Life in La Liga E-Book

Rab MacWilliam

• Herausgeber: Arena Sport
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 481

Beschreibung

In Life in La Liga, football writer Rab MacWilliam delves to the heart of one of Europe's most historically and politically complex nations to explore its rich football history, examining its deep-rooted rivalries and internecine vendettas, and the undoubtedly impressive standard of its football clubs. From the big five of Real Madrid, Barcelona, Athletic Bilbao, Atletico Madrid and Valencia, to the likes of Sevilla, Real Sociedad, Deportivo de La Coruna, Real Zaragoza, Celta de Vigo, Espanyol, Real Betis and Sporting Gijon, McWilliam laces an entertainingly informative narrative with short biographies of the Spanish game's main participants, players, and characters, as well as reflections on the humorous, tragic and pivotal events that have taken place since the Spanish league's origins in the late nineteenth century on its journey to becoming the dominant force in the global game that it is today.

Leseprobe

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2019 by

ARENA SPORT

An imprint of Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.arenasportbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Rab MacWilliam 2019

ISBN: 9781909715745

eBook ISBN: 9781788851701

The right of Rab MacWilliam to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

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Designed and typeset by Polaris Publishing, Edinburgh

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Printed in Great Britain by MBM Print SCS Limited, East Kilbride

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

SPAIN: A BRIEF HISTORY TO 1900

SPAIN’S AUTONOMOUS COMMUNITIES

PART ONE: THE EARLY YEARS

PART TWO: FROM LA LIGA TO EUROPE

PART THREE: LA LIGA AND EUROPE

PART FOUR: ‘TIME FOR CHANGE’

PART FIVE: WALKING SPANISH

FURTHER READING

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to thank Dan MacWilliam, my late father, for taking me to watch my first football match at Inverness’s Clach Park in the Highland League when I was around five or six. He also drove me down to Glasgow on a few occasions for big games at Hampden and Ibrox when I was still a kid. He initiated and encouraged my love for the game, and for this, and much else, I will always be grateful.

More specifically, I greatly appreciate the feedback I received on earlier drafts of this book from my son Nick MacWilliam and Simon Liebesny – Gooners both – and from my Stoke Newington neighbours, Pat Newman (who spends several months of the year in his villa in Murcia) and José Fernández (a Gijón man and a proud supporter of Sporting de Gijón). I much appreciate their opinions and comments.

At Arena Sport, freelance copy editor Ian Greensill carried out a meticulous job, and saved me a good deal of embarrassment by pointing out several basic errors in my text. Any errors which remain are down to me, not Ian nor anyone else. My publisher and editor, Pete Burns, had the courage to contract me to write this book, and Pete has been immensely supportive and helpful throughout the project.

Last, but by no means least, my wife Anne Beech listened to my arcane Spanish football stories, ignored my cursing and raving at my computer, and permitted me sole access to the downstairs study with the same combination of compassion, understanding and disbelief which she has brought to our thirty-five year partnership. Many thanks, my dear.

INTRODUCTION

As a young lad growing up in the Highlands of Scotland, I spent every spare moment kicking a ball around – in my primary school playground, local park, back yard of my house, anywhere I could find – pretending to myself that I was Denis Law strutting imperiously around Hampden Park or Jim Baxter lording it over Ibrox.

I preferred playing the game to watching it but, when my father took me to Ibrox and Hampden or when I saw games on TV, the Rangers side of the early 1960s, which included Baxter, John Greig, Willie Henderson et al., became my boyhood heroes. I was also enthralled by the Real Madrid team which, in the 1960 European Cup final at Hampden Park, ruthlessly and sublimely destroyed Eintracht Frankfurt.

I watched grainy, black-and-white television replays of that game, often described as the greatest game of football ever played, and marvelled at the passing skills, dribbling talent, goalscoring ability and footballing artistry of, in particular, Di Stéfano, Puskás and Gento. This was in a different class altogether to the football I knew, and that game initiated my enduring interest in Spanish club football.

When my playing days were over, I became a spectator and student of football, and I continued my attachment to the game as a book publisher in London by publishing a number of football titles, in particular British club histories. More recently, as an author I have written several books on the game without having incurred the burden of becoming a specialist on any of its aspects, as I am a generalist at heart when it comes to football.

However, although a few of my published titles, normally historical in their focus, have covered the European game, this is the first book which I have written exclusively about the game in Spain, the country whose club football had so fascinated me when I was a boy.

I have followed the fortunes of such clubs as Sevilla, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, Real Betis, Real Madrid and Athletic Bilbao, as well as the many other clubs which have constituted, in differing eras and with varying degrees of success, the ‘Primera División’ (‘La Liga’) and the ‘Segunda División’, or second tier, of Spanish club football.

Over the years, I have watched Spanish clubs in both domestic and European competitions, and have gained an insight into, and an admiration for, the game as it is played at the highest levels in Spain. More importantly, and as nothing beats being a spectator in the stadium while a match is being fiercely contested, I relished the European evenings I spent standing on the North Bank at Arsenal’s old Highbury Stadium.

At Highbury, I watched my local club Arsenal play – in the European Cup, UEFA Cup and Cup Winners’ Cup – such sides as Valencia, Real Zaragoza, Deportivo de La Coruña, Real Mallorca, Celta de Vigo, Villarreal and Real Madrid. There always seemed to be a heightened air of expectation and excitement in the stadium when a Spanish club was our opponent, more so than with any other European club. As was proudly proclaimed in the 1960s by Spain’s Tourism Ministry, and as was obvious on the pitch: ‘Spain is different’.

This being the case, I decided to write this book for the reader who is interested in Spanish football and football generally but who has a far from expert knowledge of the game’s origins and development in the country, and also of its contemporary influence within Spain and, more recently, in European competition. In the book I do not presume a facility in the Spanish language (or languages) as, when using Spanish Castilian (or Basque or Catalan) words and phrases, I provide English translations. Also, for those readers who may be unfamiliar with certain Spanish cities and regions, I try to convey, as concisely as I can, ‘the spirit of place’.

As I was researching and writing this book, I discovered that Spain is indeed different. The story of club football in Spain is significantly more complex and diverse than I had previously supposed, and much more so than that of most other footballing nations. This complex diversity, albeit in a modified form, remains in the Spanish game to the present day.

