Isco, the 83rd-Minute Penalty and the Night Betis Broke a 21-Year Curse

Minute 83. Score 2-2. Isco places the ball on the penalty spot in front of the South stand of Benito Villamarín, where 67,000 people have been standing for the last forty minutes and not one of them has bothered to sit down. I sit in front of a screen in Incheon, the clock showing four in the morning Korean time, a coffee that went cold long ago in my hand. When the ball leaves Isco's foot, I do not shout. I go quiet, because I know this moment will still be talked about twenty years from now, and I want to remember exactly how it happened. A 34-year-old player, once of Real Madrid, once labelled a wasted prodigy, once drifting through Sevilla and almost vanishing from the map of elite football, is the man standing over the decisive penalty on a Champions League night. Not the kick of someone who came to be a backdrop. The kick of a captain. At 65, I still stay up until 3 a.m. to watch a match most people in Korea cannot be bothered to switch on. But I have followed Isco since the days he was tearing things up at Valencia, and I know one thing: every time someone finishes writing the obituary of his career, he rises one more time. Real Betis host FC Porto in the 2026-26 Champions League league phase. This is Betis's second home match in European competition after twenty-one years. Twenty-one years. A generation of green-and-white supporters has grown up, gone to work, started families, had children, without ever once hearing the Champions League anthem ring out from their own stands. When the whole press room goes silent, I know I have just touched the sore spot — and tonight, the whole city of Seville aches in a different way, the sweet ache of people living out an old dream again for the first time. The match sets up two clearly opposing tactical models. On Betis's side, coach Manuel Pellegrini — a 72-year-old, one of the longest-serving foreign coaches at a single Spanish club — stays loyal to a possession-based system built on overloads down the wings, most likely a 4-2-3-1 with Isco dropping deep as a free playmaker. On Porto's side, young coach Francesco Farioli brings a high-press positional structure, a 4-3-3 or 3-4-2-1, the modern football now ascendant in Europe. Pellegrini represents the old school, the school of patience and a structure understood down to the bone. Farioli represents the new school, the school of pressure and intensity. On paper, Farioli's model is the more advanced one. But football is not played on paper. The match unfolds exactly as I feared. Betis start with an opener from Abde Ezzalzouli, the young Moroccan I used to watch back at Osasuna, his speed and recklessness still intact. But then Porto turn it around. And here is the detail that makes me put my coffee down: Betis concede two goals within seven minutes. Seven minutes. That is not a technical problem. That is a concentration problem. That is the window in which a team loses its collective bearings, when no one covers in midfield, when the back line stands at the wrong distances, when the whole shape feels like someone pulled the plug. I have watched football for forty-nine years, and I will say it plainly: a team that concedes twice in seven minutes has a structural problem, not a luck problem. I once bet that Germany would be eliminated, the whole world laughed at me, and a week later they shut up. I do not say that to boast. I say it to stress that data does not lie. And the data from this match tells me one thing: Betis won not because they were better, but because they reacted better in the moment. Pellegrini said afterwards that the team kept trusting the way it plays, kept controlling the ball, and that is precisely how they scored the other two goals. This is a line many people will skim past. But I read it closely, because it contains an entire philosophy. He did not say "we changed." He said "we continued." That is the difference between a coach with an identity and a coach gambling on inspiration. When 2-1 down, most coaches panic and push their shape up in a disorganised way, which leads to conceding again. Pellegrini did not. He kept the skeleton intact, only making changes to add firepower. And the man who came on, Cucho Hernández, was the one who equalised. This is the point I want to linger on. This win did not come from one genius move by one star from start to finish. It came from the bench. Cucho Hernández came on and changed the game. In modern football, where coaches are judged on their ability to rotate and substitute at the right moment, a goal from the bench in a big match is the signal of a well-managed team. But do not be mistaken. A goal from a substitute and a goal from a penalty are not a sustainable foundation for a Champions League campaign. That is the crux I want the reader to remember. The stadium is not empty, but I can hear the hearts of thousands of fans beating as one — only this time the stadium is not empty. This time there are 67,000 hearts. And in the moment Isco steps up to the penalty spot, I hear them all hold their breath together, then all burst together. Isco converts. Betis win 3-2. Their first home points in the Champions League after twenty-one years of waiting. And now comes my favourite part: the part where I might be wrong. People will tell me Betis are off to a perfect start, two wins from two, in a strong position to advance. People will tell me Isco is reborn, that Pellegrini is working magic, that this is Betis's season. I understand why people want to believe that. After twenty-one years, who wouldn't. But look at the nature of this win. Betis went behind. Betis conceded twice in seven minutes. Betis equalised through a substitute. Betis won through a penalty. This is not the picture of a team dominating its opponent. This is the picture of a team fighting, and fighting always has a limit on how many times it can succeed. When results run ahead of process, that is when I start to worry. Not about this match. About the ones to come. And here is what I want to say about Farioli. Porto's coach said afterwards that if you are not on top of everything, there will always be players with the quality and the