Stories of Mestalla: the family who lived under a stand, the Olympic concierge, the relentless fan...

The Mestalla stadium, during a rally to protest against the management of Singaporean tycoon Peter Lim, the club's largest shareholder, last February. Biel Aliño (EFE)

Constantino Pons liked to make paella with the wood of the enea chairs that had broken that week. This man and his wife, Lola Miguel, lived in Mestalla, under one of the stands, between 1939 and 1971. The couple had two children, Luis and Lola, who grew up there, in an area of Valencia where everything was orchards that drank from the great ditch of Mestalla, which gives its name to the stadium that this May 20 celebrates 100 years.

Lola, who is 86, is still alive. One of his two sons, the grandson of those Mestalla landlords, is José Manuel Manglano, who is 57 years old. The owner of a famous delicatessen is heir to the only family that has lived in the oldest stadium in the League. When he was six years old, his grandfather retired, but it was enough time to make his mark. "My parents had a vineyard in the area of Torrent and for years I associated that smell of figs with that place. But not long ago, when we were sewing my family's life with the memories that remained, I realized that that smell, in reality, was from Mestalla. Because next to the house of my grandparents, my uncle and my mother, where we ate, it turns out that there was a fig tree."

Manglano relates that during the Civil War, between 1936 and 1939, Mestalla came to function as a concentration camp. At the end of the war, with the stadium badly damaged, the president of the Valencian Football Federation, Antonio Cotanda, proposed to Constantino to use it because they needed a bricklayer and someone to take care of the land. "They offered him housing in exchange for an unpaid job. Around it was all orchard, so my iaio dedicated himself to cultivating everything. There was no hunger in that house."

In return, that man flooded the field with the water from the ditch and then distributed it as best he could. "That's how it was, made a potato," jokes his grandson. Constantine was much more skilled at painting the lines of the field. He went to one of the mountains of lime that they had next to the house, filled a watering can and, by eye, was making the stripes with great skill.

When the Valencian architects Manuel and Salvador Pascual rebuilt and expanded the stadium, the house of the Pons Miguel family was boxed in the grandstand. "The house ended in an attic because it was the end of the stand." There, after each match, which was played on Saturdays and in the morning, because there was no electric light, the clothes of the Electric Striker arrived: Epi, Amadeo, Mundo, Asensi and Gorostiza. The mother was in charge of washing the equipment of the Valencia players and her daughter, Lola Pons, helped her in the task of unstitching the shield, one by one, and sewing it again when the shirts were clean.

An Olympic janitor athlete

Antonio Campos lived as a child in Pedralba, but whenever he could he escaped with his grandparents to Valencia. He liked the city. One day, the grandfather, seeing his grandson's fondness for football, accompanied him to the Valencia football field. When he got there, he went to the door and the concierge stopped his feet. That man, a certain Constantino Pons, greeted him and explained that he could not pass. But the boy, who was very excited, begged him. Constantino was thoughtful and in the end made a deal with Antonio: "Kid, go to the bar opposite, the Taberna Deportiva, and leave Mr. Tomás a fifth of beer. If you do, I will let you in." Antonio shot out, paid for the beer and returned to see Mestalla inside.

That kid ended up signing as an athlete for Valencia. Campos, like the rest of the athletes from the other sections of the club, trained many days under the stands of Mestalla. Although he, as he was a long-distance runner – he achieved an Olympic diploma at the Montreal 76 Games in the 3000 m hurdles – sometimes he would go around the field while the Valencia players trained. Thus he became friends with many footballers and one of the best, the Dutchman Johnny Rep, began to accompany Campos when he was going to run to Saler.

The club's athletes had a Grandstand pass to watch Valencia matches. "Until 1994, when Paco Roig arrived and the sports sections were loaded." Life, in return, had a wink in store for him: Antonio Campos ended up occupying the position that, in his day, Constantino Pons played. "I was a janitor between 1997 and 2015, when I took early retirement. Mestalla is my second home. I joined in December 1966, when I signed as an athlete, and left the club on June 12, 2015. Almost fifty years."

Mestalla is a chorus

To José Carlos Fernández, the centenary stadium puts him poetic. "Mestalla is the refrain of our lives. Childhood passes and you go to Mestalla. Youth passes and you go to Mestalla. Maturity passes and you keep going to Mestalla". He is not exaggerating. This fan is fifty years old and in January he will turn forty as a member. There are more than a thousand games and, he says, he does not think he has lost more than ten in all those years. "My friends would come to me and say, 'Jose Carlos, we got married on March 28. We already imagine that you will not come, that Valencia plays".

This amateur, without losing the poetic tone, says that he was predestined because from the courtyard of his school, the First Marquis of Turia, you could see a piece of the South Fund of Mestalla. "That's when the spell began," he says. Because, on top of that, he lived in Benimaclet and on the way back he played with other children on the sidewalks of the stadium. "Sometimes we got into the headquarters, which was on the façade facing Avenida de Aragón, and the employees, very affectionate, let us pass and we were ecstatic seeing the trophies and flags."

As soon as he could, he took out his children's pass and started going to the General de Pie. When Valencia was relegated to the Second Division in 1986, he bought a notebook and started scoring the line-up and goals. "I never stopped doing it. I've already played more than a thousand games. Now you leaf through it and see how the lyrics are changing..."

The day his firstborn was born, after three and a half hours, the father went and made him a partner. Rober is already 14 years old and although adolescence begins to tempt him in other ways, he maintains the hobby and a curious custom: every year he buys a Valencia shirt and keeps the previous one.

His father has not wavered. With the fingers of both hands you can count your failures. A couple of them came with their wedding. The day they were returning from Italy, after the honeymoon, when the plane was flying over the city, Juan Carlos looked out the window and, suddenly, saw a point of light down there. It was Mestalla illuminated in one of those few matches that has been lost.

This incorruptible fan is distressed by the threat of the new stadium. "Hopefully we will never see him. When it was presented in 2006, while people were celebrating, it broke my soul. Destroying Mestalla would be like a sentimental genocide for an entire people of Valencianistas." In Mestalla he started going to football with friends. Every decade he changed friends. One of them became Rober's godfather. That fan, Andrés, died in 2010 from cancer. Days later, Juan Carlos went to visit his mother. The woman handed him her son's pass and said, "He wanted it to go to Rober." To his daughter, Aitana, Juan Carlos could not retain her. The girl says there is a lot of noise in the field. But it was she who made a gift to her father this time: the girl was born on May 20, the same day as the anniversary of Mestalla.