The barbell was loaded with sixty kilograms.
The instruction was simple.
“Squat,” Lopez said.
Victor Lopez stood two meters away with his arms crossed.
He watched Léo’s posture with the microscopic attention of a man who spent his career hunting the slight misalignments that eventually snap ligaments.
“Keep your back straight.
Core engaged.
Toes out, tracking in the direction of the movement.”
Léo shifted his feet on the rubber mat.
“When you go down, sit back into it.
Like the chair is directly behind you, not below you.
Drive your weight into your heels.
Steady breath.
Yes.”
Léo dropped into the squat.
The bar moved smoothly.
Lopez tracked the range of motion, scanning the knee alignment and the curve of the lower back.
“Hold it.
Good.
Now up.
Drive through the floor.
Don’t pull yourself up.”
Léo locked out the rep and racked the bar.
“Think about it this way,” Lopez said, stepping forward.
“You squat a hundred kilograms.
A hundred and fifty.
Two hundred, eventually, once you’ve built the foundation.
Then you’re on the pitch, and an eighty-kilogram midfielder tries to shoulder you off the ball.” He tilted his head.
“Do you feel anything?”
“No.”
“Exactly.” Lopez adjusted the weight clamps on the barbell.
“In Brazilian football, your technique covers the physical gap.
The pace of the game and the way defenders here are taught allow you to use movement and touch to compensate.
In Europe, you can’t.
Their academies start full-contact training earlier.
They hit harder, and they sustain the violence for ninety minutes.” He looked at Léo.
“You’re going to Europe.
Before you go, we fix the gap.”
The daily sessions stacked in brutal layers.
Rogério Ceni ran the free-kick drills in the early morning.
Ramalho took the squad for tactical work before noon.
The afternoons belonged to Lopez and Lúcio.
Lopez commanded the gym with technical instruction, while Lúcio took him out to the training pitch to make the physics feel real.
Lúcio had absolutely no interest in going easy.
Léo learned to stop viewing medicine ball slams as an arm exercise.
He learned to drive the kinetic force up from his cleats, through his core, and let his arms simply deliver the violence his body had already loaded.
Lopez corrected his sequence twice.
After the third set, it finally snapped into one fluid motion.
Bulgarian split squats.
Hanging leg raises.
It produced a specific, deep-tissue exhaustion that nested in the quads and refused to leave the next morning.
“You learn quickly,” Lopez noted near the end of the third afternoon session.
“Naturally strong mechanics.
You have your father’s genetics.” He scribbled something on his clipboard.
“The limiting factor right now is the upper body.
We’ll bring Lúcio into the gym next week to start the heavy contact drills.”
Léo thought about how Lúcio’s contact drills felt on the grass.
“Looking forward to it,” Léo lied.
Lopez allowed himself a fraction of a smile.
São Paulo hosted Goiás at the Morumbi.
They were a mid-table side, the kind of team that scrapped viciously for the points needed to avoid relegation but lacked the personnel to try anything creative.
Ramalho deployed a standard attacking shape.
Léo came off the bench in the seventy-fifth minute.
His instructions were identical: find the number ten space, link the play, and bury the chances when they appeared.
He scored in the eighty-second minute.
Wellington drove a pass into his feet.
Léo took a single touch to set the angle and drilled a low, right-footed finish past the keeper before the man could even set his feet.
2-1 final.
São Paulo’s fourth consecutive Serie A victory.
Léo had scored in three consecutive appearances.
He walked off the pitch, satisfied with the points.
Then he thought about the morning’s free-kick session and Ceni barking at him about his contact point.
Then his mind drifted to Lopez correcting his Bulgarian split squats.
There was an enormous amount of work left to do, and the season had barely started.
Léo had just stepped out of the dormitory shower when his phone buzzed against the nightstand.
“I’ve been hearing your name all over São Paulo,” Neymar shouted through the speaker.
“Everywhere I go.
Have you seen Léo?
Léo scored again.
You’ve taken over the city, cara.”
“You’re in São Paulo?”
“Claro.
La Liga finished last week, so I came straight home.” Background noise bled through the line—overlapping voices and the thud of heavy bass.
“I booked a private room at Lotus Club tonight.
We need to drink properly.
It’s been two years.”
Léo stared up at the cracked ceiling of his dorm.
