It’s been a very long time since I last posted here — apologies for that. But I’m glad to say it’s been for a very good reason.
The success of this blog, and the support from readers like yourself and followers on social media, gave me the confidence to write a book. Many of the stories that first appeared here have since grown into full chapters, enriched by interviews with the people who lived them or those who knew them best.
Once Upon a Time in La Liga is a collection of 18 remarkable stories from Spanish football. It begins in Santander, with two Racing teammates who staged a humble yet courageous protest against the Franco regime, and ends amid the glorious carnival of Cádiz, where we meet the local icon who gave his beloved Cádiz CF their stirring and very unique anthem.
In between are tales of rebellion and resilience — from the Real Sociedad director who defied ETA to the mother who took on Galicia’s drug cartels. There’s the footballer who saved himself — and a Jewish orphan — from a concentration camp, and another who became a Nazi spy. There’s the eccentric commentator who invented tiki-taka, and the boy abandoned as a child who grew up to become a generational, if rebellious, talent.
We look at Johan Cruyff’s bizarre spell with Levante in Segunda and meet the Paraguayan winger who became a Spaghetti Western star.
Plus many more — and, oh yeah, a brilliant foreword from the amazing Sid Lowe.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone who has followed, shared or commented on this blog over the years. Without your generosity and enthusiasm, this book would never have happened.
Once Upon a Time in La Liga is now out in all the usual places. I also have a limited number of copies that I can personally sign and dedicate, at the standard retail price of £16.99 plus postage to wherever you are. If that’s of interest, just drop me a message here.
And if you’ve read it already — or do so in the future — I’d love to hear what you think. I’ll leave you with what a few other people have had to say…
You won’t be able to read this letter. For the past three years, you haven’t been able to read anything. For the past three years, you have had a son you haven’t even been able to get to know.
Unless God works some miracle —you will never read these things, kiss your son, watch the swallows at sunset, or feel the rain on your face on an afternoon of football.
I have to confess to having a lump in my throat, and I would give anything to have not begun to write this. I have to admit that my longing for life is so overwhelming that thinking of you pains me greatly.
I know that you’re not a unique case. In fact, in Madrid, another guy has spent over a year in a hospital, neither dead nor alive. But you are famous; he is unknown. You have a selfless wife who never leaves your bedside; he has only his mother. In reality, I’m writing to you both, but I address it to you as your name that has been the catalyst for a wave of compassion and camaraderie. Last night, when I watched your son on television kicking the ball to start the game, I had to use all my strength to choke back the tears.
God bless those who still feel the urge for charity. But for me, this noble game was less an effort to raise funds but more an expression of your name, youth, and the sporting world’s solidarity. You were a footballer, and it was in your work that you suffered the injury that has left you in a hospital bed these three years. So many have made an effort to be by your side. If the human will cannot give you back your smile, health, and movement, then at least it has given us a glimpse of an affection that will never be forgotten.
Tomàs Salvador La Vanguardia, 20th June 1967
Tall, powerful and topped with a distinctive burst of thick red hair, Miguel Martínez stood out on the football fields of Barcelona, not just for his striking appearance but also for his assured defensive abilities. Comfortable in defence or midfield, or often simply detailed to mark the opposition’s most talented player, Martínez progressed steadily from youth to the semi-professional ranks of Catalan football. From third-tier football with Granollers, he moved up to the second division with Sabadell before signing for CD Condal — a club affiliated to FC Barcelona.
A call-up for military service in the summer of 1961 threatened to stymie that progress, with Martínez sent to serve in the marine corps in Cadíz. But, far from a hindrance, Martínez’s time in Andalusia proved life-changing. A loan spell with local side San Fernando allowed him to continue playing in Segunda and brought him into the orbit of first-division Real Betis, whose scouts urged the club to sign a player they felt would be in demand.
It was also in San Fernando that Martínez met his wife, Josefina, the daughter of the town’s leading furniture company, Muebles Marquez.
Martínez took to life in Primera with ease and joined a talented group of players at Betis. The club was reinvigorated after finally reemerging from a spell in Segunda and had finally found the means and self-confidence to purchase their own stadium.
Martínez on the front cover of Real Betis magazine Verde y Blanco, 1962
Early in Martínez’s second season at the club, Betis travelled to Real Madrid as league leaders, where Martínez was tasked with shutting down Ferenc Puskás. While the Madrid public were not impressed by Betis’ obdurate approach to the game, Martínez’s role in helping Betis grind out a share of the points drew plaudits from the press.
Betis eventually finished third, and their efforts were noticed by the incoming Atlético Madrid president, Vicente Calderón, who was attempting to rescue a season which had seen his club slump to seventh place. Calderón brokered a deal to sign three Betis players in time for the cup, which was then played as an epilogue to the league season.
The transfer included Martínez, the full-back Colo, and the attacking midfielder Luis Aragonés. All three immediately contributed as Atlético reached the final of the cup, where they were defeated by Real Zaragoza.
In the longer term, Aragonés would go on to become one the most influential figures in the history of Atlético Madrid, playing for a decade before retiring to take over as manager. Colo gave five seasons of exemplary service in defence, helping Atlético win a first league title in 15 years and talented enough to be occasionally called up for the Spanish national team.
But while his teammates were gaining international caps and accumulating silverware, Martínez’s four cup appearances would tragically prove to be his last.
For Atlético Madrid, the summer of 1964 followed the typical pattern of a high-profile Spanish club. After a few weeks of rest, the team embarked on a tour of South America. Such tours were an escape from the relentless heat of the Spanish summer but, more importantly, a lucrative source of funds.
Atlético’s tour was an ambitious one, a month-long and taking in six different countries. They began in Buenos Aires with a 1-0 defeat to Racing Club before the squad crossed the Río de la Plata to Montevideo, where a superb Peñarol side beat them by the same scoreline in front of a crowd of 60,000 in the Estadio Centenario.
Back at the team’s Columbia Palace hotel, the players dined together before going their separate ways for the evening. While some headed out to sample the local nightlife, others retired to the lounge to play cards. As a core member of the card school, Martínez was in the latter group, but after just a few hands, he left the game, telling his companions that he felt unwell and thought it best to get an early night.
A few hours later, when Colo returned to the room the two ex-Betis teammates shared, he found Martínez unconscious, unresponsive and with an alarmingly grey complexion. Colo immediately raised the alarm and scrambled to wake the club doctor. Martínez was rushed by ambulance to the Hospital Británico, where neurologists diagnosed a meningoencephalitis that had caused Martínez to fall into a coma.
