Dani Rodríguez had been a first division footballer for three minutes and 19 seconds when the ball dropped at his feet by the centre spot and the pitch and a whole new world opened up, inviting him in. High in the stand at Son Moix, a Mallorca director edged forward and, he later admitted, thought: “Run, Forrest, run!” All around, 15,127 fans had pretty much the same idea. Down below, Dani did too. So he ran: fast and straight. “I set off like mad; it felt like a whole herd chasing me,” he said with a grin – and he got away, reaching the edge of the area before anyone from Eibar could catch him: 40 metres, four seconds, four touches. A fifth and the ball was in the net.
Rodríguez carried on running but this time the herd heading after him were his own players: primera. Fists were in the air, supporters leaping into each others’ arms, released at last, footballers tumbling and shouting. Mallorca were 1-0 up on the opening night. Only, the referee had his finger in his ear. Guadalupe Porras, his female assistant, the first in La Liga history, stopped and then they all did, as if someone had pressed pause. “You must have thought: ‘Hostia, bloody hell, don’t take this off me’,” Rodríguez was asked afterwards. “Yeah, and in those words,” he replied, “I didn’t even know what they were looking at: there was nothing wrong with it.”
What they were looking at was Real Mallorca’s first goal in the first division since 2013 and Rodríguez was right: there was nothing wrong with it. Just a lot that was right. Mallorca had been to hell and back, dropping from first division to second and then to second B, down where pitches are far from perfect, municipal sports centres for homes, some worrying that their very survival was in doubt. But on Saturday night here they were, back again. Consecutive promotions, both via the play-offs – only the second team ever to do so after Granada in 2011 – had returned them to the top flight and they had scored within four minutes. It had been fast, even if it did not feel like it to some fans, and so perhaps another minute waiting for the VAR would not matter much. They had already waited six years after all.
Most of their players had waited much longer. Dani Rodríguez is 31; he has been a ballboy in the Champions League for Deportivo La Coruña but had never played for anyone in the first division; it had taken him until he was 29 to even play in segunda. Now he had scored. “Pffff,” he said. “So many things went through my mind.” A tweet later tried to explain some of them: “Never give up, keep dreaming, keep working, believe in yourself, and in the end dreams come true: from Carregal [Betanzos, Galicia], to scoring at Son Moix in the best league in the world,” he wrote, alongside a grainy picture of himself as a kid.
In a way his story was all of theirs; a bunch of football players that probably never expected to be here but were not going to hold back now, 1-0 up and dominating, tearing into their opponents. Ante Budimir put one over from four yards. And while Eibar recovered, Fabián Orellana outstanding and Paulo Oliveira equalising, Mallorca did not fold. Instead they got the winner when Joan Sastre’s cross was deflected by Oliveira and looped in with 15 minutes left to make it 2-1, a result met at the end by a huge roar. It was, Diario de Mallorca said, a “first-class victory”. “A triumphant return,” Ultima Hora called it. “A sweet awakening.”
“I could never have imagined this in my wildest dreams,” Salva Sevilla had said when Mallorca were promoted back to the first division in June and he spoke for all of them there on Saturday. When Mallorca-born Xisco Campos, the club captain at 37, came on with four minutes to go to a huge cheer, it was his first top-flight game since the 2004-05 season and he played only three ever. “I was especially happy for him on his ‘re-debut’, and in his home,” the manager, Vicente Moreno, said.
The day Salva Sevilla left Espanyol, it was to join Mallorca in Segunda B. One could call it Spain’s third tier but, organised in four 20-team regional groups, usually excluded when people here talk about “fútbol profesional”, it is anything from third tier to seventh and known as “the well”. It is easy enough to fall into but almost impossible to climb out of again. Relegated from the first division to the second in 2012-13, after 16 consecutive seasons there, Mallorca had been relegated again, falling into the well at the end of 2016-17.
It was not supposed to be this way: Mallorca had been bought by Robert Sarver, owner of the Phoenix Suns, in January 2016, when he spent €20.62m on shares. His president is the former tennis player, Andrew Kohlberg. Steve Nash, the former basketball player, is on the board. So is Graeme Le Saux. And the CEO is Maheta Molango, a lawyer who scored 12 seconds into his debut at Brighton and also played for Lincoln, Oldham, Wrexham and Grays Athletic.
Mallorca had come out of administration in 2012, with a payment plan that obliged them to return €40m over 10 years. The arrival of Sarver and Nash brought stability and promised the end of the bitter civil war that had crippled the club for so long. But as the Spanish phrase goes: if the ball does not want to go in … “Mallorca are a first division club who happen to be in the second division,” Sarver had said but by the end of the 2016-17 season they were not even that. For the first time in 36 years they found themselves out of “professional football”. “Everything that could go wrong did,” Molango said. “We’ve made mistakes and we’re sorry.” Javier Recio, the sporting director, vowed to “give back what we’ve taken away”.
They did not throw it all away. There was patience and a plan. That summer they brought in the new coach Moreno, who had previously won promotion from Segunda B with Nastic. They approached some players with three-year contracts, not the usual single year, promising they were building to return, and constructed a team for Segunda B but also for beyond. Sevilla was their first signing, dropping from first to third tier. Others followed.
