How comeback king Joselu became Madrid’s unlikely savior

For a man in a hurry, it took Jose Luis Mato Sanmartin, known as Joselu, a long time to get here. Welcome to the contradiction at the heart of this UEFA Champions League season’s best story, and Carlo Ancelotti’s favourite, the latest installment of Real Madrid’s never-ending epic, where the impossible becomes inevitable and the heroes are unexpected.

This time: the backup striker borrowed from the second division who ended the past two seasons in relegation and ends this one in the Champions League final, the scorer of the two goals in 164 seconds that took Madrid there.

One hundred and sixty-four seconds, and 13 years.

The last time Madrid played a final, in Paris in 2022, Joselu had been as a fan. “It was chaos, madre mia” he recalled. “As a journey was it was a disaster: the security there and everything. But in the end, what mattered was that Madrid won the UEFA Champions League.

“Now I’m going as a player. I’ll let those who have done it five or six times show me the way. I have always felt this badge but I’ve never lived a moment like this, so I will ask them what it’s like. And this time I’ll get to experience it a little closer up.”

Thanks to him, they all will.

– Stream on ESPN+: NWSL, LaLiga, Bundesliga, more (U.S.)

Asked this week for his favourite moment of this year’s Champions League, Ancelotti replied: “When Joselu came on in the semifinal.”

As for Joselu, he said: “It’s the most emotional moment I have had at Real Madrid. But it’s not just for me; it’s for everyone connected to Madrid. I’m pleased to be able to make the fans happy.”

And how.

He had only been on the pitch for seven minutes in the semifinal tie against Bayern Munich; in the whole knockout phase up until then he had been on there for six, five, four, zero and three minutes. But now, with a flash of his boot, faster than anyone, the clock on 87:18 and his team on the way out, losing 1-0 to Bayern, he changed everything.

Then, on 90:02, he went and did it again. And, just like that, Madrid were going to Wembley for the first time. Just like that, he had scored more Champions League semifinal goals than Harry Kane, Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappé. Put together. In 164 seconds.

Super-sub Joselu wins it ⚽️#UCL pic.twitter.com/R1AnNKU9nj

— UEFA Champions League (@ChampionsLeague) May 9, 2024

A Madrid fan as a kid, a youth team player at the club, growing up imagining himself in the first team, how many times must Joselu have dreamed of something like that?

“Like that?” he said. “Never. You can’t dream that. It was impossible.”

That wasn’t the fastest goal Joselu had scored at the Santiago Bernabéu; it wasn’t even the fastest double. In 2016, he had scored two in 130 seconds. That day, though, he was playing against Real Madrid, for Deportivo La Coruña, his eighth club in as many years, across three different countries, and that’s the point. It is also why this week, as Madrid prepared for another final and Joselu prepared for his first, there was a startling admission; why what came to mind wasn’t so much the joy of what he had done, but how hard it had been to get there in the first place, all he had been through to be here.

“To be honest, I was a bit annoyed that I didn’t think about the moment that I had just lived,” he admitted when asked what went through his mind as the ball hit the net. “Other things came into my head, darker thoughts, things from previous years, especially the last two: of the two relegations I had suffered. Unconsciously, other things came to mind that I didn’t want to come to mind. Your head does that to you sometimes.”

For Joselu, life has come full circle, dreams finally fulfilled when they seemed to have gone, everything he experienced, his entire career, cast at long last in a different light.

“I’m so happy for him because what he is living now is well deserved,” goalkeeper Fernando Pacheco said, and he knows. Pacheco, a product of the Madrid academy, a teammate there and later at Alaves, was there at the start of a long, hard journey.

It was some start. The first time Joselu played at the Santiago Bernabéu, he scored with almost his first touch. It was May 2011, he had just turned 21 and Madrid were managed by Jose Mourinho. Joselu had been on the pitch barely 100 seconds, making his debut for the first team at the end of the 2010-11 season in which he was the top scorer in the B team, Castilla.