Lotus was an exclusive, high-end nightclub in Jardins.
He had absolutely zero desire to go to a nightclub in Jardins.
“Okay,” Léo said.
“Good!
I’ll come pick you up.
I’ll drive to the Morumbi base.
Don’t make me wait outside the gate.”
“By the way—” Léo grabbed a towel.
“What’s the Confederations Cup?”
The line went dead quiet.
“What?”
“You said you have to report to the national team in Rio tomorrow,” Léo said.
“I assumed—”
“The Confederations Cup.
Léo.
It is an international tournament being held in Brazil right now.
Across six cities.
Brazil plays the opening match on Saturday.” A longer pause.
“Have you literally been inside the training base this entire time?”
“Mostly.”
“Puta merda, you need to go outside.” Someone shouted Neymar’s name in the background.
He yelled something back, then returned to the phone.
“I have to go.
I’ll call you when I’m leaving.
Be at the gate.”
The Ferrari was violently red.
Wearing sunglasses at ten o’clock at night was objectively unnecessary, but Neymar was leaning against the hood wearing them anyway.
He looked exactly like a man who knew he was being entirely too much and didn’t care.
When he spotted Léo walking through the security gate, Neymar pulled the glasses down.
A massive, brilliant grin split his face.
He opened his arms.
They collided in a heavy embrace, the kind of hug that answers the unspoken question of whether two years of silence had ruined the foundation.
Léo felt the tension bleed out of his shoulders immediately.
It hadn’t.
Neymar pushed him back to arm’s length and looked him up and down.
“Cara.” Neymar shook his head in disgust.
“You actually got better looking while you were gone.
That’s not fair to the rest of us.”
“You’re wearing sunglasses in the dark.”
“I’m on vacation.
I wear what I want.” Neymar dropped the shades into his shirt pocket.
“You’re still more serious than anyone I know.
You’ve been back for two months and you haven’t been anywhere.”
“I’ve been here.”
“The training base isn’t anywhere.
The base is work.” Neymar waved a hand at the sprawling skyline.
“The city is out there, Léo.
You grew up here.
You’ve been living like a monk.”
Léo didn’t argue.
He opened the passenger door and slid into the leather seat.
The Ferrari roared away from the Morumbi gates, merging onto the glowing arteries of the expressways.
The vast, electric sprawl of São Paulo opened up around them.
Léo rested his head against the glass, watching the concrete blur.
Neymar reached over, cranked the stereo up two notches, and glanced over.
“You really didn’t know about the Confederations Cup?”
“I knew about it generally.
I didn’t know it was kicking off this week.”
Neymar scoffed.
“Four years younger than me and always acting like an old man.
That hasn’t changed.” He drifted across two lanes of traffic without using a turn signal.
“Your father would have been happy tonight.
You know that, right?”
Léo stared at the red taillights ahead of them.
“Yeah,” he said softly.
“I know.”
Neymar let it lie.
He turned the music up a fraction louder and focused on the road.
They had grown up in the same state, rising through different clubs, chasing identical dreams.
One of them had stayed on the golden trajectory.
The other had been derailed, exiled, and forced to claw his way back through the dirt.
But sitting in the Ferrari, surrounded by the neon blur of the Paulista, the two years of unspoken baggage simply evaporated.
“By the way,” Neymar said, checking his rearview mirror.
“What.”
“Ronaldinho told me what you said to him on the pitch.” Neymar grinned.
“About the story of him giving you trouble in training.
That I tell the story differently depending on who I’m talking to.”
Léo said nothing.
“I just want you to know,” Neymar continued smoothly, “that the version I tell the press is entirely accurate.
You were very difficult to beat.
But I still won most of the time.”
“All right.”
“I did.”
“Okay.”
“I’m just saying.”
The city rushed past the windshield.
“You’re still jealous,” Neymar said, gripping the steering wheel.
“You’re still jealous that I’m better at football than you.”
“No,” Léo said.
“And you’re jealous that I’m better looking.”
“Definitely not.”
Neymar threw his head back and laughed.
It was the exact same laugh Léo remembered from when they were teenagers, pushing each other to exhaustion on the academy pitches until the sun dropped below the tree line and they couldn’t see the ball anymore.
By the time the Ferrari pulled into the VIP parking at Lotus, Léo was smiling.
He hadn’t meant to.