December 2023, the day before a game, and the manager of a team in Spain’s fourth tier gathers his squad. He reminds them of the plan – the bus will leave at 6am for an 11.30am kick-off 230km away, stopping to pick up players en route – and puts on a video. It includes every goal the opposition’s striker has scored: there are 11 from 13 games and, the centre-back watching soon realises, not one is a tap-in. Instead, Isaac Romero, the Sevilla B forward up there on the screen, makes them all himself. “Unreal, absolutely unreal,” the defender recalls. “You could tell he had to be in the first team, and that’s what happened. He’s on fire.”
That makes it sound easy, but it wasn’t. “I never imagined this,” Isaac says. That morning he played before a few hundred people and didn’t score. The next time he got a goal, there were 12,581 there. The time after that, 13,092. And a week later, when he controlled on his chest, turned, stuck it through the legs of an Osasuna defender and bent a perfect finish into corner, 36,640 people went wild. This Saturday, as he departed after 85 exhausting minutes having barrelled around the pitch and battered Real Sociedad, the Sánchez Pizjuán stood to hand him an ovation and chant the name of their new, unexpected hero.
