Wed. Jan 15th, 2025

Santi Cazorla living his dream as he tries to take Oviedo to LaLiga

OVIEDO, Spain — Through the smoke is a familiar face doing a familiar thing. Saturday night in Oviedo, the biggest night of the year, and a bus pulls out from the Monumental Naranco hotel, where blue banners hang from the facade and hundreds of football fans wait outside. From the hillside above them, a statue of Jesus looks down, stone arms wide, although He probably can’t see anything through the clouds of blue and red, the thick swirl of sulphur. The bus turns at the roundabout and edges up Alejandro Casona Street, steep and narrow now, full of people, flares marking the way.

Thousands of supporters of Real Oviedo are lined up along the route, their hands hammering on the side of the bus as it passes slowly through the parting sea on a short journey to the stadium, which on this night is a little longer and a lot louder. Fireworks go off, the floor shuddering. On board, footballers hammer back. In the front row, the coach Javi Calleja sits. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” he says.

Another Oviedo fan is inside there with them, sitting in the back row, except that he’s not sitting and definitely not sitting still; he’s kneeling, clambering over the seat to get a good look. He’s never experienced this either, not the way he will tonight, and God knows he has waited long enough. Forty years, he’s wanted to do this, which is why he’s there, even though it still won’t be quite the way it was supposed to be. Even though he shouldn’t be, not really. From outside, it’s hard to see, hard in fact to breathe, smoke everywhere, but there in the back window you can just about make him out, palm against the glass.

Santi Cazorla is laughing his head off.


Santi Cazorla is always laughing his head off.

He was laughing two nights earlier, standing there, arm raised straight above his head, bottle gently tilted, trying to pour cider from a great height — although above his head, standing at 5-foot-6, is not that great a height — into a glass held below his waist. It has a special name, escanciar, and it is a skill, one the experts are offering a lesson in now. It is also a tradition in Asturias, that green mountainous land in northern Spain, the principality that they like to say is Spain while the rest is conquered territory.

It is Thursday, exactly 48 hours before the Asturias derby against Sporting Gijón, a game right up among the best in the country, even though these days it is played in the second division. Cazorla, Oviedo’s captain, is here because it is a club event and they asked him to be and he is always there when they ask him to be: Santi, staff say, almost a little ashamed, never says no. Sometimes, a lot of the time, they worry that it is too much, that he will tire of it. It is hard to express how much of an icon he is here, how significant, how loved, how much he gives back, and this whole ambassador thing can exhaust, though Cazorla says “it doesn’t tire me at all.”

So here he is, standing alongside their guests, giving it a go. Most of it ends up on the floor.

They have asked him to be there on Saturday for the derby too, like really there. On the bus, in the dressing room, in the team — so what if he’s injured? Not that they needed to. You just try and keep him away.

Cazorla has a calf issue, a minor tear. He hasn’t trained with his teammates this morning and he won’t tomorrow morning either. Instead, while they’re out on the pitch, he is in the gym at the Requexón training ground, down a narrow, winding, wet country lane that couldn’t be more Asturias if it tried, past the brown cows in the fields. He’s unavailable, everyone knows, but, Calleja says, they want him close and although no one knows this yet, he will be in the squad, there on the bench.

A secret weapon, maybe his presence will play a part. Something to frighten Sporting, perhaps. To get everyone else excited; him just being there changes things, the last year since he came to the club has shown that. As for him, he’s desperate to be at the Estadio Carlos Tartiere, to be part of a game he grew up watching, the match he most aspired to experience and one he played at junior level, but not senior. It is the first time at home. At 40, it may be the last chance too, an opportunity he feared he would never have. “And if I get to warm up …” he says.

And then he laughs his head off again.


BORN IN FONCIELLO, a tiny place of barely 100 people in the parish of Lugo de Llanera, a 10-minute drive outside the city and into the country, Cazorla grew up an Oviedo fan. He joined the club when he was a kid, 32 years ago. He, Robi Toral and Piero Manso, fellow ballboys and youth teamers, best mates then and now, would go onto the pitch at half-time and kick about. But in almost a decade, Cazorla never made his debut. At 18, just about the age when he might have done, he left the club. Last year, 20 years on, he returned.

He did so in the second division. On the minimum salary. Having waived all image rights. And making only one demand: that 10% of the money made on “Cazorla 8” shirts goes direct to the youth academy. It has to be, he says, “the basis of everything.” Kids like him shouldn’t have to leave next time.

Departing didn’t go badly for him, in truth, even though he hadn’t wanted to go: He had played for Recreativo, Villarreal, Málaga, Arsenal and Al Sadd, won two European Championships, part of that Spain generation, and having fought back from an injury that Arsene Wenger said was the worst he had ever seen, and somehow got a Spain callup again.

