“Rayo Vallecano is love, humility, toil,” says Óscar Trejo, the captain who handed in the armband in solidarity with workers at the club.
The striker Sergio Camello calls them “the last team from another time, special for what they fight for and what they fight against”. And, Álvaro García agrees, this could be the best, unlikeliest story ever told: the winger, 5ft 5in and lightning like the bolt across their shirt, Rayo’s all-time top scorer on 36 first division goals, has lived relegation and promotion but nothing like this. None of them have. “We’ve transformed from Rayito [little Rayo], to el puto Rayo [Rayo fucking Vallecano],” says Óscar Valentín, the midfielder leading them out in Leipzig. “People always saw us as the small club that couldn’t.”
They did, but now … well, they still do. Because on almost every measure Rayo Vallecano are small, except for the things that truly matter and there they are giants. Football doesn’t always make sense, which makes it brilliant, and what Rayo have done makes even less sense, which makes it even better: a club and community gloriously out of place.
The night before Rayo’s third Conference League game, Lech Poznan’s kitman posted a video from the visitors’ dressing room at their dilapidated ground east of Madrid: virtually no light, cardboard boxes lining one wall, two plastic chairs in the corner, a few bent coat hangers and some old towels piled up in multiple colours like your granny’s airing cupboard. What are they doing in a competition like this? Go to a game and you might ask the same but be glad they are, their head coach, Iñigo Pérez, admitting that one of the joys of this European adventure has been seeing away fans feel they’ve encountered something different, real. Anyway, the answer, it turned out, was: heading to the final.
Wednesday night against Crystal Palace is Rayo’s first in their 102-year history. “To even get into European competition is an achievement; imagine actually playing the final,” Trejo says. “We’re like kids gifted a toy: desperate to open it, to play, enjoy it.”
At 38 this will be Trejo’s last game for the club he joined in the second division in 2017, an implausibly perfect end. Of the 16 men who played the semi-final against BlueCo-owned Strasbourg, only five joined from top-flight clubs and three of those had just been relegated. Only three of the squad have won a trophy in Europe – Luiz Felipe’s Coppa Italia with Lazio and Camello and Gerard Gumbau’s cameos as academy kids at Atlético Madrid and Barcelona respectively – but they have 24 relegations. Their icon, Isi Palazón, picked fruit at 19, resigned to not making it, and didn’t play in primera until he was 27. Pérez was denied a UK work permit as an assistant at Bournemouth.
Rayo have the lowest budget and smallest ground in La Liga, to which they returned in 2021. They have only played in Europe once, picked out of a Fair Play draw they didn’t attend. The only time they actually qualified, they couldn’t take part because they were in administration. Striker Jorge de Frutos suggests the Conference League is there to give clubs like them a chance, but there aren’t really clubs like Rayo. This isn’t just about position, but place.
“What makes Rayo special is the barrio,” says midfielder Pedro Díaz. Barrio, the word that defines them, is the hood, although Vallecas is huge now: over 300,000 people. The self-styled People’s Republic of Vallekas, once separate from Madrid and built on immigration, it has an identity that still sets it apart. Housing packed together, washing hanging across streets where Rayo murals bring brickwork to life and political posters cover everything. It’s proud of a working-class, left-wing identity expressed through its team, the physical and emotional heart of the community: not just in the barrio but of the barrio, playing in a ground with one end that is flats where a wayward shot can fly through your window.
“I would invite anyone to come; you won’t want to leave because of the unique feeling in the barrio, the passion,” Trejo says. When players join they’re taken round by fans, the bubble broken. On match day, they park on the street outside. A photo recently circulated of Dani Cárdenas and Andrei Ratiu getting a kebab in their kit; few in Vallecas could understand the fuss: it’s normal, if not football normal. After every game players stand before the Bukaneros ultras, listening to the voice of the people, singing songs of identification and pride.
Causes are embraced, protests common and often imaginative, a stand taken. When the owner, Raúl Martín Presa – a president fans couldn’t despise more and who despises them back, calling them “drunk, brainless and idle” – invited far-right politician Santiago Abascal, they came in hazmat suits to “disinfect” the place. It is about representation more than results. “What they care about is that we know what we’re fighting for,” Camello says.
