Rayo Vallecano take Barcelona to the edge as fans rebel against their president | La Liga

The drunk, the brainless and the idle enjoyed this. They had said they wouldn’t sing, but the best nights aren’t planned they just happen, and in the end it was their kind of night. Chaotic, wild, a lot wrong but alright, like a picture of who they are, sticking it to the man up here and down there. Packed into crumbling, filthy stands, Rayo Vallecano’s fans didn’t see their team get a deserved victory against Barcelona on Sunday but on a torn-up, dried-out pitch with not much grass, in a ground where VAR became the latest thing to fail, they did watch them fight and do it their way too, flying into the team with a budget 18 times bigger as if they weren’t big at all. “Fantastic,” Hansi Flick called them.

It started as a protest and never stopped being one but it became something else too, something fun; they had been infuriated, worn down over years, and then they had been insulted but they couldn’t help but enjoy themselves, protest and party in one. Three days after Rayo had definitively qualified for the Conference League the team that is not just in the neighbourhood but of the neighbourhood almost comically incongruous in Europe, Rayo’s supporters announced they were going on strike. Rayo’s players meanwhile laid into the treble winners, worthy of more than the 1-1 draw it finished. But for a Lamine Yamal penalty which the broken video assistant system couldn’t correct, they might have got it. But for goalkeeper Joan García they definitely might.

Because if Rayo’s team are good that line needs a somehow in there somewhere; the club could hardly be worse. As winger Álvaro García has put it: “Sometimes you think: ‘How are we where we are with what we have?’”

What they have is a mess, mostly. An institution falling apart, a club where the captain hands over the armband in protest over the treatment of staff; where they can’t use the training ground; where the stadium fails building inspections, where plug sockets sit open, wires exposed; there is bird shit everywhere; seats are broken, toilets overflow; taps don’t work. And if there is something almost gloriously bad about it, enjoyably unique, it is also just bad. There is a risk of glorifying poverty and grime, and indulging failings as authenticity. As the statement from supporters this week put it: yes, they’re humble; yes, they celebrate their barrio with its consciously working class, left-wing identity and luxury isn’t their thing. Yes, they love this place, but that doesn’t mean they have to live like this.

Worst of all is the feeling that it is not by accident but design, the way the owner and president Raúl Martín Presa wants it. He certainly wants to go to a new ground, paid for by the local government, a decision the coach Iñigo Pérez, speaking for everyone else, says would be “devastating”. The suspicion lingers this is a classic case of running the place down as a prelude, a justification to a move to somewhere he can make his own in a way the current ground never will be. The idea of Vallecas being inadequate for Europe is one he has embraced and echoed, opportunity presented as obligation. The pitch is so bad as to be suspicious. It is municipal, but the tenant has done nothing to care for it.

Presa, at the other end of the political spectrum to supporters proud of their working class, left-wing identity, has always seemed to despise the fans and the feeling is mutual. Communication is almost entirely reduced to abuse. At every game, the entire ground sings for him to leave. That he hangs on can feeling genuinely baffling at times. Graffiti round the ground demands he go. Former coach Míchel Sanchez, the barrio’s most beloved son, has publicly called him out, saying he has never belonged.

This weekend that divide could not have been laid more bare. When supporters’ groups came together to announce “enough is enough”, complaining about the way the club had fallen into abandonment, Presa responded by claiming this was just the Bukaneros, Rayo’s ultras behind the goal; they had forced other fans into backing them, acting like mafiosos. He called them – his club’s own fans – idle, brainless and drunkards, saying they didn’t respect their partners. They are, he claimed, the opposite of the values of the neighbourhood. His “evidence”? Their song, A Pirate’s Life, all yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, a woman in every port, but should I ever marry it will be the girl who’s Rayo. No work, no study, every day instead spent aboard the Santa Ines. “They talk about working class but working class is breaking your back every day,” Presa said.

In the middle, the team and its manager,” Pérez, says. And while careful about how he expressed it on Sunday night he said: “The fans have their reasons. My family are in the stands and they see the deterioration, that things could be better.” So on Sunday the first protest began, quietly broken by chants for Presa to go, which grew in intensity. As the first half went on, the banners came out one by one, each with a reason to oppose him, a megaphone explaining them: “for abandoning our stadium”; “for never listening to the fans”; “for mistreating the women’s team”: “for abandoning the youth academy”; “for refusing to sign the [reciprocal] ticket agreement”; “for dressing the stadium in mourning”. The 10th of them had just gone up when Barcelona were given the penalty with which they took the lead, Lamine Yamal falling in the area before then taking the kick himself.

“I think the ref will have a look, nothing will happen … and that’s when we found out there was no VAR,” full-back Pep Chavarría said. Before the game, referee Mateo Busquets Ferrer had taken Flick and Pérez to one side and told them that the VAR technology wasn’t working, but they were trying to fix it. Over on the touchline, Pérez the coach was going crazy, kicking the iPad by the bench. “I’m ashamed,” he said, although perhaps the league should be more ashamed. “I lost the plot; I broke a screen, I spoke badly to the fourth official and I should have been sent off.” The issue, he said, was not so much that VAR didn’t work but that “it didn’t, then it did, then it didn’t again, then it did: yes, no, yes, no” – players not knowing how to respond. “That influences the game,” he said. “And, hey, look, the [technical] error might well be Rayo’s; it wouldn’t surprise me.”

As the teams waited in the tunnel for the second half, Isi Palazón told his teammates that the referee, by then able to see a replay, had admitted he got it wrong. “It honours him that he said so,” Isi said afterwards. “I was so angry when it happened and I could say terrible things, speak ill of him, but I won’t. He’s a person.” Rayo weren’t, though, going to let this go, Vallecas alive, volume rising, supporters driven by another injustice, protests coming together as one. Driven above all by their team. Rayo had played well in the first half, García making the first superb save. Now they were on fast forward, every challenge an appeal, every attack a threat, everything frantic. And, above all, great fun. “It was chaotic,” Frenkie de Jong said, and that is the way they like it.

Organised chaos, Andoni Iraola likened it to, and he preferred more chaos to more control. Pérez, his assistant, denied a work permit by the UK home office, has taken that on, volume over precision, no bus parking. He had also, Isi said, seen what he called the “Flick Line”, Rayo’s players pouring into the space behind the Barcelona back line. The team that beat Xavi Hernández twice, that got Ronald Koeman the sack, now took Flick to the edge. And when Fran Pérez, the only new player to cost anything this summer at €1m, slipped into what he called “the binman’s zone” at the back post and smashed a side-footed volley in off the bar, they had deserved it. They had deserved more, Joan García making a couple of sensational saves, Isi delivering an outrageous assist for Jorge de Frutos for one of them.

“We played aggressive football, we didn’t stop, we kept going forward,” Chavarría said. “The manager was very clear about how we could hurt them and we carried that out to perfection; we made loads of chances and deserved all three points.”

Flick said: “It’s amazing the work Peréz has done with them; they’re very intense.”

At the end, they stood before the fans in the end, communion complete. They had come to have their say; the president had called them idle, drunkards and brainless but players and fans had a ball. “At the moment, I’ve got a slightly bitter taste. I think we deserved to win but in in a few hours’ time we’ll be pleased with what we have done,” Pérez said. Outside, way after midnight the fans waited by the gate for the players. nside the banners still hung across the stand.