Alongside the history, I have included short biographies of personalities and outstanding players, famous and infamous incidents and matches, humorous and occasionally tragic events, club and regional rivalries, instances of chicanery and double-dealing, the role of the media and the fans, Spanish football terminology and other reflections on aspects of the Spanish game.

Finally, and importantly in my view, it is impossible fully to comprehend Spanish club and regional football without the inclusion of a brief historical and political background. So, from time to time in the book I provide this information. The development of the club game in Spain has been so intimately involved with wider domestic political events that, without such an explanatory context, some of what I say would be either misleading or meaningless. However, as this is very much a book about football, I keep to a minimum these necessary contextual guides.

The book is organised chronologically into five parts which, coincidentally or not, is a structure which mirrors changes in the country’s wider social and political development. This chronological perspective is an approximate guide rather than a rigid framework as, from time to time, I feel it may be more helpful and interesting for the reader if I veer across various time periods to illustrate certain points, such as a player’s career trajectory or aspects of some clubs’ eccentricities, the latter abounding in Spanish football.

This book, though, remains essentially a history from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and is organised in as linear and as progressive a manner as I can manage and as is possible when one considers the idiosyncrasies inherent in its subject matter.

Part One describes the origins of club football in Spain, from the late nineteenth century in Andalucia, the Basque Country and Catalonia to the other administrative regions, and the speedy development of football clubs across Spain from the initiation of the Copa del Rey in 1903 to the introduction of La Liga in 1929.

Part Two considers football’s growing professionalism, organisation, popular appeal and socio-political importance, from the formation of La Liga, through the impact on the game of the Spanish Civil War, to post-Civil War club and league reconstruction and the emergence of European-wide club competitions in the late 1950s.

Part Three covers the dramatic twists and turns in domestic club football in the 1960s and 1970s. It also explores the story of Real Madrid in the European Cup from 1955 to 1960 and its growing rivalry with Barcelona, as well as the arrival on the European stage of other intra-continental tournaments and the involvement in these of Atlético Madrid, Real Zaragoza, Valencia, Athletic Bilbao and other Liga clubs.

Part Four concerns itself with the domestic dominance of Real Madrid in the 1960s and 1970s and the re-emergence of Athletic Bilbao, Barcelona, Valencia and Real Sociedad in the early 1980s. It also discusses the fluctuating fortunes of such clubs as Real Betis, Deportivo de La Coruña, Espanyol, Real Mallorca, Málaga, Villarreal, Alavés and Celta de Vigo up to the present day.

Part Five discusses Real Madrid and Barcelona in La Liga and the ‘new’ Champions League, from Real’s ‘vulture squad’ and Barcelona’s Cruyff-inspired ‘dream team’ to the close of the 2017/18 season. I also consider the twenty-first century re-emergence of Atlético Madrid, Sevilla and Valencia in La Liga and the UEFA Cup/Europa League, and look at current trends and domestic developments in La Liga. The book concludes with a reflection on season 2018/19, and a brief Further Reading list.

The above description and structure may give the impression that the book is a solemn, scholarly tome, of interest mainly to historians, sociologists and the like: far from it (although I don’t wish to discourage such learned academics from reading it). Nor is the book an attempt to explain Spain’s unique, confusing and, on occasion, brutal political history.

Rather, Life in La Liga is aimed firmly at the general reader who is intrigued by Spanish club football and who is interested in discovering more about its origins, development and the players, competitions and external events which have shaped the game and which, particularly in recent years, have made Spanish clubs the most successful footballing sides in Europe.

I have attempted to keep the book as informative, entertaining and readable as is possible when dealing with such a frequently chaotic subject. I have also tried to follow the wise dictum of the US crime novelist Elmore Leonard who, when asked why his books are so entertaining and engaging, replied: ‘Simple. I just leave out the boring bits.’

So bear with me, and follow this remarkable footballing story as it unwinds, modernises and reaches the multi-million pound industry of the present day.

Rab MacWilliam, London, June 2019

SPAIN: A BRIEF HISTORY TO 1900

When the English traveller Richard Ford wrote in 1845 that Spain was ‘a bundle of local units tied together by a rope of sand’, he neatly captured the essence of this country, whose historical and cultural experience was very different to that of most other countries in Western Europe.

While the country is today a modern, unitary, liberal-democratic state, and is regarded by its fellow nations as an equal and valued member of Europe and the international community, there remains an undercurrent of truth in Ford’s observation. In the words of the Spanish government’s 1960s promotional slogan which was designed to attract tourists to the country: ‘Spain is different’.

Spain has long been a land of disputation, conflict and extremes, concisely expressed in the Spanish proverb ‘three Spaniards, four opinions’. From the rugged Atlantic regions of Galicia and Asturias and the mountain ranges and deep valleys of the Basque Country, through the central dusty highlands of Castile and the sun-drenched Mediterranean shores of Andalucia, to the Balearic and remote Canary Islands and the more temperate hills and plains of Catalonia and Valencia, its often stunning landscapes and micro-climates reflect, and in some instances have defined, Spain’s political, linguistic and social diversity.

Spain’s history has also been varied and distinctive, embracing innovation and conservatism, and harmony and turmoil. For over 1,500 years, the country was occupied by Romans, Visigoths and Islamic ‘Moors’, the last being the most enduring and significant influence on today’s Spanish state.

After the late-fifteenth-century Christian ‘Reconquista’ had ended the final semblance of Moorish rule, the country’s imperial colonisation of Latin America resulted in Spain becoming one of the major military and trading powers in the world throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: its ‘Golden Age’ of global supremacy.

Thereafter, Spain gradually entered into a period of decline and political introversion, fuelled by domestic arguments and strife as well as by the rise of competitive European colonial states. The internal economic factors grew in their severity and they were numerous, including the vast disparity in living standards between the peasantry and the land-owning aristocratic elites under the oppressive ‘latifundio’ system. There was also a growing economic imbalance and contrast between the large expanding cities, with their access to mineral and trading wealth, and the ever-increasing poverty of the majority of the population based in the countryside.

The political situation was equally troubling. The overarching power of the monarchy, and the constant squabbling between the Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties, did little to alleviate the immiseration of the Spanish people. The ubiquitous Catholic Church maintained a firm hold on all aspects of Spanish life, preaching a rigid conservative obedience and promoting a widespread religious intolerance of all other faiths. And the escalating demands for cultural and linguistic autonomy from the central state which were made by a number of areas within Spain, in particular the Basque Country and Catalonia, were continual obstacles hindering the creation of a viable unitary Spanish state.