talent to convert chances into goals. He was saying that Porto created chances but did not take them. In other words, Porto did not lose because they were pinned back, but because they lost in the conversion phase. I believe Farioli. I believe Porto were not at all dominated by Betis in terms of ball control or territory. If that is true, then this is a defeat that could reverse over time, and that is the real risk for Betis if they meet Porto away. What I want you, the reader, to weigh: a team that wins through a penalty and a substitute can still be a good team. But a good team needs more than that to go far. And Betis, with a recruitment model built on reviving undervalued talents like Isco, do not have much room to compensate when Isco is injured or fades. This is Betis's biggest structural problem. All the creation. All the penalties. All the leadership qualities. Everything flows through one man. When you build a team around a 34-year-old with an injury history, you are betting on luck. And I, a person who has lived long enough to know that luck is never a strategy, do not want to place that bet. But I must also be fair to Isco. He is not just the penalty taker. He is the captain. He is the link between midfield and attack. He is the man who, when the whole team is behind, still keeps the cool head and calm of someone who has won Europe before. His role goes far beyond goals. I remember a time a few years ago, sitting in a press room full of men, asking a coach straight out whether pairing a 35-year-old centre-back with a 20-year-old defender was not suicide. The room sneered. But the coach went silent for ten seconds and then admitted the mistake. Men can dismiss me, but they cannot dismiss my question. And my question for Betis now is: are you building a team, or are you building a season around one man? This is the question I put to the coaching staff, not to the fans. Fans have the right to dream. They have waited twenty-one years. Let them dream. But the coaching staff must stay clear-headed, because the Champions League is a stage that does not forgive dreamers. As for Porto, I do not think this is a disaster. It is a painful defeat, but Farioli is right when he says his team was not pinned back. Porto are a great club of European football, and great clubs usually know how to turn a defeat like this into motivation. Their next match is at home to PSV. If they win, this loss is just a small scratch on a long journey. What catches my eye about Porto is the gap between the name and the reality. Porto were once a force in Europe, once champions of the Champions League, once selling players all over the world. But European football has changed, and now clubs like Porto must fight every match to hold their place amid the wave of money from the big leagues. Losing to Betis away is not a collapse. But it is a sign that the border between football's tiers is blurring. I remember Euro 2026, when the whole world was praising the youth of England and I wrote a piece celebrating Chiellini's intelligent ugliness. I was called a promoter of unsporting behaviour. But when Italy won, many came back to apologise. Football is never rosy, and the winners are usually those who understand that. Betis tonight did not play beautifully in the aesthetic sense. They played effectively in the results sense. And in football, the result is the only thing that exists on the scoreboard when the referee blows the final whistle. But I still want to tell you this: do not confuse the moment with the essence. The moment is Isco standing over the penalty spot, 67,000 people bursting together, twenty-one years of a curse melting in one night. The essence is a defence that conceded twice in seven minutes, a team dependent on one player, a long journey with many traps ahead. People hate me because I speak first, then remember me because I speak true. So let me speak first on this: if Betis let Isco get injured over the next three months, their season will face real difficulty. Not because Isco is their best player — maybe he is, maybe he isn't — but because he is the only thread tying the scattered pieces of this team together. And if Betis lose an away match in Europe in the coming period, we will start to hear the old voices: that they are only good at home, that the Champions League is beyond them, that this is just a beautiful moment that will fade. Those voices will not be fair. But football's public is never fair. What I really want to see from Betis in the coming weeks is not another last-minute goal. I want to see a win in which the team controls from start to finish, a win that does not need a penalty, a win in which the defence holds firm for ninety minutes. That is the signal of a mature team. Nights like tonight, however beautiful, are still nights of emotion, not of structure. And as someone who has spent a lifetime watching football, I know that emotion can carry you through a night. Structure carries you through a season. Betis have had a night. Now comes the question of the season. And Isco? Isco did what great players do: he showed up exactly when his team needed him most. Not in the first half, when everything was still easy. But in the 83rd minute, when everyone was tired, when the pressure was heaviest, when there was only one moment to decide fate. That is a quality that cannot be measured by statistics. That is the quality of people who have stood at the summit and know its taste. I do not know whether Betis will advance in the Champions League this season. No one does. But I know one thing: on a September night in Seville, when a 34-year-old placed the ball on the penalty spot and a whole city held its breath, I witnessed the thing I love most about this sport. It is not the tactics. It is not the data. It is the moment when all of that dissolves, and all that remains is one person, one ball, and one belief. The stadium is not empty. And my heart, at 65, still beats to exactly the rhythm it did the first time I watched a football match. That is why I still stay up until 3 a.m. That is why I still write. That is why I still believe that football, even as it has become an industry, still keeps something raw in moments like tonight.