16 June, 2014

By VIVA Team

Not every Spaniard was left feeling glum at the weekend

It was a shocker, a horror show, a nightmare. Spain’s opening game at the World Cup on Friday will go down in history as one of the worst opening defences by a world champion ever. To lose to the Netherlands was one thing. To lose 5-1 was unthinkable.

Almost literally, it was unthinkable. Except for one masochistic Spaniard who predicted such an outrageous scoreline beforehand and woke up on Saturday €100,000 better off…


Jacobo Rios-Capape, 56-year-old architect from Valencia, had entered a contest organized by petrol giant Cespa to predict Spain’s scoreline for the opening game. With a prize kitty of €100,000 worth of fuel to give away, Cespa obviously thought that a more reasonable, predictable scoreline, such as 2-0 or 2-1 to Spain, would see the prize shared between thousands of entrants who predicted correctly.

But such was the unprecedented shock of such a reverse that just one person among the 70,000 people who took part got the score correct. Just one. In the entire country.

Yet according to Spanish newspaper Marca, Rios-Capape is not some modern-day football sage, but rather an optimist.

“Hoping that Spain would win, of course, I thought that if Holland were to beat us, it would have to be big, so I came up with the 5-1 scoreline without being overly convinced by it,” he told Marca. “Actually after, I thought it was outrageous and wouldn’t happen!”

But happen it did, leaving Rios-Capape as the sole winner of the spoils – which probably amounts to a lifetime’s supply of petrol. But rather than rest on his well-fueled laurels, Rios-Capape intends to enter another Cespa competition for Spain’s next match against Chile.

This time, there is just €50,000 worth of fuel up for grabs, so if you want a chance to share in the spoils, it might pay to listen to Sr. Rios-Capape’s advice: “It will be my personal revenge for the defeat to Holland. Tomorrow I’m going to fill up and I’ll predict that Spain beats Chile 5-1 too!”