These are the days you’re here for, the moments that give it all meaning, Giovani Lo Celso says. At Real Betis’s Luis del Sol training ground in the south of a city that smells of orange blossom, swallows swoop through the sunshine to mud nests wedged into the wall of the white storehouse where the lawnmowers go. Rainbows appear in the sprinkler spray on the pitch where the session has just finished, last preparations before flying to Poland for the Conference League final against Chelsea. There’s a line they are proud of here, a design for life: Viva el Betis, manque pierda. Long live Betis, even if they lose. And if they win? If they win, this may just be the biggest thing that has ever happened to them.
On Lo Celso’s right calf is a football tattoo – old school and cartoonish with black and white hexagons – and the date of his debut, for Rosario Central in 2015. On his left is the Copa América, wrapped in an Argentina flag. He has won it twice, in 2021 and 2024. He also won a treble in France. Oh, and played a League Cup final with Tottenham – and, yes, he did watch them in Bilbao. “But I put this right up there, on the same level as those finals,” he says, settling on to a bench in the shade.
