The 120 years of Zamora, the first icon of Spanish football

Before Luis Suárez, the first Spanish Ballon d'Or (1960), or the generation led by Iker Casillas and Xavi Hernández who won two Euro Cups and a World Cup between 2008 and 2012, the icon of Spanish football was Ricardo Zamora, born on a day like today 120 years ago in Barcelona. As Alfredo Relaño relates in his book '365 World Soccer Stories You Should Know', “He was the Jordan of the time, a celebrity who was made into movies and lent his image to commercials.”

The following anecdote that reflects his reputation around the world remained for the collective memory, a story between legend and reality. When Iosif Stalin, secretary of the communist party in the former USSR, was told that the Second Republic had been installed in Spain, he asked: “And who have they made president?” They answered that it was Alcalá-Zamora. And Stalin's reply was “ah, the football goalkeeper.”

Zamora was born in Barcelona in 1901, father of a Cadiz doctor and a Valencian woman. Although his father tried by all means to follow in his footsteps in Medicine (he even quit football to focus on his studies), football was the love of his life. He started playing at the Universitari and just after, at just 15 years old, he made his debut with Espanyol's elders. At just 19 years old, he was the goalkeeper of the first Spanish team, which achieved silver at the 1920 Antwerp Olympic Games, for many decades the only international success.

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There, in Belgium, the fame of The Divine and its international emergence. He played for Barcelona as an undercover professional from 1919 to 1922 until he returned to Espanyol, the club of his life as he has always expressed. It was there that he wove a pristine and brilliant career, which led him to be popular in America on a tour that Espanyol did and in which the first person who scored a goal was paid with a gold medal, something that Piendibene achieved. , forward of Peñarol. In 1929 he won the first Copa del Rey del Espanyol, the famous Final del Agua.

With the League underway and with football immersed in professionalism, Real Madrid broke the moneybox to pay for a transfer that was famous at the time: 150,000 pesetas. It was six years. His last match was the 1936 Cup final, won by his team against Barcelona, ​​and with a spectacular save within reach of Escolà. When the war began, he was imprisoned for “gentleman of rights”, as Relaño recounts in his book, although he managed to escape and take refuge in France, where he continued to play football in Nice until 1938.

Already retired, he worked as a coach in several teams, including Espanyol, Atlético Aviación (Atlético de Madrid) or Celta de Vigo. In 1967 a world tribute was paid to him at the Santiago Bernabéu with the celebration of a match between Spain and the Rest of the World, in which players of the stature of Rivera, Eusebio or Mazzola. Zamora traveled half the world to gather the stars, although they failed him Pele and Bobby charlton. Eleven years later, Zamora, at age 77, passed away from illness. The tributes have not stopped happening.