Carlos Vicente: From rugby roots to a meteoric La Liga rise and being mesmerised by Yamal

New York Times

20-04-2025

Carlos Vicente is not your average footballer, and it has been a far from conventional journey to the top for the 25-year-old red-haired Spaniard, who is being courted by clubs in the Premier League and beyond.
Vicente plays for Alaves in La Liga — his twin, David, is with Murcia in Spain's third tier — and this season has faced Lamine Yamal, Kylian Mbappe and Antoine Griezmann. But only three years ago, he was playing in the fourth division of Spanish football.
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And when he was a kid, he wanted to be a rugby player. In Spain.
Carlos Vicente is different, as The Athletic found out.
Alaves were one of the revelations of La Liga at the start of this season. After beating Sevilla at home in their sixth match, the team from the Basque city of Vitoria were in the European places.
Now the reality is different — when this interview with Vicente took place, in the days before the 1-0 home defeat to Real Madrid this month, Alaves were 17th in the 20-team table and in a battle to avoid relegation.
'I don't like to say it because I don't believe in bad luck, but we've been unlucky,' the winger tells The Athletic. 'It's true that the objectives we set ourselves as a club are different to those from outside. We started well, but the objective is always to stay in the division.
'On a personal level, I feel good. I feel loved by the people in Vitoria, they let me know in the street, on social media. I do feel a bit like the leader of the team when it comes to setting the pace, being incisive, giving the team what it needs.'
Vicente has been involved in eight goals this season (four goals scored and four assists), but it is a far cry from his childhood. When they were kids, he and his brother used to play rugby with their father, Jose Carlos, on the beach in the summer, where they would take on holidaying Frenchmen (the sport is much more popular in France than it is in southern neighbour Spain) and some days end up bleeding from the tackles and other collisions involved.
But their father, who is also a rower and became Spanish veterans' champion with a team from Zaragoza, told his boys they had two options: go and cry under the family's beach umbrella or wash the blood off their faces in the sea and go back to playing.
'In my family, nobody was a football (fan). My father had played rugby for many years. We always say we played rugby before football,' Vicente says.
'He's always played football with us, but he played goalkeeper, so there was a time when my brother and I were hitting the ball so hard that he didn't want to play.'
A post shared by Carlos Vicente Robles (@carlosvcnt_)
Vicente has come a long way in the space of five years and there were moments in that time when he considered quitting football.
Throughout his childhood, up to 2020, the winger grew up in the youth academy of Real Zaragoza, his hometown a near three-hour drive south-east from Vitoria, where he shared the right wing with twin brother David, a full-back.
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Together, they were difficult to tell apart, but as teenagers, they managed to win the Spanish championship with the national team of Aragon, the Spanish region of which Zaragoza is the capital.
However, in the middle of the pandemic in the summer of 2020, the two brothers decided to go their separate ways. David left to join the youth academy at Las Palmas, on the Canary Islands, and Vicente to try his luck at Nastic Tarragona, in Catalonia, south-west along the coast from Barcelona.
'I arrived late, I was out of form, I didn't feel like a player and it made me rethink things,' says Vicente. 'I decided to go home for two months, to rest my head a bit. I went to train with a fourth division team, Teruel (a small town near Zaragoza).
'I have no problem talking about it because I always say that bad things are good things with time. I thought that football wasn't for me, that I wasn't as good as I thought.
'Confidence is everything in football. When I was training with the fourth division team, little by little, I was enjoying football, I would come home and say, 'Damn, what a good time I had'. That made me come back.'
After playing for modest fourth-division teams such as Ejea and Calahorra, in 2022, Vicente finally got his chance in professional football with Racing de Ferrol in the second tier.
Despite moving up the ladder, Vicente adapted to Ferrol quickly, contributing 12 goals and 16 assists in just a season and a half. His form alerted clubs in Spain's top flight and he also drew interest from across Europe. 'It was difficult to manage — if it happens again, I'll manage it differently,' says Vicente. 'You play with the pressure of knowing that 10 teams are watching you and you want to be at your best.'
In those weeks of December 2023, various Spanish media outlets were talking about Vicente as the great discovery of the season, creating a phenomenon unbefitting of a second division player.
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Among the teams that sounded out his situation were Valencia and Celta Vigo, but he went for the more unheralded Alaves. Why?
