Johan Cruyff's career is filled with iconic moments, from his Barcelona brilliance to his influence on the Dutch national team and his transformation of football as a coach.
But there is one extraordinary chapter that is often overlooked.
For ten games in 1981, one of the greatest footballers in history played for Levante.
According to author Brendan Madden, when speaking with Football Presse, it was probably the strangest spell of Cruyff's remarkable career.
"Yeah, the Cruyff at Levante story is one of those, you know, pretty much he ends up there because of a disastrous pig farming investment, which means he's kind of looking for these inventive player deals.
"Probably the weirdest 10 games in Johan Cruyff's career."
Cruyff's brief stay at the Spanish club came during a turbulent period in his career.
He had left Barcelona in 1978, moved to the United States and played for Los Angeles Aztecs and Washington Diplomats before returning to Spain.
His eventual appearance for Levante was therefore a very different chapter from the superstar years for which he is best remembered.
Madden was particularly interested because Cruyff himself barely gave the episode much attention in his autobiography.
"He likes to gloss over it.
"Hold on, hold on. There's more there, Johan."
And there certainly was.
Madden's research found a story involving an unusual financial situation, inventive contractual arrangements and a club attempting to make the most of having one of football's most famous players on its books.
"There’s a lot of stuff going on while he's there, even though it's very short time.
"There's a lot of stuff going on with ticket sales and away games and stuff not quite clicking with his teammates, etc."
The story also gave Madden the opportunity to speak to someone who experienced Cruyff's presence at Levante from a very different perspective.
Emilio Nadal, a historian of Levante, watched Cruyff as a child and has retained vivid memories of that extraordinary period.
"He was the historian from Levante.
"So he's got quite good memory.
"He also admits he's a little bit biased because he used to go to games as like a young child at that time."
Nadal's connection to Cruyff was particularly personal.
He attended matches with his uncle, who was a radio journalist covering Levante.
"He used to go with his uncle who was a radio journalist for Levante.
"Covering Levante.
"And he sort of used to have his hair ruffled by Cruyff and stuff like that."
For a child watching his local team, the significance of having Johan Cruyff around the dressing room was almost impossible to overstate.
"It's like having seen Johan Cruyff around the dressing room and you're playing for your team when you're like eight or nine.
"That's something that lasts forever."
But while Cruyff's presence created a lasting memory for people who were there, his actual contribution to Levante was complicated.
The club was not acquiring the dominant Barcelona superstar of the early 1970s.
Cruyff was older, his career had already taken him across the Atlantic and his spell at Levante lasted only a handful of matches.
Yet his name alone created a remarkable situation for the club.
Madden says Levante has subsequently been left with an unusual question: how should a club remember a player who was arguably the most famous footballer ever to wear its shirt, but who spent such a short and chaotic period there?
"Levante kind of left with this legacy where, what do you do?
"You've had this, one of the most famous players of all time.
"I mean, he's up there probably in the top five most famous footballers of all time.
"He's played for your club, but in such a weird manner."
That tension is still visible inside the club.
Madden describes Nadal's experience showing people around the stadium and encountering very different reactions depending on who is looking at the photographs.
"If you're showing hardcore Levante fans around and they're like, see these pictures of Cruyff on the wall, they're like, why have you got a picture of Cruyff there?
"He never did anything for this club, blah, blah, blah."
But outsiders see something completely different.
"If you get to like a tourist or an outsider come in and you go and they see a picture of Cruyff playing for Levante, it's like, wow.
"And it opens up a whole new story."
That contradiction is precisely what attracted Madden to the episode.
Rather than simply recounting the ten matches Cruyff played, he wanted to understand why such a strange chapter had survived in Levante's history.
The answer is partly because football clubs do not always remember their past in proportion to sporting achievement.
Cruyff may not have transformed Levante on the pitch, but his presence created a story that the club could never completely escape.
Madden believes that makes the Levante episode more interesting than a conventional account of Cruyff's career.
"Emilio has to sort of tread that line with that sort of very strange legacy of Cruyff at Levante."
There was also something almost wonderfully appropriate about the ambition involved.
Levante's president was willing to take an enormous gamble on a global superstar, even if the circumstances were unconventional and the results did not match the fantasy.
"You can't fault the president for not being ambitious."
The Levante chapter therefore sits almost like a strange footnote to Cruyff's career: a period surrounded by financial complications, unusual arrangements and a club trying to make sense of the presence of one of football's greatest names.
It is precisely the kind of story Madden set out to find in *Once Upon a Time in La Liga*.
Not another account of Cruyff's genius at Barcelona, but the forgotten moment when that genius briefly appeared in a Levante shirt — leaving behind a legacy that is still difficult even for the club's own supporters to explain.
For Levante, Johan Cruyff was never quite the superstar they imagined they had signed.
But he remains something perhaps more valuable: a story nobody else can tell.
Brendan Madden is the author of "Once Upon a Time in La Liga" from Pitch Publishing - which is available here.
