Most Madridistas would struggle to pick him out of a line-up. Yet for a few weeks in the spring of 2024, a red-haired winger from Puerto Rico was on every plane Real Madrid boarded in Europe, and he was standing on the Wembley turf when the Decimoquinta was won. On Monday night, Jeremy de Leon left the club, and he did it with a letter that deserved a wider audience than his exit will get.
The 22-year-old has signed a two-year deal with UE Sant Andreu of Primera RFEF, ending a two-and-a-half-year stay that began in the January 2024 window and never quite became a career at Valdebebas.
The Jeremy de Leon Real Madrid story: a talisman who was never registered
De Leon arrived at Real Madrid Castilla from CD Castellon in the winter market of 2024, signed on the strength of a fearless, direct dribbling game that had caught the eye in the lower divisions. Per Mundo Deportivo, he was pulled into the first-team dynamic in the closing months of that season and travelled with the senior squad to the Champions League quarter-final against Manchester City, the semi-final against Bayern Munich and the final against Borussia Dortmund at Wembley — despite not being registered for the competition and therefore having no possibility of playing a single minute.
Carlo Ancelotti, the coach who won that trophy and who has long had a reputation for superstition, kept taking him anyway. Spanish football decided that was the whole explanation, and the nickname stuck: the talisman of the Decimoquinta. Marca used it again in their headline on his departure. He celebrated on the pitch in London with the rest of them, which is a strange and rather wonderful thing to have on a CV that contains no senior appearances.
What actually happened to his Madrid career
Very little, is the honest answer. Madrid Universal report that De Leon managed just one goal in 232 minutes for Castilla across his time at the club, a return that owed as much to fitness problems as to the queue in front of him. He spent last season on loan at Hercules, and by the time the reserve side was rebuilt this summer there was no route back.
That rebuild has been brutal. Cesar Palacios, Victor Valdepenas and Jacobo Ortega have all gone; captain Manuel Angel has been allowed to leave; right-back David Jimenez was one of two more academy exits waved through in the final week. In the other direction, Oscar Naasei and Rayan Zinebi arrived from Granada and Madrid paid a €3 million release clause on deadline eve to sign Sergio Martinez from Racing Santander. De Leon was on the wrong side of that reshuffle, and everyone involved appears to have known it.
“I would be lying if I said it does not hurt”
His farewell, posted on Instagram and reproduced by Managing Madrid, is worth reading properly.
“There are goodbyes you are never truly prepared to write,” he wrote. “Ever since it all began in Puerto Rico, I dreamed of wearing this jersey. It has always been the club of my heart, and being able to make it a reality was a privilege I will always be grateful for.”
“I would be lying if I said it did not hurt. It hurts to close a chapter at the club I always dreamed of representing; it hurts to leave a place that meant so much to me. Even so, no one can take away the pride I feel in having defended this badge and in having been part of the best team in the world.”
The passage that will travel furthest is the one aimed at home. “I hope my story helps many kids on my island see that it is possible. That it does not matter where you come from, how far away the dream seems, or how many times you are told it is impossible. Dream big.”
He signed off: “Some dreams are never forgotten. They just change course. Hala Madrid, today and always.” Mundo Deportivo note that team-mates from that 2024 dressing room, among them Jude Bellingham and Lucas Vazquez, replied to wish him well.
Sant Andreu, and the honest version of La Fabrica
De Leon now heads to the Narcis Sala in Barcelona for the next two seasons, dropping to the fourth tier of Spanish football at 22. Under Jose Mourinho, the first team is stocked with internationals and the pathway from Castilla has rarely looked narrower; only a handful of academy players — Thiago Pitarch, Carlos Espi, Raul Asencio — are in the senior conversation at all.
Most of the boys who arrive at Valdebebas leave it without a debut. That is the arithmetic of the biggest club in the world, and no letter changes it. But not many of them get to say they were in the tunnel at Wembley on the night Madrid won a fifteenth European Cup, and fewer still leave with the grace this one has.
Transfer confirmed by UE Sant Andreu and reported by Marca and Mundo Deportivo. Quotations are translated from De Leon’s Instagram message as published in Spanish and English by Marca, Mundo Deportivo and Managing Madrid.
