Vedat Muriqi’s coach once called him a “strange, ugly beast”. Everyone else calls him the Pirate and if he saw himself on a dark, empty street he reckons he’d cross over too, but Real Madrid couldn’t avoid him.

Being proud even to share a pitch with them – world stars, in his words – doesn’t mean that alone is enough. This is Kylian Mbappé’s league, the front pages said on Sunday morning. The night, though, belonged to RCD Mallorca, the 6ft 4in Kosovan with the big beard, ponytail and scurvy smile crashing through them to bludgeon the first competitive goal Thibaut Courtois has conceded in a year and stand there, one hand a patch over his eye, the other pointing to everybody in the place.

“This is wonderful,” he said.

It was only a draw, Muriqi’s thumping header equalising Rodrygo’s opener to see the first league game of 2024-25 at Son Moix game finish 1-1, but that is not the point. Courtois, it is true, had been injured and had played only six times since June 2023, but that’s not the point either. “They didn’t win but nor did they need to; the point tastes of glory,” Diario de Mallorca insisted. This was new and it mattered, and not only for Madrid. It just needed someone to remind everyone of that. And anyway, it was Madrid, a club with a budget 12 times theirs, and this Madrid, his Madrid: the measure of men. One poll has almost 80% saying they would win the title and the surprise was it was so few.

This was a chronicle foretold as someone else’s story, and Mallorca made it theirs. The front of one of the two national sports dailies announced the opening of “Mbappé’s league”, the other went with an introduction for the man who needs none: ladies and gentlemen … Kylian Mbappé. Another headline read: “Mbappé arrives, Son Moix fills,” nothing to do with the 22,058 season-ticket holders – 23,010 came. Mallorca’s new manager, Jagoba Arrasate, admitted that when the fixtures came out, his son Luka, eight, had said: “Daddy, we get to see Mbappé’s league debut.” “I didn’t see the funny side,” Arrasate joked. Pitchside, VIP seats went for €850. On TV, you could choose a Kylian Cam.

Football, though, tends to find a way. Not always and for ever but sometimes. Just occasionally and just often enough to keep you coming back. And this was one of those times.

Madrid led early. Rodrygo, the man Marca literally cut out of the photo to fit that BMV thing after the European Super Cup, declaring this “a dominance never seen before”, scored the opener.

“At that point, you fear the worst,” Arrasate admitted. This, you could be forgiven for thinking, would be easy; what Carlo Ancelotti couldn’t forgive was the possibility that his players had thought so too, and by the end the anger was obvious. For a while Madrid, loaded to the left, impressed with the ball. The opening goal had been brilliantly bent after a neat move and now they were trying to better it. Maybe a little too hard. Although Mallorca had their moments, a second seemed to be coming.

At the water break, Arrasate told his players that they had to get to half-time still in the game, and they did. Early in the second half, that Kylian Cam came in handy, offering a close-up glimpse of how Muriqi pulled away from the Frenchman, got behind Antonio Rüdiger and sent a smashing header into the net. It was a dead ball but no one off; it was Mallorca’s eighth corner and ultimately they had more shots. Madrid had time, but not much of a reaction. As Ancelotti made changes, shifted players and formations, pushed, Güler, Brahim, Lucas and Modric all on, Mallorca stood firm. They also caught Madrid couple of times and could have won it, Cyle Larin escaping up the left, and Antonio Sánchez with the best of the chances.

“We lacked balance,” Ancelotti said. “Attitude” and “commitment”, too. They had defended badly and there was, he said, “no excuse”. They had not “understood” that when they came to press it wasn’t about “one player, or two or three”. There was something else too, the last line Ancelotti said before he got up and left, a necessary reminder of something simple, the other side.

“And Mallorca played well.” Well, quite. This summer Arrasate, officially a school teacher on leave, “our Jürgen Klopp” as his former sporting director had called him, left the Osasuna team he had taken from the second division to Europe and took over from Javier Aguirre. Aguirre had rescued Mallorca, surviving on the final day of his first season. He had then taken them to a Copa del Rey final too. But Mallorca struggled for survival last season and wanted to take a step forward, something a little different.

This was an almost perfect start, a glimpse of hope against the hardest opponents of all. Of the starters on Sunday, only Takuma Asanao on the right and the impressive Johan Mojica at left-back are new signing signings, but they still want another winger. Dani Rodríguez, scorer of their first goal when they returned to primera in 2019, is still around. So is Antonio Raillo, the captain who was with them in Segunda B, Martin Valjent alongside him as ever. Samu Costa and Omar Mascarell in the middle. And the cult hero Abdon Prats, who was on the bench. Sergi Darder was there too, but in a different role that he admits suits him better, a change which says something about the shift in intentions, style. “The football I lived in the north,” Arrasate says. “Press, defend hard, get the ball, attack on wings, cross, finish.”

And there’s Muriqi, the man who could head a washing machine, who holds the ball up like no one else, every aimless punt turned into a pass. “He’s ugly but, bloody hell, how well he plays! You can’t shift the bastard,” as Aguirre put it. You also can’t help but love him, his former coach insisted, and he was right. “I am ugly, but I’m attractive,” Muriqi says which says it well. Charismatic, warm, funny, and some footballer, solidarity personified. The man who Arrasate said “has a hammer on his head”. It wasn’t just about that, either, but about everything he did, everything he gave. Which was, well, everything. “He lets us breathe,” Arrasate says.

