Santi Cazorla will return to his boyhood club in Spain after playing most recently for Al Sadd in Qatar. (Photo by Simon Holmes/NurPhoto via Getty Images)Santi Cazorla was 18 when he left Real Oviedo. He didn't want to go. Born in Fonciello, a tiny place of barely 100 people in the parish of Lugo de Llanera, he had played at the Carlos Tartiere, the club's home ground for over 70 years that stood seven miles from his home. Just not quite the way he dreamed it.
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Having joined Oviedo at nine, he, Robi Toral and Piero Manso, fellow ball boys and youth teamers, best mates then and now, would go onto the pitch at half time and kick about. They were good, too -- people sat to watch the show -- but in almost a decade there, Cazorla never made his senior team debut. Now he was never going to, either.
A first division team when Cazorla was a ballboy, Oviedo had slipped from the top flight in 2001 and kept on falling. In 2003, they were relegated two categories at once: on the pitch, they went from the second division to the regionalised Segunda B, with its four divisions and 80 teams; off the pitch, they went from Segunda B to tercera, with its 17 divisions and almost 350 teams, forcibly relegated because of the financial crisis that threatened to put them out of existence. The same crisis that forced Cazorla out, the door closed when it might have opened.