The Pride of Vallekas

One of those days yet again... I wrote about ex-Villarreal striker Carlos Aranda, a player who won two Champions League titles and played for a record eight La Liga clubs. It was published on 19Spains.com here and on VillarrealUSA.com here . Follow @Vallecanos1924

The fight isn't on the pitch. Carlos Aranda is known for his work ethic and his sheer determination. But that fight, that desire, that temperamental figure on the pitch is a result of the saddening circumstances off it. Carlos was born in Málaga, Andalusia. His father abandoned him when he was little, and at the age of nine, his mother - a drug addict - died of cancer. Raised by his grandparents, his training at local club El Palo was overshadowed by the training of an early adulthood - he would fish octopuses to sell to restaurants in Málaga. It was Vicente del Bosque who discovered the young forward at El Palo, and took him to Madrid - but he didn't fit in. The glamour didn't suit him, and he even tried fleeing the club - Real Madrid had to assign him a private tutor. "Mischievous", Vicente called him, many years later. Somehow, despite all the odds, he graduated but never played in La Liga; however, he played a small part in two UEFA Champions League-...

Yesterday, I wrote an article about Carlos Aranda, who holds the record for playing in La Liga for the most number of clubs - eight. If you consider just playing for a La Liga club, not actually playing in La Liga with them, that figure becomes nine. But I dug deeper, and found out that if you look at professional clubs (La Liga and Segunda), Carlos Aranda holds that record jointly with Moisés García - an astonishing 12 clubs.  Obviously, only if you use the second metric - by the first metric  Moisés García is top with 12 and Aranda comes joint second with 11 with a couple of other players. That record will be broken soon though - there are quite a few players who are at 11, and they still have a couple of seasons in the tank. So today, I look at a player whose records are unlikely to be broken anytime soon - Elche's Nino.  Even his name has the word modest in it. Juan Francisco Martínez Modesto, aka Nino, was born in Vera, Almería, and first appeared p...

I would like to start with an apology. On two different occasions on this blog ( here and here ), I mentioned something to this effect: "Jordi Gómez, Cristaldo, Gazzaniga, Tomás Mejías and Pablo Iñiguez will return to their parent clubs, and Miku, Baena, Ebert, Embarba, Lass Bangoura, Quini, Nacho, Raț, Manucho, Amaya, Aguirre, Dorado, Dovale and Toño are all out of contract. Basically, unless there are any contract extensions, we have no goalkeepers, a center-back (Zé Castro), a left-back (Johan Mojica), a right-back (Ernesto Galán), two central midfielders (Fran Beltrán and Roberto Trashorras), an attacking midfielder (Santi Comesaña), a left winger (Álex Moreno) and a striker (Javi Guerra)." I naively used transfermarkt.com in writing that - never doing that again. Marca recently came up with a list of contracts expiring at the end of the season, and it reads more like this: " Cristaldo, Gazzaniga, Tomás Mejías and Pablo Iñiguez will return to...