In none of La Liga’s 192 derbi meetings have any British players faced each other – on Sunday at last they will

The first time Barcelona came to the capital to play Madrid, in the semi-final of the Copa de la Coronación which marked the 16th birthday and ascension to the throne of Alfonso XIII in 1902, there were three Englishmen in the team. Arthur Witty, John Parsons and Henry Morris didn’t score that May afternoon at the Hippodrome, where the teams had tetanus jabs before playing and, according to one Catalan news sheet, they had been distressed at an ungentlemanly and unexpectedly partisan crowd applauding whenever they fell over and going silent when they scored, but they did win 3-1.

Barcelona, after all, had what one paper called “a significant advantage when it came to physical condition and experience”. Born in Catalonia, Witty and Parsons had been founder members of the club three years earlier; Morris, actually Enrique, was born in Manilla to an English father and Spanish mother, had played for a couple of clubs in the city where he had arrived with his family aged 10 and was essentially a ringer. And they had two Swiss players and a German as well. Founded by two Catalan brothers two months earlier, Madrid were not yet Real and hadn’t been playing long. Most of them hadn’t, at least.

In an embarrassing climbdown, the game in Miami is off with the league having alienated the players and even Villarreal, the club that was on its side

If there is a moment that defined La Liga’s fourth failed attempt to play in Miami, an image to explain why everything went wrong, it may have been the moment it was all over. On Tuesday night, Spanish television broadcast reaction to the news from the Estadio de la Ceràmica, live and unfiltered.

Cameras caught someone else who felt dismissed and disrespected, treated as if they didn’t count. This time it was someone who was supposed to be on the league’s side, but now appeared as a portrait of poor planning and poorer communication, a lack of consideration that pushed the project to collapse.

Winger comes up against Real Madrid on Sunday after ‘a low-key friendly’ earned a dream loan move to Getafe

A 0-0 draw is seen by 3,918 people and described by the club’s own website as “a low-key friendly”. With players’ shouts echoing off 21,668 empty seats one early August afternoon, Hull City versus Getafe Club de Fútbol was nothing to write home about. Unless of course you’re Abu Kamara: in which case, that is exactly what it was and now, two months on, he’s smiling. “I didn’t even score but I’m guessing I had a decent game,” the England Under-20 winger says. “Because if not, I don’t think they would just come up to anyone and say: ‘Do you like the idea of playing in La Liga?’”

Did he ever. “At the end of the game, the sports scientist Javi [Vidal], and the technical director, Gonzalo [Fernández], came up to me and asked,” Kamara recalls. “I said: ‘Yeah, I’d be down for it.’ It’s a big league, so I take it as a massive compliment. I went back into the changing room, spoke to my friend Kasey Palmer, messaged my agent and then left the MKM Stadium. I didn’t take no contact number or anything so I don’t know how my agent did it but he got in contact with Getafe and here I am.”