“Welcome to history.” Lucas Pérez stood before the penalty spot and Bebeto sat before the television set. It was late on Saturday night in Spain, mid-afternoon in Brazil, and the striker was about to do against Eibar what he had done against Barcelona, Sevilla and Las Palmas, Celta de Vigo, Levante and Atlético Madrid. His shot beat Asier Riesgo, down at the end near the Atlantic, and put Deportivo de La Coruña 1-0 up, on course for a 2-0 win. For the seventh consecutive league game, the striker had scored for his club. Only Bebeto had ever done this for Depor before, in 1993 – and Bebeto, Lucas said afterwards, is a “legend”.

Lucas knows. Just as he knew what Bebeto meant when the public letter addressed to him was posted a little later, from Rio to Riazor. “Congratulations to Lucas Pérez on scoring for seven consecutive games, equalling a record that only I had ever achieved at Deportivo de La Coruña, over 20 years ago,” it read. “Welcome to the history of this incredible club. To be a deportivista is to be blessed, to be eternal for, and loved by, the Riazor Blues, the most beloved fans in the world. To feel them close every day, to feel the affection of fans who will never forget you no matter what.”

Lucas feels it, all right. “Superlucas equals Bebeto,” ran one headline. This was the seventh consecutive game in which he had scored; it was also his 12th goal of the season. Only Neymar and Luis Suárez have more; only two Spaniards have scored in seven consecutive games over the last half-century (Quini at Sporting Gijón in 1979-80 and Dani Guiza in 2007-08 at Mallorca); and no Galician has scored more than 12 in a season, for any club, in the same period. Lucas is there now, with 22 matches left. At Depor, only Bebeto and Pahíño, the man who claimed to be “too left-wing” to play for Franco’s Spain, have reached this point with records as good.

But it isn’t just the statistics that are significant there, it’s also the “Galician”. The place, what it means. Lucas is brilliant; he is also one of them.

No one else apart from Bebeto had matched this run, not even Roy Makaay or Diego Tristán, not Rivaldo or Walter Pandiani – players Lucas watched, players who, as he puts it: “I spent my childhood with.” Born in A Coruña in 1988, Lucas first went to Riazor when he was four, the year Bebeto arrived at the club. His idol was Fran, the captain who played out his 17-year career at the club. When Depor won the league Lucas was at Riazor and when they won the Copa del Rey against Real Madrid, at the Bernabéu and on Madrid’s 100th birthday, he celebrated at Cuatro Caminos. “Ecstasy,” he called it.

When Lucas scores he kisses the Depor badge. It’s not an empty gesture, but one of nostalgia and gratitude: “I’m kissing my home,” he told El País. This is his club, it’s just that it has taken him a long time to get here. He may look young, he may play like a young player, tearing round the pitch, full of energy and ambition, but he is 27. It hasn’t been easier getting here.

Like many kids in Galicia, his father was at sea, somewhere off the Irish coast, and he was raised mostly by his grandparents. The kind of kid who took a ball everywhere, he says he has kicked a ball on every playground and fútbol sala court in the city but he never played for Depor. He knew football was a career, so he left for Alavés at 16, but this was the Dimitry Piterman era, and things did not work out. He headed to Atlético in 2007 – where he was a team-mate of Koke – and then to Rayo Vallecano. From there he headed to the Ukraine, for two and a half years, and then continued on to Greece.

During an interview not long ago, Lucas looked out of the window at the seafront beyond the glass. “You don’t get that view in the Ukraine,” he said. Away from his family, he had felt alone and mistreated in a place where “80% of the people are poor and the other 20% are multimillionaires”. He described the last four months at Dynamo Kyiv, who he joined on loan from Karpaty Lviv, as the “worst months of his life”. When he departed, he was owed money but he was glad just to have escaped. Promises had been routinely broken, including one to let him go home because of family problems.

PAOK Salonika was better, and not just because they did eventually let him go. “They were gentlemen … the Ukrainians weren’t,” Lucas said. Last season he joined Deportivo on loan. Getting out was a battle but it seemed worth it to be home and even more worth it when he scored on his debut at Riazor. The trouble was he then suffered a knee injury in the next game which kept him out for three months. By the end of the season he had scored six times in 21 league games. It included an outrageous goal against Barcelona to clinch survival on the final day. And this summer, Deportivo signed him properly, for €1.5m.

