Suddenly the music stopped and the dancing did too, the magic gone. The Benito Villamarín might just be the loudest ground in La Liga, where the club’s anthem claims fans are packed in like cannonballs and completely convinced their team are champions even if they’re last. There’s a lot of folklore, it’s true, and some of the silliness is oversold, but there’s a lot of fun and loads of noise. Home to Real Betis, it’s a place where even being dead is no excuse for not supporting, one fan famously taking his dad’s ashes in a milk carton and placing it in his seat every week, yet for one brief moment on Sunday evening it went quiet, 53,336 people sitting in silence saying nothing, which said everything.
This was the last thing anyone wanted to see. Isco was heading into the 81st minute of Betis’s game against Getafe and the 2,307th minute of his season when he chased a ball running out of play at the north end of the ground and felt something go. His hand reached for his hamstring and a hush fell. He leaned on the advertising board, lay on the turf, and did the finger spin that says: take me off. As he limped towards the touchline, teeth clenched, the silence was replaced by a standing ovation and they began chanting his name. Then he slumped on the bench, engulfed in a black coat and a blacker mood.
Rubén Cousillas, the assistant coach, laid a hand on his face as he went, they came with ice and Aitor Ruibal offered a word, but there was no consolation. Isco sat alone, ever lower in his seat, looking lost, defeated. He screwed up his face, wiped his eyes, fingers squeezing, as if trying to hold in the tears. When the final whistle went, the game finishing in a 1-1 draw, he heaved himself up like an old man getting off the sofa, and hobbled down the tunnel. It was a hard watch, and not just for Betis fans, but for everyone. “No one laughs in Heliopolis,” ran one headline, which is not the way it’s ever supposed to be here.
The injury might not even be that serious – a minor tear, a bit of a pull, a simple strain – and this whole thing might look over the top soon, but that wasn’t really the point; it was not about how hard it will be from here as how hard it was to get here in the first place, the fact that Isco had made it at all, how wonderful it was to have him back and how that had now been taken away again. It was about the feeling that something special had been broken after all that effort to rebuild it. By the time Isco pulled up, he had already done enough to be voted man of the match. It was the 15th time in 23 games and, although teammate Héctor Bellerín joked that one of these days he would win it without even playing, that’s not bad for anyone, let alone someone who was finished, or so it goes.
A five-times European Cup winner, the man they called Magic – and think how good you have to be for Real Madrid’s dressing room to call you that – Isco’s display in extra time in the Milan final, 2016, approached perfection, and he was probably Spain’s best player in 2017 but he ended up becoming irrelevant. Under Santi Solari, he said, he “didn’t exist”, but it was not just the Argentinian: “I’m not stupid: if I haven’t been a starter with Ancelotti, Benítez and Zidane, it’s my fault,” he admitted. He started just one league game between August 2021 and his Bernabéu departure. In his last two years there, he started a single Champions League game, racking up just 400 minutes in his final season. He should have left sooner, he admitted, but it’s hard to let go. And so he, well, let go.
He went to Sevilla seeking resurrection, his salary cut four-fold: he said he just wanted to enjoy his football again and actually, while this is too easily forgotten, he started pretty well. But his time there came to a premature end when Julen Lopetegui, the manager who backed him, was sacked and Monchi, the sporting director who signed him, allegedly grabbed him by the neck, security staff having to separate them. He went to Berlin and back alone, only to be told that actually Union couldn’t register him for Europe, the terms of the contract changed. He got a call from Iago Aspas inviting him to go to Celta, but he said sorry he just couldn’t do it: his head wasn’t right. By the time he joined Betis this summer he had not played for six months. An unemployed footballer, he was also it seemed, an ex-footballer.
For a while he had thought so too, but he had become determined to resist it ending like this, reflecting on what he had done wrong, taking responsibility. He had been “apathetic” under Solari, he admitted. “At Madrid I felt like a victim when I wasn’t,” he told Jorge Valdano recently. “It was me against everyone: I blamed this guy and that guy. But you come to ask yourself why you didn’t do more; now I can see that I lost a bit of the will to fight, to prove myself. I fell and I didn’t have the mental strength to turn it round; you’re angry with everyone and everything’s wrong. I regret it more than anyone.”
