La Liga has often been written off as little more than a two-horsed race. A glorified version of the Scottish Premier League with better players. There are few, if any, surprise packages. The same familiar faces dominate the Champions League spots year after year and there is often little wriggle room for the so-called ‘smaller sides’ to butt in. However, bucking the trend this season has been Levante, a small club from Valencia that have managed to punch well above their weight and then some this campaign.
The one issue that has dominated the landscape of Spanish football this year above all others has been the redistribution of wealth. Bear with me people, I’m not about to go on a Trotsky-inspired rant about farmers and the proletariat, rather the way money is shared around from the TV revenues that the league receives.
In Spain, Real Madrid and Barcelona monopolise the majority of money gleaned from television, and as a result this has often rendered the league somewhat uncompetitive. It grants an hugely unfair advantage to the elite two, and as they won’t tire of telling us, they hold all the cards.
To put Levante’s achievements to date into some sort of perspective, let me enlighten you with some simple figures. Barcelona and Real Madrid each make £118 million a year from domestic TV revenues alone. Next up are Valencia with £42 million, then Atletico Madrid with £40 million and then Sevilla with £27 million. Levante get an equal share along with eight other teams of roughly £11.6 million each. Hardly a level playing field before a ball has even been kicked.
Some more numbers – This summer the newly-minted Malaga spent just over £50 million on new players. Levante on the other hand spent just £175,000. The club’s entire wage budget last season came to just £5.4 million, whereas Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi can expect to take home somewhere close to double that between them over the course of a season.
The club’s operating budget comes in at £18.3 million – Barcelona’s is a quite frankly terrifying £384 million. This isn’t just David versus Goliath – this is David versus Goliath, Goliath’s older brother and all of his mates.
Levante currently sit four points clear of fifth placed Atletico Bilbao and the same number of points behind their more glamorous sibling Valencia in third. When you look at the playing staff, this underdog tale begins to take on an even more staggering feel.
The club’s star player this season has been on-loan Sevilla striker Arouna Kone – a player that goes some way to epitomising the success story of Levante. Kone arrived at Sevilla for just over £10 million back in 2007 from PSV Eindhoven with a burgeoning reputation as one of Europe’s most promising strikers. A mixture of poor form and a penchant for the injury table saw him slide unrelentingly down the pecking order. In four years at Sevilla, he scored just one league goal. So far this season at Levante, he’s already bagged six in the league and seven across all competitions.
This motley-crew of overage also-rans have performed miracles on the pitch, most notably shocking Real Madrid with a 1-0 win back in September. In their 3-0 victory over the aforementioned moneybags Malaga back in October, they put out the oldest starting line-up in La Liga history, clocking a combined age of 346. You honestly couldn’t make this up.
English football fans will scour the club’s squad list and see names such as Nabil El Zhar and Asier Del Horno and wonder what the hell they are doing in such a lofty position. Aside from those hallmarks of a team over performing out of their skins, their isn’t much other than a tremendous team spirit, and a tricky attacking triumvirate of Kone, Valdo and Juanlu. Their coach, Juan Ignacio Martinez, is enjoying his first spell in the Spanish top flight.
It’s worth remembering that Levante have a chequered recent past too. The club fell into administration back in 2007 and the club’s players went a whole season without being paid. Indeed, they were relegated stone bottom of the league that very same season, 17 points adrift from safety and again in 2008/9. Last season they finished 14th in La Liga, a minor miracle in itself, just two points ahead of 18th-placed Deportivo La Coruna.
They’ve only ever spent six seasons in their entire 102-year history in Spain’s top flight. Their highest ever league finish of tenth came way back during the 1963/4 season. They are quite literally the Spanish equivalent of Hull City.
With just under half the league season gone and twenty games to go, they look just about on course to beat their best ever league finish. Their last six games have rendered seven points which has included two wins, three defeats and one draw. The wheels aren’t coming completely off just yet, but with a chasing pack of five teams within two victories of them, it will take an almost Herculean effort to resist their more illustrious and infinitely better equipped and funded rivals for the remainder of the season and secure an unlikely Champions League spot.
For a club without much history, whose only ever achievement is winning the 1937 Copa de la Republica during the Spanish civil war and who have forever lived in Valencia’s shadow, fractionally missing out on dining at Europe’s top table is an achievement in itself. As the cliché-worn drivel spouted by managers up and down the country every Saturday goes, ‘they’d have taken that before kick-off’.
Photo courtesy of Carlos RM.
Gary Linton
January 20, 2012
Good piece, James.
It’s been a big shock so far this season from Levante, but a very welcoming one.
I agree with your main points about team work and togetherness being key, but the job Juan Martinez has done with a shoe string budget is nothing less than brilliant. When Luis Garcia left for Getafe, I guess the fans started to worry but from the word go Martinez ha just got them fired up!
Cracking piece though, hope we see more La Liga stuff, from yourself!