Rayo Vallecano’s fans rolled out the banner at 10.46pm on the last Saturday of the season and rolled it away again a minute later. There had been a sneak glimpse of the message they hoped to stretch across the one end of a ground that is actually an end and not just a wall at risk of falling down, but it wasn’t quite time for the big reveal. For now all they wanted was to pull 40 metres of fabric into place, huge white letters proudly painted on a red background, ready for when, if, it actually was. They certainly didn’t intend to tempt fate; it wasn’t done yet, history still not made and, God knows, if there is a place where anything can go wrong, where football and life isn’t always kind but is always lived, it is here.
There was though a brief look before the banner was hidden again behind the back row – something about years, Europe and us – and they were close now. There were 10 minutes plus added time left and the side from the Independent People’s Republic of Vallekas, the last of the neighbourhood teams, not just in the barrio but of the barrio, were on the verge of qualifying for the Conference League. All they had to do was beat Real Mallorca and it turned out they wouldn’t even have to do that: they had taken 28 shots without scoring but it still didn’t matter because up in Vitoria, the team that could take the place from them hadn’t scored either, Osasuna losing 1-0 to Alavés.
Or so they thought until, with two minutes to go and Rayo having had time and a two-goal cushion on their side, Osasuna equalised. A final day that hadn’t had much drama until then, Rayo briefly in a Europa League place and never out of a Conference League position, suddenly had some, fate now being decided on some far away field, everything on hold, no control over their own destiny. The final whistle went in Vallecas at 10.59pm with the score 0-0; 352km away, though, Osasuna and Alavés were still playing and Rayo knew a goal up there and it would be over. Osasuna would be going to Europe in their place, the impossible dream exactly that.
Some Rayo players slipped to the floor exhausted, just sitting there, unable to do anything more now: their 38 games were gone, the final minutes of someone else’s would decide what they had been worth. Pacha Espino held up a finger on each hand: 1-1. A huddle gathered around Dani Cardenas who had the game on his phone and was tapping at the screen to get it to move. In the stands, supporters desperately tried to get their mobiles to work; the more of them tried, the fewer of them succeeded. Some, the sensible ones, had old-school transistor radios on the go. Down on the pitch, Rayo’s coach Iñigo Pérez sought refuge in club captain Óscar Trejo.
“That was my selfishness: he gives me a feeling of security,” Pérez said later. “We knew Osasuna had equalised. In that moment, you start to think of that classic footballing scenario where the team that does everything, that creates chances, that pushes, that has to win doesn’t. In those seconds your heart sinks, imagining that the blow is on its way.” Thirty seconds passed, 60, then 90, ever more convinced the cruelty was coming. Until two minutes later the final whistle at last went on Alavés-Osasuna, the huddle broke, fists in the air, and Vallecas exploded, Pérez and Trejo skipping off arms around each other, running in delirious circles.
“I’ll probably look back on the footage and feel embarrassed, but I enjoyed it,” Pérez said; they all did. They were only 15 seconds into the invasion when goalkeeper Augusto Batalla had given his shorts away. Fans did knee slides, or just lay on the grass. They cut themselves chunks of turf, burnt off bits of the net to keep and swung from the crossbar. They held their players, hugged and cried. Kids went up on shoulders, twirling scarfs. “They deserve this, we all do,” Trejo said. “This is a club made to suffer, where happiness is rare; on days like this you would pay to be a footballer.” Someone tried to heave Isi Palazón on his back and ended in a heap; others had better luck. At 11.02pm, from the back of the stands, the banner was raised, a proper look this time: “25 years later, Europe sees us again.”
It’s more than a quarter of a century, which is why when the chant went round declaring “Vallecas entera se va de borrachera” – the whole of Vallecas is going on the piss – no one could blame them. Rayo have only ever played in Europe once before, in the 2001 Uefa Cup, when they reached the quarter-finals having been handed a place thanks to the fair play table. The only time they had actually qualified, they were banned from taking the place because the club was in administration. Yes, they had looked like they might get close under Andoni Iraola. But now, the man who was supposed to be his assistant at Bournemouth, yet who the UK home office said could not make a contribution to English football, had led Rayo there for the first time ever.
