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On Wednesday evening, Real Madrid won 2-1 against Bayern Munich and reached the Champions League final for the eighteenth time in its history (a record, and a very notable one at that): in London, at Wembley Stadium, on June 1st will play against Borussia Dortmund. As has happened several other times in the recent past, Real won with a rather exceptional comeback, given that with three minutes left they were losing 1-0, a result that would have eliminated them. Then in the 88th and 91st the 34-year-old Spanish striker José Luís Sanmartín Mato, known as Joselu, scored a brace, certainly the least expected player among the many champions Real Madrid has at its disposal.
Joselu’s story is a particular and surprising one, especially for how he came to decide such an important match at the age of 34, after a fairly modest career: until this year he had essentially only supported Real Madrid without ever actually playing for them, apart from a few games many years ago, though with hope never hidden from being able to return there one day. Two years ago for example, when he was 32 years old and playing for Espanyol (a team that now plays in the Spanish Serie B), he went to Paris to watch the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool as a simple fan. Yesterday it was he, with his brace, who was decisive in getting Real Madrid to the final.
How Joselu’s life has changed in the last two years
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, Joselu returned with his family to Spain when he was four years old and began playing for Celta Vigo’s youth team. In 2010, at the age of twenty, he was bought by Real Madrid, who placed him in the reserve team , Real Madrid Castilla. With Castilla Joselu scored a total of 40 goals in 73 games, contributing to the team’s promotion from Segunda División B to Segunda División (the equivalent of our Serie C and Serie B).
In that period he also played two parts of a match with the Real Madrid first team: ten minutes in the Spanish championship against Almería and thirteen minutes in the Copa del Rey against the modest Ponferradina. He always came on in place of Karim Benzema and in both matches he scored a goal, but always when the result was already largely in favor of Real Madrid (in the first he scored the goal to make it 8-1, in the second the fourth goal for Real Madrid in 5 -1 final). In the summer of 2012, Real Madrid, which had many strong forwards in its team such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and Gonzalo Higuaín, sold him to Hoffenheim, Germany. From that moment, a not particularly brilliant career began for Joselu, divided between Germany, England and Spain: he changed many teams, always scoring some goals but not enough to be considered a high-level striker and without ever excelling.
He scored 5 goals in the league with Hoffenheim, 9 with Eintracht Frankfurt, 8 with Hannover, 4 in England with Stoke City and Newcastle. In the summer of 2019, after briefly spending a loan at Deportivo La Coruña, he returned permanently to Spain to Alavés. At that moment Joselu was 29 years old and had not yet played a “double digit” championship (i.e. in which he had scored at least ten goals). At Alavés, however, he finally began to be more continuous: he scored 11 goals in the league in 2019-2020, another 11 in the following season and then 14 in the 2021-2022 La Liga.
Joselu’s brace against Bayern Munich
He then moved to Espanyol, the second most important team in the city of Barcelona, where last season he scored 16 goals in 34 league games (despite this, Espanyol were relegated to the Segunda División). Thanks to this performance he managed, at the age of 32, to make his debut for the Spanish national team. Like years before with Real Madrid, he took just a few minutes to score: on 25 March he came on in the 81st minute of Spain-Norway and scored a brace, decisive for the final 3-0.
Last summer, in 2023, Real Madrid had to replace the French striker Karim Benzema, considered one of the best of his era in that role and for fourteen years at the club, winner of the Ballon d’Or in 2022 and author of 354 goals with Real. The idea of the management, which always aims to have the best players in the world in the team, was to take in his place another very strong but younger French striker, Kylian Mbappé. For contractual reasons, however, Mbappé remained at Paris Saint-Germain, effectively promising himself to Real Madrid for the following season.
Knowing that Mbappé would probably arrive the following year, and having already spent 100 million euros to buy the Englishman Jude Bellingham, Real Madrid therefore fell back on Joselu, borrowing it for a year from Espanyol. The management probably saw in him an inexpensive striker, with a safe, if not exceptional, performance, and who would not have complained if he had often ended up on the bench. Furthermore, Joselu has remained a big Real Madrid fan in recent years. In the summer of 2012, shortly after leaving Real Madrid, when he was in Germany he asked on Twitter if someone could give him a link to stream the Spanish Super Cup match between Real Madrid and Barcelona (the context of this request is not very clear: perhaps he did it because they didn’t show it on German TV).
Joselu therefore went from the possibility of playing in the Spanish Serie B with Espanyol to playing the Champions League with the most successful team ever, of which he was a fan. He has played a normal season with Real so far, which has not stood out either positively or negatively: also aided by the very high level of talent in the team, he has scored 9 goals in the league and, with the two yesterday, 5 in the Champions League. He also missed several, however: in the Champions League match against Napoli, when he scored the 4-2 goal in injury time after having missed several chances, almost He apologized with the fans for previous mistakes.
In short, Joselu is not the example of a very talented player that the demanding Real Madrid public is used to seeing play, but the fans immediately appreciated the effort he put in on the pitch in the minutes in which Ancelotti made him play. The Italian coach has almost always deployed Bellingham, who would be a midfielder, in an attacker position but with freedom to move in multiple areas of the pitch (or “false nine”, as they say in these cases). Joselu was therefore often a reserve, but he managed to exploit his opportunities well. Against Bayern Munich, in the most important match of his career so far, he came on in the 81st minute: ten minutes later he had scored the two decisive goals for Real Madrid’s comeback and victory in the Champions League final.