“The pass was from a guy called Cristiano Ronaldo,” he later remembered, laughing. “He looked up, thought, ‘There’s Joselu, he’ll score,’ and crossed.” He had embraced Ronaldo like a child. He felt like crying, he said. He would do a lot of that over the years.

That was the first time; the second time, it happened again: Joselu had been on the pitch one minute when he scored against Ponferradina in the Copa del Rey. The third time, he got two: coming on as a sub on 58 minutes, he scored on 63 and 65, that 130-second brace. Three Bernabéu games, 40 minutes, four goals. The fifth time, he scored as well, getting the winner. And if he failed to score in the sixth, normal service was resumed the seventh, opening the scoring after just eight minutes. The next time he was there, he scored again. Eight Bernabéu games, seven goals.

Between the first of those and the last of them, 12 years passed: over a decade between his first Real Madrid goal and his third. In the meantime, he had scored at the Bernabéu for Deportivo, Alaves and Espanyol. At eight goals in 752 minutes, there can’t be many players with a better record against Real Madrid, but what Joselu always wanted was to score them for Real Madrid. Last summer, he at last got the chance he thought had gone.

On his first game back at the Bernabéu since 2011, against Getafe in September 2023, he scored.

He was 33 and a Spain international, but it’s not like he had spent years in the seleccion, an obvious signing for the biggest side in the country, a man who had always been in the elite. Instead, he had only made his first international appearance two days before his 33 birthday, the country’s third-oldest debutant, after goalkeeper Fernando Argila and a certain Ferenc Puskas.

Sent on as a sub — and you can probably guess where this is going — he took just 148 seconds to get his first goal. One hundred and seven seconds later, most of which had been with the ball not even in play, he did it again.

The next time the Spain squad was called up, he scored the 88-minute goal that took Spain to the final of the Nations League. He had been on the pitch for four minutes. His international total read: a goal every 27 minutes. After 10 caps, he’s still running at a goal every 71 minutes. No one faster, no one who took so long.

When he scored against Bayern, in his first semifinal, Joselu was 34 years and 42 days old, the oldest man ever to score a brace in the competition. The Bernabéu chanted his name as he lay on the turf at the end, sobbing. He had made it. All the bad times, the hard nights, meant appreciating this even more. Besides, he insisted, he had become a player to experience everything that had gone before too.

“I’m not 20; there’s a whole career history there,” he said. “Playing for Madrid and Spain isn’t normal. It’s within the reach of very few. Reaching here now, at this age, isn’t easy.”

Maybe, though, it is better. Joselu knows that when he appears on the TV screen now, there are people who do a double take: “Wait, is that…? Is that that Joselu, the one who was at Stoke City and wasn’t that good? The guy who didn’t work out at Newcastle?! Playing for Real Madrid?!”

That’s him, all right. The man who once admitted that as a kid he thought he was Zinedine Zidane, who maybe even thought that playing for Spain and Madrid was normal back then, but now knows it isn’t. He’s seen it, felt it. He knows how hard it has been, how long it takes. However fast he scores goals, and he always did that.

“The thing that most surprised me the first time I trained with him, doing crossing and finish drills, was that he had this incredible ability to finish,” Pacheco says. “What struck me was the ease he seemed to have with both feet, the timing which is so hard to get right. He was a genius.”

Pacheco met Joselu at Castilla. Joselu had joined from Celta Vigo, for whom he had joined as an academy player and scored four first-team goals in 30 games in the 2008-09 season. He had left home at 11. Madrid don’t just sign anyone and Joselu, as Pacheco said, certainly had something. The most obvious, easily measurable thing of all, the quality that, more than anything else, seems to offer a guarantee of success, a big club, getting noticed. A career opening before him. He scored 40 times in 73 Castilla games, and within seconds of coming on in his first-team debut.

More games would come. He certainly thought so. But apart from that cup tie against Ponferradina — one minute, goal — it didn’t happen and he didn’t want to wait. And so began a long journey that somehow eventually led him back home.

