The Secret World Cup Club Arsenal’s David Raya Still Keeps Score Of

When Spain’s World Cup camp settled in Chattanooga last June, David Raya did something few elite goalkeepers bother with mid-interview: he reached for his phone, scrolled, and corrected a piece of club trivia almost nobody outside Merseyside still tracks.

“There’s someone else,” he told The Guardian’s Sid Lowe, reading aloud from the screen about a keeper who had just played for New Zealand — “at Southport on loan from Oxford United.” Pause. “Yeah, Max Crocombe.”

And then there were four.

According to Raya, the men who played for Southport and reached a World Cup are Peter Withe, Stan Mortensen, Raya himself — and now Crocombe, New Zealand’s No. 1 at the 2026 finals.

That is not the same story British outlets told when Arsenal reached the Champions League final. BBC Sport noted that Raya was set to become only the third player to go from English non-league football to Europe’s showpiece match, after Steve Finnan and Chris Smalling. Different list. Different meaning. Raya’s version is about a modest National League club’s fingerprint on the World Cup, not about UCL rarity.

Club archives back the names. Southport Central records Withe as a teenage trialist who made a handful of appearances in 1970–71 before leaving — then reinventing himself as Aston Villa’s European Cup final scorer and an England squad member at Spain 1982. Stan Mortensen, the 1950 World Cup forward who scored against Chile, finished a legendary career with a Southport spell in 1957–58. Chronology matters: Mortensen reached the World Cup first, then wore Southport’s shirt; Withe, Raya and Crocombe went the other way.

Crocombe’s link is the cleanest modern parallel to Raya. Oxford United confirmed his National League loan at Southport in 2015–16 and extended it because he was getting “valuable minutes.” He made 25 league appearances for the Sandgrounders. A decade later he started New Zealand’s three Group G games at the 2026 World Cup while on Millwall’s books.

Raya’s first senior competitive match was a 3–0 Southport defeat at Macclesfield in front of 1,405 people. His Champions League final in Budapest drew 61,035. The numbers are neat. The lesson is not.

On loan from Blackburn as a teenager, he walked into a league where, as he later told The Guardian, 30- and 35-year-old forwards “instead of going for the ball are going for the goalkeeper.” In a 2024 Premier League Non-League Day feature he put it more simply: at Blackburn, breakfast and laundry were handled for you; at Southport, “I had to do everything for myself,” and teammates needed win bonuses “to pay your bills.”

Former Southport manager Gary Brabin, quoted in that same Premier League piece via Sky Sports, remembered a “confident and bubbly” keeper who let a fifth-tier side play out from the back. Paul Carden, speaking to BBC Sport ahead of Arsenal’s Champions League final, said nobody at Haig Avenue would have bet the house on this ending — but nobody who saw the mentality was wholly shocked either.

Plenty of Premier League stars have hardship origin stories. Fewer keep a living list of the obscure club that toughened them — and fewer still interrupt a national-team interview to make sure a Millwall goalkeeper from Auckland gets his due.

That is the evergreen. Not that David Raya “came from nowhere.” He didn’t. He came from Southport, on purpose. And years after the black eyes and the midweek buses, he still knows exactly who else made that stop before the world found out their names.