Coruxo

In December 2010, a cyclist who had just won the Tour de France walked into the changing room of a club that plays in front of 1,500 people. Óscar Pereiro, freshly retired from the peloton, signed for Coruxo's reserve side — not as a publicity stunt but as a footballer picking up a sport he had set aside for two decades of professional cycling.

The club he joined had already gone through four names by then. It began in 1930 as Corujo Foot-ball Club, formed from the merger of two sides from the O Val district of Vigo — Corujo Sociedad Deportiva, set up in 1926 by Enrique Acuña, Horacio Ronco and Edelmiro Prada, and Mirambell F.C., founded by the businessman Tomás Mirambell Maristani. Eduardo Costas took the chair of the merged club. Spain's ban on foreign words forced the "Foot-ball" out of the name in 1946; by 1996 the club had settled, in Galician, on Coruxo Fútbol Club.

The green-and-white kit, with a pale blue alternate strip, earned the club an unofficial tag in the Vigo press — los verdes — though it never carried a nickname of its own. Its honours read as a local ledger: the Copa Galicia in 1959, the Pontevedra provincial cup twice at the end of the 2000s, and a run of regional titles through the 1950s, 60s and 80s, all played out at O Vao. The closest Coruxo came to something bigger was 2006-07, when it finished second in Tercera División and stopped there.

What keeps the club in view beyond its own district is its place downstream of Vigo's grander names. Jonathan Vila, Samu Araújo and Álex Valiño all arrived at Coruxo out of the academies at RC Celta de Vigo or Deportivo de la Coruña, sent to get senior minutes before some of them went back the other way — the small side in O Val doing the seasoning work the big clubs across town would rather not do themselves.