Any one of these largely self-inflicted problems was, by itself, sufficient to concern and destabilise a country insistent on the centralisation of power but which remained neo-feudal and reactionary, with its elite’s eyes still fixated on Spain’s past triumphs while it ignored the probability of impending economic collapse. But taking all these factors together, it was clear that urgent measures had to be taken to alleviate these seemingly intractable problems, or Spain was heading towards disaster.

By the late eighteenth century, the ideas generated by the Enlightenment, which had begun in Scotland and had found its full expression in France earlier that century, were slowly filtering into Spain. These promoted the primacy of reason, along with its accompanying emphasis on liberalism, democracy and modernity, as the principles which should govern the minds and actions of individuals and states.

Despite desperate attempts by Spain’s Church, monarchy, moneyed elites and military to keep at bay these threatening notions, these fresh and relatively egalitarian ideas found receptive homes in the minds of Spain’s expanding bourgeoisie, who were becoming concerned and affected by the worsening economic and political condition of the country. Aside from the ethical and moral issues involved, the current situation was bad for business.

Even by Spain’s historically divisive standards, the nineteenth century represented one of the most politically chaotic periods which the country had until then experienced. As the century began, the country had forged a temporary internal truce and, with British assistance, had sent Napoleon’s troops homeward to think again. However, Spain remained riven by internal disputes and bitter rivalries, the main obstacles to the creation of a nascent modern state being, again, the Church, the overbearing and over-indulged military, the monarchy and the rural land-owning classes.

Nevertheless, despite the ferocity of these constraints, in 1812 Spain proclaimed its first Constitution, which proposed such much-needed reforms as universal male suffrage, freedom of the press, ultimate power to reside in the democratically elected ‘Cortes’ (national government) and, crucially, the declaration of Spain as a unitary state.

These reforms were suppressed by the monarchy and the groups in the country who were engaged in the bloody Carlist Wars, dynastic struggles and aristocratic feuding, in their attempts to maintain Spain, in the interests of all traditionalists, as their own fiefdom, free from foreign interference. Ranged against these formidable barriers were the growing numbers of progressive, enlightened thinkers and activists, usually found in the larger cities.

In 1873 Spain’s First Republic was declared, but within less than two years and the election of four consecutive presidents, the Republic was quashed by the military, who restored the monarchy and ‘invited’ King Alfonso XII, of Bourbon lineage, to save Spain from ‘chaos’. It was to be almost sixty years before a Second Republic was instituted.

Despite this military coup, Spain established universal male suffrage, and entered a brief period of relative stability. Government alternated between Liberal and Conservative parties, but rigged elections and electoral fraud were common, these usually being arranged by local ‘caciques’ (powerful land-owning figures in the countryside). So, in effect, there was little real progress made towards modernisation and reform.

Then, in 1898, Spain’s self-image was shattered. The USA had declared war on Spain and had humiliated the country by acquiring Puerto Rico and then Cuba, the final remnant of Spain’s once-mighty Latin American colony. Known to this day as ‘El Desastre’ (‘The Disaster’), the shock to Spain of the loss of Cuba was profound, and the country again mourned the loss of its empire.

However, even at this low point in Spain’s history, growing numbers of people in different parts of the country were becoming excited by the introduction of a new sport. Football had arrived in Spain, football clubs were being formed across the country and, as the game quickly spread across Spain, national depression was giving way to enthusiasm for the game and political differences were being slowly absorbed into football rivalries.

But, this being Spain, the game was soon to become inextricably enmeshed in much wider, more complicated issues than simple football matches.

SPAIN’S AUTONOMOUS COMMUNITIES

In his book The Spanish Labyrinth, Gerald Brenan wrote that a Spaniard’s loyalty ‘was first of all to his native place, or to his family and social group within it, and only secondly to his country and government’. This pervasive sentiment has been a constant theme in Spanish history, and the regional pride, and often the accompanying sense of ‘difference’ which this has generated, has been the main obstacle to the creation of a unified Spanish nation.

The Spanish Constitution of 1978, drawn up and agreed by representatives of all the main political parties, secured the country’s transition to democracy in the immediate post-Franco years. One of its principal achievements, in an attempt to defuse the historical antagonisms between the centre and the peripheral regions (in particular Catalonia and the Basque Country), was the Constitution’s political and geographical configuration of Spain into a quasi-federal state consisting of seventeen ‘communidades autónomas’ (‘autonomous communities’).

The Constitution did not offer ‘federalism’, as the term is generally understood. Rather, it was a form of decentralised devolution. The Communities were granted ‘the right to autonomy or self-government’ but within ‘the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation’, with the state retaining full sovereignty. Where possible, the constitutional boundaries between the Communities roughly followed the borders of the medieval kingdoms and the Iberian regions prior to the initial unification of the country. By 1983, the Communities had been established. They are as follows:

Andalucia. Provinces: Almería, Granada, Jaén, Córdoba, Málaga, Seville, Cádiz, Huelva. Capital: Seville.

Basque Country. Provinces: Álava, Biscay, Gipuzkoa. Capital: Vitoria-Gasteiz.

Galicia. Provinces: A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense, Pontevedra. Capital: Santiago de Compostela.

Principality of Asturias. Capital: Oviedo.

Cantabria. Capital: Santander.

La Rioja. Capital: Logroño.

Navarre. Capital: Pamplona (Iruña).

Aragon. Provinces: Huesca, Zaragoza, Teruel. Capital: Zaragoza.

Balearic Islands. Largest islands: Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Formentera. Capital: Palma de Mallorca.

Catalonia. Provinces: Lleida, Barcelona, Girona, Tarragona. Capital: Barcelona.

Valencian Community. Provinces: Alicante, Castellón, Valencia. Capital: Valencia.

Murcia. Capital: Murcia.

Canary Islands. Largest islands: Tenerife, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, La Palma, La Gomera, El Hierro. Capitals: Santa Cruz (Tenerife), Puerto del Rosario (Fuerteventura), Las Palmas (Gran Canaria), Arrecife (Lanzarote).

Extremadura. Provinces: Cáceres, Badajoz. Capital: Mérida.

Castilla-La Mancha. Provinces: Albacete, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Guadalajara, Toledo. Capital: Toledo.

