On the way out of the Free City of Braavos, over the river and to the south, leaving King’s Landing behind too, is a bar. Unlike the buildings and narrow streets of the old town of Girona, the setting for Game of Thrones, it’s nothing much and it’s not exactly medieval but it is the only one on Avinguda de Montilivi and the last stop en route, so a small crowd gathers dressed in red and white. On the window is a sign. “Stadium: half a kilometre,” it says. A few hundred metres further along concrete blocks moved into place by a forklift truck guard the road and beyond that, the arena rises up – much higher than it used to.

Half the stand is made of scaffolding and to the left there is more of it, erected over the seats and complete with a tarpaulin roof, the kind of structure temporarily set up for fiestas all over Spain. The stands were not there a few weeks ago; well into the summer, they still did not even have permission to build, so when they went up they went up fast. They had to: scene of 25 sieges, captured seven times, Girona has a 2,000-year history, 97,586 people, and the best restaurant in the world, according to Restaurant magazine, but until Saturday it had never had a first division football team. Until, a bit before seven, heading down the hill from the other side came Atlético Madrid.

As the bus edges its way in, thousands of fans wait. The queues are long – longer than anyone has seen before, although not as long as the queues outside the ice cream parlour back in town, where they are selling its latest creation: a lolly called “first division”. The Montilivi pitch has been sunk half a metre to allow room for the advertising boards and the capacity has increased by a third; that scaffolding has transformed the place. Inside, the new season’s sticker album lies on every seat – awkwardly, Neymar’s on the cover – along with sheets of folded red card that make a racket when you wave them. Outside, a small stall plays club shop. There are no mugs but there are T-shirts. “First-division fans, team, city,” they say.

They are now. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” the mayor, Marta Madrenas, said, but while the club is 87 years old that is only half true. The wait has been a relatively short one, even if it has been cruel, the manager, Pablo Machín, even likening Girona to Atlético – not because of the way they play but because they too were jinxed. Three times in four years Girona lost in the play-offs; they missed out in 2013 and 2016, but 2015 was worse, when a last-minute goal on the final day denied them automatic promotion before Real Zaragoza beat them. Last season, they had everything wrapped up sooner – which, players admitted, they had to. Scared of a repeat, the past played on all their minds.

It was the recent past, though. As Madrenas’s predecessor put it, Girona football club don’t really have an epic history. This is last of the Catalan provinces to have a top-flight team and it’s only recently that anyone expected them to have one either; nor were thousands of fans clinging to the dream. When they were promoted to the second division in 2009, it was the first time they had been there in 50 years. Tellingly, the sports newspaper AS apologised this week: they had been using the wrong badge for a decade and no one had noticed.

They were not the only ones. Girona isn’t a huge football city. They talk about its beauty and near-by skiing and the Costa Brava – people live well here and have other things to do – while many of those who follow football support Barcelona, 99km away. Even last year, Montilivi was not always full; as the team celebrated promotion, making their way through crowded city streets, one player was caught shouting: “Where were you in the winter, dogs? You’ve appeared from nowhere.”

Girona’s temporary stands at Montilivi. Photograph: Pau Barrena/AFP/Getty Images

On Saturday, the biggest day in Girona history, they appeared from everywhere. There was a minute’s silence for Barcelona, while in town there are candles laid on bridges and messages declaring “we’re not afraid”, but they’re determined to enjoy this, which may be the best way to defeat it too, or so they say. And so they do, a lot. This week, inspectors are due at the ground to check the stands have not moved: they are made of scaffolding after all. Some of the foundations are uncertain and the fans that occupied them spent Saturday night bouncing, loud and leaping as their team got a 2-2 draw against Atlético Madrid, roaring their way to the end. It was like never before.

“Today, I’d give them 12 out of 10, we really noticed their support. I’m demanding of them, I hope they can keep that up, or give more,” Machín said, as if he was talking about another player. Which perhaps he was: “They have to be part of our success,” he added. A bigger, more solid fan base is something Girona are conscious of building, just as they built towards the first division – a target publicly set and one that was underlined by those three play-offs in four years before promotion this year.

Girona’s president is Delfí Geli, a former Atlético and Alavés player – he scored the winning own goal in the 2001 Uefa Cup final – who ended his career at Montilivi. The sporting director, Quique Cárcel, is widely admired. And while there’s a coyness about the club’s ownership, supposedly in the hand of a French TV company, they are backed by the Catalan media and sports representation company Mediabase. That means Jaume Roures, the man who owns the TV rights in Spain. It also means Pere Guardiola.

And that is where Manchester City come in. Pere is Pep’s brother, and the relationship is close with City, not least through Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain. Exactly what it entails is not revealed and a formal, public agreement, supposedly due already, has not yet been announced. Girona’s final pre-season game saw Pep’s team come to Montilivi and Girona players have spent time at the Etihad Campus, where there is a sense among staff (an assumption, even) that Girona are “ours”, effectively City’s Spanish branch. Communication is constant. Pablo Maffeo, Aleix García, “Larry” Kayode, Marlos Moreno, and Douglas Luiz are on loan from Manchester. In principle, it benefits both clubs: City get playing time and experience for some of their squad; Girona get good players.

And so here they are, in the first division, in a stadium that has been expanded and a budget that increased five-fold overnight. There is organisation, muscle, talent. It is logical, up to a point – with better luck it would have happened sooner. But, still no one expected an opening night quite like this.

Girona brought in 10 new players this summer, but only four of them played, including the former Stoke defender Marc Muniesa and the Middlesbrough forward Cristhian Stuani alongside Bernardo Espinosa and Gorka Iraizoz. Machín explained he wanted to stick with players who have spent longer at the club and understand the mechanisms better, but while that makes sense it also meant six of his side has never played a top-flight game. And the stadium has still only gone from 9,000 to 13,286, the budget from under €10m to under €50m. They are still no giants.

