They say Canary Islanders are the Brazilians of Spain and when Vitolo was growing up in Gran Canaria his idol was Ronaldo. But he also sought inspiration in a man from Bethnal Green. The Sevilla winger who will play for Spain at Wembley on Tuesday was raised in Las Palmas, played for Unión Deportiva de Las Palmas’s youth team and watched the first team from the stands at the now abandoned, crumbling Estadio Insular – when he didn’t watch them from the touchline, where he was a ballboy.
The last time Vitolo saw them win promotion, in 2015, he joined their celebratory bus parade, even though he had left the club two years earlier. The first time he saw them win promotion, in 2000, he was 11. At the heart of the Las Palmas team that year, and for six years, was a classy, tough midfielder who was an idol on the island. You’ll remember Vinny Samways. Vitolo certainly does. He was “a big fan”.
“Samways was on the pitch, I was in the stand,” he says. “I’d sit with the under-12s, eating sunflower seeds, and the players would celebrate goals with us. I remember waiting for autographs too: I don’t think I got Samways’s, but I had Turu Flores’s. The things you never forget. I talk to [former Deportivo La Coruña midfielder] Lionel Scaloni, who coaches here, and he says: ‘Yeah, but Vinny was a bit crazy, eh! Great player but crazy.’ I remember going to games with my dad and my friends and he’d lose his temper with everyone, or reading in the paper that he’d had a fight with Oktay [Derelioglu] at training.”
Vitolo is laughing now. Samways was sent off 13 minutes into his debut but his coaches adored him for his ability, the control and passing, as well as his attitude. He played 160 games and fans loved him. Fans like Vitolo.
When Vitolo climbed on the bus celebrating Las Palmas’s 2015 promotion to primera, it was just days after he had taken a similar ride round Seville, having won a second consecutive Europa League title. A third followed the year after, against Liverpool. So, in March 2015, had a Spain call-up under Vicente Del Bosque.
Now England. It is not the Wembley where Samways won the FA Cup but it is still Wembley. “This call-up is special,” he says. “It’s the chance to play there against a team like England. Wembley’s emblematic: not just for English football, but for football itself.”
It is a chance that few anticipated four months ago. Del Bosque gave him the call but not continuity. Vitolo did not go to Euro 2016 and it took Julen Lopetegui’s arrival to bring him in fully – right into the starting XI.
“I’ll always be grateful to Del Bosque for calling me up, but I really wanted to go to France.” Did that hurt? “It didn’t hurt,” he replies, pausing to add: “Well, it did upset me at the time. But I can’t hold anything against Del Bosque because he gave me my debut and competition for places was high. But I’d have loved to go to France. Then Lopetegui came in, I’m playing regularly and I have a lot of confidence with him.” That confidence has been repaid.
Indeed, if there is an outstanding difference now, someone who symbolises Spain’s shift, it is the player who has scored three times in the first five games under Lopetegui, including in Turin and Saturday’s 4-0 home win over Macedonia, when he and David Silva, his fellow canario, were Spain’s most impressive players.
“Vitolo is a regular,” Lopetegui said after Saturday’s win, and with good reason. “He’s a player with good technique, who always wants to improve,” Lopetegui added. El País called him Spain’s “most decisive player”.
“The first time I trained with the Spain squad I was surprised. You know the level is going to be high, but it was spectacular,” says Vitolo. “I remember the first session with Busquets. He might seem slow when you first see him but – uff! – he plays one-touch and it was so difficult to get the ball off him.”
Then there was Silva. “When I joined Las Palmas [B team] in 2008, Silva was already an important player; he’d played for Spain [since 2006]. He’s played 100 games now and only great players reach that. He’s a legend at Manchester City, a role model [to me] that a player can come from the Canaries and achieve.” But with players such as Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández alongside, few have recognised his significance. “Yes,” Vitolo agrees. “Maybe not giving interviews, not having a high profile hasn’t helped.”
Vitolo is proud of Silva, but he is different too. There is something about him that breaks up the Spanish style, a man with the talent of the Canaries, where he says football is “played on the street still”, embodied by players such as David Silva and Juan Carlos Valerón, but quicker, stronger, more direct, regularly topping 12km a game. “I’ve always been strong, but at Las Palmas I never ran as much as I do now,” he admits.
At Sevilla he had to. Players invariably grow at the Pizjuan and he was no exception; he credits Unai Emery with the change and together they won three Europa Leagues in a row; now, a key man in Jorge Sampaoli’s exciting, attacking, high-intensity team, he is flying - often covering the entire wing on his own. So much the better for Spain.
“The míster tells me: we have a lot of quality players are good on the ball and come inside; he needs players who can get around the outside of teams and be very direct,” he says. “Spain’s style has always been the same: control possession, control the opposition by having the ball. But sometimes you need to change; you need various options when the opposition makes it difficult.”
His qualities are a useful combination for Spain. And for England, too? One of Vitolo’s best friends is the Liverpool full-back Alberto Moreno. The pair were inseparable at Sevilla and Moreno, Vitolo insists, can be “a very special player for many years to come: I was sad to see that he got a lot of criticism after the [Europa League] final against us. He is still young and I think they got that signing right.” When he is asked what Moreno tells him about the Premier League, his response is swift and disarmingly honest: “He tells me it would really suit me.”
Really? Do you speak English? “Not much.” As much as Alberto? “That kind of level!” he laughs. “I was from the capital, Las Palmas, where there weren’t many tourists. When you go further south there are a lot more, but I didn’t pick up a lot of English.”
The directness is striking but a little less shocking coming from a player at Sevilla, the club who have “normalised” departures. “Every summer the club sells players. That’s the policy and it’s brought success,” he says. “It’s true that at other clubs, results can be affected but at Sevilla it goes OK. Let’s see what happens. But I’m very happy here and above all my family is very happy here.” Perhaps Moreno should have a word with Jürgen Klopp, then? “Well,” Vitolo smiles. “It’s a great club; there are a lot of great clubs.”
Why, then, have English clubs struggled in Europe in recent years? If they have the talent and the strength, what do English teams lack? “In the first half of the [Europa League] final, Liverpool pushed us: they were strong, putting their foot in,” Vitolo says. “And that’s something you notice a lot with English teams. From what Alberto tells me and from what I’ve seen, the most noticeable thing is that they are powerful.”
But? “Teams in Spain seem to be better tactically, more worked-upon,” he says. “Games in Spain are not so end-to-end. I think the success of Spanish teams in Europe is more a question of being right tactically than just having better players.” Too much speed, not enough thought? “Yes, maybe that’s the principal problem because if you look at the quality of players each team has it’s incredible. The good thing is the [tactical] side can be worked on, and everything else is already in place. It’s all there.”
It’s all there and it’s attractive too. Vitolo says he is happy in Seville, and you can see it, down at the club’s Ramón Cisneros Palacios training ground: he is chatty, chirpy, open. The way a Canary Islander is supposed to be. Seville may not be Las Palmas, but it’s close. Just ask Samways, who headed there from the island. Vitolo is settled and the place suits him, it has brought him success and taken him into the Spain team too, but the pull exists. “At some point in the future it could be good for me to try playing in England,” he says. On Tuesday, he will.
View all comments >