The noise never stops at Barcelona.There is always another match, another crisis. Another teenager becoming a star, another trophy to chase. The machine moves too quickly to wait for anyone and no-one dares ask for it to slow.Ronald Araujo tried to keep moving with it. He trained. He played. He captained Barcelona. He smiled. He carried on.All the while, something was breaking beneath the surface.By December, the 27-year-old defender had reached a point where he could no longer pretend everything was fine. Anxiety had followed him for a year and a half, and his family was receiving death threats at a particularly challenging time of the season.Eventually, it led to him suffering from depression. He came to a conclusion: he needed help.It was agreed with Barca that he would take a leave of absence. The club did not specify the reasons why, and nor did they put a time on when he would be back. Araujo was the first to address the situation publicly after returning to the pitch again in January.Just before he left Barca to join up with Uruguay’s World Cup squad in late May, The Athletic met with Araujo at the Spanish club’s training ground for this interview.He looked different; more relaxed, more confident, happier.“I’m going to tell you something that might come as a surprise,” he says. “Even though I haven’t played that many minutes, this has been the season I’ve learnt the most.“I’ve grown a lot mentally. I’ve learnt to be a better husband, a better father, to see things differently, to put things into perspective. People think that because we’re footballers and earn a lot of money, we don’t have any worries, but we do. A lot of things happen in the world of football, and they build up, causing you stress.“You can play on a Wednesday and be the best in the world, while on Saturday you lose and you’re the worst.“As some people couldn’t mess with me directly because I don’t look at social media, they looked for other ways. They wrote to my wife, threatening my daughters. You try and try to figure out how to deal with that. I understand it’s part of my job, but there are things we shouldn’t tolerate or take for granted.”Araujo was sent off after being shown two yellow cards before half-time in a Champions League game at Chelsea (Adrian Dennis / AFP via Getty Images)Araujo knows exactly when the turning point came. It was on November 25.Barcelona were 1-0 behind in a Champions League match against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Soon it would be half-time, a chance to regroup. But a minute before the break, Araujo, who was on a yellow card, made a poorly-timed challenge on Marc Cucurella. The referee, Slavko Vincic, showed him another yellow, then a red.“Going in like that, knowing I’d already been booked… I knew something wasn’t right,” Araujo says.“But I found it really hard to let it out. Even with my wife, who’s closest to me, it was very difficult to talk about it. I struggled to speak. I always kept everything to myself.