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11 hours ago
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Lamine Yamal wore the crown and flew the flag. With the last kick of the opening game of 2025-26, Barcelona’s new No 10 – the teenager handed the shirt Ladislao Kubala, Luis Suárez, Diego Maradona, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi once wore, the kid Spain coach, Luis de la Fuente, had claimed was “touched by God’s wand” and had been anointed by Him too – scored against Mallorca. It was his first goal as an adult and he celebrated by conducting his own coronation. La Liga’s title race had begun.
The day after it had been run, nine months on, as Barcelona’s bus made its way through the streets, from the top deck of the victory parade Lamine Yamal held a Palestine flag. “This is something I don’t normally like but I spoke to him and if he wants to it’s his decision,” Hansi Flick said. “He’s old enough: he’s 18.” Coming of age in the public eye wasn’t easy – isn’t easy – and the season hadn’t been either. There had been injuries and, Lamine Yamal later admitted, an “internal abyss”, but he had his third league title. Flick, the father figure whose own dad died on the morning they won the league and chose to share that with his other “family”, had his second. Have you ever felt so much love, the coach was asked. “No, never,” he said.
Barcelona had effectively wrapped it up against city rivals Espanyol with seven games to spare, Lamine Yamal heading towards the line, arms out like Usain Bolt contemplating Richard Thompson and Walter Dix. They mathematically wrapped it up in week 35, the first time a clásico had brought the championship to a close in 94 years. Three days after the dressing room fight between Fede Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni that ended with Real Madrid’s vice-captain taken to hospital and stitched up, suffering “craniofacial trauma”, this time it was Marcus Rashford who delivered the knockout blow. Barcelona had played in three different homes and won every game in all of them. This clásico was their 11th win in a row, their 23rd win in 25 games since the previous one 600km west.
How different things looked now. In late-October, at a time when Barcelona’s concerned coach had warned that “ego kills success”, Rayo had identified The Flick Line, and they had been sliced open by Sevilla, Madrid won 2-1 at the Santiago Bernabéu to go five points clear. That night, Jude Bellingham called Lamine Yamal’s talk “cheap”, accompanying that line with Elvis’s A Little Less Conversation, and Dani Carvajal gave him the old jibber-jabber gesture. But Madrid had a mouth of their own to worry about, Vinícius Júnior stomping off with 18 minutes left. Xabi Alonso said he wanted to focus on what really mattered, but it turned out that was what really mattered. With the coach abandoned, things began to unravel, fault-lines revealed and deepened.
Barcelona’s Super Cup win the next time they met finally closed a spell “in charge” that Alonso felt started too soon, unhappily heading to the Club World Cup, and then ended too soon as well. A new manager came who couldn’t really manage either, Álvaro Arbeloa saying all the right things that weren’t the right things at all. He offered his grey sofa for his players to open up from and brought them doughnuts when they performed well but that wasn’t often. “I’m not Gandalf,” he said and by the time sport’s biggest rivals met again in May, Madrid were out of Europe, out of the cup, and almost out of their minds. Divided and just wanting it done, 90 minutes later they were out of the title race too, 12 points behind with nine left in play and empty-handed again like last season. As for Kylian Mbappé, he was just out, slipping off to Sicily. “Let’s go Madrid!” he posted when they were already 2-0 down.
Two days later and more than 10 years since he last faced the media, president, Florentino Pérez, went full Trump in an incoherent press conference that explained nothing and kind of explained it all. At least he had identified Madrid’s problem and fixed it: the ABC newspaper. He cancelled his subscription.
Barcelona were champions, the trophy miraculously handed out on the night it was actually won then ridden round the city. They carried the Super Cup on board too but couldn’t take the European Cup, which was the one they most wanted. Madrid couldn’t either, their better nights reserved for the competition but still not good enough. Villarreal and Athletic hadn’t escaped the league phase, although San Mamés was the only place that champions PSG didn’t score. Atlético Madrid, who had knocked Barcelona out of both cups and long since let go of the league, got closest but ultimately got nothing. Arsenal knocked them out of their first semi-final in a decade and in their first Copa del Rey final for 13 years they were Matarazzoed, Real Sociedad winning on penalties: a backup goalkeeper made the final save and planted a kiss on the cheek of a former ballboy who then ran up and scored the winner, full-back Álvaro Odriozola, who didn’t even play, saying he wouldn’t swap this for “anything in humanity”.
