Imagine you win the Copa del Rey. It is the fourth time in history, the biggest explosion of joy in 40 years, maybe more, maybe ever. It needs 120 exhausting minutes and a nerve-shredding penalty shootout, so it’s nearly midnight Saturday when Pablo Marín – a ballboy the last time you reached the final – takes you over the line and after 2am Sunday before you leave the stadium. You get back to the hotel at 2.39am, a disco set up on the second floor. Taxis come at 4.45am, the celebrations going on someplace else, and the bus is waiting to depart at 10.15am, the partying guests at the NH Collection up again already. Or just not going down at all.
En route to the airport someone realises one of you did not make it, another cab hurriedly called. You fly 1,000km north, drinks trolley emptied, touch down about two, carry the trophy across the runway in Hondarribia, and do it all over again. The song that accompanied you on your most joyous journey, the soundtrack to the best days of your lives borrowed from Bad Bunny, demands coffee in the morning, rum in the evening, and so it goes, although the manager prefers gin and tonic and admits that “maybe there was an extra beer or two”. A crowd waits at Zubieta – not so much a training ground as a concept – to welcome you home and that’s nothing compared to what awaits beyond.
More beers, another bus. From behind dark glasses, shielded from the glare, you climb aboard at six o’clock the following evening, on to the top deck and around Donosti: from Anoeta, to the tune of Daddy Yankee’s Limbo, along Avenida Madrid and past Plaza Pio XII, Calle Urbieta, Avenida Libertad and the Boulevard to Alderdi Eder and the town hall, people along the route and up traffic lights, any perch will do. More than 100,000 people are there; the city has a population of 190,000 and has never seen a celebration like it. On to the balcony, into the songs. “This is the best day of my life and we’re going to have a fucking great time,” Take Kubo says, speaking for everyone, so you do.
Nothing else can match this, nothing else matters. On it goes, people to see, people to hug. Even the media too, stories to tell. By the time Carlos Soler and Marín are welcomed on to the radio show broadcasting from the Hotel Londres, on the edge of the most beautiful bay there is, it’s almost midnight again, a wonder they can even walk in let alone walk out again. Please don’t keep them long, the press officer says: they’re back at work in the morning. But, yeah, good luck with that. At last you stumble in for the session you could really do without, mercifully switched to midday Tuesday, still in a bit of a state. Which is when someone says: lads, we’ve got a game tomorrow.
It’s Getafe.
Getafe are the hangover from hell, the team that gives you a headache even when you haven’t been drinking. Caricatured more than any other team, made into a meme, victimised by their many victims, whined about like no one else, some of it is unfair – and what they are doing is absolutely extraordinary, sitting in sixth for goodness sake – but some of it is true too. Built by José Bordalás, Getafe are the team likeliest to break the game and their opponents, the opponents everyone looks forward to least. They are the side who commit the most fouls (and suffer the second most), have the most cards, aerial duels, and long balls, the team that most launch it and keep it least. Hard as nails, not here to play, they are the last team you want to face after a three-day fiesta, something in the way Pellegrino Matarazzo had said, deadpan on Saturday night: “We have Getafe on Wednesday.”
“More than a game, it’s a chore; Bordalás’s fang is twinkling,” El Diario Vasco declared. “The dentist is paying a visit to Anoeta.” It wasn’t as if Real Sociedad could bin it off either, however much they felt like it, however much they would rightly end saying just that. “We want more,” the manager insisted. When Matarazzo took over, la Real had been just two points from relegation; the president admitted to asking AI if he was a good fit and it said no but, beaten only three times in the four months since, by the teams in second, third and fourth, they came into this rearranged round of midweek fixtures as cup winners and just four points behind Betis in the fifth and (probable) final Champions League slot with seven games to go. This was an opportunity, even if the timing and the team they were up against couldn’t be less opportune, no one better at breaking up a party.
“It’s a challenge,” Matarazzo said on Tuesday morning. “Yes, we had a long week preparing the final. We played 120 minutes. We have had one, two, three days of celebration but last night the boys got to bed at a good time. Maybe we had an extra beer or two and there was the release of all the tension too. But I am optimistic we will be ready to go. We need to be aware of how Getafe play: you have to be ready to fight in order to play football.”