At first, it appeared that Joselu had made the right choice; he was ready for the first division, he didn’t need to wait, even if it meant missing them, even if it meant moving. And so he moved on. There’s a tweet of his from a decade ago that was recovered recently in which he asked whether anyone knew a good link to watch Real Madrid while he was stuck in Germany. But while he missed his team, the move wasn’t bad for him — and not just because, as he says, it meant he would be able to talk to Toni Kroos in German one day.

He went to Hoffenheim and scored five; he went to Eintracht Frankfurt and scored 14; he went to Hannover, where he got 10 in 32 games. Then Stoke signed him. Then Newcastle. It wasn’t Madrid, but it was a door into the Premier League. And actually, despite the assumptions many make, he quite liked it.

“Those were good times,” he said. “I have a lot of affection for both clubs.”

In Stoke, he made friends, with former Barcelona players Marc Muniesa and Bojan Krkić especially, who lived near him in Alderley Edge. “He always had a very good attitude, with his teammates, with the club: he always worked very hard,” Bojan says. “I have only good words to say about him. That was a nice period.”

“It was lovely, spectacular,” Muniesa recalled. “It’s a small town, but quite fancy. There were good restaurants, bars, Manchester was near, the airport too. It was a great experience to go to England, and the football was incredible. When Joselu came, Bojan and I welcomed him with open arms.

“Joselu surprised me a lot. I hadn’t coincided with him in Spain and he had gone to Germany, so I didn’t know about him. He could finish with both feet, his movement was great, he was so strong in the air. In training, I can tell you: right foot, left foot, head, scoring almost every time.”

On the actual pitch, it was different. Joselu only scored four. Manager Mark Hughes, he felt, didn’t trust in him; Stoke were shifting style, moving toward something different.

“I don’t know why he didn’t fit so well,” Muniesa said. “Maybe it was harder for him to get into the English football culture, maybe he was a tiny bit impatient, which is normal: everyone wants to play and he didn’t get the minutes he wanted. And maybe that took its toll. But every time he played, he played well. Then he went to Newcastle with Rafa Benítez, and it didn’t work out, but he’s one of the best centre-forwards I have seen.”

“Because of the way we played and because of the patience that perhaps you sometimes need, maybe Stoke was not his moment,” Bojan conceded. “But he was a great player, a great forward and I am so happy for him doing so well now. He’s a good guy.”

A good guy who was going about it the long way, not by choice but by obligation. If it was hard to be patient then, Joselu would have to be. A year on loan at Deportivo brought just six goals, even if two of them at the Bernabéu were a reminder of what he was, or perhaps a glimpse of what he might be.

He lived in the centre of Newcastle and although he doesn’t even like beer himself, he took his father-in-law to the pub for a pint and to the seaside for fish and chips. He made friends for life — there were people from Stoke and Newcastle at his wedding — and found his English teams too. He still follows Stoke. Get him on Newcastle’s fans, meanwhile, and there’s almost an awe as he recalls them.

But he scored only seven times in two seasons, rarely starting. It wasn’t always easy to handle.

“I wasn’t playing. You get a chance and if you miss, maybe it’s three or four games before you play again: there were bad moments, it’s inevitable,” he admitted. He sought support, ways of dealing with the pressure; he also sought a way out. But for many clubs, especially in England, this wasn’t the Real Madrid graduate; it was the guy who hadn’t quite done it.

“That last year at Newcastle was not good professionally, so you have to drop your level,” he said. “The offers that came in were not as big as I had received before. You have to know where you are. You always believe you’ll get a chance but it can be hard.”

The chance he eventually got, to return to Real Madrid, was almost implausible, unimaginable. He went to Alaves, with whom he was relegated. And then Espanyol, where the same fate befell him. Fates, in spite of himself, occupied his mind at the Santiago Bernabéu on his greatest night of all. They had shaped him, after all.

