The hardest thing about being 21 in a senior side is that nobody makes allowances. Yassir Zabiri did not need any: 9.62, and he looked the most comfortable man on the pitch.
At 19 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
At 21 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.
2 goals before the ground had finished arriving. Leganés spent the rest of the afternoon playing a match that had already been decided, and everybody in the stadium knew it.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Racing Santander this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
There is a figure at which a wage bill stops being ambitious and becomes the reason nothing else is possible, and this club has reached it. Nothing is left over for a transfer, a stand or a rainy afternoon.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 19 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
0‑1 to Deportivo La Coruña, and no complaints worth printing. The performance asked for nothing more than it got.
The dugout21 Sep 2026
The manager’s verdict
“That is on me. I pick the team and I picked wrong.” Managers say that when they mean it and when they need to be seen to, and after 0‑1 Leo García left the room before anybody could ask which.
5 attempts, none of them in. He got into the right places all afternoon, which is the hard part, and did the easy part badly — and that is the version of a bad day a manager can live with.
Nobody at Racing Santander is suggesting he is out of form. The manager simply wanted somebody with a different set of qualities for ninety specific minutes, and there is nothing a player can train to fix that.
Racing Santander offered $3.4M; Zaragoza said it was not close. The manager will be told the money is still there for the right player, which is what managers are told.
Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. Zaragoza have kept their man, and Racing Santander go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
The clubs had agreed and the player had not. A snub, and a public one: Veracruz keep him, and the supporters here are left wondering what he had heard about the place.
0‑1 to Valladolid, and no complaints worth printing. The performance asked for nothing more than it got.
The dugout24 Aug 2026
The manager’s verdict
“That is on me. I pick the team and I picked wrong.” Managers say that when they mean it and when they need to be seen to, and after 0‑1 Leo García left the room before anybody could ask which.
Selton was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.