While Mateo was conquering Europe with the Spanish U-19 team, a different kind of war was being waged in the shadows back in Barcelona.
It was a silent, insidious campaign, a war of a thousand paper cuts, designed not to defeat him on the pitch, but to break his spirit off it. The System, its analytical capabilities now fully redirected from tactical analysis to political surveillance, began to detect patterns of institutional behavior that were both subtle and deeply concerning.
The warnings began as minor anomalies in scheduling and resource allocation, the kind of administrative oversights that a less sophisticated observer might have dismissed as incompetence.
But the System saw the pattern, the cold, deliberate logic behind the chaos. It was a systematic campaign of marginalization, a slow, creeping strangulation of his development.