A stunned Calderón relayed the news to Martínez’s family in Barcelona and his wife in Cádiz, arranging for them to be brought to Madrid to await the next flight to Montevideo.
That a strapping and apparently healthy 23-year-old could fall so suddenly and gravely ill mystified doctors and club staff. Calderón reported the player to have been in good health, noting that Martínez had been fearful of the long flight across the Atlantic but in good spirits and enjoying his first week in South America.
Discussion eventually centred around two incidents that occurred during Martínez’s time at Betis.
The first happened during Martínez’s Betis debut against Barcelona two years previously. The player had taken a heavy blow to the head early in the game and had reportedly passed out at half-time. Despite not being able to complete the game, Martínez dutifully took his place in the starting line-up the following week.
A more serious episode took place during a pre-season tour of Galicia a year later. Martínez again suffered a blow to the head, which this time led to a seizure. Club doctors referred Martínez to a neurologist who advised Martínez that he shouldn’t play until further tests had taken place. But a second opinion was sought, which allowed Martínez returned to the team after missing just a handful of games, bypassing the diagnostics altogether.
The latter case drew speculation of possible legal action between the two clubs and forced Betis president Benito Villamarín onto the defensive, insisting his club had done everything in the best interests of the player’s health. In the absence of clear legislation, Calderón decided against a protracted legal route, instead continuing to support the player at the club’s expense.
After a brief hiatus, Atlético’s tour continued with the squad travelling through Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador then Venezuela, receiving daily updates on their stricken teammate. At first, the team were buoyed by reports of an improvement, but that hope proved short-lived. At the beginning of August, after three weeks in a coma and with no prospect of surgical intervention, the decision was made to bring Martínez back to Spain.
Flying Martínez home was a complex operation, one which required collaboration between Atlético, the Spanish Embassy in Montevideo, health services on both sides of the Atlantic and even the national air carrier, Iberia — who provided an aeroplane. Martínez, along with his family and entire Uruguayan medical staff, was flown to Barajas airport in Madrid, where he was met by an ambulance and taken across the city to the Clínica de la Concepción.
On the tarmac, Calderón pledged the club’s ongoing support to the player and his family: “We have done, and will continue to do, everything necessary to help save his life. We will not spare any effort nor put any limit on our help.” Calderón’s quotes were carried in the following day’s newspapers along with the affecting images of the inert Martínez being carried from the aeroplane on a stretcher.
Martínez’s care was passed to the distinguished neurosurgeon, Doctor Sixto Obrador, who told reporters that he agreed with the prognosis of his Uruguayan colleagues. “I’m pessimistic. There’s no case for surgery — if there was, we would do it immediately. For now, the only thing we can do is think in the long term and place our hopes in the patient’s youth.”
Martínez’s case gradually faded from the public’s consciousness as the news cycle moved on. Weeks became months, months became years as time passed silently in room 466 of the Clínica de la Concepción. Martínez’s young wife devotedly continued her bedside vigil while her parents raised the couple’s young son.
“If one day — God willing –– science achieves the miracle of waking Miguel Martínez, the Atlético Madrid player would hardly know who this boy is climbing up to kiss him.”
A picture of Miguelín Martínez clambering up on a hospital bed to plant a gentle kiss on his father’s head took up most of page ten in ABC on the morning of the 14th of June 1967. After three years, the story of the player who slept was back in the news.
“The time has arrived for the fans to demonstrate their support for Miguel Martínez. Tonight his Atlético teammates will play ‘The Rest of Spain’ –– a team containing a host of stars. Young Miguelín will wear the Atletico colours as he kicks off the match played in homage to his father.”
With Martínez’s Atlético contract expiring and no prospect of any improvement in the player’s condition, Calderón had decided a new effort was needed to be made to pay the ongoing medical bills and support the player’s family in the longer term. He enlisted the help of the influential Catalan journalist Morera Falcó, and the pair arranged for a Spanish national selection to play Atlético at their brand new home on the Rio Manzanares.
It was a type of game that was a relatively common way of rewarding a long-serving player. But given the circumstances, this particular match was sure to draw much wider attention than a regular benefit game. Falcó was keen to capitalise on that goodwill and developed an ingenious concept. As well as the usual match tickets, a special category allowed anyone in Spain to pay for a symbolic ticket that gave no actual entry to the ground. These were printed as ‘Row 0, Seat 0’ and were distributed through the regional federations.
Poster advertising tickets for the benefit match
The idea caught on. One organiser reported receiving an envelope from two young brothers containing the correct 100 peseta fee. Alongside it was a note asking for the ticket not to be sent in case their parents found out how they had spent their pocket money.
Calderón and Falcó’s persuasiveness extended to institutional level too. RTVE, the national broadcaster, paid a sizeable fee to show the game live, while the Spanish Football Federation and the player’s union also made donations.
The ceremony on the evening of the game began with a visit to Martínez’s hospital room. Juan Antonio Samaranch, the government’s delegate for sport, awarded the player the Silver Medal of Sporting Achievement, which was pinned to his bedsheet alongside medals from Atlético and Betis.
Four kilometres further south, at the Estadio Manzanares, the two captains, Spain’s Paco Gento and Atlético’s Enrique Collar, emerged onto the field holding hands with Martínez’s son who was dressed in a miniature Atlético kit, his father’s number six printed on the back.
El 28.9.1972 falleció Miguel Martínez, jugador de @Atleti que estaba en coma desde julio de 1964, cuando enfermó en una gira del equipo en Sudamérica. Fue trasladado a un hospital de Madrid y allí permaneció durante 8 años hasta su fallecimiento#TalDiaComoHoy#HistoriaATMpic.twitter.com/VBm2YxqI7a
After Miguelín took the honorary kick-off, the two captains laid flowers on a sideline seat set up to represent those that had donated by purchasing Row Zero tickets.
The game finished in a 2-0 win for the Spanish selection. But it became apparent early on that there were swathes of empty seats, and the attendance, when announced, was barely 10,000 — a fact that infuriated Falcó.
“I have a reputation in Barcelona for being firm but fair. Here I have to be the same. Frankly, I’m disappointed and feel totally let down by the Madrid public from whom we expected much better. Especially in a case of this nature. Rather than come along and lend their support, fans in Madrid have chosen to stay at home and watch TV.”