'Luis Garcia (the Alaves coach at the time) called me, as did Sergio (Fernandez, the sporting director),' Vicente says. 'Players are always looking for that feeling of being told that the club, more than wanting you, needs you. They trusted me.'
Vicente's boom continued with his debut on La Liga's fantasy gaming app, where he was coveted.
At the beginning of September, his market value in the app shot up to €50million (42.8m/$57m) — although his market value in reality is €8m, according to the transfermarkt.com website.
'There were days when 200 people would write to me on Instagram. There can be a point where it stings because they tell you something (about how they've rated your game). It's clear that good players are going to score and give assists and it's going to be noticed, but football is much more than that.'
𝑷𝒆𝒍𝒐𝒔 𝒅𝒆 𝒑𝒖𝒏𝒕𝒂 𝒂𝒍 𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒂𝒓 𝒆𝒍 𝒈𝒐𝒍 𝒅𝒆 @carlosvcnt_ …
𝑨𝒍 𝒆𝒔𝒄𝒖𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒓 𝒆𝒍 𝒈𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒐 𝒅𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒔 300 𝒅𝒆 𝑮𝒊𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒂 🔥#GironaAlavés | #GoazenGlorioso ⚪️🔵 pic.twitter.com/84uxGeT7IX
— Deportivo Alavés (@Alaves) April 8, 2025
The Alaves forward has played 50 games in La Liga now and is enjoying discovering the talent of many players up close.
'(Atletico Madrid winger) Griezmann knows where his team-mates are at all times, he doesn't need to watch the game.
'Another is Mikel Merino (who played at Real Sociedad last season and is now with Arsenal), who I think everyone knows is good, but technically he is much better than you might think. He simply doesn't miss, he is a physical beast and has a great goalscoring ability. He is a complete player.
'And then Isco at Real Betis, who everyone knows, but has different things.
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'The one who has impressed me the most is (Barcelona teenager) Lamine Yamal. He started at 16 and it seems crazy to me that such a young person is able to manage all that.'
Vicente and his team-mates experienced Yamal in full flight when he dribbled past five of them.
'It's like he's floating down the pitch,' Vicente says. 'Sometimes you don't know what it is, he must have a special kind of intelligence. Players like that have to have a mentality that you don't care about anything, that you play, you take the ball and all other thoughts slip a little bit, but you go into a state of consciousness that you don't think, you just execute.'
Accustomed to fourth-tier pitches and the slower defenders in those lower divisions, Vicente is aware of the general change in level, but especially two key issues: 'I have noticed above all the pace of play, which goes hand in hand with the physical condition of the players. There is not a single bad player. The other thing is that people don't miss. On a technical level, you don't have the option of missing a control or a pass because you lose the ball.'
Vicente is no more than 5ft 9in (179cm) tall, but standing with him, you realise he takes up a lot of space. His muscles stand out under his short-sleeved shirt and his rugby past is evident.
'I'm a physical player with stamina. I have the ability to generate things with a dribble, but I'm disciplined for my team, too. I've always been a winger and I've played as an attacker. But thanks to my physical ability, I can hold up well in a wide position. I think I can adapt as a full-back, too. The style of play I have now is not the one I had when I was younger, when I looked at Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale.
'I watch Premier League games and I'm a profile that is seen and liked there. It tends to be a much more physical competition than here. Now we have a big challenge with Alaves, but it is clear that the Premier League is one of the best leagues in the world, it is very attractive.'
Because of the way they understand sport, first David and then his brother got hooked on the NFL — they are fans of the Houston Texans.
'It's a sport where the millisecond matters a lot and where you see the weirdest stats. I really like how they prepare and the show they put on,' says Vicente. 'They're getting to that point (in football) in Europe, where everything is more of a show.
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'But there has to be a point where we are considered people. We are workers, just like everybody else. We have legs, we have health and sport is very demanding. Elite football is very demanding, but anything that makes people enjoy it more and is more of a spectacle.
'In the NBA, they are playing every other day (teams have an 82-game regular season); in the NFL, they are playing more and more games (once 10 games long, there is now talk of each team having an 18-game regular season) and with a tremendous risk, so it's important to find a balance between the two things.'
The two brothers share a devotion to all things American and last year they travelled to New York, where they went to watch a baseball game at iconic Yankee Stadium.
Vicente is keeping himself busy away from sport, too. He is finishing a degree in business administration and law at the University of San Jorge (Zaragoza) in preparation for life after football.
'To me, it has always seemed like something basic, not only as a plan B for the future, but to give me the tools to manage problems in the future,' says Vicente.
Plan A is going pretty well.