The drive back to his massive, echoing mansion in the hyper-exclusive neighborhood of Cheshire felt like an absolute funeral march.
Natán sat in the back of an expensive black Uber, staring blankly out the rain-streaked window at the dreary, grey English landscape.
His muscles throbbed with a dull, heavy ache from the grueling physical conditioning session, but it was his pride that truly hurt.
Pep Guardiola’s brutal, unyielding lecture had completely stripped him of his usual, boyish attitude.
He felt exposed.
He felt misunderstood.
When he finally unlocked the massive oak front doors of his house and stepped inside, the sheer, cavernous emptiness of the property hit him like a physical wall.
The house was freezing.
He still hadn’t completely figured out how to program the complex British central heating system, and his marble floors felt like slabs of solid ice beneath his damp socks.
He didn’t even bother turning on the main lights in the living room.
He just tossed his duffel bag onto the floor, stripped off his damp Manchester City tracksuit jacket, and collapsed heavily onto the massive, custom-built grey sectional sofa.
He stared up at the high ceiling, letting out a long, ragged sigh.
What a catastrophic, exhausting day.
Seeking a brief, mindless distraction from his own spiraling thoughts, Natán reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
He unlocked it, squinting as the bright screen illuminated his exhausted face in the dim room.
He had dozens of notifications—mostly Twitter tags of that humiliating bicycle video, and a few messages from his mother asking if he was eating enough vegetables.
But then, his eyes locked onto a single, verified direct message notification on Instagram.
It was from Kylie.
Natán’s heart instantly skipped a beat, a sudden, violent jolt of pure adrenaline flooding his exhausted system.
He sat up completely straight, his thumb hovering nervously over the screen.
He tapped the message, opening their chat thread.
Nice thumbs up, speed racer.
Next time you run away to a different country, at least leave a note.
Check your DMs.
I’m coming to Manchester.
“Oh my god!” Natán screamed out loud, the English words tumbling from his lips in a panicked, heavily accented shout.
He physically dropped his phone onto the plush sofa cushions as if the device had suddenly caught fire.
He sprang to his feet, pacing frantically around the massive coffee table, running both hands through his dark, messy hair.
She had seen the video.
That was mortifying enough.
But she was coming to Manchester?
Here?
To this miserable, freezing, perpetually grey city?
He was barely surviving his own life right now.
He was getting screamed at by Pep Guardiola, chased by maniacs in blue Corsas, and he couldn’t even parallel park.
The absolute last thing he was prepared for was navigating a romantic relationship with a billionaire American beauty mogul in the middle of all this chaos.
He snatched the phone back up, his thumbs flying across the digital keyboard with panicked, clumsy speed.
He didn’t even bother using a translation app, trusting his chaotic, broken English to get the desperate point across.
Natán: No, that’s not necessary.
He hit send, his heart pounding in his throat.
He watched the screen intensely.
Almost immediately, three small, grey typing bubbles appeared at the bottom of the chat.
She was active.
She was responding.
Kylie: Too late.
Natán groaned, throwing his head back against the backrest of the sofa.
He couldn’t let her do this.
She was a California girl.
She belonged in the sunshine, wearing designer sunglasses and sitting on pristine beaches.
If she stepped off a plane into the depressing, sideways drizzle of northwest England, she would be miserable.
Natán: You don’t have to chase me to Manchester?
It’s cold and rainy all the time.
He stared at the message, wincing slightly at his own phrasing.
Chase me.
It sounded arrogant, but he just didn’t know the proper English vocabulary to say ‘you don’t need to travel all this way just for me.’
The typing bubbles appeared again.
Kylie: Maybe I like the rain.
Natán: Um.
It’s not that nice.
Trust me.
Kylie: I could learn to like it.
Natán let out a frustrated breath.
She was incredibly stubborn.
It was one of the things he had found most attractive about her when they were eating paella and talking about her business empire, but right now, it was deeply stressful.
Natán: You won’t even I don’t.
He stared at the grammatical disaster he had just sent, completely butchering the syntax, but hoping she understood that even he, a multi-million-pound athlete who was paid handsomely to live here, absolutely hated the weather.
There was a longer pause this time.
The typing bubbles vanished, then reappeared, then vanished again.
Natán chewed nervously on his bottom lip.
Finally, a new message popped up.
Kylie: Then give me an explanation.
Natán froze.
He stared at the glowing text, a heavy, sinking feeling settling deep into his stomach.
He had walked away from the most magical, perfect night of his entire year without a single word of goodbye, simply because he was too awkward, too terrified of his own feelings, and too consumed by his imminent return to the brutal pressures of his career.
He didn’t know what to say.
He didn’t know how to explain the intense, suffocating bubble that professional footballers lived inside.
