How a Tiny Spanish Town Helped Its Soccer Team Beat a Rigged System

The first thing you need to understand is that Spanish soccer is broken. It's a dysfunctional sportocracy run by old rich men who only occasionally get together over cocktails to discuss whether they should start doing their jobs. In November of last year, when a group of Atlético Madrid-supporting fascists rumbled with Deportivo ultras not far from the Vicente Calderón on the morning before a match—a fight that left one man dead and about a dozen injured—the LFP (which governs Spain's top two leagues) failed to postpone the game because they couldn't get in touch with anyone at the RFEF (Spain's soccer federation). On a day when four La Liga matches were scheduled, no one at the national soccer headquarters was manning the phones. Two weeks later, a meeting about fan violence was pushed back because the RFEF's president, Ángel Maria Villar, was attending to a more pressing matter: he had to be in Morocco, to watch Real Madrid compete in the Club World Cup.

These are the vain, incompetent people who nearly didn't let Eibar into La Liga. The tiny Basque club—the town that houses it has just 27,000 people; its stadium holds 5,250—finished second in the Segunda División in 2013-14, which should have earned them promotion, but red tape got in the way. Eibar had shown they were fit to play in La Liga, but they didn't fit into its corporate structure. Hell, they didn't fit into Segunda's corporate structure. Despite being debt-free—which is more or less unheard of in top-flight soccer—they were deemed too poor to gain entry into the league they had qualified for. The LFP issued them an ultimatum: raise a little over €1.7 million in capital by August 6th and ascend to La Liga, or be demoted to Spain's third division.

In lieu of taking out a loan, the club canvassed fans and local businesses. They set up a glorified PayPal account that allowed anyone in the world to buy a stake in the club. Shares were €50 a pop. The folks in charge of the campaign were smart: purchases were capped at €100,000, to ensure no affluent so-and-so could swoop in and seize a sizable chunk of ownership. (As a local schoolteacher put it: "Eibar should never belong to a sheikh, but always to the people of our town.") Former Eibar loan players Xabi Alonso and David Silva, along with Asier Illarramendi, who grew up just 15 miles to the north in Mutriku, lent their visibility to the cause. Alonso in particular was annoyed that the club was being compelled to fundraise in the first place. At a publicity event in Madrid last May, he pointed out that many clubs in La Liga have all manner of "deeper [financial] problems"—that is to say: massive amounts of debt and back taxes—and here was Eibar, being punished not for being poorly run, but for being small. "I hope we can put in a big push," Alonso said. "To keep them where they deserve to be."

The push worked. Some 10,000 people in 50 countries bought a piece of the club. A 90-year-old fan named Luis Maria Cendoya purchased the share that put the club over the finish line a couple weeks before the deadline. In late August, Eibar played the first La Liga match in their 74-year history, as hosts to neighbors Real Sociedad. Eibar won 1-0.

Here is the most miraculous thing about Eibar: it turns out they're quite good. At the halfway mark of the season, they're eighth in the league table, just four points behind Málaga for the final Europa League spot, which raises the amusing possibility of the little club that could visiting stadiums in Germany and England next season. They play a defensive out of necessity, but they demonstrate that prudent soccer doesn't need to be ugly. They create chances on the counterattack and are capable of producing stunning goals. Eibar are like when Bugs Bunny draws a stick of dynamite with a magic marker, then suddenly the fuse starts burning. They seem unreal, but they are very real. Ask Barcelona: they spent 60 minutes at the Nou Camp trying to figure out how to score against those pesky Basques. Ask Almeria: Eibar hammered them 5-2.

Nothing is pure in professional sports. There is always, at some level or another, a villain behind a curtain, exerting his wretched power over the wonderful game you're watching. Eibar is a beautiful town in the bosom of green, hilly northern Spain, and it was the nation's leading producer of conquistador weaponry during the colonial era. Maybe that's a metaphor for something. The club is taking a cut of that sweet, sweet La Liga revenue now, which is like the presence of background radiation in the garden of Eden. But Eibar are as pure as pure gets in a league run by schemers and cynics. They don't have much money, but they spend it with care. They wear the logo of a local scrap metal company on the front of their kits. They fill their miniature stadium with passionate townies.

"We like our peculiar way of ruling the team," club president Alex Aranzábal told the BBC, before the Sociedad match. "We do our best with our own resources." Even he must be amazed at what they are doing with those resources, at how much there is to like.