"Every year I say I'll quit, that this is a disaster, but I end up continuing."

Torelló"It was almost like winning the Champions League. For any other team, it would have been just another victory, but for us, it's our first and it could be our last. What we endured was tough, quite difficult, but it was worth it," explains Sergi Pont (1998). Ribera de Ondara, the club from a town in the Segarra region with fewer than 500 inhabitants, recently broke a streak of 31 defeats and 412 days without a point with a hard-fought 4-3 victory against Santa Coloma de Queralt B, thanks to a brace from Pont. Their last win had been on January 11, 2025. This season, they had suffered seventeen defeats in seventeen matches in the fourth tier of Catalan football, the lowest division, with eight goals for and 98 against, including some particularly painful results: 13-0, 10-9, 2-10, 7-0. "When the referee blew the whistle, we couldn't believe it. We were all laughing, all shouting like mad, all freaking out. Our faces were beaming with joy and happiness," he says.

"Their faces were ones of relief," admits David Pont (1971), his father, the treasurer, the delegate, and the one-man band of the club. They were one of the five teams in the Catalan fourth division, out of a total of 506, that had lost every game played this season. "Just a moment, I'll stop the tractor," he says when he picks up the phone. The bitter reality of La Segarra and so many other parts of the region is depopulation. The tendency to lose things "at breakneck speed," life itself, in short. "There's nothing here. All the shops have disappeared. First, the bakery closed because the baker retired. Then the grocery store, the butcher shop... The pharmacy is still going because there are a lot of pensioners. There used to be a federated table tennis club, but they gave that up too when the players got older," he says. "It's such a small village that there's nothing else to promote it. Many people say to us, 'Wow, you're still going? Are you still around?' Because in such a small village, it's really hard," remarks Dídac Pont (1992), a player and also the secretary. The person who held the position was too old, and his father had to find a replacement and brought in family members "for convenience": they work together as farmers, cultivating dryland cereals. Sergi, the younger brother, is an electrician in the municipal works department of Cervera.

It's a humble club that survives with a single team and a budget of less than 6,000 euros: every year they have to contribute their own money. Before matches, David marks the lines on the pitch. A little while beforehand, he attaches a kind of large rake to his Citroën Berlingo and drives up and down, leveling the surface. "Like those kids at Roland Garros," he says. Then he sets up the corner flags. They wash the jersey numbers in their washing machine at home, along with some match shirts. One year they were left without a coach halfway through. "We couldn't find or afford a replacement. They told me they were running an intensive coaching course at Christmas, and I took it so I could finish the season," he explains. Both he and the current coach have to participate in training because there are always players missing. "It's many hours, but I really enjoy it. It gives you the necessary escape. From work and everything else. These two hours you're focused on football, everything else disappears."

Three bottles of probably expired cava to celebrate the victory

Besides the two Pont brothers, there are also the three Martínez brothers. "It keeps us entertained. There aren't as many things to do here as in Barcelona," says Alexis (2002), a maintenance worker at BonÀrea. He's the goalkeeper. This year, he'd conceded 42 goals in five matches. "It's tough on a sporting level, and sometimes during matches you get discouraged and frustrated. Two years ago we only won three games, last year two, and this year one, but losing that much is tough," he emphasizes. He champions the more human and social side of football: "I have some friends who always said to me, 'Damn, why do you keep playing there if all you do is lose?' And two of them have gone from 'Why don't you quit?' to coming to train every Friday." "My coworkers, my friends, everyone says it to me: 'But what are you doing there? Don't you get tired of losing?' Every year I say I'm going to quit, that this is a disaster, but I end up continuing," admits Sergi. He says he couldn't quite put his finger on it, but there's something about it that fills him with joy. "I don't know exactly why, but it's worth it," Dídac Pont echoes. He has five children, and his eldest often told him they needed to get their act together: "Come on, you guys win already, they always lose." During the games, he looks up at the stands and waves to them, beaming. At halftime, they run around the field, scraping their knees. "You can never lose your fighting spirit. Your enthusiasm. You have to fight until the very end," he emphasizes. That's how they achieved their first victory, more than a year later. Tradition dictates that when they win, they take a picture in the locker room with the numbers from the manual scoreboard, and they end up drenched in cava. The three bottles kept in the fridge disappeared in a flash. They laugh, saying they must have expired by now. "We lose everything, but we're there every year. Giving it our all," David, the father, stresses. "Some people are better at stirring the ball with a spoon on a plate than on the field, but it doesn't matter to us. The important thing is to keep going year after year," he emphasizes, after many hours sowing seeds in his plot. The greatest success is starting and finishing the seasons. Surviving. "Enduring."