Castile and León. Provinces: Ávila, Burgos, León, Palencia, Salamanca, Segovia, Soria, Valladolid, Zamora. Capital: Valladolid.

Community of Madrid. Capital: Madrid.

PART ONE

THE EARLY YEARS

The clouds of steam and the screeching of rusty brakes announced the train’s arrival in Antwerp’s Central Station on that afternoon in August 1920.

The train and its carriages had travelled from Spain, and its passengers included a diverse collection of athletes, trainers and officials. The Olympic Games were being held in Belgium, and among the runners, swimmers, high-jumpers and polo players was the football squad, the first time in the country’s history that Spain’s top footballers had united as a national team to represent their country abroad.

The squad consisted of twenty-one footballers, of whom fourteen were from the Basque Country, four from Barcelona and three from Galicia. Under the Olympic rules they all had to be amateurs, but this basis for selection was not a problem as Spain would not recognise professional football until 1925. They were, however, all from the north of the country, as these regions contained the leading clubs and the most skilful exponents of this relatively new sport.

The official Spanish reason for this northern bias – an explanation offered by somewhat piqued representatives from the country’s central heartland and its southern regions – was that these players were used to grass turf pitches, unlike players in much of the rest of the country, and the Olympic matches were all to be played on turf. Perhaps so, but nevertheless these northerners were undeniably Spain’s most talented and experienced footballers.

The first modern Olympic Games had been held in 1896 in Athens, an appropriate location given that the Olympics were last contested in Greece over 1,500 years previously. In this new era for the quadrennial tournament, football had been considered an ‘exhibition sport’ in the 1900 Paris Olympics, but in 1908 the authorities at the London Games had deemed the game worthy of ‘competitive’ status. In London it had also become the first Olympic team sport.

The proposed Berlin Olympics of 1916 had, unsurprisingly, been cancelled, and Antwerp had been chosen for the first competition since the Stockholm Games in 1912, largely due to the destruction and suffering which Belgium had witnessed during the First World War. Also, because of the War, such previously hostile countries as Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey had not been invited to Antwerp, thereby to a degree diluting the ‘international’ element of the Olympics.

Spain, as a ‘neutral’ country during the War, had been invited, and saw its invitation to participate as a recognition that the country was no longer perceived as an isolated addendum to the rest of the world, although its own Olympic expectations, at least in football, were not particularly high.

In the event, and through no fault of the Spanish players – who included such national luminaries as Athletic Bilbao’s Belauste and ‘Pichichi’ and Barcelona’s Samitier and Zamora – the football tournament developed into something of a lottery. Spain began brightly enough, beating Denmark 1–0, but they lost 3–1 to Belgium in the quarter-finals. Belgium went on to defeat Czechoslovakia in the final, but its gold medal was gained by default as Czechoslovakia, angered by the decisions of the British referee, walked off the pitch in protest before the match had ended.

The Czechoslovaks were then banned, and the French, as the defeated semi-finalists, had already packed up and gone home. So, the destinations of the bronze and silver medals were to be decided by the remaining countries, which comprised Sweden, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Spain’s first match was against Sweden. At the end of the game, after Spain had won 2–1, there were only seven Swedes and eight Spaniards remaining on the pitch, and the tie was described in a local newspaper as ‘the most barbaric and brutal game ever seen on a football field’.

This match gave birth to a phrase which, over the years and particularly during the fiercely nationalist Francoist authoritarian regime, the Spanish would embrace with pride: ‘La Furia Española’. Heartened by their Swedish survival, the ‘Furia’ disposed of Italy and the Netherlands, and emerged from the tournament clutching their prized silver medal.

In its first appearance on the footballing world stage, Spain had gained the international respect it had craved and which the country felt it deserved. This silver medal was a critical motivating factor over the coming years in generating widespread public interest and enthusiasm in football, the legitimation of professionalism in the game, the establishment of new football clubs and the inauguration of a national league.

***

Within twenty years or so of football’s arrival in Spain, the game was already beginning to contribute significantly to the consolidation of a wary sense of unity in a country in which several areas actively encouraged the continuation of a socially fractured and culturally divided nation.

While Spain’s internal conflicts gradually diminished as the country tentatively embraced a sense of nationhood, these potent rival legacies became expressed through football loyalties and were vigorously contested on football pitches, as clubs from all regions of the country met each other in regular national league and cup competitions.

Although the fortunes of the national team have fluctuated, Spain today is home to some of the world’s most admired club sides, and Spanish club football is widely regarded as representing the contemporary game at its finest.

As the following pages will demonstrate, in the majority of cases and at least initially, it was through the influence and guidance of the British – the innovators of modern football – who first planted the seeds from which grew what is now the Spanish national game.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Britain’s commercial concerns, interests and influence still pervaded much of the world. So it’s no surprise that the new game of ‘association football’, which accompanied the travels of British businessmen, sailors, workers and students, was soon revealed to its many overseas trading partners as well as to the local inhabitants.

Football in European countries typically began at the larger ports, as the local workers, who observed British sailors and workers kicking around a ball and who were intrigued by the game, decided to copy their visitors and then formed football clubs. For example, the oldest organised football clubs in Italy, France, Germany and Belgium were established, respectively, in the busy ports of Genoa, Le Havre, Hamburg and Antwerp. The popular appeal of the game was such that, within just a few years of its introduction, football clubs proliferated across the continent, and Spain was no exception.

In order to discover the origins and spread of Spanish club football, it seems sensible to begin by looking at the game’s development in each of the main Spanish regions. I begin with Andalucia, a sprawling land mass in the south of the country, where the whole thing kicked off almost 130 years ago.

***

ANDALUCIA

As was the case in many other European countries, the major coastal cities in Spain, in particular Bilbao and Barcelona, discovered football mainly through trading contacts with their British connections. Enthusiasts in these cities readily embraced the game, and they wasted little time in setting up football clubs. However, unlike most of Europe, the game of football had its origins in a predominantly underdeveloped region of the country: Andalucia.

Located to the south-west of Seville, the Andalucian capital, and close to the Portuguese border, the Atlantic port of Huelva had been established by the Phoenicians around 1,000 bc, was later occupied by the Romans and Moors, and became in the late nineteenth century the home of the first football club to be founded in Spain.