Barcelona, Madrid, Atlético and Villarreal, who finished third, will get another chance next year, along with Betis who took the new, fifth Champions League spot. Below them, cup winners Real Sociedad were joined in Europe by Celta Vigo and Getafe, whose manager, Pepe Bordalás, said qualification would go down in football history. That was pushing it, but when they started the season Getafe had 13 first-teamers available and two of those were goalkeepers. When they reached halfway, in the relegation zone, things were so desperate they played full-back Allan Nyom up front. Bordalás insisted “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone” – and he’s inflicted a lot of pretty bad things on a lot of people. Yet somehow, when they reached the end, having signed four little-known loanees in January, they were seventh. They had done it their way: Getafe had the second fewest goals as well as the lowest possession, fewest shots and most fouls.
Caught up somewhere in Getafe’s celebratory pitch invasion at the end of the final day, were a dozen or so red shirts. Relegation-threatened Osasuna’s players were still out there waiting for the night’s other games to finish so they could discover their fate, the captain calling those final minutes spent with iPads, phones and radios “agonising, the worst feeling I’ve ever had”. Eventually, they were liberated, leaping about with the Getafe fans and Nyom, who said he wanted to ensure they were safe before he ducked into the dressing room. “It’s been … weird,” said Osasuna’s coach, Alesio Lisci, and it had been too. His team had already celebrated survival after a 99th-minute winner against Sevilla a month earlier; they never expected to have to clamber clear again, eventually saved by others not themselves.
It was that kind of season. If the top lacked twists, the same five or six all season, the bottom was wild, all sudden falls and biblical resurrections. Only Real Oviedo – back in the first division 24 years later, with Santi Cazorla at last making his primera debut for the team he had first joined aged eight and rejoined on the minimum wage at 38 – went down early, no room for romance or drama. Despite being the only club with Lamine and Mbappé. They scored nine home goals all year and had more managers (three) than away wins (two).
Yet if Oviedo left early, the battle to avoid the other two relegation places was brutal, crowded, costly and went to the wire. In a league where good teams suddenly turned bad and bad ones became brilliant, just a tiny gap separated Europe from the abyss most of the season. Nine teams went into the penultimate round of games fighting to avoid the last two places and while Espanyol, Sevilla, Alavés and Valencia pulled clear then, there were still five on the final day, their fates interconnected. Elche and Girona faced each other at Montilivi, all or nothing, a late Thomas Lemar shot off the bar the margin between Girona standing or falling. In the end, four points from their last eight matches meant the team that challenged for the title two years ago and were in the Champions League last season slipped into the second division on 41 points – a total that would have delivered salvation in any other season this decade. Mallorca went too, bottom of a three-team tie-breaking mini-league involving them, Osasuna and Levante, who all ended on 42. They did so despite having a striker who scored 23 goals, a record not matched in 26 seasons.
“This hurts,” coach, Martín Demichelis, said. “Football has been cruel,” lamented Girona’s manager, Míchel Sánchez. “This league was really crazy,” Elche’s Eder Sarabia said, but it was over now and his team had survived.
There was just one thing left, the best saved until last. But the team that went from little Rayo to Rayo effing Vallecano, the club so gloriously out of place it was good, couldn’t come back from Germany and their first ever final with the Conference League trophy. Which like just about everything to do with Rayo was wrong but somehow right, the banner stretched across the stand at the end in Leipzig expressing everything, the whole point of it all, better than a cup ever could. “I have known no greater victory than being with you in defeat,” it said.
Except perhaps winning one of these …
Most charming president
Rayo Vallecano’s Raúl Martín Presa, calling fans “drunk, brainless and idle”. His own fans.
