It’s the Sids 2022! The complete review of La Liga’s 2021-22 season

It started in tears. Lionel Messi touched down on the evening of 4 August, flying into El Prat especially. Officially unemployed, he had come to sign the contract that would see him play a 17th season at Barcelona but by the time it began he was gone, like Zinedine Zidane and Sergio Ramos before him. Three of the most significant men in Spanish football over the last decade had departed in a single summer. Yet at his presentation in Paris just two days before it all started at Mestalla, on a day that felt all wrong then and feels a world away now, Messi insisted: “In the end what matters is the teams: Barcelona and Madrid are still there, so are Sevilla, Valencia, Atlético.”

And the rest. Although it wasn’t what they had planned, turning up in part because no one else had and with few appreciating how significant it was it at the time, the most successful coach in European football was there too, Carlo Ancelotti quietly arriving back in town. So, at last, were the fans. A few of them at first, then more and more until eventually stadiums were full. “I had waited a long time to live this moment,” Athletic coach Marcelino García Toral said, speaking for everyone, when he finally saw and felt San Mames something like the way it’s supposed to be. “Waking up on a Sunday morning to go to the ground with your family or friends is beautiful. People need football and football needs the people; they are football,” Diego Simeone insisted.

His Atlético Madrid team had won the league without their people, even if plenty had gone to grounds they couldn’t get into, Luis Suárez becoming an icon they had still never seen in the flesh. Now they had their supporters back, a title to defend and a supposedly strengthened squad to defend it