“This is great, marvellous [for us to start like this],” Muriqi said. “I have to be honest: it’s wonderful to score against Real Madrid. Mbappé, Vinícius, Rodrygo, Bellingham … Bloody hell, you can hardly imagine what it’s like. I’ve just told Militão: you’re all so fast. It’s incredible. They’re such good players, world stars. I watched Real Madrid when I was little and I am very proud of myself to have played against Madrid, to have shared a pitch with them.”

When he could watch them, that is, which was not often. And it’s hard to imagine Muriqi being little. He’s always been an old man, he says, an adult as a kid: “At 14, I was already shaving, I swear it. Life made me a man, for real. I have never been small, in terms of height, feeling or mentality. Since my father died, I was never small. Never.” He says that in the war he saw things no one should see, the family fleeing to Albania, dozens in a single room, and almost as soon as it was over, his father suffered a heart attack playing football with friends. He has asked himself why he didn’t turn his back on the game, the connection too painful: “I wonder about it a lot, even today. But I always tried to take the positive from even the worst moments. And I said: ‘OK, I’m going to be a footballer because he was a footballer and I’m going to follow him.’”

He lacked a guide, a childhood. His uncles told him to forget playing; he had to earn. No one else truly thought football could be a career, just not an aspiration to be entertained. He worked in a restaurant from 14, didn’t finish school – he completed his secondary studies online, having joined Mallorca. He made his debut as a teenager, went to Turkey, Italy too. It wasn’t good; he barely played and felt the pressure. Here, it has been. “Mallorca made me survive as a footballer,” he said. This week something special arrived at the club’s training ground: a shirt from KF Liria, his first club, with a pirate symbol on the front. On Sunday, Real Madrid arrived, their moment his too. He had come a long way, and wasn’t stopping here. At the end of an exhausting, hot, inspiring night, he went empty, nothing left to give. Proud? Pride barely began to express this. How are you, Vedat Muriqi was asked. “Awful, so tired,” he said, “but it was worth it.”

The gloomy noises off in horse racing over the latest incipient crisis to appear on the horizon can become a little overwhelming at times, but every now and again, a race or a week comes along to remind us all why we caught the bug in the first place.

A dozen runners, including City Of Troy, this year’s Derby winner, have been declared for the International Stakes on the first afternoon of York’s Ebor meeting on Wednesday, when the track’s richest race of the year will have a double-figure field for only the second time this century, and on paper at least, it has pretty much everything that even the most demanding racegoer or punter could wish to see in a middle-distance top-tier Group One race.

The obvious storyline surrounds City Of Troy, who has been saddled with a “best-since-Frankel” billing pretty much since his first start as a juvenile but is still looking for the career-defining performance in an all-aged field that he needs to fully live up to it.

The track, the trip and the going all look ideal for Aidan O’Brien’s colt, whose sole defeat in six starts came in the 2,000 Guineas in May, but there are enough lingering doubts after a tough race in the Eclipse in July to see him priced up at even-money in the early betting for Wednesday’s race. From a punter’s point of view, it is a near-perfect scenario that will give his many fans a chance to double their money if he wins, while offering the doubters an attractive list of each-way alternatives, including proven Group One performers and up-and-coming improvers.

For racing followers of a certain age, meanwhile, this may feel like something of a throwback renewal of a contest that has been etching lasting memories into the sport’s collective consciousness ever since the first running in 1972, when the great Brigadier Gerard suffered the only defeat of his 18-race career at the hands of that year’s Derby winner, Roberto.

Small fields and odds-on favourites have become something of a pattern in this race in recent years, and the “international” tag has seemed a little overblown too. This year’s renewal, however, has runners from four countries – England, Ireland, France and Japan – and while City Of York is undoubtedly the star name in the field, it is the presence of his fellow three-year-old Calandagan, the King Edward VII Stakes winner, that arguably turns it into a truly compelling race.

The steady decline in the number of French-trained runners and winners in British Group One events has been a distinct and somewhat surprising feature of the last decade. Five of our 36 Group Ones were won by French-trained horses in 2015, but the totals for the eight full seasons since are 2-0-0-2-1-1-1-1, an average of one per year.

Three of France’s four Group One wins between 2020 and 2023, meanwhile, were on Champions Day at Ascot in October, when an easy surface played to the strengths of horses including Big Rock and Sealiway. But Goliath got them on the board for 2024 with a thoroughly dominant display in the King George at Ascot last month, and his trainer, Francis Graffard, will arrive at York with high hopes of recording a second British Group One win in less than a month when Calandagan goes to post on Wednesday.

It is not just the fact that Calandagan hints at a potential renaissance for French-trained runners at the top level in Britain that adds so much to Wednesday’s race.

He also runs in the famous green and red colours of the Aga Khan, which have been part of the fabric of the turf for decades, and where City Of Troy’s connections are concerned, he could be seen as something of a nightmare opponent. Graffard’s runner is a gelding, and as a result, he was ineligible for this season’s Classics, but while a win for City Of Troy could see him feted as one of the greats of recent years on Wednesday, a convincing defeat at the hands of Calandagan might suggest that he is not even the best of his own generation.

Aidan O’Brien, City Of Troy’s trainer, is running away with the trainer’s title on the Flat this season and some might see it as just the latest affront to British racing’s dignity if Graffard could take another Group One back to Chantilly.

But Calandagan’s presence will add immensely to the fascination and narrative of Wednesday’s race, and if he – or Jerome Reynier’s Zarakem – could maintain the French momentum in our high-summer highlights, it would only be a positive sign for the sport as a whole.