Most optimistic owner
“Don’t talk to me about just avoiding relegation; talk to me about European places,” Jesús Martínez said in week eight, having just sacked the manager who brought them up and, so far, had the team safe. Two days later Oviedo were in the bottom three. They never came out again.
Best atmosphere
It might not surprise you to know that it was at San Mamés; it might surprise you to know that Athletic weren’t playing. Instead, Euskadi and Palestine were.
Best tifo-type thing
At last the pandemic hoarding pays off. Atlético’s fans greeted their team with a bog-roll shower so good it turned the Metropolitano into the Monumental and Sevilla followed suit a few days later. So what did Uefa and La Liga do? They fined them, of course.
Best post-match singalong
Rayo, belting their way through A Pirate’s Life – with the CD Yuncos players they had just beaten.
Best party
And worst hangover. Imagine you win the Copa del Rey for the fourth time ever, it kicks off at 10pm, takes extra-time and penalties, and you don’t leave the stadium until 2am. Imagine the hotel disco starts at 2.39am, taxis take you to a club at 4.45am, you clamber on to a bus bound for the airport at 10.15am having not slept, and crack open the duty-free on the flight home. Imagine the liveliest of the lot of you shouts: “This is the best day of my life and we’re going to have a fucking great time.” So you do; that day and the next and the next, circling the city from the top deck of a bus, sinking beers and getting sunstroke on board, hundreds of thousands there to go wild with you. Imagine you stumble in the next afternoon, still in a bit of a state, to prepare a game you just want to get through. Now imagine someone says: lads, it’s Getafe.
Most nostalgic fan
Lionel Messi, silently slipping into the Camp Nou all alone one cold Sunday night in November.
Most brilliantly unexpected fan
Unluckiest fan
At the end of their 3-0 win over Real Mallorca, one Betis supporter desperate to get Cédric Bakambu’s shirt came bounding down the stand, tumbled over the barrier and fell right at the forward’s feet. Which is one way to grab a player’s attention. But he still didn’t get it: Bakambu just stood there looking bemused instead. Oh for a Sergio Herrera, the Osasuna goalkeeper who, after victory in Palma, safely gathered up the entire team’s kit and hand-delivered it the stands, no pratfalls needed and no broken bones.
Naughtiest fan
Oviedo’s game at Mestalla was put back 24 because of torrential rain, leaving supporters trapped in Valencia and missing travel home, so the club arranged for them to fly back on the team’s charter the following day. Which was lovely. But when the picture went up online, a mum in Asturias couldn’t help recognising one of the passengers. “Hey, Real Oviedo,” she posted, “please tell my son I’ll be having a word with him when he gets home.” Apparently, he was supposed to be at his gran’s house.
Best groomed fans
When the Celta striker Borja Iglesias was subject to homophobic abuse for painting his nails, their fans and teammates decided they would do the same, solidarity shown in all sorts of colours and designs.
Bluntest headline
“Zaragoza are going to shit,” El Periodico de Aragon said, and sadly they weren’t wrong.
Best starting XI
Best revenge
You wait till I’m older than you! When tiny Inter de Valdemoro from somewhere way, way down in the ninth tier faced Getafe in the Copa del Rey, they were eight goals down with half an hour to go. So Getafe sent on Borja Mayoral, at last given the chance of a lifetime to stick it to big brother Kity in the opposition’s midfield. Mayoral scored two more in an 11-0 battering. Speaking of which …
Best name
Valdemoro’s goalkeeper, that night? Busy.
Toughest opponent
Robert Navarro, tackled by tinfoil.
Best red card
Granada’s Jorge Pascual, sent off for calling the linesman “fucking moustache-face”. And, the referee’s report read, for “pointing to his upper lip to simulate said moustache”. Just in case he hadn’t got the message, like.
Best timing
Best-dressed team
Sevilla, rocking the hand-me-down chic. “You haven’t got any trainers, you lack the clothes you need, and someone from your family says: ‘Would you like your grandad’s trousers?’,” coach, Matías Almeyda, said. “‘Yes please, I could use them.’ ‘Would you like your cousin’s T-shirt?’ ‘Sure, give it to me’.”
