Ayoze Pérez: ‘I saw my name on the Euros list. There was shock, then immense happiness’

Ayoze Pérez does like a nice cup of tea. One November day last season, in the hours before Real Betis played Mallorca, a friend of his had a feeling. “He said to me: ‘You’re going to score – and as the game is at teatime, you should celebrate by drinking one,’” the former Newcastle and Leicester forward explains. “I thought: ‘Well, at least it’s original.’ It’s something fun, different.” Something his too, a challenge to be met. And so there he was a little after half past five lifting a cup to his lips, the year of his life under way.

The following week, in the derby against Sevilla, Pérez did it again. Then again and again. Seven more times last season and 10 this, in nine games. He did it the first time he played for Spain and the most recent time as well, in Copenhagen on Friday, success measured in tea: a symbol of a journey which brings him back to where it all began. On Monday night Spain face Switzerland at the Heliodoro in Santa Cruz. Home of CD Tenerife and his home too, the last time Pérez played there was against Córdoba in the second division in May 2014.

“This means a lot to me; it’s a moment I dreamed of as a kid. To go back after so many years and with the national team is special,” he says, sitting in a corner of the federation’s Las Rozas HQ. “I never imagined playing for Spain in Tenerife.” Twelve months ago, few imagined him doing so at all yet he arrives as a European champion, the game’s top-scoring Spaniard. Born and raised on the island, Pérez helped take Tenerife to the second division, where he was their top scorer, but has not been back to the club since he set off for England a decade ago; had he not gone, he wouldn’t be back now.

“Everything happens for a reason; I’m a big believer in that,” he says. “It’s a process that brings you here. It all comes together, makes you who you are. You’re always learning. You’re shaped by your experiences, and my experience is the Premier League. I remember the nerves, travelling to England with my brother and agent. I’d never even left Spain before. I had no idea what was out there, what I was going to find.”

Some of Europe’s biggest clubs were interested but as Pérez says: “I was a kid and had [only] played in segunda.” Liverpool’s manager Brendan Rodgers, who later signed him for Leicester, hesitated.

Newcastle’s scout Graham Carr convinced his club to pay the clause, getting in ahead of Porto. Pérez was 20, an islander heading 2,000 miles north and a world away. “It’s intimidating. But when you’re a kid, you take on whatever they put in front of you. I was excited, signing for a big club. I watched a lot of Premier League football.” He embraced it.

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He lived in Jesmond then Gosforth, where visitors found the heating always on full-blast and him hanging around the house just in shorts as if back in the Canaries, every Tenerife game on the telly. His brother Samuel played for Blyth Spartans. Newcastle were cautious; one day they made Pérez play for the under-21s against Carlisle. He was taken off at half-time, having scored four, Peter Beardsley, the coach, telling Alan Pardew: don’t worry, he’s ready. By the season’s end he had scored against Spurs, Liverpool and Arsenal.

“I can still see the flight there, the first few days … all of it. It was an unforgettable experience. It’s been a long time, eh.” Nine years he was in England, forged there. Five seasons at Newcastle, four at Leicester. A relegation and a promotion, a title win in the Championship. More than 300 games. Sixty-three goals. A £33m transfer. An FA Cup winner’s medal. Even a comedy series about him. International football, though, remained out of reach; the list of players ahead of him made some reading, after all. In 2015, he played twice for the under-21s, and that was it.

Then last spring, in his second season at Real Betis having returned to Spain, something happened. A corazonada, Pérez calls it; something stirring in his heart. He was playing the best football of his career and across March and April got five goals in as many games, ending the season on nine in La Liga, 11 overall. Maybe being back helped get him noticed, but he was the only one who really saw it and when Betis drew at the Santiago Bernabéu a few days before the Euro 2024 squad was announced, he dared say the quiet part out loud: “I said: ‘I don’t know, I just have this feeling …’”

There had been no whispers, no hints, no heads-up? “No, no, nothing. Zero, zero. Sometimes something appears inside you. And, look, it happened. No one tells you. There’s a pre-list but that’s 60 names. I found out the way everyone did: I saw my name on the list. There were a few seconds shock, then immense happiness.”

At 30, Pérez was an international for the first time. Going to Germany was a different matter, though. Luis de la Fuente had named a preliminary 29-man squad; three would be left out, Pérez surely among them. Even after he scored on his debut, a friendly against Andorra, a poll in Marca rated him the most likely to be left at home. “I heard that a lot: it was a given that I would be cut. But the coach said: ‘You’re here because you’re talented; feel free, liberated, play.’ It was a chance to be at the Euros, and out of nowhere.”

And so it was. There’s a smile the size of Santa Cruz, that look in his eyes. “The hostia,” Pérez says. The hostia is the consecrated bread, the communion wafer. The absolute business, in other words. “When you’re included in the final squad, the happiness is on the inside, because there are teammates you respect who have to leave. It’s hard for them, missing out at the last moment. There’s a bit of sadness, some pity, but of course internally I was so happy. Ten days earlier I’d never been called up in my life; now I was going to the Euros.”

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Not just going. Pérez stops, laughs: it’s all pretty absurd really. A month later, he was a champion, leaving Berlin with only the third winner’s medal of his life around his neck and two international games under his belt. Although injury limited him to one appearance against Italy, Pérez says: “I enjoyed every minute. My first call-up and it’s there. I could barely contain my happiness, living it all from the inside.”

The selección is his place now, earned the long way. There is a value in bringing something others can’t – “when you play away from home, you develop differently, have a different footballing and personal culture,” he says – and there are goals, lots of them.

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More of a No 9 than over the past decade, a return to his roots, he has developed a habit for late winners. It helps to be supplied at Villarreal by Álex Baena – “what an amazing ability he has to find players,” Pérez says – and to have joined a team he calls “nice to watch, attacking, that creates lots of chances”. But he has as many goals as his clubmates combined and no one has more per minute in La Liga.

“My career has had very good moments, not such good moments, and all that contributes. I was in England for years. That has an impact on you, how you see football, the way you play. Now it’s nice to be back to Spain after the time there, which was incredible. This has been an important, very special year for me, and I hope the best is still to come. I had a good second half of the season with Betis and a very good start with Villarreal. I got my first call up at 30, straight into the Euros. After so many years, I didn’t know if the chance would ever come. When it does you don’t let go. I had wished for it for so long. And now I’m here again with Spain. After all that, you value it more, appreciate it. It’s just wonderful to be here.”

Here, especially, the perfect close to his 2024. “Many things to come together to make this even more emotional,” Pérez says. “The pride of being European champions, playing at the Heliodoro, where my story starts. I’ve been away a long time and haven’t set foot on the pitch there since I left. To go and with the national team … imagine what that means to me. That was the beginning of a special journey. It’s going to be a unique moment to be in the ground where I grew up, with some of those who were part of it.”

Spain haven’t played in Tenerife for 28 years and no Canarian has scored for them in the islands. Twelve months after the year of Pérez’s life began with a challenge, he’s heading home at last and these days he can’t stop scoring. Time perhaps to pop the kettle on again.