Article updated: 29/01/2026
There is no other club in Spanish football that is quite like Rayo Vallecano. Tucked away in the south-east suburbs of Madrid and dwarfed in size & support by two heavyweights of the world game, you would forgive Rayo if they opted for a simple, quiet life. Nothing could be further from the truth, as either by default or design, Rayo has led a very eccentric existence.
The story of Rayo Vallecano goes back to 29 May 1924, when Agrupación Deportiva El Rayo was formed. Rayo is Spanish for lightning, and the club kicked around the local leagues for the next 20-odd years, one of many small clubs in the Vallecas district of Madrid. Home in those early years was the Campo de la Calle de las Erillas, which stood around 300 metres west of their current home. In 1940, the club moved to the Campo de El Rodival and by 1947, they were the district’s senior team and had changed their name to Agrupación Deportiva Rayo Vallecano. By 1949, Rayo had reached the Tercera and was a subsidiary of Atlético Madrid. The club also adopted its distinctive red sash in 1949 after receiving shirts from Club River Plate of Argentina, who had used El Rodival for training in the lead up to a friendly with Real Madrid. El Rodival remained the club’s home ground until the mid-1950s, then, for a couple of seasons, the club led a nomadic existence until the renovation of Campo de Vallecas, the former home of Atlético Madrid, was completed in September 1957. The handicap of not having a permanent home did not hinder Rayo as the club won promotion to La Segunda at the end of the 1955-56 season, where they would play home matches at Atléti’s Estadio Metropolitano.
The stay in La Segunda lasted five seasons, with Rayo surviving a relegation/promotion playoff in 1958/59, thanks to an 8-3 aggregate win over Club Turista de Vigo. The following year, the club bounced back to earn a highest place finish of fifth in 1959-60. Relegation followed in the following season, but four seasons later, Rayo returned to La Segunda in style. The 1964-65 season saw Rayo play 30 matches, score 102 goals and become the first club outside of the top flight to remain unbeaten throughout a league campaign. Despite emphatically winning the league, Rayo had to navigate the playoffs. In the semi-finals, the club was drawn against Xerez CD. They won the first leg at Vallecas 4-2. The return leg saw Xerez inflict the club’s only defeat of the season, a 2-1 loss, but Rayo squeezed through 5-4 on aggregate. In the final, Racing Ferrol was disposed of 4-0 over two legs. Back in La Segunda, Rayo had a look of permanence about it, and the club soon established itself as one of the front-runners in the division. Fourth place was achieved in 1967-68, and the club was not out of the top ten in any of the first eight seasons back in La Segunda.
Little had been done in terms of development (or repairs!) at the Campo de Vallecas since it reopened in 1957. Floodlights were installed in 1970, but the poor condition came to a head following Rayo’s 2-2 draw with Baracaldo on 15 October 1972. The club’s president, Pedro Roiz Cossio, announced his resignation due to the inability to guarantee the safety of spectators or funds to rebuild the Campo de Vallecas. The next home match against Hércules CF was also postponed, before the Comunidad de Madrid & National Sports Council announced plans to build a new stadium on the site within the following two years. On 5 November 1972, Rayo beat CE Sabadell 3-0 at the Campo de Vallehermoso. For the next three and a half years, they played their matches at Vallehermoso, which was principally an athletics stadium in the centre of Madrid. Form dropped a little whilst at Vallehermoso, and in 1975, Rayo had to overcome UP Langreo in a relegation playoff to maintain their place in La Segunda. Rayo’s final match at the Campo de Vallehermoso took place on 23 May 1976, which saw the home side beat Club Deportivo Ensidesa 5-1.
The building of the Estadio Nuevo Vallecas was beset with delays, overrunning its scheduled opening by 18 months. Even the initial official opening had to be delayed. Rayo was due to play a combined Real Madrid/Atlético Madrid XI on 20 May 1976, but this was postponed due to unfinished building work. The stadium’s formal inauguration took place on the evening of 5 June 1976, and was conducted by the president-elect, Aldofo Suárez. Finally, on 6 June 1976, the Estadio Nuevo Vallecas opened with Rayo losing 0-1 to Real Valladolid in the final match of the season. As for the Campo de Vallehermoso, whose central location was a mile or so to the southwest of the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, it saw out its days as an athletics stadium until it was demolished in the autumn of 2008. The site lay empty for nearly a decade before being redeveloped as a 9,000-seat athletics stadium in 2019, and since 2024, it has been the home of the American football team, the Madrid Bravos.
Under the management of Víctor Núñez and buoyed by the momentum of a new stadium, Rayo remained unbeaten at home throughout the 1976-77 season, which is just as well considering their very ordinary away form. A points total of 45 was two clear of fourth-placed Real Jaén, and secured Rayo’s first promotion to La Primera. Their impressive home form continued during their first season at the top level, with reigning champions Barcelona and champions-elect Real Madrid losing at the Estadio Nueva Vallecas. Away form was still a problem, however, with Athletic Club and Valencia handing out drubbings. In the end, Rayo finished their first-ever top-flight season in a very creditable tenth place. The end of their first visit to La Primera came at the end of the 1979-80 season, when a total of 26 points saw them finish in sixteenth position.
