María Castellano writes about Spanish and Latin American football for FootyGazette. She covers La Liga as a beat, the Spanish national teams across both the men's and women's games, and the broader Iberian-Latin axis that runs from Madrid and Barcelona through Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Montevideo. She is the writer who turns up at a Vallecas press conference, asks a question in the local register, and then files an English-language piece that explains not only what was said but what was understood — the part that Anglo coverage, for reasons of access and language, has historically had to skip.

Castellano is based in Madrid. She read Periodismo at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid between 2014 and 2018, and completed a postgraduate in Sports Journalism at the Universidad de Navarra in 2019. Her first staff role was on the local desk at AS, where she covered Rayo Vallecano and Getafe through two seasons and developed the habit, unusual in the Spanish sports press of the time, of reading club accounts as carefully as starting elevens.

She moved to Diario AS's national football desk in 2021, and from 2023 has freelanced widely, contributing to El País, The Athletic's Spanish-football vertical, Panenka, and the Buenos Aires-based La Garganta Poderosa.

Her areas of expertise include La Liga tactics and squad-building, the post-Florentino transition at Real Madrid, the long Barcelona financial recovery, Atlético Madrid under and after Diego Simeone, Liga F and the Spanish women's national team, Argentine football's domestic structure and its export economy, Brazilian Série A and the player-pathway industry, Liga MX and the Mexicano de exportación phenomenon, and the cultural-linguistic register that governs how all of the above is reported in its own language before it reaches an English-speaking audience.

She works in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Her source network spans dressing rooms, agents, and federation officials across the Spanish-speaking football world, and she reports in the language of the source. "The English-language coverage of South American football," she has written, "too often treats players as products that arrive pre-translated. They do not. The translation is the story."

Castellano writes for FootyGazette because, in her words, "English-language football writing has improved enormously in the past decade, but Spanish and Latin American football are still mostly covered as a transfer pipeline." She wants to write the version in which Vallecas, Vélez, Pachuca, and Pumas are subjects in their own right — not narrative furniture for a Premier League story.

Castellano grew up in Vallecas, where her father took her to her first Rayo match at the age of six, and she remains, by her own loud admission, a Rayista — a fact she discloses in every piece in which the club appears. She is also, less loudly, a long-time follower of Independiente del Valle in Ecuador, a club she stumbled into during a 2022 reporting trip to Quito and never quite left.

You can reach María at [email protected].