The reason for Huelva’s undisputed status as ‘El Decano’ – the ‘dean’ or ‘oldest member’ – of Spanish football lies in its proximity to the Rio Tinto (‘Red River’), which rises in the Sierra Morena mountains to the north of the town and which enters the Gulf of Cádiz near Huelva. Upstream and close to the river were the world’s oldest copper mines, first excavated over 5,000 years ago and reputed to have been the fabled King Solomon’s Mines.

During one of Spain’s frequent internal power struggles, in 1873 a British-led consortium seized the opportunity to acquire from the Spanish government, for somewhat less than its market value, the mines and the surrounding land, and established the Rio Tinto Mining Company. During the 1870s British and Spanish workers developed the necessary infrastructure, including the forty-mile rail link with Huelva so that the extracted copper could be exported across the world. These workers spent their spare time, if they had any, playing ‘foot-ball’, as the game was then known in the area.

Today, the land is under Spanish ownership but, when under British control, the Rio Tinto mines had become the world’s leading copper supplier. As well as bringing over experienced mining workers from Britain, the company employed local people from Andalucia, one of the poorest regions in Spain, as well as unemployed workers from across the country, mainly from the northern regions of Galicia and Asturias.

The majority of the engineers, technicians, drilling managers, doctors, accountants, middle managers and directors, however, were British, and they established in Huelva a bi-cultural, quasi-apartheid social system. Living in relative luxury and isolating themselves from the Spanish workers, and enjoying an expatriate, sybaritic lifestyle in what became known as Huelva’s ‘barrio ingles’ (‘English quarter’), these people also played occasional games of football, which were observed by the local Spaniards who quickly developed an admiration and a facility for the game.

After the arrival of the British, football kick-abouts had become common in the area but there had been no attempt to form or register an official football club. The appointment of Doctor William Alexander Mackay as head physician at the Rio Tinto Company was to change all this. Mackay had been a keen football player when a medical student at Edinburgh University, and he had enthusiastically joined in the casual games around Huelva.

He soon assumed responsibility for all Rio Tinto Company ball games, when he was approached by a group of young Spaniards who wanted to learn more about football. He decided, along with these Spaniards and one of his British co-workers, Charles Adam, to form a football club in the port. On 23 December 1889, Huelva Recreation Club was founded. Later known as Recreativo de Huelva, it is the oldest football club in Spain.

The club’s first game – and the first football match under FA rules to be played in Spain – took place the following year, on 8 March 1890, at Seville’s Tablada Hippodrome against Sevilla FC, a team of British expatriates drawn mainly from the Seville Water Works. With only two Spanish names on each team sheet, Huelva lost 2–0.

Huelva and Caithness

Lybster is a small village on the coast of Caithness, the northernmost county in the United Kingdom. I mention Lybster in the context of a book on Spanish football because Dr William Mackay, the man who brought football to Spain, was born here in 1860 and brought up in the village, then a busy herring port.

I was intrigued to discover this, as my mother was also born and spent her youth in Lybster. I enjoyed some of the happiest weeks of my childhood in this small harbour village, which nestles on the east coast of the austerely beautiful county of Caithness, located over 600 miles north of London.

In 2014, Lybster Council received a request from Huelva for the village to send its local amateur football team, Lybster FC, to visit the Andalucian city to play Recreativo de Huelva, in honour of Dr Mackay. The Council discovered that Mackay had indeed been born in the village, and agreed with alacrity.

The doctor, known in Huelva as ‘Don Alejandro’, was not only instrumental in establishing Spain’s oldest club, he was also behind the building in 1892 of the club’s Velodromo Stadium, he was club president from 1903 until 1906, on behalf of the club he was awarded in 1909 the ‘Great White Cross’ by King Alfonso XIII, he has a street named after him in Huelva, and he was awarded the title of Freeman of the City. He eventually moved back to Scotland, and he died in the Highland town of Tain in 1927.

A thirty-strong contingent from Lybster FC flew out on a four-day trip to Huelva in the summer of 2018, and the Caithness team were beaten 5–0 by a Recre side who fielded members of their 2006 team, their last appearance in La Liga. Lybster retaliated by playing Jamesie Mackay, a sixty-five-year-old veteran. In 2019 – the 130th anniversary of the Don founding Huelva – the Spanish club will visit Lybster for the return match. Football is a sentimental game, is it not?

By the early years of the twentieth century, Recreativo de Huelva was competing in regional Andalucian competitions, and the club was also a founder member of the Real Federación Española de Fútbol (Royal Spanish Football Federation) which, after four years of protracted regional disagreements, was finally established in 1913.

Although in 1906, ‘Recre’ had reached the final group stage – effectively the semi-final – of the Copa del Rey, a 3–0 defeat by Madrid FC ended its hopes, and Huelva had to wait almost 100 years before it surpassed this stage in the competition: in 2003, Recre reached the Copa del Rey final but were beaten 3–0 by Real Mallorca. Almost all the players in the 1906 game were British, but by 1913 Recre’s regular first team was composed entirely of Spaniards and the club had adopted the blue-and-white striped shirts which it wears today.

Like so many of the pioneering clubs in Spanish football’s history, Recre has since achieved little in the way of major success but, one way or another, it survives. Throughout its existence, the club has moved from regional leagues to journeying between the second, third and fourth levels of Spanish league football.

Recre has played five seasons in the top division, La Liga, the highlight of which was its 3–0 victory (revenge is sweet, if a long time coming) over the superstars of Real Madrid (Madrid FC, as was) at the Bernabéu Stadium in December 2006, a result which was one of the biggest shocks in the history of La Liga. By 2009/10 the club was back in the second tier, and today it plays its football in Segunda B. Over the last few years Recre has survived financial crises with the help of their loyal supporters – one being Dr Mackay’s grandson, who is president of the Huelva Supporters’ Trust – and sympathetic external assistance.

In 2016 news emerged that Recreativo de Huelva was in serious financial trouble, a far from uncommon problem in Spanish football. The club owed millions of euros to the tax authorities, and it could not pay staff and player wages. El Decano faced the real threat of extinction. The club’s owner, Huelva City Council, had to sell. In the summer of 2018, the club was acquired by Eurosamop for the sum of one euro. It is too early to predict what the future may hold for Spain’s oldest football club but, given its historical importance, one hopes that El Decano will not disappear from the Spanish footballing map.