It is a monumental achievement, made all the better, worth celebrating, by how monumentally out of place it all feels, way beyond the fact that no team in the first division has a lower income. So out of place in fact that you genuinely wonder if they will be allowed to play European football at their place. “I don’t need to run through the difficulties we have here,” Pérez said. “All you have to do is take a little walk around to see it.” A walk around the stadium where there’s no stand at one end, the pitch instead overlooked by flats – a Fede Valverde shot literally flew into someone’s living room – and where concrete crumbles, pipes are rusty, and water comes in through the roof. Where “water” flows across toilet floors but not out of the taps.
Rayo have never won anything, or even played a final. Three weeks ago, thieves broke in and took everything. Police are looking for a man with a carpet, etc and so on. Actually, thieves really did break in and police are looking for a man with 60 pairs of boots. The players refused to train in protest because it was the third time it has happened. Staff have to pay for much of their own material and gym equipment has been chewed on by pests. This is the only club with no online ticket sales and they’re not very good at telling anyone when the actual ticket offices will open, either. In the buildup to this game, hundreds of fans queued overnight, sleeping in the street, just in case they opened the next day. They didn’t. There may be no owner – no man at all – more despised by fans than Rayo’s.
“Sometimes you think: ‘Bloody hell, how are we where we are with what we have?’” left winger Álvaro García said, and that was before they had got here, to Europe. “Rayo don’t have the normal things that other grounds and other clubs have.” As one visiting manager put it on his way outone day, this is a place that needs “disinfecting”. And yet this, that same manager says, is special, real, the connection authentic, different, like something from another time. At the end of Saturday’s win, Mallorca goalkeeper Dominik Greif said he had never experienced anything like it: “Incredible: it is the dream of any player to have fans like this.”
Quick Guide
La Liga results
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Real Betis 1-1 Valencia, Real Madrid 2-0 Real Sociedad, Leganés 3-0 Real Valladolid, Espanyol 2-0 Las Palmas, Alavés 1-1 Osasuna, Getafe 1-2 Celta Vigo, Rayo Vallecano 0-0 Mallorca, Girona 0-4 Atlético Madrid, Villarreal 4-2 Sevilla, Athletic Club 0-2 Barcelona
There is something about Vallecas, Madrid’s self-consciously working class, left-wing neighbourhood, and the team that represents it. When new players arrive, supporters take them around and show them. There is always a risk of romanticising poverty, justifying failures as character and fans really would like some basic amenities. Players would too. Yet at Rayo in the place of the resources and facilities many clubs take as standard, goes pride and identity, a different feel about the dressing room, the whole place, something that brings it all back to the start, some of the trappings and traps of professionalism stripped away. Something that makes a European qualification feel so special, matter so much; something, perhaps, that makes it possible in the first place, changing mindsets and attitudes.
“We’re a poor club, a humble one,” Pérez said. “But that first day, the players laid aside their shirts with their names and numbers on and left themselves entirely naked, giving absolutely everything they have. In professional football where everyone has a name, where they are in a good position economically, it’s very hard to achieve that. And yet there has not been a single day when they have not done so. Those weaknesses we have bring many strengths.” The biggest party they had ever seen was earned the hard way, everyone forced to wait just a little longer before they could say it: Rayo Vallecano – Rayo Vallecano! – were on their way into Europe.
First though they were on their way round the neighbourhood, a big, blue, suitably battered looking bus making its way down Avenida Albufera to collect the them. “That’s the first I had heard of it, but I will follow,” Pérez said. “After the game I hugged Batalla. He was crying. And he said: ‘Mister, tonight you will come out, tonight you will celebrate’, because he knows I never do. I said: well, tomorrow I’ve got to think about the Conference League. But today, I’m enjoying this. I promise you. My granddad used to say to me effort equals reward. That’s not always true, but I’m happy that tonight it is.”