There were offers then to sell him for a profit and the temptation to do just that but he was adamant he was not going anywhere. “I always wanted to be here,” he said. He had got home, he was not about to leave again if he could help it. “There is nothing bad about A Coruña,” he said, “not one thing.” The only thing he was not happy about was that they had had to pay for him.

It was worth it, the best piece of business of the summer in Spain. Lucas has scored in seven consecutive games, and against strong teams – a run that includes Sevilla, Barcelona, Atlético and the Galician derby compares favourably with Bebeto’s goals against Logroñés, Zaragoza, Espanyol, Cádiz, Oviedo and Rayo Vallecano. Better still, Bebeto’s initial note and then an open letter to Lucas published in La Voz de Galicia wished him luck in making it eight to “help Depor win”. It signed off with a “Hasta la victoria!” And that’s the key: Deportivo have not lost in that run. A run, remember, that includes Barcelona and Atlético, joint leaders of the league.

This is not just one man benefiting, it is a team. “Deportivo are flying along the motorway and they’re not prepared to put their indicators on and come off at the next exit,” ran one report. In Spain few people are prepared to put their indicators on at all but you knew what they meant. Christmas comes with the team who survived only on the final day last season, sitting in a European place. They have 26 points, twice as many as at this stage last season. They need just 13 more to secure survival.

The coach Víctor has built an extremely well organised side who break swiftly and defend brilliantly, backed by a midfield where Pedro Mosquera, in particular, has been impressive – and he’s a local boy too. No team have faced fewer shots this season; at the other end, meanwhile, it is Lucas who makes the difference.

“What Lucas is doing is tremendous,” Víctor said. “We have spent a long time now reading and listening to people praising him and I would like to join them because it is not just goals, it is that he gives us a spectacular [amount of] work. He is hammering on the door of the national team. He is completísimo and we’re delighted to be able to enjoy him.”

He is leading Depor. He has 12 goals this season and they are all sorts of different goals, decisive goals spread across games, not just occasional gluts. No one else in the team has more than two. But, as Víctor insists, there is more to it than that.

“Our club deserves players like this; humble players,” Bebeto said and there’s something contagious about the way he approaches games, while his identification with the club is also significant: the communion between him and the fans is complete, because of the way he plays too. Note that his coach didn’t just call him complete, he added the superlative to call him completísimo.

“Being happy can be seen on the pitch,” Lucas said. Listening to him talk – intelligent, genuine, clear-sighted – it is impossible not to like him. Hearing him speak about his journey and his family it is impossible not to be moved; watching him play it is impossible not to be moved too. Somehow, the two things go together. On the pitch, he is always moving. It looks like it means everything to him. Quick, determined, chasing everything, there’s a kind of desperation about the way he plays, a need to win. Yet that does not bring the nastiness sometimes associated with such desire. Instead, it’s as if he is making up for lost time. Which may be exactly what he is doing.

He is home now, where he says he always wanted to be. Lucas said he would give anything for his grandparents still to be around and to watch him at Riazor. His parents can. Asked recently about how his family felt about his performances so far this season, Lucas replied: “They’re just happy to have me around.”

Talking points

• We waited over 600 days and Estadio Deportivo produced a special Star Wars cover, complete with Rubén Castro and Kevin Gameiro holding lightsabers – “may the derby be with you!” – and filled 46 breathless pages with buildup. Tickets had sold out in minutes and everyone got very excited … And all for this?

As usual, the atmosphere was incredible for the Seville derby. The football, on the other hand, was mostly dire. There were 43 fouls, 12 yellow cards and no goals. There were only two shots on target – both of which Gameiro should have scored. The ball went out of play for the first time two seconds into the game and it took only 34 seconds for the first crunching tackle, which pretty much set the tone, although mostly the fouls weren’t even redeemed by being comically crunching. Mostly, they were just flow-breaking. Stop, start, dive, foul, complain. And repeat.

Commenting on Canal Plus, Michael Robinson summed it up: “Everything that is ugly about professional football came together in this match,” he said.