Most sought-after shirt
Smelliest shirt
Real Betis’s scratch and sniff jersey: made of oranges and smells of oranges too. Well, it does before the game, anyway.
Handiest goalkeeper
Dani Cárdenas, saving a Kike García penalty and the Vallecas nets.
Best teammate
All Action Hero Hugo Hard not complaining about being on the bench. “If I’m not a starter any more,” he said, “it’s because [Umar] Sadiq is playing like Pelé.”
Most modest player
When Barcelona previewed Mallorca’s visit as Robert Lewandowski versus Vedat Muriqi, the Kosovan replied: “There are few strikers that compete with Lewy … and I’m not one of them. Thanks, though.”
Best apology
The Betis striker Cucho Hernández scored against Levante and immediately said sorry to his former club. Which would have been nice but he never played for Levante. He did play for Huesca, who wear the same colours.
Manager of the year
Luis Castro fell on his arse on his debut, slipping over as he kicked the ball back but didn’t do so again, instead leading a miracle at Levante. President, Jokin Aperribay, asked ChatGPT if Rino Matarazzo was a good coach for Real Sociedad and it said “no”; four months later, they had won a historic Copa del Rey. “They say I get results from not much, always find a way to get points, but this is the like a pencil: you sharpen it and sharpen it, and keep sharpening it, and in the end there’s no pencil left,” Getafe coach, José Bordalás, warned, but somehow he took them back into Europe with just a stub and that rubbery bit. The day he presented Luis Garcia, Sevilla’s sporting director grumbled “it’s like a funeral in here”, yet the coach resurrected them in six weeks. “Some teams have bazookas and tanks, and we’re there fighting with a catapult,” Eder Sarabia said, but promoted Elche survived and did it playing nice football too. Then there were Claudio Giráldez and Manuel Pellegrini again. And Hansi Flick of course, champion once more. But the winner is the Villarreal-bound Iñigo Pérez who, through the endless troubles, from not having a pitch to play on, a place to train or hot water to wash with, led Rayo Vallecano to their highest-ever finish and a first final with rare dignity. “It’s easier to reach success through love,” he said, and so it was.
Player of the year
With 10 goals in the last 14 games – the only matches he started all season, a fact which simultaneously enhances what he did and diminishes his case – the single most significant footballer this season genuinely might be the Levante striker Carlos Espí. When fans called for him to be given the Ballon d’Or, Vedat Muriqi responded by twirling his finger at the side of his forehead, saying: “This lot are crazy.” But one more point and he might just have got this far more prestigious award, along with salvation. And Joan García, whose “science fiction” save against Espanyol was the season’s best and had Lamine Yamal declaring: “Mother of God almighty, what a goalkeeper!” But it probably has to be Lamine Yamal himself, crowned at 18. “I would like to be everything everyone wants me to be,” he said, which said a lot, but he was still better than anyone else, leading Barcelona’s escape towards the line.
Team of the season
G: Joan García, Barcelona.
RB: Marcos Llorente, Atlético.
CB: Florian Lejeune, Rayo.
CB: David Affengruber, Elche
LB: Carlos Romero, Espanyol.
M: Fermín López, Barcelona.
M: Luis Milla, Getafe.
M: Pablo Formals, Betis.
RW: Lamine Yamal, Barcelona.
CF: Vedat Muriqi, Mallorca
LW: Alberto Moleiro, Villarreal.
Subs: Aaron Escandell (Oviedo), Eric García, Pedri (Barcelona), Ratiu, Chavarria, Isi (Rayo), Jon Martín, Mikel Oyarzabal (Real Sociedad), Aleix Febas, (Elche), Abde (Betis), Budimir (Osasuna), Espí (Levante), Mbappé, Guler, Tchouaméni (Madrid), Muñoz (Osasuna), Pubill, Koke, Griezmann (Atlético), Martínez (Alavés), Gueye (Villarreal), Exposito (Espanyol), Iglesias (Celta).
