Luís Castro was 11 when he started vomiting blood. Taken to hospital and diagnosed with purpura, initially doctors told his parents there was no chance of him living and even when he was cured they said he couldn’t do any physical exercise ever again. But three lonely years later, driven by an inner strength he ascribed to a higher power, he was back on a football pitch, building a career that took him through the lower leagues in Portugal as a player and around the world as coach, winning trophies in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and Brazil, until one day in December his name landed on the president’s desk at Levante: just the kind of man the Spanish club needed in their impossible fight for survival.

Oh, wait. No, that’s not right. “I had heard of another Luís Castro but not this one,” Pablo Sánchez admitted on Sunday night, “and this one turned out to be the ideal coach for our club.”

This Luís Castro, also Portuguese but born 70km west and 19 years later than that one, a quiet, softly spoken man that Levante’s president could now reveal he didn’t know and nor did anyone else, began at the bottom coaching five-year-olds, isn’t the Grêmio manager who twice defeated Real Madrid while at Shakhtar Donetsk, but is the best thing to happen to Levante in a long time. Castro wouldn’t ever say so himself, but Sánchez would: he had just watched the Ciutat de València go wild again, his manager silently slip away and his captain take the mic, leading fans in a thunder clap. He had watched the forward Roger Brugué go next, suggest it was best to keep it simple, avoiding songs with lots of lyrics, and launch into a chant of “yes, we can!” instead. He had seen them mean it too.

Somehow, Levante really can. Mallorca, Girona and Osasuna still really could not.

Nine teams went into this weekend knowing that they could end the season occupying the final two relegation places and joining Real Oviedo in the second division in what had become the tightest, most expensive fight for survival in Spanish history. With Sevilla, Valencia, Alavés and Espanyol clambering clear, five came out of it still at risk, and if one is Levante, they can almost touch safety now. For them to go down, it would take a specific combination of results next Saturday: they would have to lose at Betis, Girona would have to beat Elche in the final day’s ultimate final, Mallorca would have to fail to beat Oviedo, and Osasuna would have to get at a point at Getafe, creating a three-way tie on 42 points, from which they would fall owing to their inferior goal difference.

It’s not impossible but it’s not likely either: according to Opta, Levante’s chances of going down are 6%, while Osasuna’s are 9%, Elche’s 35%, Girona’s 55% and Mallorca’s 95%. Even if it was, it’s a miracle they got this far. Not so long ago, that percentage looked close to 100%; a fortnight ago it did, in fact. And then, 2-0 down against Osasuna, they came back to win 3-2. They were 1-0 and 2-1 down against Celta in the next game, but won that 3-2 as well. And this weekend they defeated Mallorca 2-0 at the Ciutat. But if three consecutive wins pulled them clear of the relegation zone for the first time this year, this goes back further.

When Levante sacked Julián Calero in November, they were 19th, level with bottom of the table Real Oviedo. Newly promoted, they have the smallest salary limit in the first division on €17.4m (£15.1m), compared to €22.1m (£19.2m), €34.8m (£30.3m) and €36.9 (£32.1m) at Sevilla, Getafe and Elche respectively. They had picked up just nine points from 14 games, and got only one more in the next two under the interim coaches Álvaro del Moral and Vicente Iborra, dropping to the bottom. As 2026 started they were six points adrift and would slip as far as seven from safety.

Within an hour of full-time in De Moral and Iborra’s second game, they had announced the arrival of Castro and, if most fans had no idea who he was, if those who Googled came up with the wrong one – try it, the other Castro still comes first – they weren’t alone. “The first time I heard his name, I didn’t know him,” Sánchez said on Sunday evening. “He has written his name into Levante’s history in gold letters,” Las Provincias wrote this morning.

It is a history Castro said he knew, that he had been studying, and one he said he shared: fighting against the tide. No playing career at all to promote him, he won the Uefa Youth League as coach of Benfica’s Under-19s and saved Dunkerque in France, also taking them to the semi-final of the cup. That experience was important he said; so too was the experience at academy level for a club like Levante where there is no money to spend. The first session of the new year, a new era, began with a minute’s silence in memory of Delia Bullido, beloved press officer at the club over 25 years, and then they got to work, a clarity to the message. They were going to go for it. Three days later, they beat Sevilla 3-0. Three games after that, a 96th-minute winner helped them defeat Elche 3-2, and so it began.