An exasperated Falcó pointed out that the two million pesetas raised from the gate receipts, broadcasting rights and other donations would only support Martínez and his family for a couple of years.
It took Falcó a few days to calm down, but when he did, he received some somewhat more positive news. When the returns from the regional federations had been collated, they showed that an astonishing figure of 31,000 Row Zero tickets had been sold across the country.
What Falcó had devised as a way of supplementing the main gate receipts had, in fact, outstripped them by a factor of three to one. The donations from fans with no intention of attending the game pushed the grand total to over five million pesetas: a figure in line with – if not surpassing – what Falcó and Calderón had envisaged.
Once again, the case of Miguel Martínez made the newspaper headlines and led the newsreels, then once again, attention drifted elsewhere. His wife, Josefina, remained at his bedside — always with the same line for whoever asked. “One day, he’ll wake up, and he’ll look straight at me and say: ‘Wow, what a sleepyhead I am!’”
Josefina’s vigil continued for another five years until, at 6.30am on Wednesday, the 28th of September 1972, Martínez passed away at the age of 33. The cause of death was recorded as kidney failure, unrelated to the condition that had kept him in a coma for over eight years.
When news reached Atlético, that morning’s training session was cancelled. Players, coaches and board members made their way to room 466 of the Clínica de la Concepción, where they paid their last respects to their teammates and condolences to his family. That Sunday, Atlético took to the field at home to Espanyol wearing black armbands as a mark of respect.
Two days later, Martínez was laid to rest in the Cementerio de la Almudena, the main cemetery of Madrid. The city where he’d been for nearly a decade but hardly knew.
Josefina continued to fight her husband’s cause, bringing two cases to court in an attempt to have the death classified as a work accident, something that would title her and her son to draw down a pension. Her testimony highlighted the two head injuries Martínez suffered while playing for Betis, but the judge ruled against her on both occasions.
For the son Martínez barely got to know, that night in 1967 would not be the only time he took to a football field in homage to his father. In the early 1980s, Miguelín followed in his father’s footsteps playing two seasons in defence for San Fernando — a touching echo of one of the happiest years of Miguel Martínez’s short life.
In front of them stood a man in his early sixties with thinning, grey hair with a sketch pad in hand. Behind him on a screen with the lecture title: “Classic Mechanics: A Throwing Model Based on the Construction of the Motions of Great Historic Pitchers.”
The man flicked through his illustrations of some of the great pitchers of baseball past in a vain attempt to convince the baseball men that the mechanics of modern-day pitchers could be fine-tuned for efficiency and, crucially, to avoid injury.
The baseball men sat disinterested and unmoved, bulging arms folded. They’d been in baseball for years, and they weren’t about to start taking lessons in pitching from a cartoonist.
Eventually, the talk reticently drew to its conclusion, and the baseball men filed wordlessly out of the room. Resentment for this most recent waste of time was reserved not for the kindly baseball illustrator but for the man who seemed to have a never-ending list of crackpot ideas. The bespectacled business school graduate who apparently thought he could waltz into one of the sport’s blue-blooded organisations and tell everyone there were better ways of doing it.
But time would prove Jeff Luhnow right. Though his communication was undoubtedly clumsy, many of his ideas proved to be innovative and were adopted by the St Louis Cardinals. Soon, he was put in charge of the Cardinals’ player recruitment and was responsible for a series of drafts which proved to be the most successful in the league.
As the Cardinals and his astute player selections won titles, Luhnow moved on –– to the worst team in the league. The new owner of the Houston Astros had given Luhnow the chance to run an entire baseball operation precisely the way he liked. Powered by Luhnow’s analytical decision-making, the Astros rose from unwatchable laughing stock to the best team in baseball.
But then Luhnow’s world came crashing down as the Astros were engulfed in the biggest cheating scandal in modern-day baseball. Luhnow would pay the price — suspended by Major League Baseball, then sacked on the very same day by the ownership that had once placed complete trust in him.
Left on the outside of baseball once more, Luhnow has since resurfaced in the most unlikely of places — in the southern Madrid suburbs as the newly installed president of CD Leganés.
Jeff Luhnow was born in Mexico City in 1966 to American parents who had been dispatched south of the border by their employer, the advertising behemoth McCann Erickson. Brought up in a football-mad city, it proved a challenge to follow the family love of baseball, but Luhnow and his younger brother would spend hours pitching and hitting in the backyard and found some competitive action in the city’s Liga Azteca youth baseball divisions.
But it was trips to America that would really instil Luhnow’s love of baseball. Summer camps in Texas gave him regular opportunities to visit Houston’s space-age Astrodome. Then later, when Luhnow moved to California to complete his schooling, he would catch as many LA Dodgers games as possible.
By the time Luhnow completed his studies, gaining an MBA from Chicago’s Northwestern University, he had developed a deep knowledge of baseball. His many afternoons spent watching the city’s long-suffering Cubs at Wrigley Field inspired him to produce an academic paper on how to turn the team’s fortunes around.
Luhnow’s MBA naturally led him into the business world, where he joined the management consulting firm McKinsey and Co before setting up Archetype Solutions. One of Archetype’s early successes was producing a subtle intervention that provided customers of tailor-made clothing companies with better-fitting clothes. Archetype’s analysis found small but significant biases in customers’ self-reported measurements. An algorithm was introduced into the manufacturing process that subtly corrected the sizing, making customers happy and clothing companies relieved at not having to constantly process returns.
While Luhnow’s innovative use of data propelled him upwards in the business world, America’s favourite pastime remained just that to him. In fact, it didn’t even cross Luhnow’s mind that his skills would be helpful to a baseball team. Baseball remained a closed shop, with owners largely happy to let the baseball lifers do their thing.
But 2003 would prove to be a seminal year in baseball with the publication of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The book detailed how the low-budget Oakland Athletics had punched above their weight by exploiting weaknesses in established baseball methods and thinking. Key to the Athletics’ success had been the hiring of a Harvard economics graduate named Paul DePodesta. DePodesta helped the organisation develop alternative metrics that identified players likely to be productive for the team but available on lower salaries due to their underperformance on traditional statistical measures or their lack of visual appeal to the scouting fraternity.
The immediate effects in baseball were twofold. Suddenly there were highly-educated baseball fans with years of experience in business who could now see a route into the game they loved. And now, club owners were scrambling to revamp recruitment and create entirely new analytics departments.
