“The poor kid couldn’t believe what had happened; none of us could have if we’d just done what he had just done,” said Álvaro Mantilla, Racing Santander’s captain in the match they had longed for more than anything in the world. Which was why the kid – a 19-year-old from just along the coast who had been at the club half his life – wasn’t the only one crying. The day Sergio Martínez played his first game for Racing, he had climbed into the stand to hug his grandad; the day he played his first in primera, on Sunday afternoon at the Sardinero, he just about managed to stand before it, legs giving way a little and tears coming to his eyes. All around him they felt it too, 22,413 people absolutely losing it.
What he had just done was, well, everything. At least that’s how it felt right then. “Euphoria”, his captain called it. In his first game in the first division, his third start ever, Sergio hadn’t just scored; he had scored the kind of goal you get in a comic, all explosions and exclamation marks. The ball sat up like an invitation and Kapow! – Sergio smashed it on the bounce, a cartoon arrow drawn to the top corner. It tore through the air and through time, flashing past at 126km an hour and 14 years a second, so Sergio ran to the corner, holding the badge he has worn since he was 10. There, there was a wobble as it came to him just what he had done. Bloody hell, this was actually happening.
The teenager won’t even remember the last time Racing were in the first division: he was five. This was not just Sergio’s first top-flight game, it was Mantilla’s too – he was born and raised 5km away. And it was Jorge Salinas’ first as well, another 19-year-old from Santander. Sergio Canales, an academy kid from Santander like them, had played there and with Racing but that was 16 years ago, when he was a teenager too, the most eligible in Spain. Thirty-five now, he had at last come home. In almost the entire time he had been away, so had his club. Sunday afternoon was the first time that Racing, founder members of the first division, had played a top-flight game since 2012. And here they were 2-0 up against Villarreal, the redemption real.
It didn’t last long but it will last for a very, very long time. Leading 1-0 through a penalty from Andrés Martín, Sergio made it 2-0 in the 34th minute. They had deserved it too: “The energy was unstoppable,” Villarreal coach Iñigo Pérez admitted. For 44 minutes, Racing were something like perfection. And then in 67 seconds, two flashes from Pape Gueye and Nicholas Pépé had taken it away again – a reminder, Racing’s coach José Alberto López said, of what the first division is, how unforgiving it can be. Except this wasn’t going to be taken away: not the point, a 2-2 draw against the team that finished third last season which could be decisive in what will surely still be a fight for survival, and not the moment, their day.
El Sardinero, more ground than stadium, built in the late 1980s and with something about it that’s happily still there with corner floodlights touching the sky, was packed again. Along the waterfront they had come, the only people not in white Racing shirts those in green ones: a city, a community built, heading back to where they belong. If they were home, so was the first division: this was one of those days that everyone else could celebrate too. “I loved it,” said Pérez, and he coaches their opponents. “I’m so happy to come here and see all the emotion and the excitement. This is a joy for anyone who comes.” But more than a historic club being in the first division for the first time since 2012, this was about being, full stop.
Relegated in 2012 after a decade in the top flight, having played in Europe just three and a half years earlier and beaten Manchester City along the way, Racing fell a long way, and might never have got up again.
At all.
They were relegated again immediately and spent seven of the next 10 years in Segunda B, Spain’s theoretically amateur third-to-seventh-tier with its 80 teams and four groups. Worse, their fight for survival was not just about sport. By then, the financial and institutional crisis was out of control. The debt had reached over €40m. €14m was owed to the state and players and staff went unpaid. In July 2011 they filed for bankruptcy, opening up an administration process. In an era when the club’s shirt sponsor was for a brand of chorizo, slang for thief, two presidents would eventually get jail sentences for embezzlement of club funds – and that doesn’t include Ahsan Ali Syed.
Francisco Pernía and Ángel Lavín were the men charged. Between them came “Mr Ali”, welcomed as a saviour in the winter of 2011, championed by Pernía and the leader of the Cantabrian government, Miguel Ángel Revilla, who declared: “The Hindu has his pockets full of cash.” Ali spent €3.5m on the buyout and said there was space alongside Real Madrid and Barcelona for Racing. Instead they ended up in a league with Langreo, Durango and Calahorra. He, meanwhile, had disappeared entirely, wanted by Interpol and finally arrested almost a decade later for fraud.