Convinced that there wasn’t such a deficit in quality as it might appear, Castro ensured there were defined roles, non-negotiable tasks, a mechanism. A simple thing to start: “We were letting too many goals in transitions; when we were attacking, we weren’t ready to lose the ball,” he told Cadena Ser. Levante stepped forward, opened the pitch, pressed. “But this isn’t athletics: it’s more often about your brain than your physical qualities,” he said. “Players are people, intelligent, and if you’re honest with them, just, they know what they have to do. If they’re not playing they know why not and what they have to change. We tell them: ‘You’re good at this, this, this; in this, you have to change.’ We’ll train it, work on it, talk about it; tell me what you think. And if you can change, you’ll play.”

There’s something apparently unremarkable about Castro, who has the look of a provincial bank manager and the voice of a snooker commentator. It is as if he is trying to go unnoticed, but for all that he is quiet, there is an authority about him, something uncompromising; an honesty and directness that might sound blunt if it wasn’t said so softly. There are no explanations if you’re out the team, just an expectation that you react. “If the worst player has the best salary, it doesn’t matter: he doesn’t play,” he says. And if it’s easy enough to talk about work and meritocracy, about how nothing changes “if A, B, or C plays” as he does, it’s another to actually do it.

Karl Etta Eyong became Levante’s most expensive signing this summer at €3m (£2.6m) aged 21 – no one else cost more than €500,000 (£430,000) – scored five goals in the first 10 games, one of them still at Villarreal, and hasn’t started any of the last 14. “He went from the [third tier] to everyone talking about him, almost making him think he was the best in the world, and it’s hard to be mentally prepared; we’re giving him time and confidence,” Castro admitted. When the Cameroon striker scored the winner against Osasuna, it was his first in the league in six months. In his place, Carlos Espí, a 20-year-old youth player from Tavernes, 60km down the coast, who didn’t start a game until February, has now got nine in the last 12, the season’s great revelation, the embodiment of their unexpected rise.

Levante have won seven of those; they had only won four all season until then. “We were the main candidates to go down and now we’re one step from salvation,” Sánchez said. “Castro surprised us. He has shown a lot of knowledge and fast. He’s a very normal person and we’re not delighted with him; we’re absolutely delighted. This is explained by hard work, a coach who has put us where we are and brave, professional players who refused to give up.”

Where they are is close now. If there was a drop off after the superb start, February bringing four defeats a row and seeming to condemn them; if the fact that everyone at the bottom started winning too, making it feel like survival was always going to be just out of reach, like they might swim and swim and still not get the shore; if May opened with a 5-1 battering at Villarreal, then land was getting a little closer. When they beat Celta in midweek, Levante pulled out of the relegation zone for the first time this year, fans gathering at the airport to welcome them home, and although they were pulled back in by Alavés beating Barcelona the following night, by Espanyol winning after 134 days, in the 32nd minute of the 37th week they pulled out of the bottom three again and dragged Mallorca down into their place, ending a matchday out of the drop zone for the first time since November.

On the night that Valencia went from relegation candidates to European hopefuls, their manager saying “we would have liked to have fought for this sooner”; in which Manolo González, who had sobbed in midweek, said it was “like they have won the Champions League” in the Espanyol dressing room, the weight of a relegation that “would have stayed with us for life” finally lifted; in which Toni Martínez called it “a script written” after he scored his eighth goal in the last nine games to save Alavés; and the Sevilla manager, Luis García, could bring “the six most intense weeks of my life” to a successful close, the Ciutat de València brought triumph and despair together. In one corner, Mallorca’s players apologising to their fans, knowing that they need a miracle now; to the left of them, Levante’s players lined up before theirs, knowing that they had performed one.

A league table since Castro took over would have them third, from 10 points in 16 games to 32 in 20 games; the actual league table has them, the team that were 19th all year, all the way up in 15th, relegation receding. Now they just need to stay there for one more week, fate in their own hands for the first time in six months, the right Luís Castro leading them to within reach of redemption. “The numbers are good but if we don’t finish it off we’ll be left with a very bad feeling,” he said. “They have 24 hours to enjoy this, as they always have when they win, and then we will get back to work. We can’t think ‘we’re out’, no, no, no. We’re not safe yet and we won’t look at the table, not until week 38. And it’s still week 37.”