Jeff Luhnow epitomised those in the former category; the St Louis Cardinals’ owner Bill DeWitt Jr was very much in the latter. Through a mutual McKinsey connection, Luhnow was hired by the Cardinals as the vice-president of baseball development in September 2003.
Luhnow’s arrival inevitably caused friction in the organisation with those who had been happily doing it their way for years. But with the backing of the owner, Luhnow’s influence grew, and many of the ideas that had been met with hostility eventually became standard practice. Luhnow was an early proponent of extreme defensive shifts — moving fielders far away from their traditional positions — based on data analysis of the specific batter they were facing. Managers had been reluctant to adopt the strategy, but over time it became standard practice across the league.
Even Luhnow’s cartoonist, dismissed out of hand during his presentation, was vindicated. His ability to identify pitchers at greater risk of injury led to him becoming a pitching consultant for around a dozen teams in the MLB.
But it was consistent recruitment success that had marked Luhnow out and turned heads around the league. Luhnow had hired Sig Mejdal, a biomathematician who worked at NASA optimising astronauts’ sleep patterns, to help him with draft preparation. Mejdal and Luhnow’s analysis gave the Cardinals an edge in the early rounds and the ability to keep finding value even in the very late rounds of a draft.
That ability was particularly desirable to teams looking to rebuild. And there was no team in baseball in more need of reconstruction than the 2011 Houston Astros.
Despite being the worst team in baseball, the Astros were bought for $680m by the logistics and shipping magnate Jim Crane. Crane immediately contacted Luhnow with a view to him becoming the Astro’s new general manager. So enticed was Luhnow by the prospect of running a baseball team entirely by his own methods that he immediately sent Crane a 24-page dossier setting out his vision. When Luhnow met Crane, he asked him what limitations would there be on his management. Crane slid a piece of paper across the desk, completely blank on both sides.
The Astros began a new chapter, but Crane and Luhnow were smart enough to know that in the short-term, the Astros would get worse, not better. Building a winning squad through the draft would take years, and the emphasis on the future meant that anyone of value on the Astros roster would be sacrificed to accumulate future draft picks.
Luhnow had taken over a team that had lost 106 games. In 2012, his first season, the Astros lost 107. In 2013 they lost 111. By the beginning of the 2014 season, the Astros had become quite literally unwatchable, with one game registering a 0.0 Nielsen rating — a figure that meant the TV ratings provider couldn’t detect that anyone had tuned in to watch the game at all.
Still, Luhnow and Crane held their nerve, and 2014 was to provide some hints of a recovery and a famous magazine front cover that more than hinted at a brighter future for the Astros.
In that same early-season where fans could barely bring themselves to watch, a Sports Illustrated journalist named Ben Reiter embedded himself with the Astros. Wowed by Luhnow’s analytical processes and how the Astros had restructured, Reiter returned to the magazine to produce the article. His editors were so persuaded by the piece that the entire front page of the 30th June 2014 edition was dedicated to it, with the boldest of headlines — “Your 2017 World Series Champs: An Unprecedented Look At How a Franchise Is Going Beyond Moneyball To Build the Game’s Next Big Thing.”
Today in 2014, Sports Illustrated picks the @Astros - fresh off of 3 straight seasons of 100+ losses - to win the 2017 World Series. @SInowpic.twitter.com/NtMYI9gHQ9
The cover drew a fair amount of derision, and popular culture had long since decreed that appearing on the front page of Sports Illustrated was more of a curse than a blessing. But it was a prediction that would come true and, for all the analytics and data science behind it, in the most emotional of ways.
The intervening years had seen the Astros improve, but 2017 was proving to be the best yet. By the end of August, the city of Houston was abuzz as the Astros led their division, already almost guaranteed a play-off spot and with a real shot at a World Series win that October.
Then, disaster struck as Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas and Louisiana causing catastrophic flooding and damage on a par with that of Katrina in 2005. With much of Houston underwater, the Astros were forced to play home games on the road until the authorities deemed it safe enough to return to a city in desperate need of a morale boost.
Wearing patches on their shirts in support of the victims of the hurricane, the Astros blazed through the rest of the regular season and through the play-offs. In a decisive game seven, the Astros beat the LA Dodgers to win their first-ever World Series title. Just three years after three straight 100-loss seasons had made them the worst team in baseball, Luhnow’s rebuild had propelled them to the very pinnacle of the sport.
Luhnow’s work had laid the foundations for sustained success. The Astros reached World Series again in 2019; once more, the series went to a decisive game seven. This time it wasn’t to be, as the Washington Nationals prevailed, but the Astros were now consistent contenders, as Luhnow had envisaged all along.
But that game would prove to be Luhnow’s last in baseball.
“The Astros stole signs electronically in 2017.”
The headline of the article in The Athletic on the 12th of November 2019 was as matter of fact as could be.
Sign-stealing — figuring out the signal that a catcher gives to his pitcher in order to provide the batter with knowledge of what type of pitch to expect next — was almost as old as baseball itself. Done organically, it was a legal and accepted practice – almost an art – that mainly came into play when a batting side had a runner on second base. From there, the runner had the perfect view of the opposing team’s catcher, and if he could decode the signals, he could let his own batter know if the next ball was likely to be a fastball or a slower changeup.
But sign-stealing by any other method was illegal and frowned upon, and using electronic equipment to convey information was explicitly prohibited by MLB rules. That did not stop rumours of the practice swirling around the league.
The article in The Athletic outlined the scheme that the Astros had used in 2017. Their sources were four people who had been with the Astros in 2017, including pitcher Mike Fiers. The set-up was simple. At Astros home games, a camera was set up in centre-field that focussed exclusively on the catcher. Pictures were relayed to a TV screen positioned in the tunnel just behind the Astros dugout. Players and other employees would watch, and when they believed they knew what pitch was coming next, it was communicated to their man at-bat by loudly banging on the rubbish bin in the tunnel. No bang usually meant a fastball was coming; a bang meant the batter should expect a slower pitch.
The story caused a sensation — a very 21st-century sensation. Within hours of the story breaking, a video was posted on YouTube by an account called ‘Jomboy’ of a sequence of play detailed in the article. To date, the video has over 7 million views.
The incident featured Chicago White Sox pitcher Danny Farquhar, who came in to pitch late in a game away to the Astros at the tail-end of the 2017 season. It was gone 10pm on a Thursday night, meaning most of the crowd had gone home, and the stadium was relatively quiet. When winding up to throw, Farquhar noticed a banging sound and felt that the batter he was facing had been unusually alert to what type of pitch was coming. When his catcher called for another changeup, Farquhar again heard the banging, broke off his motion, and went to talk with the catcher. The pair set a trap where a fastball would be signalled but a changeup thrown. Sure enough, the batter swung too early, and the slower delivery struck him out.
