bother because at least for the 90 minutes and some that their national team was going to be on the TV, the whole nation was going to halt.

----

Even with their son, brother and boyfriend playing in the first World Cup game of his life, the Hernandez family had somehow still made it late.

They weren’t ’late late’ as Olivia termed it, but for a game which had filled the Mercedes Stadium 2 hours before the game, they were having a lot of faith in getting there before the match began, with all the traffic in town.

"Must be the VIP experience," Olivia joked as she lay on the large bed in the room while Hori called out to Miranda and her mother.

She was standing by the door in the red with blue-sleeved Spanish home kit, and on her back was her brother’s name coupled with the number 10.

It was a size bigger, but for a "well-endowed" fashion person like her, as she liked to call it, all she needed was to tie it into a cropped shirt.

"You are not getting dates at a football game. Can we go?"

Olivia, sitting on the edge of the bed in an identical kit, laughed before she could stop herself.

From the bathroom, the sound of Miranda and Komi finishing whatever they were finishing came.

Then the door opened, and Miranda came out first, then Komi behind her as the latter touched the small necklace she had worn to see if it was well placed, making Miranda facepalm after all the adjustments she had made to get it right for Komi.

"Done," the latter said as Hori stopped leaning against the door.

"Finally," she said, already turning out of the room.

"We’re not late," Komi said.

"We will be."

"We won’t."

"We already—"

Before Hori could make out the rest of her sentence, her mother’s hand found the back of her head with precise accuracy, showing the experience she’s gained from doing it over the years.

"Don’t talk to your mother like that," Komi said, and there was a smirk somewhere underneath it that she wasn’t entirely hiding.

Hori rubbed the back of her neck while Olivia pressed her lips together to keep from laughing again.

"I heard that first comment," Komi said again, not letting that go.

Hori frowned, but there wasn’t much she could do.

They walked out onto the elevator with Hori and Olivia, leading to watch Izan play his first World Cup game.