Sid LoweSpain writerAug 18, 2023, 08:53 PM8 Minute Read

Santi Cazorla was 18 when he left Real Oviedo. He didn’t want to go. Born in Fonciello, a tiny place of barely 100 people in the parish of Lugo de Llanera, he had played at the Carlos Tartiere, the club’s home ground for over 70 years that stood seven miles from his home. Just not quite the way he dreamed it.

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Having joined Oviedo at nine, he, Robi Toral and Piero Manso, fellow ball boys and youth teamers, best mates then and now, would go onto the pitch at half time and kick about. They were good, too — people sat to watch the show — but in almost a decade there, Cazorla never made his senior team debut. Now he was never going to, either.

A first division team when Cazorla was a ballboy, Oviedo had slipped from the top flight in 2001 and kept on falling. In 2003, they were relegated two categories at once: on the pitch, they went from the second division to the regionalised Segunda B, with its four divisions and 80 teams; off the pitch, they went from Segunda B to tercera, with its 17 divisions and almost 350 teams, forcibly relegated because of the financial crisis that threatened to put them out of existence. The same crisis that forced Cazorla out, the door closed when it might have opened.

With unpaid players denouncing Oviedo and departing, everything collapsing and local politicians manoeuvring to pull the plug, pushing a new project in its place; with the president Manuel Lafuente desperately trying to keep the club afloat and fans’ mobilising to become its salvation, Oviedo had to restart with nothing. The B team effectively became the first team and Cazorla, who had been playing at U19 level for three years, the best of them out on loan, took part in the first training session. The coach had doubts that he was ready. Worse, the crisis and forced relegation had a knock-on effect, devastating the academy: at each age the B team would be removed, leaving Cazorla nowhere to play.

Virtually obliged to leave home, he joined Villarreal B, who played in tercera. (Amidst the crisis, another youth team player, three years younger than Cazorla, would leave too. You may have heard of him: his name is Juan Mata.)

By the time Oviedo faced Masconia in tercera in August 2003, beginning what they came to know as their ongoing journey through the barro — the mud — it was over. By the end of the season, Cazorla had played twice in the first division with Villarreal. That is two more than Oviedo have in the 20 years since. Soon, everyone knew him: twice a European champion with Spain — only injury prevented him from being a World champion too — absurdly talented and universally popular, that smile always there even when there have been ample reasons for it to be wiped from his face, he would go on to play 687 seniour games. None of them were for the team he supports. Until now.

This week, 20 years almost to the day since he walked out, Cazorla walked back in. At 38 years old, this will surely be the last move of an excellent career. The video that announced his return to the team he never actually played for, was like something taken from J.R.R. Tolkien: wearing a wizard’s hat, he rides a horse through a field. A child stops him: “You’re late,” the child says. “It’s never late when you have a lot to give back,” he replies.

In another video, he sits on an empty beach when he answers a phone call from Real Oviedo, folding up his deckchair and carrying it off, leaving it instead in the middle of the pitch at the Tartiere. The beach is in a place called Barro.

Suddenly, everyone was going wild. This is special. There’s something in the message from the coach of Andorra B, Eder Sarabia, a kind of wonder which is applicable across the country and the whole division. “Next month Santi Cazorla will play at the Estadi Nacional,” he writes. And that’s an opponent. As for Oviedo, it is hard to do justice to quite how big this is: the excitement, the joy, the feeling of belonging.

When Oviedo went through another financial crisis in 2012, still down in Segunda B and again on the verge of going out of business, saved once more by its supporters, Cazorla was among those who bought shares. With Mata and Michu, he was vital for the internationalisation of their cause — at the time it would be no exaggeration to say that no academy on the planet could claim three better Premier League players. That summer, Oviedo reached the playoffs to go up from Segunda B to the second division. Cazorla went to watch, and tweeted: “We’ll be back!” They weren’t, alas. Now he is.

He played for Recre, Villarreal, Malaga, Arsenal and Al Sadd, 81 times for Spain, but Oviedo never stopped being his team.