He didn’t know how to articulate the sheer panic he felt at the thought of disappointing a woman like her.
He took a deep breath, his thumbs hovering over the glass screen, deciding that brutal, unfiltered honesty—no matter how clumsy his English was—was the only actual option left.
Natán: Sorry, I lost track and didn’t want to hurt your feelings.
I’m bad at this human stuff.
He hit send, instantly regretting the pathetic sound of it, but it was the absolute truth.
Give him a football, and he was a genius.
Give him normal, human emotional interactions, and he was a disaster.
The response came quickly, carrying a sharp, undeniable sting of vulnerability.
Kylie: It hurt my feelings more.
We had gone on two dates, you could have said something.
Natán blinked.
He read the sentence twice.
He read it a third time, his brow furrowing in profound, genuine confusion.
His brain frantically translated the English words into Catalan, trying to make sense of the cultural context.
Dates?
Natán: They were dates?
Kylie: Obviously.
Natán’s jaw actually dropped.
He stared at the screen, completely gobsmacked.
He had genuinely, truly believed they were just two people hanging out.
He thought the seafood restaurant was just a coincidence of seating, and the gelato on the beach was just a friendly stroll.
He thought the kiss at the hotel was a spontaneous, magical anomaly.
Because he had spent his entire adolescence locked inside football academies, hyper-focused on reaching the absolute pinnacle of the sport, he had never actually learned the subtle, unspoken rules of modern dating.
He had no idea he was actually courting her.
Natán: Oh.
He felt like a complete, utter idiot.
Kylie: How about twice a week?
Natán’s panic immediately flared back up.
Twice a week?
Between the grueling double training sessions, the intense video analysis meetings, the travel for away matches, and the sheer physical exhaustion that left him practically comatose by 8:00 PM every night, twice a week was a logistical impossibility.
Natán: That’s a stretch.
I’m busy.
Kylie: Every four days.
She was negotiating.
She was treating this like a high-stakes business acquisition, and Natán, completely out of his depth, defaulted to his rigid, athletic schedule.
Natán: Every six days.
I play a lot of games.
How about after game days?
There was a brief, tense silence on the digital line.
Natán held his breath, wondering if he had pushed too hard, wondering if his rigid, scheduling boundaries had finally killed the spark.
He didn’t want to lose her.
Despite his terror, the thought of seeing her dark eyes and hearing her throaty laugh again made his chest flutter wildly.
The screen lit up.
Kylie: Fine, see you Sunday.
A massive, foolish, irrepressible grin broke across Natán’s exhausted face.
The crushing weight of the day—the rain, the miserable training, the brutal lecture from Guardiola—suddenly felt a hundred times lighter.
Natán: Sounds perfect.
Natán’s euphoria lasted exactly until 8:00 AM the following morning.
From that moment on, his entire life rapidly descended into an unmitigated, psychological nightmare.
The entire week leading up to their opening fixture was absolute hell.
If Natán thought Pep Guardiola had been harsh during that first rainy afternoon, he was horrifyingly mistaken.
That had merely been a warning shot.
Over the next five days, Pep made it his personal, obsessive mission to completely deconstruct and rebuild the nineteen-year-old winger from the ground up, and he did so with a relentless, aggravating intensity that drove Natán to the absolute brink of insanity.
Pep kept getting under his skin.
He was everywhere.
He was a bald, shouting phantom that haunted every single blade of grass on the training pitch.
On Tuesday morning, during a simple, low-intensity passing drill, Pep violently blew his whistle and brought the entire twenty-man squad to a dead halt just because of Natán.
The manager marched across the pitch, grabbed Natán physically by the shoulders, and forcibly twisted his torso by about fifteen degrees.
“Your body shape is entirely closed!” Pep scolded loudly, his voice echoing across the facility.
“When you receive the ball on the touchline, if your hips are facing the stands, you are entirely blind to the center of the pitch! You are cutting off half the field! Open your hips! Receive on the back foot!”
Natán was mortified.
He had been receiving the ball that way his entire life, using his explosive acceleration to turn out of trouble.
But Pep wasn’t interested in his acceleration; he was interested in structural perfection.
On Wednesday, the nagging escalated.
During an attacking phase drill, Natán made a brilliant, penetrating run down the wing, receiving a pass and whipping a gorgeous cross into the box.
But the play broke down, the defenders cleared it, and the coaching staff initiated a counter-attack simulation.
Natán jogged back at a leisurely pace, catching his breath.
“Run!” Pep screamed from the touchline, waving his arms like a madman.
“Sprint! Natán, if you jog, you die! You sprint back into shape! Five seconds of absolute fury! Get back!”
Pep nagged him about every little thing.
It wasn’t just his work rate off the ball or his defensive tracking.