Rayo came within a point of an immediate return to La Primera, losing out on a worse head-to-head record with third-placed Racing Santander. There followed two seasons of diminishing returns matched by emptying coffers off the pitch before a disastrous 1983-84 season saw the club finish in last place in La Segunda and drop to the third tier. Rayo had little trouble topping the southern division of the recently formed Segunda B and returned to La Segunda. It took a further four seasons of steady growth in La Segunda before Rayo won promotion back to La Primera at the end of the 1988-89 season. There followed a period of 15 seasons of four relegations & three promotions, as Rayo led the life of the archetypal yo-yo team. In 1991, José María Ruiz-Mateos became club president. Under his leadership, the club cleared its debt and changed its name to Rayo Vallecano de Madrid. In January 1994, Ruiz-Mateos handed over the presidency to his wife, Teresa Rivero.
The reign of Dame Teresa was one of extremes, which ultimately ended unpleasantly. Promotion to the top flight had already been achieved in 1994-95, but the stay was a brief, two-season affair. Promotion was won again in 1999, and what followed over the next few years was the most successful period in the club’s history. The ninth-place attained at the end of the 1999-00 season was, at that point, the club’s highest ever final placing, and thanks to their excellent disciplinary record, earned Rayo a place in the UEFA Cup. Their first campaign in Europe was memorable, featuring aggregate wins over Constelació Esportiva of Andorra (16-0), Molde of Norway (2-1), Viborg of Denmark (2-2 – away goals), Lokomotiv Moscow (2-0) and Bordeaux (6-2). Their run ended in the quarterfinals, where Deportivo Alavés won the tie 4-2 on aggregate. Understandably, the long run in Europe had an impact on league form as Rayo finished the 2000-01 season in fourteenth place. In late 2001, in an act that lacked a certain magnanimity, the stadium was renamed Campo de Fútbol de Vallecas Teresa Rivero or Estadio Teresa Rivero.
In 2001-02, Rayo achieved an eleventh-place finish, but with many of the better players moving on, it was only a matter of time before relegation came a-calling. That arrived in June 2003 when Rayo finished bottom in La Primera with 32 points, 11 points shy of safety. If that wasn’t bad enough, what followed had the Rayistas crying in their cervezas. A second successive relegation in 2003-04 saw the club in Segunda B for the first time in twenty years and playing regionalised football, little over three years after appearing in a UEFA quarter-final. If the club thought the stay in the third tier would be short, they were in for a shock. Defeats at the end-of-season playoffs in 2005 & 2007 (they didn’t even make the playoffs in 2006) added to the fans’ agony. They finally won promotion back to La Segunda after winning the league title in 2007-08, then seeing off Benidorm and Zamora in the playoffs. Three years later, and despite all the turmoil off the pitch, Rayo made it back to La Primera thanks to a great second-place finish.
It would be easy to paint the Ruiz-Mateos family, and in particular Teresa Rivero, as the villains of the piece, but the truth is that their reign was full of light and shade. There were the highs of the European run and the visits to La Primera, where many of the top dogs limped away from Vallecas, licking their wounds. But you cannot ignore the lows of the longest period at the third level, since the mid-1960s and the huge debts the club incurred. This, and a perceived reluctance to sell the club, led to a huge amount of resentment towards Dame Teresa from the disenfranchised fans. She finally sold the club in March 2011, and soon after, the stadium was renamed the Campo de Fútbol de Vallecas.
When it opened back in 1976, it had a capacity of 20,000, with the lower portions of each stand featuring terracing rather than seats. The terraces lasted until 1996 when new seats were installed throughout the stadium, reducing the capacity to 15,500. It was also the final stadium in Spain to feature security fences, but rather symbolically, the new owners removed them in March 2011. As the first row of seats was too close to the pitch, a further 792 seats were removed, leaving the current capacity at 14,708. The two main stands are steeply raked and identical, except the middle tier of the southern stand features a band of red seats and the Directors’ Box. The rest of the blocks of seats in both upper tiers of the stands are white with a distinctive red sash. The popular west terrace also has this seating configuration and features two entrances for players and officials, as the changing facilities sit beneath. I haven’t mentioned the east end of the ground because there isn’t one, or rather, so tight are the local tenements to the ground, all that stands behind that goal is a wall full of advertising. It hasn’t always been the case. For the first 20 years, the east end of the stadium featured a narrow terrace that tapered away towards the north end. The switch to an all-seater enclosure in 1996 put paid to the terrace, but ironically, it also created the stadium’s most iconic feature.
The Campo de Fútbol de Vallecas is owned by the Comunidad de Madrid, but Rayo is responsible for the upkeep of the interior. However, the stadium has seen little change in the past 42 years. Sure, the colour of some of the seats has changed & the removal of fences, but that’s it. Lack of investment came back to haunt Rayo when it returned to La Primera in 2018. A €1.2m upgrade of the stadium was only partially completed at the start of the season, and when safety concerns were raised during Rayo’s opening fixture, the stadium was closed for 6 weeks. What would be deemed unacceptable from the start in any other top European leagues needed a high-profile televised match to highlight the stadium’s inadequacies. For all its brilliance, this was La Liga at its chaotic worst. Two proposed redevelopments of the stadium have failed to leave the drawing board, with the club and the municipality not having the appetite or the budget to progress the plans beyond a pipe dream.
Over the years, Vallecas has proved to be an intimidating arena, but why? Yes, the configuration of Estadio de Vallecas is unique in top-level Spanish football, but this is only part of the reason. As with any intimidating arena, design only plays a part. You need atmosphere and passion, and whilst there may only be 14,700 of them crammed into home matches, the Rayistas deliver atmosphere & passion. New owners have come & gone, and frankly, Rayo is a shambles off the pitch. But the magic remains on match days, as Rayo continue their up-and-down relationship with the top two divisions of Spanish Football.
Estadios de España 