If the script goes to plan, Spain’s La Liga season will open with a fairy tale. It goes by the name of Santi Cazorla. He is 40 years old, his right ankle has endured so much wear and tear it often feels twice that age.
Yet on Friday Cazorla will be a top division footballer once again, should he take to the field, probably off the bench, for Real Oviedo at Villarreal.
The script has set up this comeback perfectly. Cazorla spent three spells of his long, courageous career at Villarreal, who he first joined at 17, reluctantly waving goodbye to Oviedo, the club he grew up at, after their relegation to the second division.
Oviedo went on to sink far lower. They have spent time in Spain’s fourth tier in their 24 years outside the top flight, faced bankruptcy but, helped by the midfield prompts of the repatriated Cazorla, once a Premier League star with Arsenal, they won promotion back to the elite in June.
He duly signed what he says will be his last, one-year contract to fulfil, as he told The National, “my dream of playing in the top-flight with the club I love.”
No player in this season’s La Liga will be more universally popular than the genial Cazorla, who won two European championships with Spain. And no Liga star will carry into 2025-26 greater expectations than Lamine Yamal, a European champion with Spain last summer.
Lamine was an infant less than one year old when Cazorla lifted the same trophy in 2008. Between their two bookends, two gifted entertainers separated by 22 years in age, is the story of a nation’s deep and enduring talent pool.
It’s the basis of why La Liga has outperformed every other European league in terms of major international prizes in the 21st century.
Right now, Yamal’s Barcelona are flying the broadest flag for home-grown excellence and will, at Mallorca on Saturday, begin the defence of a title they won thanks to academy-nurtured youth and careful management of worldly veterans.
Robert Lewandowski, last season’s leading scorer in Spain, is still sharp at 36 and is ably supported by the likes of Yamal. Another teenager, Pau Cubarsi, stepped to the daunting challenge of marshalling a back four urged by manager Hansi Flick to push up high, and bear the risk of leaving space for counter-attacking opponents to exploit.
The formula makes Barca thrilling for spectators, but potentially vulnerable. The coming months will tell if they have further finessed their bold strategy or are ready to be found out.
Alonso’s reboot
The last time Real Madrid made a former playing idol their manager, he promptly won three successive Uefa Champions League titles including, in his first full season as a senior coach, a Liga and European Cup Double. That was Zinedine Zidane.
A decade later, Xabi Alonso, who governed Madrid’s midfield for five years up to 2014, is being asked to do something similar.
Unlike Zidane, Alonso already has a distinguished managerial resume, built around his astonishing domestic double at the helm of Bayer Leverkusen in 2023-24.
There was inevitability that he would follow that with an upwards move to one of the three superclubs – Liverpool, Madrid or Bayern Munich – he represented as a cerebral footballer. The timing made Madrid, who waved goodbye to Carlo Ancelotti in June, the front-runners for his signature.
The timing also made them needy. Ancelotti could not mount a successful defence of his European Cup or Liga titles last season. His successor recognises he has urgent work to do in key areas.
Up front, there’s improvement to be made in how Vinicius Junior and Kylian Mbappe, individually brilliant but both inclined to operate in the same left-flank, work as a tandem.
At the back, there’s three new signings to bed in – Trent Alexander-Arnold, Dean Huijsen and Alvaro Carreras – and while Alexander-Arnold and Carreras are the sort of dashing full-backs Xabi likes, there has been little time to brief them with the detailed planning this diligent new coach would like.
Madrid, who reached the semi-finals of the Club World Cup, have had barely a month of off-season between then and Tuesday’s opening Liga fixture against Osasuna.
Ominously, that Club World Cup adventure, Xabi’s Madrid initiation, ended with a humiliating 4-0 loss to Paris Saint-Germain. The coach insisted that result should be parked as representing the tired end to last season – not as a prologue to this one. But it left him, and many madridistas, with plenty of evidence a significant shake-up is needed.
Camp Nou’s cliffhangers
Barcelona make a convincing case they are the most watchable team in the Europe. Trouble is, not many home fans get to watch them in person at the moment.
The redevelopment of Camp Nou, a two-year project that obliged Barca to relocate to the Olympic Stadium in 2023-24 and 2024-25, was due to be completed earlier this year.
It still hasn’t been, and there’s now an against-the-clock rush for it to be approved to play in by the time of the club’s first home match in mid-September. Even then, a very reduced capacity would be allowed, because the full renovation, with seating for over 100,000, is set a long time in the future.
Barca are becoming accustomed to walking the tightrope of imminent deadlines. Their difficulties in meeting La Liga’s Financial Fair Play rules over the past three seasons have regularly left new signings unregistered for a season’s opening day, their paperwork being completed after match day one.
The same suspense gathers over how many of this summer’s recruits – goalkeeper Joan Garcia, striker Marcus Rashford and the young winger Roony Bardghji – will be officially licensed to play in time for Saturday’s trip to Real Mallorca.
Barca are not alone making La Liga’s auditors wait until the last minute to approve or discount squad additions – a week before match day one, 50 new signings across Liga clubs had not yet been registered – but they are conspicuous for their brinkmanship.
The stadium delay also has a big bearing on the income-versus-outgoings ratio they must present to La Liga to justify increased squad costs. The club argue, rightly, that the rebuilt Camp Nou will be a long-term money-spinner. But its turnstiles need to start turning for those revenues to flow in.
The doyen of Atletico
Some time, probably in the late spring, Diego Simeone will pass the landmark of 1,000 matches as a club manager. More than three-quarters of those games have been in charge of Atletico Madrid.
As Simeone, the great alchemist of Atleti, embarks on his 15th season at the helm, he can count up millions of reasons why he has stayed so long.
No manager in Spain has had heftier backing in the transfer market. In the last two summer windows combined, Atletico, a mid-table, financially-constrained institution when Simeone took over in late 2011, have outspent every other Liga club, including rivals Real Madrid, on transfer fees.
The latest addition is Giacomo Raspadori, the centre-forward fresh from winning his second Serie A title with Napoli and with 40 Italy caps to his name.
Raspadori can look forward to the sort of excellent service Alex Baena, lured from Villarreal and second only to Yamal and Raphinha in last season’s leading assisters in La Liga, provides to a striker.
But he’ll also be alive to the intense competition for forward positions in a squad including Antoine Griezmann, Julian Alvarez and target-man Alex Sorloth, not to mention the coach’s son, the lively winger Giuliano Simeone.
That’s a lot of firepower in the hands of a manager sometimes scorned for his cagey tactics, but whose ambition to gain a third Liga title of the Simeone era is plain.
