Real Sociedad are in LaLiga’s title race and they’re doing it by developing talent from within

“When you see him score that goal at Anoeta, you feel like leaping onto the pitch and hugging him,” Xabi Alonso says, and he wasn’t the only one. Nor, more importantly, was the kid he’s talking about as he takes shelter from the rain at Zubieta, just south of the city of San Sebastian.

It was late on a Saturday night in mid-October when Julen Lobete’s last-minute shot almost took the roof off the stadium and carried Real Sociedad to the top of the table where they have been since, and few understood better what it meant than the former Liverpool and Real Madrid midfielder. For all of them.

It’s been almost 20 years since Alonso was at the heart of the last Real Sociedad side to wonder if maybe they could win the league, eventually finishing second in 2002-03. But it’s not just that, or that he was a youth team product born in nearby Tolosa and raised in San Sebastián who became the club captain. The son of a man who actually did win the league there — his dad Periko claimed the title in the two seasons either side of Xabi’s birth — Alonso is also the coach of Sanse, Real Sociedad B, the only development team in Spain’s professional second division and the team where Lobete started the season. Lobete, 21, literally left the Sanse bench halfway through a game to dash out of the stadium to join a session with the first team, called to make his debut, and the step-up hadn’t always been easy.

“He’s a very open lad, with a pure heart. He has no hidden layers: he is what you see,” Alonso says. “Two weeks before he had missed a good chance, then he [came back down and] played with us and missed another one. I said to him ‘don’t worry, you’re going to get the chance,’ and so to see him score that goal makes you proud of him… and…