League structure précis

In Part Two of this book, I will be describing in some detail the structure and format of the Spanish league system. However, as I mention the league in these opening pages, I here give a brief synopsis. The Primera División, or La Liga, is the highest level, and sits above the Segunda, the second level. The third level was the Tercera until 1977, which was when Segunda B was introduced in its place, relegating the Tercera to the fourth and bottom level of the Spanish national football league. Here is where the regional and local leagues begin. The league’s rules are rather complicated, as you will discover.

Elsewhere in Andalucia – and outwith many of the larger cities, particularly Seville, Granada, Cádiz, Córdoba, Málaga and Jaén – football was relatively slow to engage the interests of the predominantly rural inhabitants of the region. Indeed, UD Almería did not open its doors for business until 2001 but, coached by manager Unai Emery, it became in 2007/08 the youngest established club to reach La Liga since the Spanish league’s formation in 1929.

The arid soil and hot climate, the dusty and mountainous terrain, the communication and travel problems, the cultural barriers, the ‘pueblo’ (village-centred) attitude, and the prevailing widespread poverty did little to encourage the development of the game in much of rural Andalucia. However, in the south-west of the region, trading contacts with the British, as in the case of Huelva and Seville, were frequent, and football became established here in the early years of the twentieth century.

Seville

I recall, a good few years ago, wandering around Seville’s Jewish Quarter and discovering a small bar hidden away in a maze of winding lanes close to the city’s imposing cathedral, which was once a mosque.

I went into the shabby old bar and I was delighted to find that the walls were covered with old, black-and-white photos of football games. Such bars are rare. One’s entry is frequently accompanied by suspicious glances from the regular drinkers, as these bars are normally to be found in ‘enemy’ territory.

Closer inspection revealed that the bar was devoted to Real Betis, and it was probably the only such place of homage in that relatively affluent, touristic part of Seville, an area commonly regarded as the natural home of Betis’s city rival, Sevilla FC. In fact, the rivalry, and mutual disdain, is intense, and has been so for over a hundred years.

Sevilla FC lays claim to being ‘Spain’s oldest football club devoted entirely to football’, having been formed by a gathering of young Scots and Spaniards in January 1890 as Sevilla Foot-Ball Club. The title of ‘Spain’s oldest football club’ is contested by several clubs, notably Athletic Bilbao (who formed in 1898 but did not achieve official status until 1901), Tarragona (established in Catalonia in 1896 as a sports club but who did not form a football team, today’s Segunda División Gimnástica de Tarragona, until 1914) and, of course, Recreativo de Huelva who, by common consent, lead the pack.

The first president of Sevilla was the Elgin-born British vice-consul to Seville, Edward Farquharson Johnston, and the nationality of the early players was overwhelmingly British. In 1905 Sevilla Fútbol Club was formally registered. Two years later, competition arrived in the city when some local polytechnic students formed Sevilla Balompié, ‘balompié’ being the literal Spanish translation of ‘football’. The pervasive national usage of ‘fútbol’ is another indication in Spain of the sport’s British origins.

The year 1909 marked the beginning of the rivalry between what became the city’s two major clubs. The mutual enmity began as a result of neighbourhood and class realities. Sevilla was a club largely composed of middle- and upper-class players and directors from the affluent side of the River Guadalquivir, based mainly in and around the Nervión area of the city.

In 1909, a talented young player from Triana – then the working-class, gypsy-dwelling heart of Seville – became available for acquisition by Sevilla, but the club’s board, wishing to retain their and the club’s ‘burguesa’ (‘bourgeois’) status, decided not to sign him, on the basis of his unacceptably uncouth class background: after all, he was ‘just a simple worker’ from a poor family.

This decision was fiercely contested at board level and led to the resignation of at least two directors, who promptly linked up with Balompié to form a new club, Betis Balompié, which was based on the less affluent Triana bank of the River Guadalquivir. In 1914 King Alfonso XIII granted Betis the name ‘Real’, and it became Real Betis Balompié.

This split in the Sevilla board resulted in one of the club’s enduring nicknames, one with a more pejorative and barbed edge than the standard ‘rojiblancos’ (‘red-and-whites’) and ‘Nerviónenes’ (‘the ones from Nervión’).

The directors who resigned in indignation at the club’s overt class bias, and who helped to form Betis, presented Sevilla FC with a gift of a white handbasin with a red stripe (Sevilla’s colours), accompanied by a note offering ‘a farewell which, for life, you will use to collect shed tears, not for your failures but for our successes’. The Spanish word for a handbasin is ‘palangana’, and many still refer to Sevilla as ‘los palanganas’.

In 1915 the first game between the two clubs narrowly went Sevilla’s way, by a 4–3 scoreline, but such was the crowd violence and general mayhem, on and off the pitch, that the referee had no choice but to abandon the match. In 1918 – the second game in what became the ‘Seville Derby’ – most of the Betis players were on ‘mili’ (National Service) while many of the wealthier and better-connected Sevilla team managed to avoid ‘mili’. So Betis deliberately and provocatively fielded a team composed of inexperienced youngsters, and they were beaten 22–0. This ‘moral victory’ by Betis made the club’s point and, one hopes, more than compensated for the footballing humiliation. To date, there have been 114 ‘Derbies’, with Sevilla well ahead on points.

Today, both Seville clubs are influential members of the Spanish football establishment, but this perceived class antagonism lingers on. Sevilla has become by some distance the more successful club in the city, but a working-class, underdog, left-wing sentiment still clings to Betis (a prominent supporter in recent years was the Socialist Party’s leader Felipe González), whose motto is the indefatigable ‘Viva el Betis manque pierda’: ‘Long live Betis even when they lose’.

‘Alcohol, Alcohol . . .’

If one were to encounter an inhabitant of what is one of the oldest and historically most important ports in Europe, one might expect to encounter at least a degree of haughty reserve. If so, no one appears to have informed the Cádiz CF fan base of what is expected from them. More likely, though, is that they have paid no attention, given that, according to Sid Lowe in the Guardian, they are ‘. . . the best in Spain . . . a special breed with impenetrable thick accents, missing teeth, and who sing about booze’.

Cádiz sits on the Atlantic coast, around fifty miles south-east of Huelva. The city was established by the Phoenicians in 1100 bc, and is today home to the Spanish Navy. Despite being one of Spain’s more venerable football institutions (Cádiz CF was formed in 1910) and aside from two solitary seasons, the club’s only continuous spell in La Liga was the eight seasons between 1985 and 1993, when its highest placing was twelfth. The club can currently be found in Segunda.