He, Moreno and the rest made their debuts at Peralada, in a municipal ground that holds 1,500 against a team that had been taken over by Girona to be their B team. By the end of the season they had been promoted. By the end of the following season they had been promoted again. On Saturday first division football returned to the island.
“I never thought I was leaving the elite behind,” Sevilla insisted, but truthfully he never thought this either. None of them did. And even if they imagined Mallorca getting there, many would not have imagined getting there with them. Most teams, when they get to the first division, obsessed by “experience” there, change almost the entire team, denying them the reward they fought for. Some ditch the manager too.
Like Saturday’s opponents Eibar, a model for most to follow, Mallorca have not. Of the starting XI only Febas and Lumor Agbenyenu were new: five had played in Segunda B with them and four in the second division (including Iddrisu Baba, from the youth team). It is true they have signed nine players and want four more before 2 September; it is true, too, that they know it will be hard to survive and insist on humility – acting “as if we were the shittest of the shit” – aware that, at €29m, they have the division’s smallest operating budget. It is also true that they won promotion on 23 June, a month after everyone else had finished, denying them preparation time. They know they will have to wait to see which players are left. But Saturday’s line-up was not just circumstantial nor was the result. It is the way they want it.
As one beaming director put it after the game, long after everyone had gone: “I really, really like my team.”
So does Moreno, although he is pushing for more players. Already revered on the island, he was making his first division coaching debut at the same ground as he had made his first division playing debut for Xérez a decade before. “Seven of those who played with us in Segunda B got on the pitch tonight. What sometimes looks like a handicap can be an advantage,” he said afterwards. “Having players from before allows our ideas to be put into practice more quickly.” Then he added something that, at least at some level, is even more important: “And this is a group of players who deserve to enjoy this opportunity because they’re the ones who brought us here.”
At one pre-season training session Moreno was caught on camera ranting at his players, some of whom had arrived late. He sought the intensity, the enthusiasm, the effort that had taken them to primera and that would see them survive there, to impress on them the importance of the work and the size of the opportunity ahead, just how big this was. “For fucks’ sake,” he said. “We’re already 10 minutes late and some of you have a face on. That’s not going to last 30 seconds with me. A first division training session: some of you have been gifted this. The first ‘face’ I see, the first person easing off a little, that’s it, up yours, gone. I don’t care if we end up with just eight of us: I’ll put [assistant coach Dani] Pendín on the pitch. Got it? Some players never get the chance to play in primera.”
On Saturday night Mallorca’s players did. They had earned it, nobody else. And they took it. Fast. It was early when Dani Rodríguez set off running and late by the time he left, walking out of Son Moix with his son, “Papá 14” printed on the back of a mini-Mallorca shirt. “Life can be wonderful,” he said as he went.
Talking points
• You are 38 and a half, you are beginning your last ever season, time almost up, you go on with two minutes left, not long enough to do anything, and your opponents are Barcelona. Yeah. And? Erm. And you are Aritz Aduriz, so you do what you do, of course. The strange case of the man who gets better as he gets older and who took that penalty got even more stupidly brilliant when he scored a ludicrous overhead kick to defeat Barcelona and send San Mamés wild. “He’s an animal,” Athletic Bilbao’s manager, Gaizka Garitano, said. “I have coached a lot of players but no one quite like him.” So, could the season’s best goal end up being its first?
• 21 July: Zinedine Zidane says the sooner Gareth Bale leaves, “the better”. 17 August: Bale starts Real Madrid’s opening game of the season, provides the superb assist for the opening goal in a 3-1 win at Celta – meaning Madrid are ahead of Barcelona and top for the first time in 818 days – and heads home post-game having heard his manager say: “He’s staying.”
• Another Briton, another assist. On a very impressive debut, Kieran Trippier produced a wonderful ball for the only goal for Atlético against Getafe. That said, a moment from João Félix eclipsed everything else. Somehow, he went 70 metres, past three, getting kicked, pushed and pulled, all the way up the other end, part power, part quality, part sheer bloodymindedness, all genius, to win a penalty. Which Álvaro Morata missed.
• Chimy Ávila belter. Three words that vont tres bien ensemble. The scorer of last season’s best goal did it again – and on the opening day once more.
• And, yes, the refereeing could even have got worse. Which is pretty impressive.
• Full Monchi. Sevilla had seven new signings in their side and a new manager, too. Julen Lopetegui ’s team beat Espanyol 2-0.
• It was a good weekend for the new teams: Mallorca won, Osasuna won (somehow) and Granada scored four but did not win. Which leads us to …
• Always go to Villarreal. Well, obviously: Santi Cazorla’s there. And he scored this weekend. As did Roberto Soldado on his return to Spain. But there is more, as Spain’s premier soccer statistician Mr Chip noted this weekend after a 4-4 draw with Granada: there have been 7,076 games this century and only 10 4-4 draws. Four of those have been at the Madrigal.
La Liga results
Athletic Bilbao 1-0 Barcelona
Alavés 1-0 Levante
Atlético Madrid 1-0 Getafe
Celta Vigo 1-3 Real Madrid
Espanyol 0-2 Sevilla
Leganés 0-1 Osasuna
Mallorca 2-1 Eibar
Real Betis 1-2 Valladolid
Valencia 1-1 Real Sociedad
Villarreal 4-4 Granada