And yet, that’s not all bad: he said that experience and the time in England was what had eventually brought him back to where he always wanted to be, if not by the most direct route. When he appeared at the Bernabéu, most in England could barely believe it. Some used those words that should never be used: reject, flop. To them, the relegations might have made sense, but this?! How could the guy who averaged 3.3 goals a season in the Premier League be playing for Real Madrid? How could that be him beating Bayern?

Because he’s really good at football, a born finisher. The man who scored within seconds of coming on the first time he played for Real Madrid and who, having returned 13 years later, has scored 18 times, despite playing a supporting role. It is, his teammates say, not a surprise. It is also deserved, a portrait of perseverance. “A year and a half ago, I had never played for the national team; I’d never had a moment like this, but now I can include it on my résumé,” he said, alongside the relegations.

“He goes down with Alaves and Espanyol in a row and now this, which is amazing,” Manu García, his captain at Alaves, said. “But football is context. You read things like ‘Stoke ex’ as if they were doing him down, dismissing him. Bloody hell. If Joselu had been at Atletico Madrid, or Villarreal or Sevilla, and he could have been, he would have scored loads of goals.”

And if Alaves struggled, Joselu was superb, scoring 11, 11 and 14 goals in his three league seasons. The following season he got 17 at Espanyol. They did not go down because of him but in spite of him. And then, a door opened, a chance to go home. Not just for him but his family too — his wife is the sister of Real Madrid right-back Dani Carvajal’s wife and the extended family are based in Madrid. With Karim Benzema leaving a year ahead of schedule, Mbappé still not coming and Harry Kane heading to Munich, Madrid came back for him.

The results have been even better than they expected. But they don’t shock those who know him.

“He’s a great guy and a great player,” Rodrigo Ely, an Alaves centre-back at the time, recalled. “In training sessions, he was just the way he is now: the slightest chance, and it was a goal. He’s very pesado, a real pain in the butt who would fight for everything. It was always very hard to mark him. I would define him as a complete player: he works for the team, he chases defenders, brings the ball down, is an outlet when the team is suffering. And above all, he finishes very well first time: both feet, head. In the area, he is very hard to mark.”

“You put him in front of goal and pff, bloody hell. You should have seen the training ground battles with Pacheco,” García said.

Pacheco, Joselu’s teammate at Castilla, had been reunited with him at Alaves. He laughed. “We would wind each other in training,” he said. “But at Alaves it wasn’t just the goals: it was the work he did, the ability in the air, the way he laid the ball off. That gave us life. And as a person, he’s a spectacular lad, the kind of person who will help you in anything. I’m so happy for him because what he is living now is well deserved.”

“Outside, maybe he didn’t get the repercussion that he deserves, the attention he gets now at Madrid or with the national team, but in the dressing room we appreciated him,” García added. “The work he did for us, wow, it was huge. We could all see he was a great player, elite. And then he went to Espanyol and scored a lot of goals. He’s a very very good footballer.”

Pacheco said: “It was clear that as soon as he went to a team where the attacking volume was higher, he was going to score goals.”

“In the previous three years, he had scored 10-15 goals, both at Alaves and Espanyol, so I am not surprised by what he is doing now,” Ely said. “Being at a team like Real Madrid where there are more chances, where he is closer to goal, it’s not a surprise he is scoring. He has also had the intelligence to understand his role. He has interpreted that perfectly, and I’m so happy for him. He deserves everything that is happening to him.”

It’s the warmth that most stands out, the appreciation. “That year at Stoke was lovely and we’re friends for life,” Muniesa said.

“Me, Bojan and Joselu have a WhatsApp group. We’re always winding each other up, joking. Now, me and Bojan have to put up with it, take it. It pisses us off because we’re big Barcelona fans and he’s doing it for Madrid. He’s won the league and he’ll probably win the Champions League too. But I’m so proud of Joselu, so happy for him and Melanie, his wife. It’s lovely to see a friend of mine, almost at the end of his career, fulfilling his dream of playing for his team.”

From fan to hero, the hard way.