Ayoze Pérez does like a nice cup of tea. One November day last season, in the hours before Real Betis played Mallorca, a friend of his had a feeling. “He said to me: ‘You’re going to score – and as the game is at tea-time, you should celebrate by drinking one’,” the former Newcastle and Leicester forward, explained. “I thought: ‘Well, at least it’s original’. It’s something fun, different.” Something his too, a challenge to be met. And so there he was, a little after half past five lifting a cup to his lips, the year of his life under way.
Almost exactly 12 months on, it came to an end that was premature just when it looked like it would be perfect. Nothing though will take 2024 from him, or the decade that took him there, Pérez’s long journey home. And at least he did get home, if only for a little while. That November day, Pérez met the challenge, raising a cup and saucer in celebration. The next week, in the derby, he did it again. Then again and again. Seven more times last season and 10 this, in just nine games. He did it the first time he played for Spain and the last time as well, in Copenhagen on Friday, success measured in tea: a symbol of a journey which brought him back to where it all began, in front of his people.
On Sunday night, Pérez trained with the national team at an open session at the Heliodoro in Santa Cruz, ready for Monday’s meeting there against Switzerland. Home of CD Tenerife and his too, it was the first time he had set foot on his pitch since a second division match against Córdoba in the second division in May 2014. There will not be another chance, not now. Virtually the first time he kicked the ball, he felt something in his right hamstring, ruling him out of a game that, he said, talking in the final hours before travelling to the Canaries, “means a lot to me … a moment I dreamed of as a kid.”
Football can be cruel, but it has been good to him too. His had been a long way home. Pérez had not been in Tenerife since he set off for England a decade ago, a journey into the unknown that, he believes, made him the player and person he is.
It was 2014 when he left. Some of Europe’s biggest clubs were interested but as he said, “I was a kid and had [only] played in segunda”. Liverpool coach Brendan Rodgers, who later signed him for Leicester, hesitated. Newcastle scout Graham Carr convinced his club to pay the clause, getting in ahead of Porto. Pérez was 20, an islander heading 2,000 miles north and a world away.
“It’s intimidating. I remember the nerves, travelling to England with my brother and agent. I’d never even left Spain before. I had no idea what was out there, what I was going to find. But when you’re a kid, you take on whatever they put in front of you. I was excited, signing for a big club. I watched a lot of Premier League football,” he said, and so he embraced it.
He lived in Jesmond then Gosforth, where visitors found the heating always on full-blast and him hanging around the house just in shorts as if back in the Canaries, every Tenerife game put on the telly. His brother Samuel played for Blyth Spartans. Still young, Newcastle were cautious; one day they made Pérez play for the U21s against Carlisle. He was taken off at half-time, having scored four, Peter Beardsley, the coach, telling Alan Pardew: don’t worry, he’s ready. By the season’s end he had scored against Spurs, Liverpool and Arsenal.
“I can still see the flight there, the first few days … all of it. It was an unforgettable experience,” Pérez recalled. “It’s been a long time, eh.” Nine years he was in England, forged there. There were five seasons at Newcastle, four at Leicester. A relegation and a promotion, a title win in the Championship. Over 300 games. Sixty-three goals. A £33m transfer. An FA Cup winner’s medal. Even a comedy series about him. International football though remained out of reach; the list of players ahead of him made some reading, after all. In 2015, he played twice for the U21s, and that was it.
Then last spring, in his second season at Betis having returned to Spain, something happened. A corazonada, he calls it; something stirring in his heart. He was playing the best football of his career and across March and April got five goals in as many games, ending the season on nine in La Liga, 11 overall. Maybe being back helped get him noticed, but he was the only one who really saw it and when Betis drew at the Santiago Bernabéu a few days before the Euro 2024 squad was announced, he dared say the quiet part out loud: “I said: ‘I don’t know, I just have this feeling…’.”
There had been no whispers, no hints? “No, no, nothing. Zero, zero. Sometimes something appears inside you. And, look, it happened,” Pérez said. “No one tells you. There’s a pre-list but that’s 60 names. I found out the way everyone did: I saw my name on the list. There were a few seconds shock, then immense happiness.”
At 30, he was an international for the first time. Actually going to Germany was a different matter, though. Luis de la Fuente had named a preliminary 29-man squad; three would be left out, Pérez surely among them.
Even after he scored on his debut, a friendly against Andorra, a poll in Marca rated him the most likely to be left at home. “I heard that a lot: it was a given that I would be cut. But the coach said: ‘You’re here because you’re talented; feel free, liberated, play.’ It was a chance to be at the Euros, and out of nowhere.”
And so it was. There was a smile the size of Santa Cruz, that look in his eyes, at the thought of it, the difficulty describing it. “The hostia,” Pérez said. The hostia is the consecrated bread, the communion wafer. The absolute business, in other words.
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“When you’re included in the final squad, the happiness is on the inside, because there are [three] teammates you respect who have to leave. It’s hard for them, missing out at the last moment. There’s a bit of sadness, some pity, but course internally I was so happy. Ten days earlier I’d never been called up in my life; now I was going to the Euros.”
Not just going, Pérez laughing at how pretty absurd it all was really. A month later, he was a champion, leaving Berlin with only the third winners’ medal of his life around his neck and two international games under his belt. While an injury limited him to one appearance against Italy, another kept him out last month, and now he has been denied a full homecoming, the gratitude remains and he will return. “I enjoyed every minute,” he said. “My first call-up and it’s there. I could barely contain my happiness, living it all from the inside.”
The selección is his place now, earned the long way. More of a No 9 than over the past decade, a return to his roots, he has developed a habit for decisive late winners. It helps to be supplied by Álex Baena – “what an amazing ability he has to find players”, Pérez said – and to have joined Villarreal, a team he calls “nice to watch, attacking, that creates lots of chances”. But he has as many goals as his clubmates combined, no one has more per minute in La Liga and no Spaniard anywhere has as many. On Friday, in his fourth Spain game, he scored the opener against Denmark.
“My career has had very good moments, not such good moments, and all that contributes,” he said. “I was in England for years. That has an impact on you, how you see football, the way you play. You develop differently, have a different footballing and personal culture, which can help [the national team]. Now it’s nice to be back in Spain after the time there, which was incredible. Everything happens for a reason; I’m a big believer in that. It’s a process that brings you here. It all comes together, makes you who you are. You’re always learning. You’re shaped by your experiences, and my experience is the Premier League.
“This has been an important, very special year for me. I had a good second half of the season with Betis and a very good start with Villarreal. I got my first call up at 30, straight into the Euros. After so many years, I didn’t know if the chance would ever come. When it does you don’t let go. I had wished for it for so long. And now I’m here again with Spain. After all that, you value it more, appreciate it. It’s just wonderful to be here.”
Even if it hurts now, precisely because of where he is. “Many things to make this even more emotional,” Pérez had said. “The pride of being European champions, being at the Heliodoro, where my story starts. I’ve been away a long time and haven’t set foot on the pitch there since I left. To go and with the national team … imagine what that means to me. That was the beginning of a special journey. It’s going to be a unique moment to be in the ground where I grew up, with some of those who were part of it.”
Spain haven’t played in Tenerife for 28 years and no Canarian has ever scored for them in the islands, another challenge laid before him as he returned a decade on. Instead, injury hit just as it seemed it was time to pop the kettle on again, but Pérez will be back.