Getafe gonna Getafe. Before kick-off on Wednesday night, they lined up by the halfway line and gave Real Sociedad a guard of honour, applauding them as they went past, carrying the cup; after it, they lined up on the edge of their area, didn’t let them past again, and won 1-0 – without a shot on target. “That’s football, papa,” as Bordalás is fond of saying.
Starting with only three of those who had begun the final on Saturday, Real Sociedad won an early penalty, but Brais Méndez hit the post. Orri Oskarsson, star of la Real’s version of Café con Ron, missed a great chance. Jon Aramburu hit the post. Ander Barrenetxea saw one shot go over and another cleared off the line. And Duje Ćaleta-Car couldn’t reach the ball, blocked a yard from goal; 13 shots, four of them on target, but the only one that went in was a Jon Gorrotxategi header, into his own net.
At the end it kicked off a bit: Juan Iglesias accused Mikel Oyarzabal of covering his mouth and saying something about his wife, while the Donosti media denounced the visitors as an “insult to football”, a team of “cheats”, playing a totally “different sport”. La Real had been beaten for only the fourth time in 2026, fifth place slipping from them: now they are seven points and three places away, brought back to earth by Bordalás’s team, which is the way it tends to be.
Only … they weren’t, not really. “We lacked energy in the first half,” Matarazzo said after. Well, yeah. But there were no complaints and no regrets, and nor should there be. No game could eclipse something generational; as the phrase goes, no one can ever take this dance from them. Not just winger Wesley’s mum and Bixio Gorriz, Copa del Rey winner in 1987, salsaing into the small hours, but the whole thing: the cup that injured full-back Álvaro Odriozola, who didn’t even play, said he wouldn’t swap for “anything in humanity”, insisting: “I’ve never walked on water but this must be how it feels; I can die happy now”; the cup that was only the fourth in their history and was worth at least two, at last played out before fans unlike 2021, Oyarzabal calling these “double celebrations”, a reminder now of what they had missed then; the cup that they took around Anoeta again on Wednesday night, applauded round the pitch after Getafe had gone. The loss didn’t last long but this, this would last for ever.
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Athletic 1-0 Osasuna, Mallorca 1-1 Valencia, Real Madrid 2-1 Alavés, Girona 2-3 Betis, Elche 3-2 Atlético, Real Sociedad 0-1 Getafe, Barcelona 1-0 Celta. Thursday: Levante-Sevilla, Rayo-Espanyol, Oviedo-Villarreal.
Nothing could take that away, the extraordinary revival this season and something deeper happening beyond it, Real Sociedad’s second cup in five years as good a record over the last decade as anyone bar Barcelona and a success secured with 10 players – 10 – who had come through the academy. Eight of them are from Gipuzkoa, the smallest province in Spain. Nothing could take it from Oyarzabal, captain, academy product and a goalscorer in all six finals he has ever played; from Unai Marrero, the backup goalkeeper and Real fan who became the hero just as he was against Osasuna in the last 16; from Marín, who Marrero kissed on the cheek and wished luck; from all of them. From Matarazzo’s astonishing journey from New Jersey, refusing to ever turn back when most would have done: “but then,” he said, “I wouldn’t be in a Copa del Rey final.”
And that, these last four days showed, was everything. The celebrations were a moment to share, to live: from Elustondo emulating Imanol Alguacil’s celebration from 2021 and introducing his teammates one by one, warmth in every word to the American coach with Italian roots and a German footballing education, addressing them in Basque. Every man who had played since the first round was invited to be on the balcony, Mikel Goti coming home from Córdoba, where he’s now on loan, to join them, and an entire community was spread out before them, the essence of who they are. It was right to wait a day for the fans to get back from Seville too, right to let loose like never before, whatever waited on Wednesday. Imagine you win the Copa del Rey. Forget objectives, targets, it’s about moments like this, always. “It’s the history we made,” Matarazzo said.
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