Farquhar was livid and let the Astros bench know what he thought. But no member of the press approached him to ask about it after the game, and his teammates put it down as pitcher paranoia. It took two years before reporters putting The Athletic article together finally called him to ask about that night.
The Astros were the perfect target for public opprobrium. Despite the emotional nature of their World Series win, the organisation had gained a reputation as one that would put positive baseball outcomes above all else. They had negotiated contracts in bad faith with some of their draft picks, and several former employees had complained about a toxic workplace culture.
Eyebrows were raised when the Astros signed pitcher Roberto Osuna at the end of a 75-game suspension for domestic violence. For businessmen like Crane and Luhnow, they were simply buying a distressed asset at a low price. Then the matter went to another level when Astros assistant general manager Brandon Taubman ranted bizarrely at three female reporters about the player. Taubman was eventually sacked but only after a series of typically tone-deaf responses by the Astros.
Reviewing tens of thousands of emails and text messages and interviewing 68 witnesses, Major League Baseball’s disciplinary enquiry was thorough. Its verdict, for Luhnow, was stunning. Despite the report stating that there was no evidence to suggest that Luhnow was aware of the scheme, he was suspended from baseball for a year for what had occurred on his watch.
The same day, Astros owner Crane went one step further, firing Luhnow along with the other man punished by the league, the team manager A.J. Hinch. “Neither one of them started this, but neither did anything about it,” read Crane’s statement.Confusingly, the report concluded that the sign-stealing scheme was “player-driven and player-executed”, yet a few paragraphs later stated that it would “not assess discipline against individual Astros players.” The Wall Street Journal subsequently reported that the league had struck a deal with the players’ union that granted immunity to players who testified.
For some, Luhnow was the fall guy, the man who paid the price for a player-driven scheme in a league that was terrified of punishing players. For others, Luhnow had made his own bed by creating an organisational culture that put the pursuit of a competitive edge beyond all else.
But as the din of the permanently indignant social media debate raged on, one cold hard fact remained — the man who had worked in the sport he loved and won three World Series rings was now a baseball outsider once more.
When Luhnow spoke to KPRC Houston in his first public interview after his sacking and suspension, it was clear he felt his future lay away from the diamond.
“The opportunity to apply business practices, analytics and technology exists in many sports. My skills aren’t stuck in baseball — they could easily be transferred to another sport. I’m considering all my options at this point.” Luhnow went on to mention European football as one area of consideration.
It was a process that saw Luhnow arrive on the southern outskirts of Madrid and the quirky satellite town of Leganés with its streets named after AC/DC and The Scorpions, spectacular sunsets, and a roundabout dedicated to a giant sculpture of the Loch Ness Monster.
🌆 ¿Hay algo más bonito que un atardecer en Butarque?
The town is also home to CD Leganés, a popular and tidily run club in Spain’s second division, seeking promotion to the top flight they recently played in for four seasons before being relegated in unfortunate circumstances.
For the bilingual Luhnow, the club and the league provided the perfect fit for the Blue Crow Investment Group that he heads. “We believe the league has the most growth potential, with the financial controls and the recent deal with CVC. Leganés has the best combination of what we searched for: location, fans, stadium and growth potential.”
The 99% stake acquired in Leganés made the club the second football acquisition after the purchase of FC Cancún of Mexico’s second division.
Analytics will undoubtedly be a significant part of Leganés’ future. “We want to use technology to create advantages. We have people who have used technology in the Premier League and MLS. Leganés can certainly take advantage of that. We believe football is a little behind in that respect, but that is something that is going to change.”
The new president will be as focused as ever on the process but will hopefully take time to appreciate those incredible sunsets over the Estadio Municipal de Butarque. Preferably without the distraction of someone banging on a dustbin.
He was the man who could organise anything. The man on top of every little detail. That’s why they put him in charge of this.
He was the man who changed the course of Spanish football history by signing Alfredo Di Stéfano for Real Madrid from under the noses of Barcelona. The man who then helped add Paco Gento, Raymond Kopa, José Santamaría and Ferenc Puskás to the squad.
He was the man who, not satisfied with creating the greatest Real Madrid side of all time, then helped launch the competition that later defined them — the European Cup.
He was the man that revolutionised basketball in Spain and then Europe, creating the Spanish League and then the European Cup. Then, of course, revitalised Real Madrid’s basketball team so successfully that they came to dominate both competitions.
He was the man so implicitly trusted by Real Madrid president Santiago Bernabéu that he was eventually left to run the club almost by himself.
That’s why they’d given him this job, and he’d been only too happy to take it. After all, this was a man used to creating competitions from scratch — how hard could organising a football tournament be?
But here, just weeks before the tournament was due to start, Raimundo Saporta was feeling the strain. So overwhelming were the demands that the phone in his apartment seemed to ring non-stop, with the answering machine long since filled to capacity.
Newspapers speculated upon his state of health, reporting regular stays in Switzerland where he undertook medical checks accompanied by his mother. El Pais noted behavioural changes in Saporta — “a man so usually discreet who has begun to make the front pages with strident statements and continuous mentions that his only boss is the King. Those close to him claim that he has been prescribed medication that relaxes him but sometimes gives him an unusual euphoria. Drowsiness at certain public events seems to confirm these symptoms.”
But Saporta persevered with the task, admitting to extreme fatigue but otherwise dismissive of what was being printed by the newspapers — “The press has been very difficult to deal with.”
There was, though, one thing they could all agree on: the 1982 World Cup was proving way more challenging to organise than anyone had anticipated.
It was in London in the summer of 1966 when FIFA confirmed their plans for three future tournaments. Spain stood aside for West Germany to host the 1974 edition, which meant they were automatically selected when the competition returned to European soil eight years later.
In the mid-1960s, the notion of hosting a World Cup seemed almost quaint. The cosy 16-team tournament lasted less than three weeks, was broadcast in sleepy black and white, and its 32 matches were mainly attended by curious locals.
By the time 1982 came around, the tournament was well on its way to becoming a modern-day global technicolour jamboree. FIFA had eagerly expanded the competition meaning Spain would host the biggest tournament yet — a 24-team, month-long extravaganza requiring more host cities and accommodating more fans than ever before.