Over those long months, Isco had been working three times a day with a personal trainer called Rodrigo Carretero, heading out to play with the ball on a local pitch at 10pm each night. He had changed his diet, lost weight, sought therapy too. He’d had problems, he admitted, as a person not just a player; he needed to stop, to treat his mind. Now he found a strength missing before, physically and mentally. Occasionally there would be videos of his sessions on social media, sometimes you’d spot him working out in his old Madrid gear. He had done all he could, but he needed an opportunity, someone to take a chance on him. At 31 he was too young to retire, sure, but there’s that bottom line again: not one game in six months. He had only scored two league goals in four years.
Betis, though, saw an opportunity; from finding out to closing the deal, it was all done in less than two days. “It’s a good time for him to come,” sporting director Ramón Planes said. “It’s a chance to prove himself.” Vindication was the word he used. “He wanted a challenge, a chance to leave everything behind,” said the coach, Manuel Pellegrini. There was familiarity there too: Pellegrini had managed Isco at Malaga and Real Madrid and had tried to sign him for Manchester City. One of the problems Isco has had is not just that his ideal position is already occupied, in many teams it doesn’t exist, but Pellegrini’s approach fits him perfectly. Pretty much the first thing he did in his first training session was nutmeg one of his new teammates. Still got it. “You can’t turn your back on quality like that,” Planes said. And yet this was a different Isco, too.
Friday: Athletic Bilbao 4-0 Mallorca
Saturday: Girona 0-0 Real Sociedad, Alavés 1-3 Barcelona, Granada 1-1 Las Palmas, Valencia 2-1 Almería
Sunday: Real Madrid 1-1 Atlético Madrid, Real Betis 1-1 Getafe, Osasuna 0-3 Celta Vigo, Villarreal 0-0 Cadiz
Pellegrini put him straight in the team. “We needed someone to give us football,” the coach said. And, boy, has he. Isco was man of the match that day. And the next, and the next, and the next. He has scored more goals already than in the previous five seasons put together. No one in the Betis team has more; no one has more assists either. Slim, fast, aggressive, he is involved in everything, giving everything too, taking responsibility. He leads. There is “sacrifice”, one teammate says. He has missed just one game, and that was through suspension. “He’s the total footballer,” former Betis captain Capi said. Only two players in the league have completed more successful dribbles, no one has won more one-on-one duels, and no one has created more chances. There is a reason no one has been fouled more.
But never mind the numbers, just touch the talent. You don’t even need to be a Betis fan, although it helps: if he is their everything, he is everyone’s pleasure too. “Football was happy for you,” Valdano told him. Watch him close: the touch, the turn, the quality. The magic. Watch those feet, so soft he could be wearing slippers, the willingness to want the ball always. See the things only he sees, watch him play, and he is just better than everyone else. “I’m like a little kid at Disneyland now,” he said, and so are the rest of us, glad to be given another chance. To feel the football, the noise, the fun, the way it’s supposed to be at the Benito Villamarín, game after game. The way it’s supposed to be, full stop. Until this Sunday when it did stop. No Isco, no disco. “I asked him and he’s in a bad way; let’s hope it’s not much,” said teammate Rodri Sánchez, speaking for everyone.
| Pos | Team | P | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Real Madrid | 23 | 33 | 58 |
| 2 | Girona | 23 | 27 | 56 |
| 3 | Barcelona | 23 | 17 | 50 |
| 4 | Atletico Madrid | 23 | 20 | 48 |
| 5 | Athletic Bilbao | 23 | 21 | 45 |
| 6 | Real Sociedad | 23 | 11 | 37 |
| 7 | Valencia | 23 | 2 | 35 |
| 8 | Real Betis | 23 | 1 | 35 |
| 9 | Las Palmas | 23 | 3 | 32 |
| 10 | Getafe | 23 | -2 | 30 |
| 11 | Alaves | 23 | -7 | 26 |
| 12 | Osasuna | 23 | -10 | 26 |
| 13 | Rayo Vallecano | 22 | -9 | 24 |
| 14 | Villarreal | 23 | -12 | 24 |
| 15 | Mallorca | 23 | -11 | 20 |
| 16 | Celta Vigo | 23 | -8 | 20 |
| 17 | Sevilla | 22 | -9 | 17 |
| 18 | Cadiz | 23 | -16 | 17 |
| 19 | Granada | 23 | -22 | 12 |
| 20 | Almeria | 23 | -29 | 6 |
