Paco Gento, Real Madrid legend and six-time European Cup winner, dies aged 88

When Paco Gento arrived in 1953, he thought Real Madrid were too big for him but that was nowhere near as big as he would make them. He joined a club that had not won the league in two decades, since before the civil war; by the time he retired 18 years later, it was the biggest, most successful in the world and he had set a record still unmatched half a century later and likely never to be beaten.

Nicknamed La Galerna, the Gale, after the wind that tore through the Cantabrian coast like he tore through defences, Gento died on Tuesday, aged 88. In a career spent almost entirely at Real Madrid he won 12 league titles and six European Cups. No footballer can match that; only two clubs have won more and one is the institution he helped transform, where he was the honorary president.

Gento might not even have been a Madrid player for long. At the end of his first season, the club’s president and patriarch Santiago Bernabéu was minded to transfer him to Osasuna. Raised in the village of Guarnizo, where his family tended to livestock and chicken and he played barefoot with “balls” made of paper or stuffed with feathers, where he listened to Atlético on the radio, Gento had signed for Madrid at 18. “Too young,” he later admitted.

He had only played a handful of games for his nearest club Racing Santander, one of them while still underaged at 17, forcing them to forfeit the match and leaving him having to wait to restart his career. The contract to join Madrid was signed hidden away in a garage somewhere to avoid furious fans in Santander and for a while they were not much easier on him in Madrid. The club had seen something that supporters could not yet.

“The whole thing was too big,” he said shortly after retiring. “Just their