Málaga, Las Palmas and Deportivo La Coruña will almost certainly be relegated after Paco López returned to his boyhood club to mastermind their stunning surge towards safety“Keep calm,” Levante’s manager, Paco López, said but he knew better than anyone that it was a bit late for that. Maybe tomorrow. For now, Sunday lunchtime in the Valencian sunshine, it was time to enjoy it, like he’d said from the start. His players had thrown shirts into the crowd and turned the pitch into a mosh pit, pushing and pogoing, dancing round a circle, emotion escaping as they embraced and 24,001 red-and-blue flags waved: 24,000 around the ground and one high above them all. Along the east stand, the division’s team’s flags...
On course for their fourth manager in under five months, Las Palmas had drifted to the foot of La Liga before a lifeline emerged against Espanyol …The new manager of Unión Deportiva de Las Palmas is on holiday and won’t be back until the new year. He wasn’t on the bench at the Estadio Gran Canaria on Sunday and won’t be on the bench at the Coliseum on Wednesday either, while the man who will be there in Getafe knows he’ll be gone by the end of the game: he won’t make it to Christmas – which wouldn’t be that unusual except he only started work at the end of November – and the man replacing him won’t make it...
Barcelona’s nuanced identification with Catalonia is part of what gives the club an explicitly socio-political dimension. And that meant this was always going to be more than a match … even if in the end it was less than oneAt every Camp Nou game for almost six years now, chants for Catalan independence have gone up when the clock reaches 17 minutes and 14 seconds, commemorating the year the city fell to Felipe V, but not this time – not on the day they were perhaps closer to independence than ever before. This time, Europe’s largest stadium was silent. No fans could be heard, only footballers. Occasionally, the referee’s whistle rang out or somebody clapped yet there were no chants,...
From Real Madrid’s historic double to a bottom three in a league of their own, via explosive managerial cameos and that statue, it’s the annual awardsLuka Modric went to lift the trophy but there was nothing in his hands, just a look on his face that said it all. Beside him, Gareth Bale was giggling. Real Madrid won the league, shouting, embracing and leaping around the pitch at the Rosaleda where they had just defeated Málaga on the final day, but there was something missing. “What do you mean, no trophy?” the Croatian asked Madrid’s press officer. “They’ll hand it out at the start of next season,” came the reply. “So now we celebrate here, we go back to the...
Barça’s fate was in their own hands, which as it turned out was the worst place it could be against Málaga, despite the draw by La Liga title rivalsBarcelona’s fate was in their own hands, which as it turned out was the worst place it could possibly be. Saturday’s story was the story of the season in Spain: everything changed to stay the same, the table remaining unmoved. Another dead ball, another defender leaping to score, another victory coming for Real Madrid, this time in the city derby – the game the front pages had declared “half the league” only that was not the half of it. Pepe’s header would have been an appropriate way to win their first title...