With Lavín taking over, Racing’s crisis deepened, the sense that the end was coming. In January 2014, fans stormed the directors’ box and tried to force Lavín out. Then, a fortnight later, their players walked on to the pitch for the quarter-finals of the Copa del Rey against Real Sociedad. Still in Segunda B, they had beaten two first division sides but instead of playing they just stood there with their arms around each other’s shoulders. There was a dignity in their defiance, a solidarity.
With Lavín at last forced out, former player Manolo Higuera stepping in in 2015, there was the start of a revival: a decency, an honesty, a seriousness about confronting their reality. Something was forged by being on the edge too, but they hadn’t stepped back from it entirely. When club legend Pedro Munitis became coach in 2015, it wasn’t just that he wasn’t paid, it was that he, like others at the club, was paying: players’ wages, and even travel costs were coming out of his pocket. More than 50 legal cases still hung over them. The club was “dead and buried”, Higuera admits, little they could do; that they came through it was “a miracle”. They only played one of the next three seasons in the second division and although they went up in 2022, when José Alberto López took over as coach that December, there was a risk that they would slip back down again. Instead, he secured survival. Then seventh, then a playoff place, and then the title.
José Alberto said that to begin with Racing were still closer to being an amateur side, “more neighbourhood team than professional club”. He admitted that he wondered what he had got himself into, but he helped them get out of it. Having been forced to give up playing at 20 because of rheumatism, José Alberto had begun at the bottom, working at Ikea while he coached in Asturias; now his approach carried Racing. Brave and attacking, his team would go for opponents; this was going to be fun too, that was non-negotiable. Even last year when they won the second division, they conceded 61 goals. A momentum built that would eventually bring them up. Optimism was back at last, on and off the pitch.
Alavés 3-0 Getafe, Espanyol 3-0 Levante, Racing Santander 2-2 Villarreal, Sevilla 2-1 Rayo Vallecano
Monday Deportivo La Coruña v Elche (8pm BST)
Wednesday Atlético Madrid v Malaga (8pm BST)
That summer Higuera convinced Sebastián Ceria to get involved. The time was right: Ceria, a social democrat Argentinian philanthropist with a PhD in mathematics from Carnegie and a professor at Columbia, had just sold his company for $850m. His wife, Alicia Zorrilla, is from Cantabria and friends with Higuera’s wife. Ceria bought a controlling stake for €30m, bringing a new mentality built around the people – and above all stability. In December 2024, the final administration payments were met, their debts paid off 13 years on. Assets that had been stripped have been recovered, so too has the pride, a sense of belonging. With Ceria describing football as “democratising”, the shift is visible in the shirts all across the city.
It had started with a lunch in London. This Sunday Higuera and Ceria sat in the stand at the Sardinero together and watched Racing Santander play in the first division once again. And they watched the side play the way the coach that transformed them always said they would: no backing down, no doubt that primera is their place too. They saw the flags along the roof – every first division team there, them too – and heard the fans belt out La Fuente de Cacho at the start of the day they had waited a lifetime for. They saw fans lead the way alongside the Cantabrian sea and Mantilla lead the way out of the tunnel, armband on. They saw Sergio announce his arrival and all of theirs, not alone in feeling the tears. And Canales, who had announced his departure at the same age, standing before supporters singing songs of redemption and return. “It was … strange,” Canales said, somehow speaking for all of them too. “I can’t quite assimilate this still. I could feel the hairs standing on end. Above all, what I feel is gratitude.”
| Pos | Team | P | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alaves | 1 | 3 | 3 |
| 2 | Espanyol | 1 | 3 | 3 |
| 3 | Sevilla | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| 4 | Racing Santander | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 5 | Villarreal | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 6 | Athletic Bilbao | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 7 | Atletico Madrid | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 8 | Barcelona | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 9 | Celta Vigo | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 10 | Deportivo La Coruna | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 11 | Elche | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 12 | Malaga | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 13 | Osasuna | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 14 | Real Betis | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 15 | Real Madrid | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 16 | Real Sociedad | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 17 | Valencia | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 18 | Rayo Vallecano | 1 | -1 | 0 |
| 19 | Getafe | 1 | -3 | 0 |
| 20 | Levante | 1 | -3 | 0 |
