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| Reuters |
To the west of Los Palacios y Villafranca, where Barcelona and Spain prodigy Pablo Paez Gavira (aka Gavi) was born, are huge, soggy marshlands separating his tiny Andalucian town from the historic Guadalquivir river, which flows from the Atlantic Ocean almost all the way across to the Mediterranean Sea.
Right now, it'd be no surprise if the mayor proposed to the local council for a small airstrip to be build on land claimed back from the marshes, or for a flotilla of small boats registered to Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Juventus or Manchester City to be seen determinedly chugging their way up towards the town from the Guadalquivir's junction with the Gulf of Cadiz.
That's because things just got really crazy.
The football community in Spain already knew that Los Palacios, a tiny speck on the landscape in geographic terms, had produced not only this phenomenal 19-year-old known as Gavi, but also 27-year-old Fabián Ruiz (now at Paris Saint-Germain) and Sevilla's grandmaster, the 37-year-old Jesús Navas. This small place appears to be a massive anomaly: previously only known for its tomato and rice crops, it has produced three top-class professional footballers.
