Six years ago to the day, José Luis Mato Sanmartín, best known as Joselu, made his last visit to Wembley as a player. He came off the bench with 14 minutes to go and a lost cause to chase. No luck that evening. His Newcastle United team were defeated 1-0 by Tottenham Hotspur, Wembley’s tenants at the time. Harry Kane scored, Son Heung-min assisted and Spurs confirmed their place in the following season’s Champions League, where they would go on to reach the final.
It would have taken some very magical thinking indeed to forecast that the same Joselu, now in his mid-thirties and contracted to a second-division Spanish club, would, half a dozen Mays later, overtake €100million Kane in the fast lane to the highest prize in club football. But after Wednesday’s late plot twist in the Real Madrid-Bayern Munich semi-final of the Champions League, that’s where we are.
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Joselu, the former Newcastle and Stoke City reserve striker, is heading to Wembley on June 1. His goals, two of them in three minutes shortly after coming off the bench, are why, again, Real came from behind in a European knockout tie; why they made the final in London at the expense of Kane’s Bayern.
Joselu is officially due back at Espanyol, of Spain’s second tier, at the end of next month, a condition of his one-season Real loan from there, and if the expectation is that he will actually be spending his 35th year somewhere grander, there’s no erasing the journeyman from his career timeline.
His is a story of brief youthful hopes — never more alive than when José Mourinho, as the Real head coach, plucked Joselu from Castilla, the club’s junior feeder squad late in the 2010-11 season and gave him a few minutes off the first-team bench.
Then came a life more ordinary. After the momentary elevation, at 21, to Real’s first XI, the company that Joselu kept became less illustrious, the stamps on his professional passport Hoffenheim, Hanover, Eintracht Frankfurt; then Staffordshire and Tyneside, where he was on Premier League benches as often as in initial XIs; and on to relegations at Alavés and Espanyol.
Real re-hired Joselu last summer to plug a hole in a squad short of footballers answering to any traditional description of centre forward. Joselu understood he would not start games too often. “We use him for crosses,” Carlo Ancelotti, the Real head coach, said. “He’s a fantastic forward who gives us energy.” Now , he’s a garlanded supersub. Three of Joselu’s five Champions League goals this season have come after his introduction, in second halves, from the bench.
His sudden moment of fame feels all the more touching because he’s a Real supporter. Scroll back over Joselu’s social media posts and you can find the 22-year-old journeyman-elect, who had recently moved to small-town Hoffenheim in Germany, asking if anybody out there could help him with a website link to watch Real’s matches online.
Ten years later, he was in Paris for Real’s most recent Champions League final, the 1-0 win over Liverpool. He was there as a fan, with a guest ticket provided by Dani Carvajal, a team-mate from the youth sections of the club, now Real’s captain and Joselu’s brother-in-law. On Wednesday came the payback: Joselu effectively booked Carvajal and tens of thousands of Madridistas their tickets to the club’s 18th European Cup final, where they will be favourites against Borussia Dortmund.
Quite the Wembley occasion it will be for centre forwards with hardscrabble professional pasts. Three days ago the Champions League final might have been shading towards a duel between Kane and Paris Saint-Germain’s Kylian Mbappé, the thoroughbred captains of England and France duking it out, a bookend to their tussle for this season’s Golden Shoe, the award for European league football’s top marksman.
What the occasion has instead is Joselu and Borussia Dortmund’s Niclas Füllkrug, who, with his first-leg goal, did to PSG in their semi-final what Joselu would go on to do to Bayern in Madrid. Like Joselu, Füllkrug is a very late bloomer. He’s 31 and he has played more of his professional football in tiers below Germany’s top division than he has in the Bundesliga.
If, in three weekends’ time, Dortmund are chasing the game and they need a Joselu-type off their bench, they will be likely to call on Sébastien Haller, a player for whom every match is a blessing. In 2022, Haller had testicular cancer diagnosed. There would be two operations and several rounds of chemotherapy treatment before he made his debut for Dortmund, who had just signed him from Ajax.
Haller’s trip to London next month will take him back to earlier, hopeful, but rather challenging, times in his professional journey. If Joselu’s souvenir album from his Premier League years looks a little grey in parts — 11 goals in the minutes he eked out across 79 games for Stoke and Newcastle — then sample Haller at West Ham United. He was there for a season and a half, carrying the club’s then record transfer price tag of £45million but delivering a below-expectations ten goals in 48 league matches.
But give Haller, 29, an international knockout game — club or country — and he will write you a redemption tale again and again. In February, he shook off injury to put Ivory Coast into the final of the Africa Cup of Nations and then scored the winning goal against Nigeria. Last month, he came off Dortmund’s bench to galvanise their comeback from two goals down in their Champions League quarter-final at Atletico Madrid.
These are the sorts of moments, as Joselu put it as he left the Bernabéu, “that you become a footballer for. All the hard work pays off at times like this.”
