Sergio Camello: 'Rayo is the last team standing from football from another time'

An 11-year-old, second-hand VW Beetle with more than 300,000km on the clock pulls over on Clown Fofó Street in the heart of Vallecas. The music goes off — the Smiths silenced — and out gets Sergio Camello: movie aficionado with 156 films reviewed, part-time photographer, sometime drummer, Olympic gold medallist and the second-top goalscorer in Europe's top five leagues.

Engulfed in graffiti, stickers covering the glass between metal bars in red, a single step up from the street, the small door into Rayo Vallecano's ground is locked — but in 64 hours it will open for the first time this season. "It's my home, it's Vallecas," Camello says. Forced to abandon their place, the tenants return on Saturday at 2pm. With the Madrid council declaring the Estadio de Vallecas unsafe and unfit for purpose, Rayo's home matches have instead been played in Leganés, out of the city to the south and boycotted by fans. Walking the neighbourhood that is proud of its social conscience, its community and its team, Camello can't wait to be back again. And not just for the football; maybe not even for the football.

"It's the pre-game, the post-game, the people," he says, passing the bar where they'll be waiting for him after, same as always.

Seven in seven — and teammates chanting 'Pichichi!'

Yet the football is good too, good as it's ever been. Across the continent's top five leagues, only Barcelona's Raphinha — with 12 goals in seven LaLiga appearances this season — has more than Camello's seven in seven league games, a total Camello himself has never bettered. "I try not to think about it but my teammates keep reminding me," he says. "'Pichichi! Pichichi!' It's not Sergio any more."

Pichichi was the great Athletic Club striker whose name adorns the top-scorer award. No pressure, then. "None, I love it," Camello replies, "and I love that they're enjoying it."

Two months into the season, this is already his best campaign in primera, where his previous season totals were five, three and three. Back in mid-September, when he arrived at the Santiago Bernabéu to face Real Madrid, he was already riding a streak of 10 goals in his previous 10 LaLiga games — as many as he had managed in the 97 appearances before that run. Although there is a tactical element, with new coach Beñat San José altering his movement, Camello looks deeper for an explanation.

"Pressure is horrendous": the conversation that changed everything

Above all, he looks inside — which is where, from the beginning, another conversation starts: a simple question prompts a complex, nuanced and human discussion, the striker talking calmly, thoughtfully and with startling, unexpected honesty. Camello is that most unusual of footballers — prepared to speak on materialism, racism or homophobia, on social media "poison" or the housing crisis. That rare player prepared to use his platform, he says it was born of his upbringing but also learned here in the barrio.

So what has changed?

"How I go on to the pitch," he says. "I thought it would be much harder to change my mindset but I'm seeing that I can be myself: be free, connect with the Sergio I can offer Rayo. To feel liberated, to enjoy it — and it's been a long time since I enjoyed all this like this."

"The first thing was to have many conversations with friends, people who truly know me. Especially my twin brother Gonzalo; there's a connection that goes beyond the human. He could see I wasn't enjoying it much, wasn't myself. We talked and I tried to take that on to the pitch. Above all, to play without the pressure. Because pressure is horrendous. It makes it so that you don't enjoy absolutely anything, puts you in a position where if things don't work, that leads to frustration, frustration leads to pity, and suddenly everything is negative. There's a point in the conversations where it's: 'That's it; it's done'."

"This is a sport you chose before it was your job, because it's what made you happiest. It's about connecting to that kid again. I'd discussed this in therapy too; the idea of getting back to that kid."

The anxiety attack, and the kindness of strangers

Somewhere that connection can be lost — not just through failure you have to live with, but through success too. "The pressure can come from everywhere," Camello says. "We're young, the change happens so fast, no one prepares you for it. If you can't manage that it can do a lot of damage and that happened to me. [Early on], I would even get a bit paranoid, have fixations. 'They're looking at me.'"

"The first day in primera, when I scored, the journey there had been normal — scooter, bus, metro, bus — but on the same journey home some kids followed me shouting: 'Camello! Camello!' It was a shock. The night we returned from the Olympics I was in the usual bar, people crowded, and I had a kind of anxiety attack and had to go. And, look, I'm me, Sergio Camello, a normal person from a humble team. I can't imagine what it is like for someone at Lamine Yamal's level. I don't envy that."

"But it's about seeing the balance, understanding," he continues, "and football has given me so, so much. There are so many people who can't enjoy their job, who don't have the [financial] freedom. When you have bad moments, when the clouds come, when you feel that cycle of negativity, you talk."

Camello looks across the room: it's quiet, 25 chairs sitting empty. "One of my friends [Dani Fernández] is a musician about to do four sellouts at the Wizink [Centre]; when I met him, he wouldn't have sold out this room," he says. "We both got 'caught' in this about the same time and we talked a lot. When he had doubts, I was there; when I did, he was. A torch in the darkness. You think: 'I'd love to be a rock star', and then someone you admire who is tells you how bloody shit it can be behind the scenes. You understand each other, you think: 'Bloody hell, maybe I don't have to analyse things so deeply.' If in even those places you idealise, there is darkness, solitude, maybe I'm not so bad."

"Otherwise you could go into a very dark place where you feel you have to escape this [football]. Even then the world wouldn't end. And fortunately, the positive in football has always weighed much more heavily. And that's been shown to be right. Those conversations give me perspective, make me conscious of how fortunate I am."

"Your feet are that bit more on the ground"

Although Camello says doubts about the game itself are rarely shared in such depth in the dressing room — "football might be the most important thing in the entire world to your teammate" — something about this place helps. The club's problems are significant, debilitating and should not be romanticised, he insists, and yet somehow they have made a success of it, built through solidarity. Besides, he says, "we're also here because we want to be", and there is something about Rayo, something about breaking out of the bubble, that has been good for him — for all of them — as people as well as players.

There's a moment when he talks about everything that comes with being a footballer and says "it's easy to be a dickhead", but that's diminished at a club not just in the barrio but of the barrio, one that's "totally different" to anywhere else he knows, where "your feet are that bit more on the ground and you realise you're not stars".

"Rayo is the last team standing from football from another time, that's what I like," Camello says. "Even just parking here on the street right in front changes things. The same faces, every time. The least important thing about the football here is the football; it's what they stand for every weekend, what they believe in, the connection. It's Isi in the bar on the corner. Unai and his mates in the one down the bottom there. The bar we've taken over. That doesn't exist anywhere else. To have those guys you were watching half an hour ago in the same bars — that doesn't happen. I've built relationships that are very sincere that I never expected. I'm a normal bloke who fulfilled mine and many kids' dream. Like a superhero when they pull on the mask; I come here, I put on the kit, I'm the most competitive, most professional person you can be. But when I leave I take it off and forget about it."

There is a release, refuge in something else. And for 64 more hours, the door on Clown Fofó Street stays locked — until the tenants come home.