If the World Cup had evolved in those intervening years, Spain had changed immeasurably. Franco’s death in 1975 led to a period of rapid but fragile transition. A new Spain aspired to become a modern democracy, but the process was complex and hindered by distrust between competing interests on either side of the political spectrum.
On the periphery of the process, political violence reached alarming levels. Terrorist atrocities and incidents formed a depressingly regular part of the news cycle. ETA, in particular, became more malevolent than ever, and their spectre hung heavily over the World Cup. Just weeks before the start of the tournament, the Basque separatist group attempted to wipe out the telecommunications of an entire city, blowing up the eight-storey headquarters of Telefónica in central Madrid, taking 20,000 lines and 700,000 telephones off the network in the capital.
An act during the tournament seemed almost inevitable, particularly when a Guardia Civil officer was murdered by ETA in Gipuzkoa on the day of the opening ceremony.
The political upheaval seemed to entirely distract from a troubling economic picture. An economy heavily reliant on foreign oil was reeling from successive oil shocks, sending prices spiralling upwards. Organisers now found themselves trying to organise a World Cup in an environment that saw inflation constantly in double digits.
Unemployment soon rocketed, leaving a fledgling government floundering, unable to take any meaningful action while budgetary deficits swelled to dangerous levels and foreign exchange reserves depleted rapidly.
Financing a World Cup became a nightmare. As well as the usual stadium and local infrastructure upgrades, there was the unwelcome discovery that Spain’s entire television network would have to be upgraded to broadcast the tournament at a cost of 17.5 billion pesetas (€105 million).
As if there was not enough to worry for organisers about, the outbreak of the Falklands War brought four of the qualified teams into conflict with each other. A 2014 release of United Kingdom government archives revealed anxious deliberations over whether to withdraw England, Scotland and Northern Ireland from a tournament that featured Argentina as holders and was hosted by a country where the public opinion was overwhelmingly against the UK’s claim to the Falkland Islands, given Spain’s position on Gibraltar.
The government decided the three teams should travel to Spain as planned, but only after myriad discussions that included the bizarre highlight of Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine calculating the various permutations of the rather complex World Cup draw — “Scotland could play Argentina in the second round, but Northern Ireland and England can only meet them in the final,” he concluded.
That draw had been a shambles that did little to settle the host’s jitters. Taking place shortly after Christmas in Madrid’s Palacio de Congresos, the creative minds amongst the organising committee decided to theme the draw along the lines of Spain’s Christmas lottery, using both the distinctive golden cages used to draw the numbers and the purple-sashed pupils of the San Ildefonso school who famously sang the results.
The event quickly descended into farce, with the presiding FIFA delegates apparently forgetting their own fairly basic stipulations, drawing Belgium and then Scotland into the wrong groups. “Quite extraordinary,” exclaimed Barry Davies in typical fashion on the BBC’s coverage of the draw, “They went to great lengths to explain the procedure, but when it’s come to the draw, they’ve not adopted their own plans.”
Even after correcting the errors, the draw dragged on interminably. FIFA officials grew increasingly impatient with the amount of time it was taking the schoolchildren to extract the balls and deliver them to their table. Matters got even worse when the miniature two-piece Adidas Tango balls containing the teams’ names began to break apart inside the cages. This led to the unedifying spectacle of fingers being poked into the machinery in an attempt to get them moving.
Sorteo Mundial 82. Sale Bélgica. Debía ir con Argentina (para evitar que 🇨🇱 o 🇵🇪 vayan con 🇦🇷 o 🇧🇷). Pero lo mandan con Italia. Luego sale Escocia. Debía ir con 🇧🇷 , pero lo ponen con 🇦🇷...
Le avisan a Blatter y tras gran incertidumbre, corrigen el error. El papelón. pic.twitter.com/0l6jffBLRY
When the draw finally ended, it was left to those on the organising committee to take the positives. “Spain have a good chance to qualify for the second round. After that, we’ll see. I think the tournament is guaranteed to be a financial success. On the field, we’ll have to see, but whatever the outcome, we’ll support the players,” was the upbeat verdict of the president of the Royal Organising Committee, Raimundo Saporta, who’d been appointed the most important job any Spanish football administrator had ever been given.
Not a bad achievement for someone given their chance in football mainly because he knew precisely nothing at all about it.
Saporta’s journey to the heights of Spanish football was an unusual one. Indeed, there is mystery surrounding where it even began with his place of birth the subject of debate among Spain’s most eminent football historians. Most official documents stated Saporta was born in Paris in December of 1926, but a detailed investigation by the football history association, CIHEFE, concluded it was more likely he was actually born in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
What’s for sure is that Saporta was born to Sephardic Jewish parents who were both born in the Ottoman Empire. By the early 1940s, the family had long been settled in Paris, with Raimundo happily studying at the prestigious Lycée Carnot. But when German boots reached Parisian streets in the early part of the Second World War, the city became a precarious place for anyone even suspected of being Jewish, with families regularly taking measures to conceal their ethnicity. CIHEFE found evidence that Saporta’s school records had been edited to remove any reference to Constantinople, quite probably as part of the family’s attempts to avoid Nazi scrutiny.
Taking advantage of the Spanish citizenship they held — in 1924, Spain had made citizenship automatically available to Sephardic Jews — the family secured safe passage to a new life in Madrid. Tragically, soon after the family settled in the city, Raimundo’s father Jaime was struck fatally by a tram.
Heartbroken, the family continued on in their alien surroundings, although they afforded themselves some familiarity by enrolling both sons in the Lycée Français de Madrid. The French school had a lively basketball scene that Saporta very much enjoyed. Realising his physical talents would never guarantee him a place on a squad, he began helping out in administrative roles and was soon named the team’s official delegate.
Saporta’s exceptional organisational talent soon turned heads at the Spanish Basketball Federation. The governing body’s president, Colonel Jesús Querejeta Pavón, was so taken by Saporta that he immediately sought to add him to the board but was frustrated by the Federation’s own rules, which stated directors must be at least 21 years old. Saporta continued to work in an unofficial role until being installed as vice-president upon reaching the required age in 1947.
Saporta set about improving and restructuring Spanish basketball and was held in such regard that when, in 1952, Santiago Bernabéu began looking for someone to organise a basketball tournament as part of Real Madrid’s 50th-anniversary celebrations, he received exactly the same answer from whoever he asked: Raimundo Saporta.