And yet … and yet, it’s hard sometimes not to think that there could have been more, injury denying Cazorla a World Cup, and that the roll call of clubs could have been weightier. That maybe he didn’t always choose well. He had been on the verge of playing for Real Madrid, but he stayed at Villarreal. Pep Guardiola said Cazorla would have fit perfectly in Barcelona‘s midfield, but that never happened either. His talent, and the joy of his football, sometimes feels like it was not paid back in full; maybe even that the game owes him something and instead dealt him a horrific injury.

“I have a clear conscience in that sense,” he says. “Wherever I have been have been places that they really, truly wanted me. I was close to going to Madrid but maybe they didn’t transmit to me that they really wanted me. At Arsenal, they really loved me, at Villarreal, at Recreativo, at Málaga, in Qatar … I can’t recriminate myself for any decision I made, don’t look back with regret. In the end, I have been where I thought they wanted me, where I felt the affection I need to play football.”

Besides, at the end of it all, there was this. And there is nowhere quite like this. This is one regret he would have had. Home pulled and nothing, Cazorla insists, means quite what Oviedo does. There’s something about this place: it was the third time that an Oviedo academy product, forced by the club’s crisis to seek a top-flight career elsewhere, had returned; not to better times but to worse, to help: Esteban Suárez, Michu, now him.

In returning like they did, that affection has become universal, too. At every ground, Cazorla is applauded — well, except Gijón and, no, he would’t expect that either, although it turns out that when Sporting’s Guille Rosas was a kid, he waited for Cazorla to sign a Spain shirt for him one day.

“I don’t know why there’s so much affection; I supposed because I played in the best generation Spain’s had,” Cazorla says. “And maybe people appreciate that I’m still playing football and in my city, the fact that I went home: not many people do it.

“It was a decision of the heart. I would play for free if I could, but there are rules that have to be respected, and in the end the club has to pay me a minimum salary. It’s my home and I came here to contribute, to do my bit. In the end, it’s something that I felt ever since I left: that I had to return to my club, and I am not asking for anything in return.”

His wife wouldn’t have let him, anyway. His son Enzo always told him he wanted to see his dad play in blue.

According to the club’s sporting director Agustin Lleida, it was was the easiest deal he ever did, except for the guilt he felt.

“We knew Santi wanted to come home. We had arranged a video call and that weekend I was trying to work out his salary in Qatar, what we could offer him, what options we had,” Lleida told La Nueva España. “I was all ready: a salary, a percentage of shirt sales, the takings from a friendly. But I felt bad looking at what he was earning there because of how little we could offer him. I said: ‘Look, I have this proposal, but …’ and he said: ‘I don’t want anything. Wearing the shirt is payment enough.'”

Cazorla says: “It was a dream to play in this shirt: I was wearing it at 9 years old in the academy but circumstance meant I had to leave very young. But coming back was always there in my mind, getting the chance to wear it as a professional.”


FOR A LONG time, there might not have been a shirt to wear, a club to come back to. Oviedo were a first-division team when Cazorla was a ballboy but were relegated in 2001 and kept on falling. In 2003 they were relegated two categories at once, all the way down to tercera, which is actually the fourth tier and has seventeen divisions and almost 350 teams, often playing on little better than park pitches. A financial crisis forced Cazorla out the door, just when it might have opened, and almost brought down the shutters forever.

With local politicians pushing for a winding-up order and putting their weight behind an alternative, starting a new city team from scratch, the fans rescued Oviedo from folding then. Another crisis almost put them out of business again in 2012 and, once more, supporters mobilised. A share issue saved them: the club have 45,000 shareholders around the world. Cazorla, a symbol of where they should have been and a figurehead of the campaign along with two other academy products, Juan Mata and Michu, bought many of them.

The club were, though, still in Spain’s semi-professional third tier, until 2015. As a measure of how far they had fallen: they played an Asturias derby … against Sporting’s B team. And although the top flight, the eternal aspiration, still resists, the fans always remained, and under the Pachuca Group of Mexico now, Oviedo are a club growing fast: there is stability, security, a future.

“The club’s in a very good state,” Cazorla says. “Pachuca want to do things the right way, properly, and they’ve got a lot of experience. They want to keep growing, reach primera and hopefully the sort of heights they’re used to. We’re taking good steps forward all working together.

“It has felt hard to be a fan watching from a distance at times. There were difficult moments. When I was in the academy, we went down to tercera for administrative reasons. Thank goodness, we were able to get together and save what was left of the club. We’re now enjoying better times. Eventually I’ve been able to wear this shirt, many years on, and I’m really enjoying this time here, being able to help the club after it came close to disappearing altogether.”


