Sunday's World Cup final at MetLife Stadium will draw a global audience of billions - about as far removed from a Tuesday night on a bumpy Northern Premier League pitch as football gets. But look past the glamour, and there's a surprising crossover between Spain and Argentina's footballing worlds and the English non-league pyramid, from a World Cup winner's own siblings to a Rangers cult hero rebuilding his career in Bedfordshire - with a couple of the game's biggest legends turning up in the story too, even if only in framed shirts on a clubhouse wall.
The standout story belongs to Julián Alvarez, part of Argentina's World Cup-winning squad in 2022 and now a forward at Atlético Madrid. When Alvarez signed for Manchester City that same year, his two older brothers, Rafael and Agustín, made the move to England with him. Just a few miles from the Etihad, the pair signed for non-league Abbey Hey, then playing in the North West Counties League - Rafael as a left midfielder, Agustín (known as "Turrón") at left-back.
The family ties ran deep throughout their time there. Alvarez has talked about growing up playing football with his brothers, and the trio's closeness meant he was a regular visitor to Abbey Hey games, often bringing family along to watch. That connection culminated in Qatar, where Rafael and Agustín missed a run of non-league fixtures to fly out and watch their younger brother lift the World Cup. Few clubs at the tenth tier of English football can say two of their players spent that winter celebrating a world title with the man himself. The brothers have since moved into Spanish amateur football, but for a season and a half, deepest Manchester non-league had a genuine link to a World Cup-winning dressing room.
On the Spanish side, the best tale is that of Nacho Novo, a Galician forward who became a bona fide cult hero at Rangers. Across six seasons at Ibrox he scored 73 times in 255 games and won three Scottish Premier League titles, having first arrived in Britain in 2001 via Raith Rovers, then Dundee, ahead of his move to Glasgow in 2004.
By the time his playing days looked over - a career that also took in a spell at Glentoran in Northern Ireland, followed by a serious heart attack and a stroke in 2018 - few would have expected a comeback. Yet in 2020, at the age of 41, Novo returned to the game with Biggleswade United, then playing in the Spartan South Midlands League Premier Division: roughly eight divisions below the level he operated at in his prime. It wasn't entirely random, either - Biggleswade's chairman was Guillem Balagué, the prominent Spanish football journalist and biographer of Messi, Ronaldo and Guardiola, who took over the club in 2014 and built up a notably Spanish-flavoured coaching set-up, complete with a head coach and academy staff recruited from Spain.
Balagué's connections have given Biggleswade a wall of fame that punches well above the club's weight. Alongside Novo's shirt hangs one signed by Diego Maradona, secured by Balagué at a 2015 event and now a treasured fixture of the clubhouse - not a playing contract, admittedly, but proof that even football's biggest icons have left their mark on this corner of English non-league. A signed Messi shirt sits nearby too, meaning that between Novo's playing career, the Alvarez brothers' spell in Manchester, and Biggleswade's framed mementos, non-league England has quietly rubbed shoulders with three of Argentina and Spain's most iconic footballing names.
As Spain and Argentina meet for football's ultimate prize this weekend, it's a reminder that non-league football has a habit of brushing up against the sport's biggest stages in the most unlikely ways - a Rangers great returning to the pitch several divisions down the pyramid, the brothers of a World Cup winner turning out on a Tuesday night while their sibling prepared to become a world champion, and even a couple of framed shirts carrying the signatures of two of the greatest players either country has ever produced.
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