Pep criticized the angle of his decoy runs.
He criticized the weight of his five-yard passes.
During lunch in the club canteen, Pep even walked past his table and explicitly instructed the club dieticians to cut down Natán’s carbohydrate intake and increase his lean proteins, casually mentioning that the boy looked “a fraction too heavy” to execute the high press effectively.
By Thursday, the tactical overload was suffocating.
They spent two hours in the dark, windowless tape room.
Pep specifically queued up footage of Natán from the previous day’s training, using a red digital laser pointer to highlight every single microscopic error in his positioning.
“Look here,” Pep said to the entire squad, pointing the red laser at Natán’s static figure on the screen.
“David has the ball under pressure. Fernandinho is blocked. Look at Natán.”
Natán sank so low in his ergonomic leather chair he practically disappeared.
He was seething.
He was vibrating with a quiet, furious indignation.
He felt entirely singled out.
He was £40 million worth of raw, attacking genius, and this manic, obsessive manager was treating him like an undisciplined academy child who had never kicked a football in his life.
It was aggravating.
It was deeply, profoundly aggravating.
Natán missed Spain.
He missed the freedom.
At Espanyol, his manager had simply patted him on the back, told him to stay wide, and given him the absolute freedom to do whatever he wanted.
By Friday afternoon, the final training session before the weekend, Natán was completely mentally fried.
He was exhausted, bitter, and entirely convinced that Pep Guardiola genuinely hated him.
He assumed, with absolute certainty, that he was going to be dropped.
After a week of relentless nagging, and endless tactical corrections, there was no logical way he was going to feature in the match.
He mentally prepared himself to sit on the cold, plastic seats of the substitute bench, wrapped in a massive, oversized coat, watching the real professionals execute Pep’s flawless system.
The squad gathered in the dressing room on Saturday morning for the final pre-match tactical meeting.
The atmosphere was incredibly tense.
The first game of a new era.
Pep stood at the front of the room, looking impeccably dressed, his eyes sweeping over the silent, highly focused players.
He didn’t offer a rousing, emotional speech.
He didn’t talk about passion or desire.
He simply picked up a black dry-erase marker and turned to the massive tactical whiteboard.
“This is the starting eleven,” Pep announced, his voice calm and completely devoid of emotion.
He began writing the names on the board, speaking them aloud as the marker squeaked against the plastic.
“Caballero in goal.”
Willy nodded, adjusting his gloves.
“Aleksandar Kolarov. John Stone. Gaël Clichy. Bacary Sagna.”
The defensive line was set.
A mix of veteran experience and new blood.
“Kevin De Bruyne. David Silva. Fernandinho.”
The engine room.
The creative heartbeat of the team.
Expected and completely undeniably elite.
“Sergio Agüero.”
The undisputed talisman.
“Nolito on the left.”
Natán slouched slightly in his locker stall, wrapping a piece of white athletic tape around his wrist, waiting for Pep to name Jesus Navas or Iheanacho at this rate for the final spot on the right wing.
He was already planning his post-match text to Kylie, wondering where they were going to eat on Sunday.
“And then…” Pep paused, the marker hovering over the right flank of the drawn pitch.
“…Natán.”
Natán froze.
The roll of athletic tape completely slipped from his fingers, bouncing softly onto the pristine carpet.
He snapped his head up, his dark eyes wide with absolute, unadulterated shock.
He stared at the whiteboard.
There it was, written in stark black ink on the right wing.
Natán.
He was starting?
Natán looked around the room, utterly bewildered.
Kevin De Bruyne, sitting a few stalls down, caught his eye and offered a faint, highly amused smirk, clearly enjoying the young Spaniard’s total confusion.
David Silva gave him a small, encouraging nod.
Natán looked back at Pep, entirely lost.
He didn’t get this old man.
He had spent the entire week being mentally and physically tortured.
He had been screamed at for his body shape, scolded for hiding from the ball, and relentlessly nagged about his lack of defensive sprinting.
Pep had done absolutely everything in his power to get in his head.
And now, he was handing him the starting shirt?
It made absolutely no sense.
If Pep thought he was so tactically inept, so fundamentally flawed, why on earth was he trusting him to start the very first match of his highly anticipated Premier League tenure?
As Pep launched into a rapid-fire, highly complex breakdown of the opposition’s pressing triggers, Natán felt a deep, overwhelming headache beginning to throb right behind his eyes.
The pressure was suddenly suffocating.
He wasn’t just starting; he was starting after a week of being explicitly told every single thing he was doing wrong.
The mental gymnastics required to understand Guardiola’s specific brand of tough love were completely exhausting.
Natán stared blankly at his neon-green boots, a heavy, sinking feeling settling into his stomach.
He really, truly made a bad decision leaving Catalonia.