OH, HE’S HELPING all right. The impact of his return has been immense, in every sense, including on the pitch.

Truth is, no one knew how good Cazorla really was when he came back, including Cazorla himself. That he was an icon, sure. That everyone loved him, certainly. That the symbolism was powerful, no doubt. But the player? What would they do if, well, you know, he couldn’t do it?

Turned out, he could. The quality never goes, still better than anyone else. Cazorla came on a mission: to help take Oviedo back to the first division a quarter of a century later. With him at the heart of their midfield last season, they reached the playoff final for promotion to primera, only to miss out by a single goal.

If most assumed that was it, his one last shot, he decided otherwise. He would try again, determined to get there. Now 40, he’s still going. Somehow. And now he’s laughing his head off again.

“Some people seem to be trying to retire me, but I have for at least five years left! Or five months.” Either way, it’s working: coming into this derby, Cazorla has played 19 of the 21 games, starting 16 of them, and they are again in a playoff spot, just three points off automatic promotion, four from top.

And at 1:25 p.m. on Friday when, after the session at Requexón, Calleja names his squad and Cazorla is in it, the replies on X say it all. Wait, what? A thousand hearts, a million variations of Santiiiii and Cazoooorla. It’s not just fondness, it’s football. The hope that maybe he’s made a recovery, maybe, just maybe, he can be there after all. With him, winning is always closer, after all. “He won’t feel his foot but he will feel the shirt,” one says.


ON CAZORLA’S ARM is half a tattoo. On his ankle is the other half, a symbol of his suffering: the skin cut from one place and grafted onto another. His daughter India’s name in two bits, a constant reminder of the injury that almost ended his career. That maybe even should have ended it. He didn’t play for 636 days; he might not have played again and many, many days he thought it was over. But somehow, he did. He’s 40, he’s been under the knife 12 times, he was told he should settle for being able to walk around the garden, but he’s still a footballer.

Does it hurt?

“What really hurts is when I don’t play,” he says. “That’s always been the case: not playing is the painful part. I always love to be involved. I’ve had some complex injuries in the past. I’ve built up quite a lot of experience dealing with injury and that makes you stronger. I’m better at getting through it than I was. And the current one is only a short setback. In that situation I try to help from the sidelines.”

They don’t know he won’t play, but he does. But he wants to live this. The game. Last season, at home, he could not.

And so there he is in the back window of the bus, through the flares and the smoke and the noise, laughing his head off. There he is on the turf pre-match, warming up. Carefully, it is true, but he is. There he is, in front of the TV cameras pitchside, beaming through the last interview not long before kickoff. “You can feel the excitement of the people; I feel it too, the same way they do,” he tells them. He also tells them he’s available if needs be and maybe he even means it, even though he knows what they don’t. There he is, in through the dressing room door, past the figurine of the Virgin of Covadgona, spiritual heart of Asturias, leading the final team talk.

“This is not any game,” he tells his teammates. “We know what this means; we’re playing for a feeling: ours, our families’, our fans’.”

There he is as the traditional bagpipes play the anthem of Asturias, “Beloved Homeland,” and of Real Oviedo, a giant 1,800-square-metre tifo tumbling down over the north stand, a month of dedication from 12 men, a giant work of art carrying the Cruz de los Angeles, emblem of the city. “Symbol of our battles,” it reads. There he is leaping from the bench, into the arms of Daniel Calvo and Diego Cervero — another former academy player, a striker here in the depths of Spanish football and now the doctor — when Alemão scores the opening goal and 28,500 people go wild. There he is standing before them all applauding at the end, after César Gelabert equalises for Sporting. They didn’t win, but he couldn’t have missed these moments.

“We could have done with Santi, who has the experience and calm the game needed,” Calleja says. “But I can’t ask more in terms of the heart everyone showed. I had never seen an atmosphere like this. I have been in the first division, the second, Europe, but I have never felt what I felt today. I have never seen anything like it. Ever. It’s unique. And if there’s one thing that’s first division, it’s the fans.”

One day.

Despite the draw, only goal difference keeps Oviedo from the playoff places. Promotion would be the greatest ambition of all, the greatest achievement too. Yes, really: “I’ve had incredible experiences, but this is different; coming home and doing something the club waited so long for would be very special.”

Can you see yourself in primera?

“I really hope so,” Cazorla says. “God willing, I can keep playing for a while, as long as my body allows. Of course I hope to play in the first division with the club of my life. But whether or not I get there doesn’t matter; what matters is that Real Oviedo do.”

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