Yassir Zabiri had 42 minutes of Rennes football behind him, and he scored both goals as Racing beat Alaves

Racing Santander were 13th in La Liga on Saturday morning with four points from four games. Alaves arrived at El Sardinero second in the table, three wins and a draw, the only side other than Barcelona with a case for a fast start. Racing won 2-1, and both goals came from a 21-year-old who played 42 minutes of football all of last season.

Koski scored first, and it did not last

Ville Koski put Alaves ahead in the 19th minute from a corner, which was roughly how the afternoon was supposed to go. Racing had been promoted in May after 14 years out of the top flight, and their first month back had produced one win, one draw and two defeats.

Yassir Zabiri equalised in the 38th minute, running onto a ball through the middle and finishing without fuss. He got the second ten minutes into the second half. Alaves had the better of long stretches after that and could not do anything with them, and when Andre Almeida was sent off for Racing in the 87th minute the home side simply saw the last few minutes out with ten. It was Alaves’ first defeat of the season.

The 42 minutes

Zabiri is on loan at Racing from Rennes, signed in July until June 2027. His half-season in Ligue 1 amounted to six appearances, every one of them from the bench, 42 minutes in total, and no goals. On that evidence nobody in Spain had any particular reason to expect what happened on Saturday.

The evidence from a year earlier says something different. At the 2025 Under-20 World Cup in Chile, Zabiri scored five goals for Morocco, two of them in the final in Santiago on 19 October, a 2-0 win over Argentina that made Morocco the first Arab nation to win the tournament. He said after joining Racing that the move was about playing his way into the senior Morocco squad for the Africa Cup of Nations. Two goals against the team sitting second is the sort of afternoon that argument needs.

What it does to Racing’s season

The win lifts Racing to ninth, which for a promoted club in September is the difference between a hard autumn and a normal one. They went up alongside Deportivo La Coruna and Malaga, sealing it with a 4-1 win over Real Valladolid in May, and El Sardinero had more than 21,000 in it on Saturday for a club that spent most of the last decade a division or two below this.

Alaves are still near the top and a single defeat in five is not a slump. But they lost to a side they were expected to beat, to a forward who had done nothing in France, and that is how promoted teams stay up.

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