Valencia’s Carlos Soler: ‘You’re comparing me to Cazorla, Mata and Silva? Nah’

The familiar lament says technology is taking over, a generation choosing gaming ahead of the game. Football, they say, is losing players to the PlayStation. Not always. This time, it’s the opposite: on Saturday night, Valencia face Real Betis in the final of the Copa del Rey and had it not been for the Game Boy, the man wearing 10 running their midfield wouldn’t have been there. The way he tells it, he might not have been a footballer at all.

In the beginning there was a ball. Carlos Soler grew up watching Valencia from close quarters and English football on Canal+. He has been at the club since he was seven, a ballboy before he was a captain, carrying their flag on European nights at Mestalla. Ask him about a game, not just his, and there are details, enthusiastic analysis. He began a football journalism degree until it became too much, even for him. At one point, he says almost without meaning to and years before he has to, that he would like to coach. And yet he wouldn’t play until grandfather Rafael bribed him.

“I was very little and didn’t want to join a team,” he explains. “Kick a ball about, sure. Play with grandad, grandma, other kids, OK. But not play. Bonrepòs is a team in a little town near here my brother played for. At half-time I’d go on and take shots. I was only four, tiny, but I hit the ball very hard; I could lift it off the floor, and run fast. My brother’s coach said to my dad and grandad: ‘That’s not normal for his age. Why don’t you sign him up?’ But I didn’t want to.

“That’s when my grandad said he would get me a Game Boy if I went. It was the craze at the time; I’d seen it on the telly. And so I began.”

It worked out nicely. “Very nicely,” Soler says. There’s a glint in his eye, although there