Granada

As the football season turns to winter, Europe's big leagues have some familiar names at the top of their tables: Liverpool, Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain, Ajax. Except, of course, in Spain, where Granada—having taken advantage of the postponed Clasico between Barcelona and Real Madrid—surged ahead of the pack with a 1-0 over Real Betis on Sunday. Theirs is a fairy-tale story that has set the small, historic city buzzing.

"The people in Granada are ecstatic," says Jorge Azcoytia, a journalist with Marca. "The city is covered in the red-and-white colours of the team. Newspapers sold out [Monday] in the kiosks because people realise that history is being made. It's 46 years since Granada was leading the Spanish premier division, during the 1973-74 season.

"A lot of the team's followers have never experienced this before. It's a party for the whole city. Everyone is excited about the team. The last game against Real Betis, the stadium was sold out. Everybody was very happy. It looked like the team had just won a title."

It's only 10 games into the season, so Granada have a long way to go yet—only two points separate them from Real Madrid in sixth position—but already they have racked up 20 points, the same total they mustered from 38 games when they got relegated in 2017. (Bottom-placed Rayo Vallecano got 32 points last season when they went down.)

Granada were in a bad place at the time. Their coach, Tony Adams, a former England team captain from the 1990s, became a laughing stock when a clip of him trying to teach drills but instead looking like he was dancing in a nightclub went viral. 

As Tony Adams becomes the first Granada manager to lose his first 4 games, could his training regime be to blame?https://t.co/vs9mvnh3TI

— Jeremy Vine | Here, on Insta & Facebook (@theJeremyVine) May 6, 2017

Their sporting project was a shambles. More than half their squad—hoovered up from 21 countries across the globe—was on loan. In January 2018, their former, longtime president Quique Pina was arrested as part of an investigation into money laundering from the sale of football players.

Their new Chinese owner, Jiang Lizhang—who bought the club in 2016 and, at 38, is only a few years older than striker Roberto Soldado—took stock and decided on rebuilding the squad predominately around locally sourced players. Now, 15 of the squad are Spanish nationals. Lizhang also took a hands-off approach on the sporting side, letting his directors and coaches do their work.

"Jiang Lizhang has done something interesting," says Rafael Pineda, a journalist with El Pais. "He's in charge of the club's important financial decisions, but for the sporting part, he totally relies on Spanish directors like Antonio Cordon and the coach, Diego Martinez. He doesn't intervene in the football matters of the team.

"As you can imagine, the owner is very happy. The team has given back to Granada's fans the pride they lost and now people really buy into the team, and this transmits to the pitch. It's a team that only invested €7 million in buying players during the summer, but it has managed to become the league-leader.

"It's like the French comic books The Adventures of Asterix. Well, the Gallic village that stands alone is Granada—they're there in their small village resisting, with only a fistful of dollars, an aptitude for work and ilusion [hope, desire]."

The appointment of 38-year-old Martinez—who only ever reached the foothills of Spain's football leagues as a player before retiring prematurely because of injury, according to Pineda—was a key piece of the jigsaw. He took over in the summer of 2018. Extraordinarily, he was the club's 10th manager in two years. He's had an interesting journey since graduating with a sports science degree from Granada's 16th-century university.

Martinez started training teams in his early 20s before being plucked by Sevilla's legendary sporting director Monchi to join the club's coaching staff for several seasons. He then tried and failed as head coach at Osasuna for a season before Granada took a punt on him. It worked.

"Diego Martinez is a little genius. He's the youngest coach in La Liga. Monchi brought him to Sevilla and he did a great job there," says Pineda. "As a trainer, he's very versatile with his tactics. He works with several systems. He tries to teach basic values to his players, such as sacrifice, humility, hard work. He's a good communicator. 

"He thinks about football 24 hours a day. He's always checking on the players. He's a hard worker, who scrapped his way into the elite, because he wasn't a footballer with a good career behind him, but he has this group of players at Granada who are absolutely with him."

Martinez led the team to promotion last season built on the ethics of a tight-knit group. He does bonding exercises like taking the players, coaches and kitman for a day's hiking in Andalusia's Sierra Nevada mountains, says Azcoytia.

The esprit de corps has translated into a water-tight defence that only conceded 28 goals in 42 league games during their promotion campaign last season, and, as Azcoytia points out, they only lost by one goal in each of their nine defeats in all competitions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEdtJscphEs

"Diego Martinez maintained the same block of players from last season who won promotion from the second division," says Aimara G. Gil, a journalist with Diario AS. "The team's very compact. He's maintained this essence in the premier division. The club didn't go overhauling the squad like crazy. They did a few very specific transfers.

"The dressing room is like a tribe. Everyone plays for each other. It's the key to the success of this Granada team. They defend well. They work hard at pressing. He's made them very competitive. They're effective without having star players or the quality that Barca, Real Madrid or Atletico have. They're greater than the sum of their parts."

Soldado, 34, is their most well-known player, a former Spain international who was picked up on a free from Fenerbahce for one last tour of the battlefield, with the belief that he would add to the century of goals he's scored in Spain's top flight. Azcoytia singles out Rui Silva, their young Portuguese goalkeeper, whom he believes is destined to be capped soon at international level, and playmaker Angel Montoro, "the team's brain."

Alvaro Vadillo, who scored the winner against Real Betis—and who also scored in the team's unforgettable 2-0 defeat of Barcelona in September—was a prodigy. He's the youngest player in the history of Real Betis to play in Spain's premier division. He made his debut in 2011 as a 16-year-old but has suffered two career-threatening knee ligament injuries, the first in a clash with Real Madrid's Sergio Ramos at the Bernabeu. Martinez, who picked him up on a free transfer in the summer of 2018, uses him sparingly.

"Vadillo is technically gifted," says Gil. "He's had very bad luck with injuries, but at 25 he now finally has a bit of stability at Granada. He's one of the players with the most quality in the squad. He has to take care of himself or he could be back to square one with another injury. The manager has been careful with him—he's played all the games except one [against Espanyol], but he's only played 90 minutes once [against Valladolid]. He wants to protect him a bit."

Granada have the third-lowest salary budget in Spain's premier division of €35 million, which is about 20 times lower than Barcelona's, and wouldn't cover Leo Messi's wages, but it doesn't stop their fans from keeping Leicester City's improbable English Premier League title win in 2016 in their minds. The two cities are of a similar size. Leicester had never won a league title before. The best Granada have achieved has been a couple of sixth-place finishes in the 1970s (1972 and '74).

"Diego Martinez always repeats the same mantra—that he's only thinking about the next game, and that the team has to get 40 points, more or less, to guarantee their survival," says Azcoytia. "It's the only thing that the players repeatedly say—this objective to maintain their premier division status.

"But it's not so long ago that a team like Leicester City won the English Premier League. The fans here in Granada are excited. They want to keep driving the team on, but realistically the important thing after only returning to the premier division is to stay up."

Who knows? Pineda reckons it could fight for a Europa League place by the end of the season: "As people within the club are saying away from the media's microphones: 'It's free to dream.'"

                      

Follow Richard on Twitter: @Richard_Fitz