But the fans of the old club don’t appear particularly distressed by its relative lack of success. In fact, they don’t appear to be particularly bothered about winning, so long as they are enjoying themselves. This cheerful acceptance of their status is conveyed in one of their ‘songs’:

‘Alcohol, Alcohol, Alcohol.

We come here to get drunk, the result doesn’t matter at all.’

They have also been spotted at matches waving flags, emblazoned with the message ‘Arbitro, guapetón’ (‘Referee, you’re gorgeous’), a refreshing change from ‘Who’s the wanker in the black?’

In 1492, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile received the surrender of the ‘Moors’ from the Alhambra Palace in Granada and, with this grand gesture, these devout Catholics signalled an end to the Christian ‘Reconquista’ of Spain, almost 500 years after it had begun in the north of the country.

The departure of the Islamic people who had ruled Spain for over 700 years, as well as most of the ‘moriscos’ (Islamic followers who had converted to Christianity, at least nominally), came in 1606 when, with the Christian brutality which was typical of those times, they were forcibly expelled from the country.

The Alhambra – a magnificent, brooding fortress and a tribute to Islamic architecture – looms imperiously over the city of Granada, which lies to the east of Seville and is located on the other side of the Sierra Nevada from Málaga. Formed in 1931, Granada CF became, in 1941/42, the third club from Andalucia to enter the top tier of Spanish league football, La Liga. The club remained in La Liga for twenty years, but then went into sharp decline as financial problems mounted, and it collapsed at one stage as low as the fourth tier.

However, by 2002 the club was back in Segunda and, in 2010/11, Granada again reached La Liga, thirty-five years after the club had last been in the top tier. It remained in Primera for six seasons, dropping into Segunda for 2017/18. The fact that Tony Adams (a name Arsenal fans may recall) was manager during that particular Liga season obviously had nothing to do with Granada’s temporary fall from grace.

The Mezquita, or Great Mosque, is at the heart of the splendidly enigmatic city of Córdoba, once the vibrant, multiracial and religiously tolerant capital of Islamic Al-Andalus, which occupies the fertile Guadalquivir river plain to the north of Seville. Its football club underwent various incarnations in its earlier years, re-emerged in 1954 as Córdoba CF and spent several years in La Liga in the 1960s.

Its highest Liga position is fifth in 1964/65, but during the following four decades, the club groped its way around the relative obscurity of the Segunda and Tercera. They did reach Primera again in 2014/15, but a 0–8 home thrashing by Barcelona, Luis Suárez claiming a hat-trick, ensured Córdoba’s relegation that season, and the club was back in Segunda.

The city of Jaén, in the northern foothills of the Sierra Nevada, is admired for the quality of its olive oil production. Perhaps a bottle or two of this revitalising liquid will help to smooth the upward path of the city’s football club, Real Jaén, whose current league status could benefit from a bit of assistance. An early arrival, of 1922 vintage, whose history includes three seasons in the 1950s in La Liga, ‘los lagartos’ (‘the lizards’, due to the all-white strip) seem to prefer the Tercera, which is where the club is normally to be discovered, sheltering under a rock.

The Mediterranean port of Málaga, birthplace of Picasso, was one of the pioneers of Andalucian football when Málaga Foot-Ball Club was set up in 1904, as the game was played on the dockside quays by British sailors in the declining years of the nineteenth century. As appears to be the norm in Spain, the club adopted various guises as the years passed and, as CD Málaga, spent a couple of seasons in La Liga in the 1950s and began to settle into La Liga in the 1970s.

In 1993, another club, Málaga CF, was born, and very quickly advanced up the ladder to La Liga where, with the occasional slip from grace, the club remained from 2000 to 2018, when it was relegated. It is, however, too determined a club to remain there overlong, and will probably soon be back in La Liga, where it belongs. Málaga’s European adventures will feature later in this book.

Having languidly drifted across the romantic, humid lands of Andalucia, I now turn my attention to an entirely different region in terms of climate, geography, culture and language. I refer to the north of Spain and, in particular, to the harsh, mysterious world of the Basque Country.

***

BASQUE COUNTRY

Bilbao

Around 500 miles north of Seville, gazing out at the stormy Bay of Biscay, stands the bustling seaport of Bilbao, the largest city in the Basque Country.

By the late nineteenth century, Bilbao’s population was approaching 100,000. It was a fast-expanding city, with its shipbuilding, railway yards and steel mills, in particular, being significant contributors to its local economy and its trading links with other European countries, including Britain. It also possessed the nucleus of a business-oriented middle class, geared towards innovation and profitable commercial expansion.

This industrialising mini-economy with a receptive commercial culture was, aside from a few exceptions such as Barcelona, in marked contrast to much of the rest of Spain which was economically backward, agrarian and in thrall to the ‘latifundios’, the large, privately owned estates.

Since ‘El Desastre’ of 1898, and the consequent collapse of the important colonial market, much of rural Spain – in particular, the central, inland regions – was again experiencing isolationism, internal political strife and recurring power struggles, against a background of economic decline and increasing poverty. In the early years of the twentieth century, internal emigration to the larger towns and cities was increasing, but the rural peasantry who remained on the land were penurious and close to starvation.

However, this was far from the case in the areas surrounding the major ports, in particular Bilbao. British miners had been arriving in the Basque Country from north-east England cities, such as Sunderland and Newcastle. Shipyard workers also headed to Bilbao from the southern English coastal cities of Southampton and Portsmouth to take advantage of the economic benefits of industrialisation in the city. These immigrants brought with them the British game of football.

In 1898, these British workers formed Bilbao Football Club. In the same year, Spanish students back home from English universities, where they had discovered and enjoyed football, established Athletic Club in the city. Prior to this, in 1894, the two groups had played each other in casual games at Lamiako on the east bank of the River Nervión, the workers winning 6–0 in the first fixture.

In 1901, the students met at the city’s Café Garcia, and there they drew up the rules and regulations for Athletic Club. Despite the club’s claim for an 1898 founding date, 1901 is the general consensus (outside the Basque Country). By this early stage in its history Athletic Club had already adopted a cause: Basque nationalism, a philosophy underlying what many Basques perceived as their and their region’s unique character.