Yet the results are good, somehow. Presa described the Poznan video as “miserable”, complaining that “mocking someone’s humility or poverty is horrible”. But their kitman could hardly be blamed – “opponents come and can’t believe it: when you’ve stayed in luxury hotels and you stay in a hostel, you’ll see fault,” Valentin says – and supporters saw a reality that needed saying, the president responsible and in no position to act offended.
Besides, that was just the away dressing room: look around at the municipal ground for which they pay €81,784 annually and it’s filthy, falling apart, cables hanging out, cement breaking off, water running through roofs but not taps. Rats run through too. You can romanticise humility, embrace earthiness, but this is more basic; it is dignity. When the video assistant referee failed against Barcelona, operators said the stadium electricity supply was insufficient; against Real Madrid, a power outage was prompted by pulling out a plug. The club shop is the size of a cupboard: one in, one out, no shirts the day before the final. There are no online ticket sales, queues going round the block. The inescapable feeling of abandonment is so complete as to feel deliberate, provocative.
It’s not just fans but footballers, common cause made. Trejo gave up the captaincy in 2013 because staff had been mistreated. Some, Camello says, are not paid. Facilities aren’t first division standards, let alone a European finalist. Rayo abandoned their training ground and home ground as unsafe this season, the players’ union releasing a statement denouncing deficient hygiene and a lack of hot water or adequate facilities. One night last year they had their boots stolen. And here’s a defining image: goalkeeper Cárdenas standing on a ball, held steady by a photographer, taping up the net. Despite it all, Rayo have succeeded, built something special, deeper. Despite it or because of it, strength and unity in adversity?
“We’ve asked that ourselves too,” Camello says, signalling a tired astroturf pitch. “This is where our B team plays, our women’s team too, the best not so long ago. People don’t understand how we can not look after this, care for it. We joke about everything, yet nor should we romanticise it: it’s not nice to suffer every year. But when historic players turn every problem into humour, you understand you have to work; [all the problems] can’t weaken or consume you.”
Valentín says: “It’s the essence of this club. The profile of players is humble people from below. You don’t have the resources others have, it is togetherness, taking it with humour, every day.” Trejo sums up: “If you have a good relationship, you’ve already won.”
And,” Camello continues, “it’s lovely that a humble barrio finds itself before so many people. We would look up at teams but that doesn’t make you humble; humility is respecting yourself too and we’ve done that. Two years ago, this same week, we just survived relegation.”
Here they are, all together el puto Rayo. “You see the barrio, feel the humility and it’s contagious,” Gumbau says. “I like the philosophy here: in life, not just football, problems bring people together, there’s solidarity.” When fans fell victim to a scam, buying tickets for a nonexistent charter to the final, players led a crowdfunding campaign to ensure no one missed out, something oddly perfect about that: a portrait of who they are, all wrong but all right. “The line between footballer and fan exists less here; the relationship is real,” Valentín says.
The symbiosis too, even in the style: a daring, direct, bold, fun team continuing Andoni Iraola’s organised chaos under his former assistant, a coach of startling sensibility whom Trejo says has “the seductive power to make people believe how good they are” and who understands that this runs deeper. This is identity, idiosyncrasy, and it is theirs, power to and from the people. As Pérez says: “Rayo have to reflect the way they are, day to day, in the streets and the stands. They wouldn’t understand us playing in a passive, fearful way, a way that didn’t attack constantly, didn’t embrace risks that effort can overcome.
“When unpleasant things happen to our fans, our duty isn’t to isolate ourselves: it’s to know, hear why. If you’re remotely empathetic, you’ll react. And now’s a moment to bring them happiness, build memories,” the coach says. “When we started against Neman [Grodno, in the playoff] I told the players we hadn’t been invited; we had earned it. I refuse to renounce ambition. Rayo Vallecano is the perfect example that in life, in sport, those who lose a lot, which is most people, who have problems, suffer, aren’t used to success, can find it sometimes. We imitate our fans, feed off each other, and that’s powerful. Rayo is the person who knows where they’re from, knows destiny is defeat, but refuses to give in. Sometimes wonderful stories are written.”