During the World Cup in Qatar, he was searching for a stream to watch the derby against Sporting — this week, by the way, Sporting’s Javi Fuego responded to his return with a lovely post of the two of them playing against each other in a junior derby decades ago — and a teammate there, Marc Muniesa, said he knows the words to the club’s anthem because Cazorla was always singing it. There’s a video that has done the rounds over the last couple of days of Cazorla in the stands at the Tartiere a few years ago, there as a fan. Asked what Oviedo means to him, he says: “it’s hard to explain … it’s home.”

In the end, the announcement happened a little faster than planned, everything suddenly exploding, everyone going mad, but it had been a long time coming. It’s that you can never quite bring yourself to believe that it actually will happen; at times, Cazorla himself couldn’t. At times, it hasn’t been possible, or else it might have happened sooner. Even this time, at last free of his contract, there were bureaucratic barriers to be overcome. There were moments when the transfer seemed unlikely to happen, when talks had ground to a halt and he feared that the last chance would slip by. When it came to the actual negotiation itself, well, there was none.

Cazorla always wanted to play for Oviedo before retiring, wanted his son Enzo, a few years older now than his dad was when he first joined Oviedo, to see him in blue. The club’s president Martin Pelaez declared this the biggest deal that the Pachuca group — they run both Oviedo and the Mexican club — has ever done but also the easiest.

He will earn the minimum salary in Spain’s second division. He has waived all image rights. And the only request he has made is that 10% of the money made on shirts sold with his name and number on — and there will be loads of them — goes direct to the youth academy. Kids like him shouldn’t have to leave next time. The relief is that he eventually got back again. “When you’re a nine-year-old with a dream, and you get the chance, you have to take it,” Cazorla said. The last couple of days have seen a flood of photos on social media of a young Santi in a series of classic Oviedo shirts and even more classic haircuts. One comes with a tweet from the club, insisting: “We’ll see this kid smile again.”

Pelaez said, “When a player of Santi’s stature renounces everything, it’s easy. He could be somewhere else earning lots of money, he could be at any team, but he wanted to be here. We’re only giving him a salary because we have to.”

Now comes the hard part: playing. The demands, the need. Cazorla will be 39 before the end of the year. He has spent the last three years in Qatar. It is natural that he should be concerned that it might not work out; that maybe the affection felt now — and it is overwhelming — will fade. That there may even be criticism, or worse. He should not worry. There is admiration for all that he achieved, all the joy he gave, all that he overcame. All he has done to return. The reason he did — “pure feeling,” as he put it — and how he did it.

The injury he suffered in Oct. 2016 while at Arsenal should have ended his career: he was operated on 11 times and infection ate 10 centimetres of tendon. They tried everything. They built an Achilles out of a hamstring. The tattoo of his daughter’s name — half of it now on his arm and half on his ankle, cut out and placed there to patch him up — serves as symbol of it all. In his own words every time they stitched him up the wound came open again, a huge hole in his heel acting like a window into the horror beneath.

They thought he might lose his leg. He was told he would be fortunate to kick a ball around the garden with his son. He went 668 days without playing. But he did come back. Not just that: from 2018-20 years he was Villarreal’s best player, more than a glimpse of what he had been.

Doing so had taken its toll, required a gigantic effort — for all the smile, he’s tough, resilient — and so he went. Qatar offered financial reward as well as relief, of course. That first season he was the best player in the league — Xavi calls him the best he has coached — and that could have been it, the end. Three years on, it’s remarkable that he is still going — and at times he may not have wanted to — but there was something that keep him going: the end he sought.

“Lots of people may think I have nothing to gain and a lot to lose, but it’s the complete opposite,” he insisted this week. “When you have a dream to fulfil, that comes above all else.” When he spoke to Oviedo, Cazorla made no demands, he didn’t want anything: it was payment enough to have the chance to wear the shirt again. It was all he wanted, all he ever wanted. It is what the fans wanted too. For them but also for him: whatever happens now almost doesn’t matter. If he plays wonderfully, then great. If he doesn’t, he played. If it’s a single minute of a single game, it’s worth it. It’s been a long wait.

Santi Cazorla was nine when he arrived, dreaming of playing for Real Oviedo. Thirty years later, he will finally get the chance.