The Pride of Vallekas

Follow Mark Rickling on Twitter: @mrickling A bit about yourself and your background I'm an American living in the nation's capital, Washington DC. In addition to supporting Rayo, I'm a season ticket holder for the local MLS team, D.C. United. ¡Vamos United! How long have you been a fan of Rayo and what made you support them in the first place? Good question. I first started supporting Rayo in the 2011-12 season. As fan of soccer in a country where this sport is an also-ran in relation to other, more popular, team sports like American football and baseball, you're constantly told by the soccer media that you need to pick a foreign side to support. There are innumerable articles and even books devoted to this very subject -- what non-U.S. team is for you the American fan. Invariably the suggestion turns out to be some Premier League side, and as a result the streets of DC are littered every Saturday and Sunday morning with people walking to their local soccer b...

Sarthak ( @Vallecanos1924 ) puts it succinctly. The Old Boys' network in the RFEF is still alive & kicking. The gravy train rolls on. pic.twitter.com/Fk89zocbf5 — Barça Women (@BarcaWomen) May 23, 2017 Exactly. Behind the incredible Hulk kits is a story that shows weakness - weakness of the argument for why the Segunda B should even exist. In March 2016, Atlético Astorga couldn't survive in the Segunda B. It ran a 30,000 euro deficit. It needed 70,000 euros more to survive. Just think about that - a club formed in 1969 had spent just two years in the Segunda B and was struggling to function. The team from Astorga did the unthinkable - they reached across to Ponferrada, 64 kilometers away, to their fiercest rivals, and became their B team. The situation was so dire that Sagrario González, president of the board, defended it as the "the only solution" to be able to compete in the Segunda B - and this was after Ponferradina had loaned them fiv...