Sergio Camello pulls up on Clown Fofó Street, in the heart of Vallecas, in an 11-year-old, second-hand VW Beetle showing more than 300,000km on the clock. The Smiths are silenced and out gets a footballer who is several things at once: a movie aficionado with 156 films reviewed, a part-time photographer, a sometime drummer, an Olympic gold medallist and the second top goalscorer in Europe’s top five leagues. The small door into Rayo Vallecano’s ground — graffiti everywhere, stickers covering the glass between red metal bars, a single step up from the street — is locked. In 64 hours it will open for the first time this season. “It’s my home, it’s Vallecas,” he says.
Rayo have been forced to abandon that home. The Madrid council declared the Estadio de Vallecas unsafe and unfit for purpose, and the club’s home matches have instead been played in Leganes, out to the south of the city, in games boycotted by supporters. On Saturday at 2pm the tenants return. Walking the neighbourhood, which is proud of its social conscience, its community and its team, Camello cannot wait to be back — and not just for the football, perhaps not even for it. “It’s the pre-game, the post-game, the people,” he says, passing the bar where they will be waiting for him afterwards, same as always.
The football itself is going well too, as well as it ever has. Only Raphinha has more goals across Europe’s top five leagues than Camello’s seven in seven league games, and Camello has never scored so many at this stage. Two months into the campaign it is already his best season in the Spanish top flight, where his previous totals were five, three and six. There is a tactical element, with new coach Beñat San José altering his movement, but Camello looks deeper for an explanation. His teammates, meanwhile, keep reminding him of it. “Pichichi! Pichichi! It’s not Sergio any more,” he says of the nickname borrowed from the legendary Athletic Club striker whose name adorns the top-scorer award. “None, I love it,” he adds of the pressure, “and I love that they’re enjoying it.”
So what has changed? “How I go on to the pitch,” he says. “I thought it would be much harder to change my mindset but I’m seeing that I can be myself: be free, connect with the Sergio I can offer Rayo. To feel liberated, to enjoy it — and it’s been a long time since I enjoyed all this like this.” The first step, he explains, was a series of conversations with people who truly know him, above all his twin brother Gonzalo, who could see that he was not enjoying himself and was not being himself. The aim was to play without the pressure he describes as horrendous: the kind that stops you enjoying anything, where setbacks turn into frustration and frustration into pity until everything is negative. He also discussed it in therapy — the idea of getting back to the kid who chose the sport before it was his job, because it was what made him happiest.
That loss of perspective can come from success as much as failure. Camello talks about how fast the change happens and how nobody prepares you for it, and about the damage it did to him — the paranoia and fixations early on, the sense that people were looking at him. He recalls the first day in primera, when he scored: the journey to the ground was ordinary, scooter, bus, metro, bus, but the journey home was not, with kids following him shouting his name. The night the team returned from the Olympics he was in his usual bar when the crowd closed in and he had what he describes as an anxiety attack and had to leave. “I’m me, Sergio Camello, a normal person from a humble team,” he says, adding that he cannot imagine what life is like for someone at Lamine Yamal’s level, and that he does not envy it.
Perspective also comes from outside football. Camello talks about a friend, the musician Dani Fernández, who is about to play four sellouts at the Wizink Centre and who, when they met, would not have filled the room they are sitting in. The two got caught up in their respective rises at about the same time and talked constantly — each there for the other’s doubts, a torch in the darkness. Discovering that someone he admires can describe how hard life behind the scenes can be, he says, made him realise he did not have to analyse everything so deeply. He is careful to say that doubts about the game itself are rarely shared in such depth in the dressing room, because football may be the most important thing in the world to a teammate.
What helps is the place. Camello insists Rayo’s problems are significant and debilitating and should not be romanticised, yet the club has built something through solidarity, and he says the players are there because they want to be. Breaking out of the bubble has been good for them as people as well as players. It is easy to be a dickhead as a footballer, he says, but that is diminished at a club not just in the barrio but of it, where your feet stay a little more on the ground and you realise you are not a star. “Rayo is the last team standing from football from another time, that’s what I like,” he says. “Even just parking here on the street right in front changes things. The same faces, every time. The least important thing about the football here is the football; it’s what they stand for every weekend, what they believe in, the connection.” He names Isi in the bar on the corner, Unai and his mates in one further down, the bar the players have taken over. To have the same guys you were watching half an hour earlier in the same bars, he says, does not happen anywhere else. He describes putting on the kit like a superhero pulling on a mask — the most competitive, most professional person you can be — and taking it off afterwards and forgetting about it.
There is refuge elsewhere too: in the camera, in drum lessons he admits have been slow, in a guitar he has abandoned, in films and in the indie rock he first heard in the family car, music his reggaeton-loving teammates who control the morning stereo do not share. And there is a project he has wanted to do for a long time. Camello has joined the charity Action for Music, which gives children in humble neighbourhoods the chance to play music: four hours of classes a week in percussion, strings and wind, entirely free, from the space and the teachers to the instruments, with schools in Tetuán and Carabanchel. He is getting involved, learning, and wants to set up a school in Vallecas next year — done his way, with rock. He describes a recent session, a kid on saxophone loving every moment of it, and the idea of giving children a place to go, someone who believes in them, and something they can be good at. The plan is concerts at the end of each year. “It’s a way of giving back to Vallecas everything it gives me,” he says. “I’m so excited.”
Asked whether that feeling — the family in the audience, the applause, the sense of being worth something — sounds like scoring a goal, Camello’s eyes light up. It is, he says. He is still the same guy he was when he was not scoring, but in that moment there is nothing else in his head, just a feeling that all of it makes sense: the ball hitting the net, a ground on its feet together, the celebration. It is like it is all worth it. You feel important, he says. You are good at something.