• Oh, and the Copa del Rey draw means there will be two more of them at the start of the new year.

• “We read an article saying we came here with cakes and champagne and that annoyed us,” said the Getafe manager, Fran Escribá. So Getafe set about proving that they had not come with cakes at all. And nor, in the end, did they crack open the champagne, although they were pretty close. It finished 2-2 at Mestalla in a crazy and very enjoyable game with three of the four goals superb. João Cancelo stood out for Valencia, whose attitude and intensity has certainly improved under Gary Neville, but they do look tired and it was Getafe who could have won it, with Ángel Lafita getting two chances in the final 10 minutes. He missed the ball on one and smashed the bar with the other.

• The Atlético captain Gabi could not travel to Málaga with his team-mates on Saturday night as he had been called up as a substitute to man a polling station in Boadilla del Monte, where he lives, for the general elections on Sunday (which no one really knows who won, yet). In the end everyone else turned up so Gabi was able to dash down to Málaga on the train but he might have wished he hadn’t bothered. He was sent off for two yellow cards – the second for a handball – and Atlético were beaten for the first time in 10 weeks, thanks to a goal from Charles that deflected in off Diego Godín.

All of which means that they will not be top at Christmas, after all. When Barcelona arrive back from Japan, where they won the Club World Cup, they will still be leaders, with a game in hand at Gijón in February.

• “When they were handing out the brains I got there late, but the day they handed out balls, I got the biggest, fattest ones of all,” announced the Rayo manager, Paco Jémez, early last week. He was preparing for the game at the Bernabéu and as usual the talk was of his unusually bold approach. Jémez pointed out his team are not the only ones who have been hammered by the big clubs, even if his side’s goals against column at the Bernabéu and the Camp Nou does tend to say four, five, six or more. It’s not so long, after all, since Granada were beaten 9-1 at the Bernabéu. “If we let in nine, no one will get out of Vallecas alive,” he said.

Oh.

On a quite surreal afternoon, it finished 10-2 with four from Gareth Bale, three from Karim Benzema and two from Cristiano Ronaldo. Rayo went 2-1 up and almost 3-1, but then had two men sent off and a penalty given against them. (The first red was right but the penalty and second yellow were very dubious). Their reaction was … well, not to react at all. They seemed to give up there and then, throwing in the towel. Players made gestures that seemed to say: “That’s it, it’s over … go on, score then, if it’s going to be like that.” So Madrid scored, over and over and over again.

Slowly, the anger that threatened to engulf the stadium when Rayo were leading subsided. There had been whistles for players and manager, and chants for the president to reign. Now there was a weird, almost still atmosphere. Madrid had not scored 10 for 55 years but there was something odd about it, as if it didn’t matter that much, and no real joy. It sounds bizarre, and it says much about Madrid and the pressure and expectation that swirls around the club, but despite scoring 10 in this match, 18 in their last two home games, few thought Rafael Benítez came out of it any stronger. “We did what we had to do,” he said, almost apologetically.

As for Jémez, he was fuming. (Just for a change, like). “We’ve been humiliated, trodden on,” he said. “This does no one any good. They’ll have seen this around the world and the image of Spanish football is damaged. There are players the size of trucks who have prepared all their lives for moments like this that are crying in the dressing room.” Then he got up and said: “Happy Christmas to everyone … including the referee.”

• Sunday 6.15, 2-0. All three games played at that time – and it was weird, in a league as fragmented as this one where there are normally nine or 10 different time slots, to have so many games on at the same time – finished with the same scoreline. Celta at Granada, Villarreal at Real Sociedad and Athletic at home to Levante. Where the biggest cheers were not for the goals but for the return of Iker Muniain, eight months later.

• Wishing you all a very Karim Benzema

Results: Valencia 2-2 Gatafe, Espanyol 1-0 Las Palmas, Betis 0-0 Sevilla, Deportivo 2-0 Eibar, Real Madrid 10-2 Rayo Vallecano, Real Sociedad 0-2 Villarreal, Granada 0-2 Celta, Athletic Bilbao 2-0 Levante, Málaga 1-0 Atlético Madrid. Postponed until 17 February: Sporting v Barcelona.