Rayo Vallecano stun Atlético with their fans in revolt and stadium unusable | Sid Lowe

One day in November, the coach of Rayo Vallecano decided that was it: he was out. The captain in whom he finds strength had reached a similar conclusion long ago, handing in his armband as an act of protest and dignity. Two Fridays ago, the squad signed a statement saying they couldn’t carry on like this. And last Friday, the fans who’ve been through it all before decided they too would walk away. Yet 48 hours later, after another week that proved them right, resisting everything, there they were still, celebrating another implausible success, another day when they had stuck it to The Man. If not, admittedly, the man they’d like to stick it to.

Actually, ‘there’? Not all of them were in the same place, even if that was a way of showing they were in this together. Because Rayo fans were out on the streets of the self-styled independent republic of Vallecas with their banners and scarves and songs on Sunday, while their team and coach were 10km south, playing in a different city. With their training ground unusable and their home home ground declared to be so too, they had to prepare at Getafe’s place and play at Leganés’s stadium. Where, in front of 9,000 empty seats, and kicking off in the relegation zone, they only went and beat Atlético Madrid 3-0, three days after Diego’s Simeone’s side had battered Barcelona 4-0.

Football doesn’t always make sense, which is what makes it brilliant, and a lot of the time Rayo Vallecano make even less, which is what makes them what they are. Still the smallest side in primera, they play in a ground built into the barrio that has only three sides, the fourth a wall where a Fede Valverde shot literally flew over and into a living room in the tower block behind. But that isn’t the problem: they’re proud of who they are and the home they have, proud of the team they support and the side’s almost absurd ability to overcome the odds, this season resisting Madrid and Barcelona in Vallecas and heading into Europe 25 years later. The problem that is the odds are stacked so heavily against them, and from within.

These days supporters ask only one thing of the president and owner, Raúl Martín Presa, repeatedly, vociferously and to his face: that he leave. He called them “drunk, brainless and idle”, the provocation constant, and the situation so unpleasant it is hard to believe he keeps going. Not least because the deterioration of the club. Óscar Trejo – the man who realised the best thing he could do as captain was to stop being captain – described it as a place where there was “problem after problem”. The list is endless and documented at a club that lives in isolation from the rest of the league and is somehow allowed to, a law unto itself, embarrassing for everyone.

The stadium and training ground are municipally owned and Presa is pushing the Madrid government for a move to a new ground, something the coach says would be “devastating”. Rayo backed La Liga’s CVC deal to bring investment to clubs, who would be forced to use at least 70% for development or infrastructure, but have not taken the money. Staff have long paid for equipment out of their own pockets and when players returned for pre-season, they couldn’t work at the training ground, where there was a fungal infection on the grass. The players have said there has been a lack of hot water in the showers on some days.

Rayo’s Nobel Mendy rises for a header against Atlético. Photograph: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty Images

The stadium is even worse, rubbish and rubble piling up, cables hanging out, chunks of cement breaking off; toilets are filthy, even for a football stadium. You can romanticise humility, embrace earthiness – and they do – but this is something more basic, something beyond that: simple hygiene. The facilities are almost laughably poor, Lech Poznan’s surprised kit man publishing a video: no light, boxes stacked up, a couple of plastic chairs, a few coat hangers and the old multicoloured towels stacked up in the dressing room looking like a scene from your granny’s airing cupboard. The playing surface wasn’t good either, and don’t think that suited them, the classic sneaky trick of the small team: under the coach Íñigo Pérez, Rayo would rather play and, he lamented, they couldn’t on this. The full-back Pep Chavarría called the pitch “a disgrace”. “Not even good enough for the regional football,” according to his teammate Álvaro García. Patches had been put down, but it didn’t work. Then last week, 10 days after facing Osasuna, they started to relay the whole thing, four days before facing Oviedo and in the middle of the wettest month anyone could remember. They hadn’t finished 24 hours before kick-off. What could possibly go wrong?

On the Friday morning, Rayo’s players turned up for training in the stadium, took one look and left. Patience worn down, that afternoon they put out a statement with the players’ union outlining the issues they faced and calling for “worthy working conditions”. But it wasn’t until a little after 10am the following morning, less than four hours before kick-off, that La Liga unilaterally announced the postponement, mumbling something vague about climatic conditions and Rayo having tried their best, when they really hadn’t tried at all. That weekend only one game in the Madrid region was postponed “because” of the weather, at any level and any age group: this one. Oviedo supported the Rayo players’ demands, they said, but this wasn’t an accident; it was negligence.

Rayo’s own fans agreed – they had seen it all before – and that position seemed reinforced when a week later, La Liga decided that, never mind Oviedo on 7 February, the pitch wasn’t read to face Atlético on 15 February. This time Rayo’s players and coach thought it could be ready but, with the team having to prepare at Getafe’s HQ because the training ground was no better, they were forced take on Atlético at second division Leganés, five tables set up outside at Rayo’s training ground so that season-ticket holders could queue for a ticket. With supporters’ groups calling for a boycott, not even a third came. A Mariachi band did, standing at the gates and singing Paquita la del Barrio’s “Rat on two legs”, dedicated to Presa. “Scum of the earth,” it runs, “how much damage you have done. Cockroach, bloodsucker, hyena, snake … the lowest beasts are nothing compared to you.”

So it was that on Sunday, as kick-off came, thousands of Rayo fans stayed at home and 2,000 marched through Vallecas. At Butarque meanwhile 5,335 people turned up to watch Rayo and Atlético. In truth, that was more than they hoped but most did so torn and apologetically: their struggling team needed them, they reasoned. It was still only a quarter of the members and it led to the lowest attendance since the pandemic, the sad, damaging sight of empty seats, something soulless about it all. “People say: ‘This is the drop that sees the glass overflow,’” Pérez said, the Spanish equivalent of straw on a camel’s back. “But the glass is broken, and that’s the danger.”

Drop by drop, the surprise was not that Rayo went into Sunday’s game in exile and the bottom three, facing relegation for the first time in five years; it was that it hadn’t happened much, much earlier. And that, by the end of it, they were out again. That Rayo Vallecano, the team that don’t make sense, the club that is completely, marvellously out of place in Europe, did it again. The week that Lech Poznan came, Pérez admits he was “emotionally out, and it had nothing to do with football”. But that night, 2-0 down after 40 minutes, they came back to secure a 3-2 win that healed and he is still there. Against Barcelona, they wouldn’t be beaten. Against Madrid, they wouldn’t be either. And, in a third “home” game against the big three, nor would they be against Atlético.

Rayo Vallecano defender Alfonso Espino fights for the ball with Nahuel Molina. Photograph: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty Images

“I hope this helps us avoid relegation,” Andrei Ratiu said. “We would have liked our fans close and understand those that didn’t come. We put out a statement, and hope to be heard. We needed this win.” They had deserved it too: goals from Fran Pérez, Óscar Valentín and Nobel Mendy had the Final Countdown booming round Butarque, Atlético broken. At full-time they bundled back into the dressing room, leaping about second division facilities better than theirs. “We’re happy after the week we’ve had,” said the captain, Valentín, a tinge of sadness sinking in as he offered an eternal truth for his team: “It hasn’t been easy to focus on the game.”

Nor was it about the game, but something bigger, the coach insisted. “This is one of the best wins in a sporting sense, but it’s not a special day,” Pérez said. “It’s a bitter day for Rayo’s people, I can’t say differently. I won’t fall into the hypocrisy of saying: ‘We’ve won, it’s a happy day.’ Today is a day to be with those having a bad time, a day to think, to help, to empathise, a day to feel sad.”