The decision that changed Fermin Lopez's life forever

Fermín López lived in a two-storey house in El Campillo, a village of 2,000 inhabitants whose population fluctuates according to the season, fifty up, fifty down. A minute's walk away, around the corner, we find the Peña Madridista 'Los Cipreses', founded in 2018 (we talked about the Pena Blaugrana Camp-Barça, which is not far away). When the footballer was a child and already professed the Blaugrana religion, locals remember, he used to go to the door of the peña every time Barça scored a goal, especially in the Clasicos, to cheer it. This is how neighbours of the village that SPORT visited to chat with his father, also Fermín López, remember it.

We ring the doorbell and, after a few seconds of waiting that seem eternal because of our desire to find out where the phenomenon grew up, a deep voice, full of personality, comes out of the intercom: "Hello, I'll open the door". We climb the stairs that lead us to a dining room decorated with a two-piece sofa, a television and a table full of family photographs in which we recognise the player. It smells of football. His brother, Juan Antonio, is a goalkeeper and, as they say in the village, "he's one of the good ones". Now he's injured. Fucking ligaments. A serious injury. He will be back.

This house didn't always have the aroma of the ball, although it was impregnated with it until it became a temple: "He was very mischievous, nervous, a nuisance, he wouldn't stop. At first you took him to the pitch and he didn't play, it didn't motivate him, he made piles with the sand. He was five years old or thereabouts. He didn't play ball," recalls his father. His growth was late; his passion for football, more or less, too. His love for Barça came from his uncle Juan, his mother's brother. He was called 'Miri' after Maradona and those who saw him play say that "to see Fermín is to see Miri even in his gait".

His father, who welcomes us with his shirt off and puts it on as we climb the stairs, sits on the sofa after an eight-to-three working day at the post office. "My brother-in-law is the one who has poisoned him a bit with this football thing, I wasn't very keen on it, I was always working". It didn't take him long to realise that he was up to something because "when he was seven years old they already wanted to federate him, he already had a lot of talent. He would pick up the ball, he would go from one to another, nobody would take it away from him, all day long with the ball at his feet. I would tell him to go and get the fruit and he would take the ball". "The older people," he recalls, told him that "this boy is going to be a footballer".

The town's municipal youth football school, Recreativo, Betis... Barça! "It's been non-stop", smiles Fermín López, who was, is and will always be his father, but who was also a chauffeur for years, which is the same as being a father: "I failed an exam, I was lying on the sofa and he said to me 'come on dad, we're going' (to Seville to train with Betis). And I told him 'go to your room, we've got to make up for it'". That day there was no ball. Fermín López was (and is) a good student, probably because of his love for the ball. "He finished school, had lunch and went to private lessons every day for an hour. He was good enough, but he had to go, no matter what", his parents imposed. "My wife was worse than me, but it was the way to encourage him, the ball was everything." Every day it was a two-hour round trip to Seville. Every day because Fermín didn't have enough with the obligatory training sessions, he also wanted the voluntary ones. He earned it by applying himself to his studies.

Barca always call twice

"Dad, my friends say that Barça want me. They've seen it on the internet", he told his father in the car during one of those daily journeys between Sevilla and El Campillo. "Half the things there are lies," he replied. "OK, but if you let me, I'll go," the boy insisted. "We'll see, Fer...". Not only did 'Rubio', as his father also calls him, put the squeeze on, but Barça did too: "Carles Martínez came, the first one, incognito, for a couple of games. Then he told me that he told his teammates to stand next to me to take a picture of us and see if he was going to grow up, to see what he was going to be like", says the father, who is not tall and therefore keeps his feet on the ground and helps his son to keep them there too. That happened in one tournament. Later, in another one played in Tarragona, Jordi Roura, then director of youth football at Barça, appeared: "Roura is here", they said, "he's coming for the 7 of Betis". The 7 of Betis was Fermín López.

The first time they went to get him "we said no, we saw him as so small...". The second time they said yes, and the first one to say yes was the boy. "It was difficult, you have to bite the bullet," recalls his father, comfortable on the family sofa, gesticulating without realising it as his mind drifts back to distant emotional scenarios that today return to his face in the form of a wry smile. "You think... It's absurd what we're doing, but it's what he wanted. If he had once told me he didn't want that...". "What?" we asked. "There was one time... he had been in Barcelona for about ten days, school in Catalan, away from home, he would call me at seven in the morning and say 'I don't want to be there, I don't know anything'". I told him: "Tomorrow I'm coming for you". And Fermín López, at that precise moment, made a decision that changed his life: "No, wait, we'll talk about it later".

And there he stayed until today, an ordinary weekday in a hot month of October, when a curious light slips through the white curtains of a two-storey house in El Campillo to listen to a story of which only a few pages have been written.