Jagoba Arrasate felt the power of Kylian Mbappé’s magnetism as soon as the draw paired his Mallorca with Real Madrid: “That’s the first thing my son said to me: ‘We’re going to see Mbappé make his debut in La Liga!’” he said last Tuesday about this Sunday’s match (9.30pm, DAZN). “I don’t find it funny at all,” he joked.
The coach will share the league debut with the Frenchman under the gaze of the Son Moix with the largest crowd in history. The same day that Arrasate spoke of his son’s fascination, the club announced that it had sold the 3,962 tickets it can put on sale in just a few hours, after also breaking its record for season ticket holders, 22,058 for this season. The seats at 95 euros, the cheapest, flew off the shelves, as did those in the three VIP areas located behind the dugouts, at 850 euros per head to sit seven metres from the grass where the Frenchman will run: the highest price ever paid at the Palma stadium.
Son Moix has changed a lot since the night of 24 August 2003, when Florentino Pérez saw David Beckham make his debut there, the culmination of his first galaxy, in which he joined Figo, Zidane and Ronaldo. In that first leg of the Spanish Super Cup, the athletics track still existed, keeping spectators at the ends more than 40 metres from the pitch and those at the sides more than 20 metres away. The 850-euro seats did not appear until last January, when the renovation by architect Izaskun Larzabal, the same architect who transformed Anoeta, was completed.
There were around 6,000 fewer spectators back then, but the expectation was similar, as Alejandro Campano, a Mallorca midfielder at Beckham’s debut, recalls: “The excitement was huge, more than in any other game against Madrid or Barcelona. You could feel it as soon as you arrived on the pitch,” he says. “Beckham was brutal. He was everywhere. He was the protagonist of everything. What he did was brutal. At that time there were no social networks and he was on television all the time. He was the protagonist.”
Beckham, who was already married to a celebrity like Victoria of the Spice Girls, was the first great icon to emerge from the intersection of football and the world of entertainment. The impact of the novelty in that ecosystem 21 years ago was even more striking than that of Mbappé today: “Before, it was more impressive. Today, players are more used to this,” says Campano, who now works as a football agent.
And he had already ventured into the Englishman’s world before. At Christmas 1997, Sevilla, for whose reserve team he played when he was 18, chose him, along with half a dozen other teammates, to work as doubles for Beckham, Rivaldo, Maldini, Valderrama, Hierro, Vieri and Del Piero, among other figures who had come to the city to film a Pepsi advert in the Plaza de España. “I still have some photos with him and Victoria.”
Beckham’s arrival was a flash of light for much of what was to come in the business. It was also the beginning of the end of that first approach to Florentino Pérez’s galactic model. Despite losing the first leg in Mallorca (2-1), Madrid won the return leg at the Bernabéu (3-0) and won that Super Cup, the team’s only title until the president resigned in February 2006, and also the only one for the Englishman when he announced in January 2007 that he would go to the USA at the end of that season, in which he ended up winning the La Liga of comebacks.
That galaxy was built differently, and Pérez also managed it differently. Beckham arrived at 28 when Zidane was 31; Figo, 30, and Ronaldo, 26. At 25, Mbappé crowns the one that lands this Sunday in Mallorca: Vinicius (24), Rodrygo (23) and Bellingham (21). They arrive after the Frenchman won his first title on Wednesday in Warsaw, the European Super Cup.
You can follow EL PAÍS Sports on Facebook and Xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
