Lucas Perez places the ball on the ground in prime freekick territory, a little to the left of the D outside the Barcelona Atletic box. Note the word Atletic here, this isn't the Barca we know - this is their B team. Perez and his hometown club Deportivo La Coruna are in the third division, and they need this goal to go in. Desperately...
You've had a good career. You left home early, way too early some would say. Son of a fisherman who was barely home, you've grown up with your grandparents in A Coruna. You love the local club -- Deportivo -- to bits, but to make a career in football you have to move out.
After a stint at a youth club in the city, you moved to the Basque country and from there to Atletico Madrid's youth system, and made your senior breakthrough with another capital club, Rayo Vallecano. Then Ukraine, Greece, and finally back home.
Sodes incribles!
Grazas por este recibimento �� pic.twitter.com/QGDD0HLM1f
- RC Deportivo (@RCDeportivo) May 12, 2024
You miss vast swathes of your first season with Deportivo due to injury but return just in time to score in a comeback draw at the Nou Camp to stave off relegation from LaLiga. You then top score for them with 17 goals, stave off relegation for one more year before Arsenal come calling. A stint at the Emirates, a loan back home (at the end of which Depor get relegated to Segunda), a season at West Ham. Back to Spain with Alaves and Elche and Cadiz. All in the top division.
You're still in fine touch, you are Cadiz's top scorer. One day, though, you decide: 'I want to go home'. It will cost you 493,000 Euros -- approx. 4.5 crores INR -- and all that to spend the last of your best years in a division two levels below the one you're at. There will be a tenfold cut in salary. Most wouldn't even consider this choice; from a purely career-driven point of view it's senseless, from a financial perspective there's hardly a worse decision to be made. You wouldn't make it, surely. But then again, you're not Lucas Perez.
Perez takes six steps back, and a deep breath to set himself. This is it; he knows it.
Bo e feliz luns, #deportivistas ��
��⬆️#RenacemosXuntos pic.twitter.com/Pm0nR7D2Yy
- RC Deportivo (@RCDeportivo) May 13, 2024
Depor have been in this third division for four years now. The club that was among Spain's highflyers in the late 90s and early 2000s, the team they called 'Super Depor', conqueror of LaLiga and feared Champions League contender, have been through a lot in the recent past. As have their fans: relegation in 2018 and then again, the following season. In 2021 they escaped a third relegation by just a point. This wasn't the club Perez had grown up supporting, the club that Perez had seen swashbuckling through matches. But none of that mattered when it came to make the call. After all, it was home.
"I tell my friends," he would say when announcing his decision, "that a four-year-old boy who used play here in the neighbourhoods of Coruna, well, he had a dream. The time has come to make the decision and return home."
"I'm not a star. I am Lucas, the same one from Monelos [the neighborhood in A Coruna he grew up in], the same one... I don't come here to save anyone, the only thing I come here is to help. Unusual? The only thing I do is come home, which is where I want to be. I never thought that it would happen this way, but hey the way doesn't matter. I'm here."
What about all that money he was leaving at the table, though?
"Money doesn't move me."
Perez takes three steps forward, plants his right foot next to the ball and whips it in with his left. The ball curls past the wall, and into the near post, hit too hard, too accurately for the diving keeper to save it. Fifty-seven minutes in Depor lead, and that's all they need. They've now topped group 1 of this third division (there are two groups) and into Segunda they go.
Galicia is a state where men move away for work, inland into the affluent cities or out into the sea to the deep Atlantic, but now one of her own has come back home, sacrificing material wealth to help the great Galician entity that is Deportivo La Coruna. A Coruna's very own, saving their beloved club, one freekick at a time. Doesn't get much better, does it?
And for that freekick, for that decision he made driven by pure love for his home, Lucas Perez takes our Moment of the Weekend.