He has only been at Real Betis for nine and a half months, but Pablo Fornals He can now tell more than one incredible anecdote from his time at the green and white club. “How lucky to get to Betis!”exclaims the Castellón playmaker in an interview in which he reviewed his entire career until reaching his eventful signing for the Heliopolitan team, in a few hours in which he went from tears of farewell to West Ham to a face of astonishment when he told him that An error had prevented the operation from being closed and ending up sighing with relief after UEFA’s approval, the next day and with the 2024 winter market closed. It is not the only curious thing that has happened to him in these first months at the club and in the city, since nothing that he had experienced previously in his career resembles the hotbed that he found by surprise in the week before his premiere at El Great Derby.
A renewal with West Ham that he did not see coming
Fornals attended the podcast from the lounge area of the Luis del Sol Sports City Offsiderswhere among many other matters he has reviewed in detail what his hectic last hours as ‘Hammers’ and his suffering landing at Betis were like: “In the Premier I had fulfilled a dream, but when you are no longer so happy when you get home, They notice it too. My son had a hard time adapting to the school there… We saw that it was time to leave and what luck to get to Betis. I fulfilled my contract at the end of last season, but in England the clubs have the option to extend it for another year unilaterally, which here in Spain is illegal without negotiating. I arrived one day and they told me that they had signed me for another year. That’s it, I saw myself there another year; but at Christmas offers came and we wanted to return to Spain.”
The monumental mess of his transfer to Real Betis
“The Betis thing happened, but it almost didn’t happen. The transfer did not arrive, West Ham made a mistake in some information and the operation was not completed, the same thing happened to Benhrama and me. It did not agree with the data that Betis sent and it was not done. I’m already on February 2, with the market closed, because UEFA allows it. “It was shown that there was no bad faith, just an error and in the application it was seen that West Ham tried to replicate the data 10 or 11 times.”
“I was in the stadium, there had been a game that day. It was 11:00 p.m. I said goodbye to my teammates, the coach gave a beautiful speech, everyone was excited hugging each other, I was crying like few times in my life… and 00:00 struck without the signing being completedso in theory I had to train the next day with West Ham. Thank goodness that UEFA saw that the numbers added up and authorized it,” Fornals said, thanking them for the love they still have for him in London.
His first sensations at Betis
Come and play. “I entered with the right foot. I arrive on Friday, I train on Saturday and I am called up on Sunday. It was at home, people asked me to be taken out and I made my debut. The first minutes were disastrous but The next game we went to Cádiz, I went out again and scored my first goalplaying very well on the right wing. We were at a time when we were in and out of European positions, in the end we ended up in the Conference but we had a good chance of getting into the Europa League.” In these nine months, Fornals has already played 32 official matches, with four goals and two assists. .
The anecdote at school that summarizes what The Great Derby in Seville is
“The derby is… intense, very intense. The city is paralyzed, there are groups of friends divided into both sides. Families in which some are from Betis and others from Sevilla… They are two weeks, the one before the game and the one after, very very intense. I had never seen anything like it in my life like going to my son’s school and people throwing themselves at me, some ‘Fornals you have to win, we have to win the derby’ and others ‘Fornals, we are going to beat you, hey! ‘. The week of my first derby was… ‘wow’. “An incredible week.”