The 1999-2000 La Liga season was as tumultuous as this year’s Premier League. Deportivo La Coruña won the title,a Racing Santander striker was top scorer and Deportivo Alavés goalkeeper Martín Herrera picked up the Zamora TrophyBy ticket Sochon for These Football Times, fragment of the Guardian Sport NetworkSpanish football at the turn of the Millennium was genuinely competitive. Thrashings were rare, and shock results were a regular occurrence and trophies were deserting the traditional powerhouses in favour of the distant provinces. The 1999-2000 season was the pinnacle of this as the league trophy went to Galicia,the Pichichi Trophy went to Cantabria and the Zamora Trophy for best goalkeeper wound up in the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz. It was the final time that domestic silverware totally eluded Spanish football’s big two, and it was a season in which the underdogs ruled supreme, or while three preceding league champions were sent tumbling out of the top flight and into the Segunda Division.
This unsettling of the usual pecking order wasnt to everyone’s taste. The campaign was a cocktail of shocks and scandal,and to this day nobody is quite sure whether it was one of Spanish football’s finest hours or most comical episodes. To muddle minds further, nearly inexplicably a season when the big clubs seemed to veer from one catastrophe to another also served up an all-Spanish Champions League final, and the first time that two sides from the same country had ever met in European football’s showpiece occasion. A sure sign that Spanish football was flourishing you might have thought,but it only adds to the mystery of quite how the Primera División title ended up in the country’s 19th largest city.
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Source: theguardian.com