With minimal fuss, Saporta arranged an impressive four-team tournament, including international opposition in the form of Racing Club of Paris, the Puerto Rican national team and a talented team of Suffolk-based American serviceman named the Lakenheath Pirates. In the final, Real Madrid rallied from a huge deficit to beat an excellent Puerto Rican team, who ABC described as: “possibly the finest team to have ever played basketball in the city of Madrid.”
Delighted by the tournament, Bernabéu immediately recruited Saporta to his board. Saporta pointed out that he knew absolutely nothing about football, “That’s good,” countered Bernabéu, “There are far too many around that think they do.”
Saporta’s creative problem-solving and attention to detail saw him implicitly trusted with some of the most important matters of the club. When Bernabéu observed the impasse in Barcelona’s attempt to sign Alfredo Di Stefano, it was Saporta he dispatched to Colombia to convince Millionarios that dealing with Madrid would be far simpler and more lucrative than talking to Barcelona.
Eventually, Real Madrid won the day. Even by the time Di Stefano made his Madrid debut, Saporta had been at the club barely a year.
El directivo del Real Madrid Raimundo Saporta, en un momento distendido, junto a los jugadores Raymond Kopa y Alfredo Di Stéfano. pic.twitter.com/MKNRKrMALs
— Nostalgia Futbolera ® (@nostalgiafutbo1) June 20, 2020
Saporta became Bernabéu’s right-hand man, and the pair worked closely together for a quarter of a century, each complementing the other’s character. Where Bernabéu was authoritarian, impulsive and prone to fits of rage, Saporta was collegiate, assiduous and avuncular.
Bernabéu had the grand visions, but it was Saporta who could get things done. That was something that L’Equipe came to learn when attempting to launch their idea of the European Cup. The newspaper had been frustrated in their attempts to get the project off the ground until someone suggested a phone call to Saporta might get things moving. Sure enough, the idea had become a reality within a few days as Saporta worked his magic.
Saporta took care of some of the tiniest details. As Justo Tejada, who won two league titles with both Barcelona and Real Madrid, remembered to Panenka magazine: “Barça will always be the club of my heart, but at Madrid, they looked after every little detail. You couldn’t even forget your wife’s birthday as a bouquet would show up for her with a card that said: ‘From the office of Raimundo Saporta’ ”.
Remarkably, Saporta combined the football club’s vice-presidency with the basketball operation’s presidency. There he helped create a basketball version of the European Cup and established the Spanish basketball league as one of Europe’s most successful.
The tournament that started it all in 1952 even lived on, eventually morphing into the Torneo de Navidad, a four-team tournament that attracted top international teams and some of America’s most storied basketball colleges and became a staple of Spanish Christmas TV viewing for decades.
By the time of Santiago Bernabéu’s death in 1978, Real Madrid had won six European Cups in both football and basketball. Most assumed the vice-president who had done so much to deliver that success would replace Bernabéu, but the man himself had other ideas.
“Don Santiago always told me not to accept the presidency if he died. And that’s what I’m doing. Firstly, because of a lack of personal ambition, and secondly, because he told me I would suffer a lot in the role.” With that, he walked away from the club he’d worked at for some 26 years.
But just months later, the Spanish Federation, shocked by the announcement by FIFA of an expanded World Cup, suddenly realised the committee they had assembled was not up to the task. There was only one person to call. Within days, Royal Decree number 2346/78 declared Raimundo Saporta as the president of the Real Comité Organizador de la Copa del Mundo, reporting directly to the King. It was as prestigious a title and role as could be, but one that really would make him suffer.
As Italy’s Dino Zoff held the World Cup aloft, just a few feet away in the stadium that bore his old boss’ name, Saporta could finally afford to let out a sigh of relief. It had been a success.
It had certainly not been easy, and the stresses on Saporta as the cornerstone of it all had been enormous. At one stage, a row with the host cities escalated to such an extent that Saporta offered his resignation, causing an almighty panic in the government, the Spanish Federation and FIFA and front-page headlines that Spain was on the verge of giving up the World Cup. His resignation was refused, and the cities were swiftly brought into line.
The off-the-field factors that Saporta had so feared miraculously subsided. ETA’s guns fell silent, and the Falklands War concluded early in the competition, with none of the teams crossing each other’s paths.
Financially, the tournament even technically reported a profit with the infrastructure debt either covered by lottery funding or creatively kicked down the road by accountants.
On the field, it would prove to be a World Cup that lived in the memory, serving up a combination of compelling football and skullduggery in equal measure in matches attended by over two million spectators. The only thing missing was a strong showing from the hosts, who were desperately disappointing and eliminated after winning just one of their five matches.
Saporta was widely commended for his work. In their review of the year, ABC called the World Cup the biggest success of 1982, lauding Saporta as the “mastermind behind the event.”
Saporta though, would publicly acknowledge the adverse effects that the World Cup had on his health — “It did me harm” — and a heart attack in 1987 took a further toll. He died in 1997, still involved in basketball, helping plan the European Cup’s revamp to the Euroliga.
At his funeral, the Real Madrid president, Lorenzo Sanz, lamented the loss of a man “only behind Santiago Bernabéu as the most important person in the history of Real Madrid.”
Remarkably, in the forty years since that 1982 World Cup and despite the country’s standing in world football, Spain has never since hosted a major tournament. Perhaps maybe, because they’ve never found anyone else quite like Raimundo Saporta.
Acknowledgements
Fernando Arrechea and Victor Martínez Patón’s superb investigation into the country of Saporta’s birth helped with this article
Preparations at Asador Donostiarra on Madrid’s Calle de la Infanta Mercedes were in full swing. The labyrinth of dining rooms buzzed as an army of waiters frantically buffed cutlery and polished glasses; sommeliers double checked there were enough bottles of cava on ice and enough reserva for later; while the chefs decided it was about time to light the charcoal under those famous grills.
The restaurant had been selected to host the feast for the biggest birthday party the city had ever seen. It was well used to hosting the great and the good of Madrid, but this was going to be something special, something historic. They would need to clear some space on the walls for some more photos after this.
But then the phone rang.
The call was short. The manager who picked it up barely saying a word before slowly replacing the receiver. The news quickly filtered through the restaurant — “They’ve cancelled: it’s off,” — causing everyone to stop what they were doing. Staff stood about or slumped on chairs, waiting to be told what to do next. In the kitchen, they began silently putting the kilos of chuletón back in the fridge.
Then, barely ten minutes later, the phone rang again.
