If you are a football fan, you’ve probably imagined it countless times. Meeting the stars you grew up watching. Walking into the stadium of the club whose victories shaped your childhood weekends. Maybe, if luck ever smiled wide enough, catching a glimpse of them during a training session or waving as they leave after a match. It’s a fantasy so many hold on to quietly, the kind that feels too distant to ever come true.

But what happens when that dream finds you first? When the passion that once kept you up at 2 a.m. watching matches turns into the very thing that takes you to those stadiums, not as a spectator but as someone sitting across from the players themselves?

For Irfan Junejo, one of Pakistan’s most celebrated digital storytellers, that fantasy became reality. Through Begin, the official streaming partner of LaLiga in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, Junejo became the first Pakistani creator to represent the region at FC Barcelona’s base camp, interviewing players ahead of El Clásico, football’s most-watched rivalry. The collaboration, part of Begin’s effort to connect South Asian voices to global sports culture, gave Junejo a chance that few in this part of the world could even imagine – an exclusive, one-on-one conversation with the stars of a club he had supported since childhood.

What began as a boy’s late-night ritual of watching Ronaldinho and Messi on a flickering TV screen in Karachi had quietly transformed into a moment of global storytelling. Yet when that moment finally arrived, Junejo says, it wasn’t awe that filled his mind, it was focus.

A seat among the stars

“The moment I walked into Barcelona’s training facility, I was trying to contain everything – emotions, excitement, responsibility,” he recalls. “It’s not easy to get access to these players, so I knew I couldn’t afford to lose focus for even a second.”

Three cameras were rolling, two microphones were live, and the setting wasn’t as simple as it seemed. “The light wasn’t camera-friendly. If I made the players sit there, the background would get overexposed. So my mind instantly went to fixing that.