The Pride of Vallekas

Every time I look at my drafts folder I feel a sense of failure. Those are ideas that I've started but never finished. Articles for this blog for which I've pounded at a keyboard and then hit a brick wall and stopped. No, I didn't finish it. No, I didn't stop - I failed. I keep thinking that I failed. I started a piece on Movilla a few days back ( here )  but never finished it. Then, and at other times, thoughts of failure bleed into this blog. Today, I finished it. It's not perfect by any means, and certainly doesn't completely cover his career. But it's one less draft in my draft folder. One more article finished and scheduled. One more failure turned into a success. Last time, I asked: "where do I even start"? I really should have seen it.  I started at the very start. It's almost poetic that one of the most successful careers in Spanish professional football starts with a series of failures. José María Movilla was born i...

Fran Beltrán renewed his contract! The former Getafe youth academy player signed an extension until 2020, making him a professionally paid player. Any club that wants him will now have to pay his release clause of eight million euros. Is he still a bargain? Yes. Absolutely. On a small football field in Madrid, Alfredo Di Stefano stepped on for a veterans match. He was retiring, and this was his sendoff.  Used to large crowds and noisy football stadiums, he probably was thinking - where am I?  Spain's districts are divided into neighborhoods, or barrios . South west to Puente de Vallecas is the working class district of Villaverde, where a small barrio  of about 18,000 inhabitants resides. It has historically been isolated, from the north and east by the railroad, to the south by the old Army Car Park and to the west by the old highway to Andalusia (A-4). 40% of the population is made up of immigrants - in the 1960s, immigrants from Extremadura, An...