The Basque Country consists of four Spanish (and three French) regions, these being Álava, Gipuzkoa, Navarre and Vizcaya, which was home to Bilbao. The first three regions were relatively underdeveloped and, importantly, lacked an industrial middle class. Vizcaya was different, Bilbao was without question the Basques’ most important city, and so Athletic Club was to become, at least in the eyes of the club, the standard-bearer for the Basque cause.

The Basques were and are an anomaly in Spain and, indeed, in Europe. Their origins remain obscure, and their settlement of the lands around the south-east Bay of Biscay predates the arrival of the Celts. Their language is entirely different to Spanish Castilian, and is unique in Western Europe. Their culture, although heavily Catholic-influenced, is also very much their own and has little in common with Castilian. Although in these regions there are many who consider themselves Spanish, there is a sizeable number which does not and which considers itself Basque, and Basque only.

In 1894, Sabino de Arana had founded the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), a radically conservative Basque nationalist political party, and he coined the term ‘Euskadi’, loosely meaning ‘the Basque community’. Another Basque word – ‘Erdaldunak’ – means ‘people who speak a different language’, and could then, and now, be applied to many people within this region whose preferred tongue is Castilian. In any event, shortly after its establishment, Athletic Club and the PNV became close allies, with the former embracing the policies of the latter.

The word ‘Euskadi’ continued to resonate throughout Spain until relatively recently, when the Basque armed separatist group ETA (‘Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’: ‘Basque Homeland and Freedom’) laid down its arms after four decades of bloody struggle against the Spanish state.

Meanwhile, after the legal foundation of the club in 1901, Bilbao and Athletic briefly merged, under the name Vizcaya, to contest the Copa de la Coronación, the forerunner of the Copa del Rey. Five clubs – Vizcaya, FC Barcelona, Madrid FC, New Football de Madrid and Español – competed in this celebratory tournament, and Vizcaya beat Barcelona 2–1 in the final to claim the Cup. The Copa, held in Madrid, was the venue of the first match between Barcelona and Real Madrid (as Madrid FC were later titled), and the Catalan club won 2–1.

In 1903 the alliance between the two Bilbao clubs became a permanent merger, under the name Athletic Club. (Also in 1903, a group of Basque students formed Athletic Club Madrid, known today as Atlético Madrid, and forged strong, if temporary, links with Athletic Club.)

Athletic Club claimed the inaugural Copa title in 1903, and again in 1904 and 1911. In 1913, the club inaugurated their new stadium – San Mamés – known as ‘La Catedral’ by the faithful (in both senses). This stadium was to be Athletic’s home for the next 100 years.

The Spanish football federation decided in 1914 that, as the Copa was becoming so popular with national football clubs, it would end the existing practice of free entry into the competition and replace this with a series of regional play-offs, with each regional winner allowed into the Copa.

However, this decision did not deter Athletic Club. With the invaluable presence of striker Pichichi, it was unstoppable between 1914 and 1916, winning the trophy three times in succession.

Pichichi

England has the Golden Boot, Italy has the Capocannoniere (‘head gunner’), Turkey has the Gol Kralligi (‘goal king’), Germany has the Torjägerkanone (‘top scorer cannon’), and most other footballing countries have a similar annual award for the leading goalscorer in their top football league. Spain has the Trofeo Pichichi, a prize named after a Basque player who, 100 years ago, was a supremely talented forward and prodigious goalscorer for his club, Athletic Club of Bilbao.

Rafael Moreno Aranzadi was born in Bilbao in 1892 into a wealthy middle-class family. His father had been a mayor of the city and his uncle was Miguel de Unamuno, a Basque poet, essayist, philosopher and prominent academic. Educated at a private Catholic school, and under family pressure to follow an academic career, Aranzadi briefly studied law but, since his youthful experiences of the game on the playing fields by the River Nervión, he had known that football would be the overriding priority in his life.

A precociously skilful footballer, he ditched his legal studies and, in 1911, he joined Athletic, established only ten years previously. He was, at just over five feet in height, on the small side, and he became known as ‘Pichichi’, an affectionate nickname meaning ‘little pigeon’ or ‘little duck’. He was a confident and self-assured youngster and, despite (or perhaps because of) his lack of inches, he was a master at the art of dribbling, heading (perhaps surprisingly) but, above all, goalscoring.

In 1913 Pichichi claimed the first goal ever scored at Athletic’s magnificent new San Mamés Stadium, against fellow Basques Real Unión, and he scored a hat-trick in the 1915 Copa del Rey final against Español. Immediately recognisable on the pitch by his white bandana (to protect his head from the thick laces then in use on footballs), this little footballing genius, christened by newspapers ‘El Rey de Shoot’ (‘The Strike King’), scored 200 goals in 170 games for Athletic Club, his only club, between 1911 and 1921.

He played five games for Spain’s first national team in the 1920 Olympics, scoring one goal, and he retired from football in 1921. Although he was once their hero, an increasing number of Athletic fans considered that his individualistic attitude and ‘celebrity lifestyle’ were affecting his play, that he was becoming arrogant and selfish on the pitch, and made their feelings known vocally during Athletic games. Pichichi’s pride and self-esteem were under attack, so he gave up playing. He then briefly tried his hand at refereeing, but quickly found that to be tedious. In March 1922, he contracted typhoid from dining on contaminated oysters, and he died at the age of twenty-nine.

His death was mourned in Bilbao, and he became a footballing legend, a status ensured by his unparalleled goal tally, his loyalty to the club and his early death. In 1926 Athletic installed a bust of Pichichi at San Mamés, and it is customary for all visiting teams to leave a bouquet of flowers beside the bust. A painting of Pichichi and his wife, against an idyllic rural Basque landscape, hangs in the club president’s office.

Pichichi was Spanish football’s first sporting superstar. In his honour, Marca, the Madrid-based daily Spanish sports newspaper, initiated the ‘Trofeo Pichichi’ at the beginning of the 1952/53 season. The award is retroactive to the establishment of La Liga in 1929 so, ironically, as Pichichi predates La Liga he could not have been a candidate.

However, although the trophy has been claimed five times each by Alfredo Di Stéfano (Real Madrid, 1953–1959), Quini (Sporting de Gijón and Barcelona, 1973–1982), Hugo Sánchez (Atlético and Real Madrid, 1984–1990) and Lionel Messi (Barcelona, 2009–2018), the overall winner up to 2017/18 was Telmo Zarra, who won six trophies between 1944 and 1953. And his club? Athletic Bilbao. In season 2018/19, however, Messi equalled Zarra’s record.