The familiar lament says technology is taking over, a generation choosing gaming ahead of the game. Football, they say, is losing players to the PlayStation. Not always. This time, it’s the opposite: on Saturday night, Valencia face Real Betis in the final of the Copa del Rey and had it not been for the Game Boy, the man wearing 10 running their midfield wouldn’t have been there. The way he tells it, he might not have been a footballer at all.
In the beginning there was a ball. Carlos Soler grew up watching Valencia from close quarters and English football on Canal+. He has been at the club since he was seven, a ballboy before he was a captain, carrying their flag on European nights at Mestalla. Ask him about a game, not just his, and there are details, enthusiastic analysis. He began a football journalism degree until it became too much, even for him. At one point, he says almost without meaning to and years before he has to, that he would like to coach. And yet he wouldn’t play until grandfather Rafael bribed him.
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