THE GREATEST TEAM NEVER TO WIN THE EUROPEAN CUP
“Who the f**k is that weird-looking kid playing upfront?” Former Real Madrid coach Luis Molowny was short of something to do one afternoon in September 1980, so he decided to watch a youth team friendly against San Lorenzo. Molowny couldn’t believe what he saw.
Playing in attack for Madrid was a blue-eyed blond who was so frail, he looked as if he’d blow over in the slightest gust of wind. Already rejected once for a place in the Real Madrid cantera, this kid had long arms and short legs, and avoided physical contact with opposition defenders like a ballerina performing a grand jeté. Molowny sprinted to the other side of the pitch – a not inconsiderable effort for the thick-set Canary Islander –where he’d spied youth team coach Juan Gallego. Molowny pointed at Los Blancos’ unconventional No.7 and spluttered his enquiry.
“Emilio Butragueno,” came Gallego’s reply. “Good kid – he works in his dad’s perfume shop on the Calle de Narvaez.”
Molowny snorted.
“He’s a f**king genius.”
Speak to Real Madrid fans of a certain age and the merest mention of Butragueno elicits a misty-eyed reaction. His rare intelligence, killer instinct and ruthlessness were incongruous to a boy-next-door image. You wouldn’t just let him marry your daughter; you would even fund the wedding, give him all your savings and thank him for the pleasure.
Butragueno was the figurehead of a legendary 10-year spell which delivered 16 major honours and a world-record 121-game unbeaten stretch at the Bernabeu. Nicknamed El Buitre – ‘the Vulture’, a play on words with his surname – he emerged from Real Madrid’s academy at the same time as four other atypically talented-yet-slight graduates, who’d make more than 2,000 appearances in all white. Together they were known as La Quinta del Buitre: ‘the Vulture Squadron’. They were Manchester United’s Class of ’92 or Barcelona’s Generacion del ’87 – which produced Lionel Messi, Gerard Pique and Cesc Fabregas.
Most importantly, four of the five were from Madrid, and their strong connection to the club’s fanbase was obvious. They cared.
So why don’t we know more about La Quinta? Simple, said Alfredo Di Stefano, not long before his death in 2014. “They played very well,” shrugged the Blancos legend, “but they didn’t win the European Cup.”
By late 1983, Real Madrid were three years without a La Liga title – “an offensive excess”, said a player at the time. Although they’d reached the 1981 European Cup Final, the play was pragmatic. Defensive. Dull.
Julio Cesar Iglesias, a journalist for broadsheet newspaper El Pais, thought there must be a better way.
“I was sick of Madrid’s mechanical football; no imagination; physical and technical,” he later explained. “I explored their youth teams and found the creativity of the young Spaniards more interesting.”
Iglesias spent