Meanwhile, in front of them stood Atlético, the team who have reached two of the last four Champions League finals while Girona, in the words of one player, were being “stopped at the first division gates”.

Yet if Machín gave the fans 12 out of 10 on Saturday, the fans would give his team more. Midway through the first half, they were already greeting the team’s every touch with olés; at the end, there was a standing ovation and rightly so.

It is not that in their first game in primera, Girona had somehow managed a 2-2 with Atlético Madrid it is that it is Atlético who had somehow grabbed a draw. It is that Girona went 2-0 up in the first half, both of them scored by Stuani, making him the first player in history to score two headers against Diego Simeone’s side. It is that even after Atlético came back with two late goals, one a belter from Correa, they could have still have won it: first Muniesa produced an overhead kick that flashed wide on 92 minutes, then Jan Oblak, the visitors’ best player, made an astonishing save from Kayode a minute later. And it is that if that had gone in, they would have deserved it.

Girona’s debut was, the headline in Diari de Girona declared, “almost perfect”; Girona had been “colossal”. They had given Atlético a “bath”, bubbles and all. Atlético, ran one match report, “were on the ropes.” More like tumbling through them and on to the punters in the front row. Playing with three centre-backs, the two wing-backs – Maffeo and Aday – tore into them. Opening the pitch wide, every diagonal headed in their direction. In the middle, Alex Granell and Pere Pons, both from Girona province, controlled; Borja García, given freedom, played. They all did. They pressed and passed, dominating. Intense and quick, the ball shifted swiftly from side to side, delivered quickly into the area: the passes from Granell that led to the two goals were superb. This was not plucky little team resists; this was Girona attack. “They were better than us,” Saúl admitted. “Atlético were floored,” wrote Marca.

“It is an honour to go down in our history but we deserved more: if we could have won it would have been wonderful,” Stuani said, still giving interviews long after most had departed, fans heading back into town, past that bar, closed now, and into the narrow streets – the loneliness of the history-maker. Portu, the striker who had battled alongside him, described it as “bitter sweet”. “We started the day as unknowns but we have shown that we won’t be easy to beat,” he said.

“We have taken what we did in the second division and applied it to the first,” Machín insisted, wiping sweat from his forehead. “It was so hard to come up and we have to enjoy it and if you had told me we would play like this, I would have been happy, although I would have been happier with the points, so I leave a little hurt. We were on course for a memorable night, because it was historic, because of who we were against and because we were in the lead, but just when it looked like we would win, they had that thing big teams have: talent and a touch of luck. We were on the verge of perfection.”

Talking points

• The chant that spontaneously broke out after the minute’s silence on Placa Catalunya in Barcelona the day after the terrorist attack was: “I’m not scared.” Football in Spain made that message its own on the opening weekend. Games went ahead, seen almost as an opportunity rather than an obligation. On Sunday morning, Real Betis laid flowers on the Ramblas, while in the evening 14 seats sat empty in the directors’ box at the Camp Nou and the home players took to the field wearing shirts that said Barcelona on the back instead of their names. Their opponents wore T-shirts in support. There was a minute’s silence all over Spain, messages and banners everywhere, and in Seville where Espanyol, the city’s other team, were playing, the Sánchez Pizjuán was lit up in Catalan colours. In Germany, Marc Bartra, from Barcelona and a the victim of the attack on the Dortmund bus, scored and raised his black armband to the sky.

• “I hope someone takes a picture of it quickly,” Asier Garitano said after Leganés beat Alavés 1-0. “It” was the league table, and Leganés were top of it, having won the opening game of the new season, and plenty of people did, although it turned out that they were not in quite such a hurry. “We can end it here; it’s been a pleasure, bye,” the club tweeted that night; by the following evening they were still there on alphabetical order after Valencia had beaten Las Palmas 1-0. Eventually Real Sociedad, Barcelona and Madrid climbed above them. The key, of course, is that 15 others do not.

• And so Spain stands alone, the only major league without any kind of technology. Still, what does it matter, right? It’s not like this a country prone to hysteria when it comes to refereeing and conspiracies. And it’s not like anything ever happens. Oh. Week One and there’s already been two “goals” – one that was given, one that wasn’t – to remind everyone of how easy it could be. Sevilla’s first against Espanyol might not have gone in but was given; Getafe’s “first” against Athletic did, but wasn’t. “Everyone in Europe must be looking at us and thinking: “what are those Spaniards doing?” said the former Valencia goalkeeper Santi Cañizares.

• There was also a penalty given for a foul outside the area up in Vigo, where Celta and Real Sociedad produced the best game. Maxi Gómez scored twice on his debut but Real took it, all three goals, from Mikel Oyarzabal, Juanmi and Willian José, taken superbly – including the penalty.

• It started with Keylor Navas at one end and ended with Casemiro, almost a 100m away and barely three or four from goal. In the meantime, there were 44 passes – more than there has ever been since people started counting these things over a decade ago. Florin Andone had two great chances in the opening 10 minutes and missed a penalty but Madrid always seemed in control, their centre of gravity tipped towards the midfield where Toni Kroos and Luka Modric dominated.

• And Leo Messi got a hat-trick – of shots against the post.

Results

Leganés 1-0 Alavés, Valencia 1-0 Las Palmas, Celta 2-3 Real Sociedad, Girona 2-2 Atlético, Sevilla 1-1 Espanyol, Athletic 0-0 Getafe, Barcelona 2-0 Betis, Deportivo 0-3 Madrid

Monday: Levante-Villarreal, Málaga-Eibar.