Joaquin's back: The soul of Real Betis returns

It’s an old Woody Allen line from his 2003 film Anything Goes: “He who wants to get the cheque, gets the cheque.”

If you’re in the bathroom when the waiter brings the bill, you never wanted to pay in the first place. Real Madrid didn’t really want to spend €40 million euros on David de Gea when next season he could be a free agent and Manchester United didn’t want to replace one of the top five keepers in the world with one from the top 25.

But anyone who thinks the most earth-shattering transfer on Monday didn’t go through on time wasn’t paying attention. There were no Transfer Matching System teething problems in Andalucía, and raising his arms above his head to greet the adulation – the right one in a strange plaster cast that covered his forearm and two of his fingers – Joaquín Sánchez Rodriguez went home to Real Betis.

Joaquín said he’d hurt injured his hand smashing it on the table in frustration when at one point it seemed the deal would not be done. But it was done and, hairline fractures apart, everyone was happy.

Fiorentina were pleased with the prospect of receiving €2m for a 34-year-old in the last year of his contract, and with his replacement Kuba Blaszczkowski signed from Borussia Dortmund. And Betis were happy with the 2,000 extra season tickets they sold after Joaquín’s arrival, pushing this year’s figure up to 43,000.

Joaquín is a throwback player. You could throw him all the way back to the 1970s when wingers played with their socks rolled down around their ankles and no shin pads, and he wouldn’t look out of place. And yet somehow with the game played at three times the speed four decades later he is someone who has still thrived in a career that has taken him from Betis, to 51 Spain caps, to Valencia, to Malaga, to Fiorentina, and nine years later back to where he was raised, breast-fed until the age of seven as he once famously admitted in an interview.

Joaquin has always been different. And not just because of the late weaning. He was different in this window too.

He never maintained a ‘dignified silence’ while Betis were trying to sign him. Instead he took to Instagram and published a picture of himself looking sad and forlorn. “I want to come home” the caption read.

The message did not offend Fiorentina supporters, who hung a banner at the training ground that read: ‘Matador, non ci lasciare. Con la pelota ci hai fatto innamorare’ (Matador do not leave us. With the ball at your feet you have made us love you).

Joaquín is a player who still understands that football has to be entertainment.

This is the player who, when presented to Malaga fans in 2011, greeted the 15,000 supporters who had come to see him and told them all a joke about a widow who goes to a cup final and is asked by a supporter without a seat if he can take the empty one next to her.

When she tells him he can because it belonged to her late husband the grateful supporter asks why she had no other family member who wanted the seat. ‘I did,’ she says ‘but they’re all at the funeral’. They were rolling in the aisles.

Joaquín knows that not every team can win, but every team can entertain. If you are going nowhere, then at least go with a smile. Betis will win nothing this year – they were thumped 5-0 last weekend by Real Madrid and the best their supporters can hope for is to stay up. But along with the crumbs of top-flight survival let them also eat cake.

There were 20,000 supporters at his presentation and there was even a small welcoming committee who couldn’t wait for him to arrive at the stadium and went to meet him at the airport. “That made me proud,” he said. “The respect is the thing you take with you when you retire.”

Players tend not to go home any more at the end of their careers. There are too many lucrative alternatives. The money would have been there for Joaquín too had he looked for it. He didn’t. He only had eyes for Betis.

Sporting director Eduardo Macià said the club was “welcoming its soul back into the Betis body”.

“I’m happy as a kid in an Imaginarium,” Joaquin said, putting a new spin on an old cliché by actually naming a high-street toy shop.

The club’s fans felt the same way. Everyone had got what they wanted.