The fall and rise of Mallorca (with help from basketball and Le Saux)

On this weekend six seasons ago, Real Mallorca went to Valencia and lost. That is Valencia B, by the way, a feeder team made up mainly of youth players who were then competing in the third tier of Spanish football. And that third tier spreads far and wide, effectively taking in divisions four, five and six in a regionalised network of 80 clubs in all. It’s a place where anybody, even a whole island, could sink very quickly into obscurity.

Yet on Saturday night, the same Real Mallorca will contest the final of the Copa del Rey, the most glamorous knockout tournament in Spain and stimulus for a great weekend migration to Seville for tens of thousands of Mallorcans, travelling by air, land and sea.