Levante Beat Athletic Club 3-1 as Brugué Scores Twice in Two Minutes

VALENCIA, SPAIN · WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2026

Two minutes can hold an entire football match, and on Wednesday night at the Ciutat de València they held this one. Levante beat Athletic Club 3-1 in La Liga's rescheduled Matchday 6 fixture, and everything that mattered flowed from a chaotic spell midway through the first half when Roger Brugué scored twice in 120 seconds and turned a tight, even contest into a chase Athletic never quite completed. Flashscore's report of the night put the result in its proper frame: this was Levante's first win over Athletic in nearly eight years, and the Basque side's first defeat since the end of August. Sportradar's fixture record confirms the bare facts — 3-1 at the Ciutat de València, 2-0 at half-time, and a game that was still alive until the eighth minute of stoppage time.

The fixture itself had been a long time coming. This was the Matchday 6 game carried over from September, and Athletic arrived in Valencia for the second time in four days, having drawn 0-0 with Valencia across the city on Saturday — their third consecutive draw, per Flashscore — hoping, in Edin Terzic's case, that the rescheduled night would finally produce a win. For a while it looked plausible. Athletic started the brighter of the two sides, and Álex Berenguer forced Mathew Ryan into a strong save at full stretch as the visitors pressed their early advantage home. Levante, winless in five league matches and without a victory since August 29, were being made to survive the opening exchanges in their own stadium. Then Athletic gave the game away.

Two minutes of chaos

The opener, on 20 minutes, was the kind of goal a defence concedes in a bad dream. Flashscore described a failure to deal with a low cross sparking a pinball situation in the Athletic box, the ball ricocheting around until it opened the door for Brugué to drill a low shot beyond the unmoved Unai Simón at the near post. Sportradar's timeline credits Dani Requena with the assist, and there was barely time to note it down before the second arrived. Mikel Jauregizar's misplaced pass started the move the wrong way, Thiago Fernández drove a powerful shot that Simón could only parry, and Brugué — who had, as Flashscore put it, only just finished celebrating his first — tapped into an empty net. Two-nil on 22 minutes, and a stadium that had spent the autumn watching leads slip could hardly believe how quickly this one had been built.

Brugué's double deserves its own paragraph, because it was not a one-night accident. Flashscore noted it was his second brace of the season and named him its man of the match, and the shape of the two goals tells you what kind of forward he is: the first a poacher's reaction in a crowded box, the second the simplest finish in football, earned entirely by being the one player who followed the shot in. Athletic had controlled the ball and the territory for most of the half; Brugué had touched it decisively twice. Football keeps a particular cruelty for teams that confuse possession with progress, and by half-time the visitors had become the first side all season to trail Levante at the interval — a statistic Flashscore recorded and one that says as much about Levante's autumn as it does about this match.

A penalty, a red card, and a comeback that lasted six minutes

Terzic acted at half-time, sending on Iñaki Williams for Jauregizar and Peio Canales for Johaneko Louis-Jean, and Athletic pushed. The way back arrived midway through the half, and it arrived slowly: Jon Ander Olasagasti was penalised for an accidental kick on Maroan Sannadi in the box after a long VAR review, a decision that felt harsh in its mechanics and unavoidable in its outcome once the replays had run. Berenguer, Athletic's best player on the night, stepped up and calmly rolled the penalty home on 67 minutes as Ryan guessed the wrong way. At 2-1, with more than twenty minutes to play and the momentum suddenly Basque, the Ciutat de València got the nervous finish it had been spared for an hour.

It lasted six minutes. On 73 minutes Dani Requena — the midfielder who had made the opening goal — got himself through on goal, Aymeric Laporte brought him down as the last man, and the referee showed the Athletic defender a straight red card. Flashscore called the dismissal somewhat harsh, noting the minimal contact between the two players, and there is a fair argument there; but a last-man foul on a man running clean through is the reddest of red-card territories, whatever the force involved, and Athletic were left needing an equaliser with ten men and their most experienced defender in the dressing room. Sportradar's timeline records the red card plainly, one line after Berenguer's penalty, and the six minutes between those two lines are the whole story of Athletic's night: hope, then the door closing.

Numbers that flatter the losers

The strangest thing about this 3-1 is that the losing team won almost every count except the one on the scoreboard. SportsCafe's match record gives Athletic 62 percent of the possession and 542 completed passes to Levante's 331, 21 shots to Levante's 12, and nine corners to three. OneFootball's figures tell the same story from the same game: 62 percent of the ball, 21 attempts, and a side that lived in the opposition half without living in its penalty area. Where Levante won, decisively, was in the quality of what they produced: seven shots on target to Athletic's four, and an expected-goals figure of 2.05 to 1.95 on SportsCafe's count — a narrow edge that came entirely from creating the game's three clearest chances and taking all of them. Ryan was worked, certainly, not least by Berenguer early on, but Simón was beaten three times and it could have been worse in the closing minutes as Athletic committed men forward and left the spaces a counter-attacking side dreams about.

The clincher, when it came, came from the bench. Karl Etta Eyong had only been introduced on 72 minutes, replacing Petar Ratkov, and deep into stoppage time — the 90+8th minute on every record of the match — he netted a close-range rebound to make it 3-1 and remove all doubt. Flashscore's account closes the loop on what the goal meant: it wrapped up Levante's first win since August 29, a run of five league matches without a victory ended on the night their longest wait of all, nearly eight years without beating Athletic, ended with it. The same report had Levante jumping above Athletic in the table on the strength of the result, and whether or not October positions mean much in the long run, a side that started the evening looking down can feel the difference a single win makes to the view.

What it leaves behind

For Athletic, the regrets will be specific rather than general. They did not play badly for long stretches of this match; they played carelessly for two minutes and emotionally for six, and a team with their control of the ball should never have needed a VAR penalty to get back into a game they trailed because of their own errors. Three straight draws becoming a first defeat since August is not a crisis, but the pattern Flashscore identified in Valencia on Saturday — possession without penetration, two shots on target worth the name here beyond Berenguer's efforts — is becoming the question of Terzic's autumn. For Levante, the evening offered the opposite lesson: you do not need the ball to own a match, you need the moments, and Brugué owned two of them before the game was a quarter old. A first win in nearly two months, a brace from the player Flashscore made the night's outstanding figure, and a stoppage-time goal from a substitute to let the home crowd finally exhale — Wednesday nights in the Ciutat de València have not felt like this very often this season. On this evidence, they might start to.