Cádiz pay for failure to make football fun with miserable relegation | Sid Lowe
The sun went silently down on the team from the carnival city to leave everything settled in La Liga with one week still to play
La Liga packed up for the summer a week early, nothing left to do. With seven days still remaining, it’s all decided: the title, second, third and fourth; who goes to the Super Cup and who goes to the Club World Cup; Champions League, Europa League and Conference League; that other league too, the three teams disappearing silently into segunda, fight leaving them early, unable to go the distance. Even the Pichichi is probably done after a Sunday evening in which Alexander Sørloth got four of the 31 goals scored, leading Villarreal’s comeback from 4-1 to 4-4 against Real Madrid, and Cádiz got none of them. It was the story of their season, four years in primera coming to a premature and predictable end, curtain closed on 2023-24.
Up on the east coast, Madrid’s top scorer Jude Bellingham sat on the bench rested, little to do but laugh as Sørloth began his escape, moving on to 20, then 21, 22 and 23, four ahead of the Englishman in the scoring charts and two above Girona’s Artem Dovbyk. At the same time, 849km away down on the south-west, Cádiz’s top scorer, Chris Ramos, a fan who grew up next door to the ground and became the first gaditano to score in the first division for 30 years, sat on the bench exhausted staring into space, broken. Cádiz had two strikers out there, sent in search of a miracle: between them, Sergi Guardiola and Maxi Gómez have scored one this season. Sørloth had just got four times that in 17 minutes, one less than Ramos in 2,694 across 37 games.