The conversation this time was disjointed — even farcical, as the Galician accent on the other end of the line struggled to make itself heard over the din behind until finally finding a quiet corner: “We heard they cancelled. Don’t worry — we’ll come instead. We’ll be there in an about an hour. Oh — and we’re thirsty!”
2002 was Real Madrid’s centenary year, and they had big plans to celebrate it. Florentino Pérez’s election as president in 2000 had revived the club’s finances and heralded the beginning of the Galáctico era. Reinvigorated, they began honouring their 100th year in a style befitting the most successful club in European football.
The razzmatazz began on the 6th January — El Día de Reyes — when the club’s basketball team hosted a Magic Johnson All-Star team. A largely knockabout event that saw Magic himself switching to play for Real Madrid midway through the game.
A special theme park was set up in Madrid’s huge Casa de Campo park, with a mock-up of the Plaza de Cibeles — where Real Madrid traditionally go to celebrate trophy wins — greeting visitors as they arrived. Inside, patrons could visit an exact reproduction of the Real Madrid dressing room — where an empty jacuzzi displayed footage from the club’s history; ride bumper cars painted in club colours; try to navigate a hall of mirrors without bumping into images of legendary players; or try a virtual reality simulator which put the user in the novel role of a ball during a Real Madrid game. On opening night, candles on a birthday cake large enough to serve 4,000 portions were blown out.
The Spanish post office issued the almost obligatory set of commemorative centenary stamps, and the route of the 2002 Vuelta a España was drawn up to conclude with a final stage time trial with the finish line at the Santiago Bernabéu. The stadium would also play host to a match in December between Real Madrid and a FIFA Rest of the World XI, complete with Placido Domingo singing the club anthem to round off the year of celebrations. A rather lofty request that no other football games be played anywhere in the world that day went largely unobserved — much to the mirth of the Catalan sports press who gleefully published a full schedule of the day’s other fixtures on the morning of the game.
Despite the packed calendar, there was a spectacular list of events that Carat — the ‘global media and marketing agency’ entrusted with running the centenary festivities — couldn’t quite pull off. A mobile exhibition aboard a ‘Centenary Train’ stopping off at Spain’s major cities never quite got on track. A fashion show featuring the world’s top dozen supermodels parading Real Madrid inspired garb along a catwalk at Plaza de Cibeles and a head-to-head match play golf challenge between Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia featuring a final hole in the Bernabéu both also failed to materialise. And the biggest moonshot of all — a plan to project the club’s crest onto the surface of the moon via the Hispasat satellite — proved to be exactly that and was eventually deemed logistically near impossible.
If Tiger Woods, Naomi Campbell and the curvature of the earth had all proved impossible to negotiate with, the Spanish Federation proved a great deal more pliable when Madrid laid out their proposals for that season’s Copa del Rey.
The Copa del Rey Final was usually the last act of a Spanish season, often played long after the rest of European football had downed tools for the summer. The previous year’s final had taken place on the last day of June. But Madrid successfully lobbied the Federation to allow them to host the final while also bringing the entire tournament schedule forward so that the match would fall on the exact day of their 100th birthday on the 6th March 2002.
For a club that primarily identified itself with the European Cup, the domestic cup was not usually a priority. Indeed, in the previous eight seasons, they hadn’t managed to make it to a final. But the playing staff were soon fully aware that this season had to be different, and — despite scares in Tarragona and Bilbao — they duly delivered, reaching the final to set up a gala night.
With everything in place, all that was needed was some opponents. At one point, the cup had looked like becoming a procession for Madrid with big guns tumbling out at in bizarre circumstances. A crisis-torn Barcelona were humbled by Segunda B’s UE Figueres, and then Rafa Benitez’s Valencia made the fatal error of illegally introducing a fourth non-EU player as a late substitute against Novelda and were kicked out of the competition.
Madrid’s eventual opposition would be Deportivo La Coruña, who had an eventful time of it themselves. A row over the suitability of L’Hospitalet’s artificial pitch ended with the Federation ordering the game to be switched to Barcelona’s Mini Estadi and L’Hospitalet refusing to play, allowing Depor a walkover to the last eight. There they had to go to extra-time with Real Valladolid before only narrowly defeating Figueres in the semi-final.
Despite a less than convincing run to the final, Depor were a serious proposition. In a golden era of their own, Super Depor had followed up a famous league title win with a second-place finish and were going toe-to-toe with elite opposition in Europe as the continent woke up to the talents of a side that included the like of Djalminha, Mauro Silva and Juan Carlos Valerón. The talented and steely group of players were more than game for the challenge of ruining the biggest birthday party in world football. And their fans were pretty up for it too.
A queue snaked all the way from the Estadio Riazor to the city’s old town on the day that Deportivo’s allocation of 25,000 tickets went on sale. A Wednesday night kick-off and the prospect of a 14 hour round trip were not enough to quell the enthusiasm of supporters who were more than happy to buy into a narrative of ruining Real Madrid’s big night.
Sticking it to the establishment was a prominent feature of the Galician psyche at the time. While Madrid and Barcelona boomed, Galicia had felt forgotten as the region’s traditional industries declined. A situation that was beautifully illustrated by the award-winning film Los lunes al sol highlighting the plight of Vigo’s shipbuilders and the debasing effects of unemployment.
The region’s reputation had been dealt a further blow by the dismantling and prosecution of the region’s prolific drug cartels, and jibes of ‘drug addicts’ or ‘drug dealers’ were commonly aimed at fans of the Galician clubs at away games.
As the huge convoy of coaches rolled out of A Coruña before dawn on the morning of the game, some fans jokingly likened it to feeling like an army on a special mission. Any self-respecting army needs a flag to rally around, and it just so happened that Depor fans had found pretty much the perfect one. As a response to the patriotic Spanish flag with a silhouette of a bull common at sporting events, designer and Depor fan Antón Lescano had come up with a tongue-in-cheek design that superimposed a giant Galician dairy cow onto the flag of Galicia. The result was a hit, chiming perfectly with the irreverent Galician sense of humour and becoming a symbol of the occasion with hundreds spotted around Madrid as the bars and plazas filled up with the masses from the northwest.
While the fans enjoyed themselves, the Depor players and staff focused squarely on the game, although some irritants were proving difficult to block out. During the press conference on the eve of the final, Depor head coach Javier Irureta did his best to remain polite when he was ludicrously asked if the squad had remembered to pack their nappies.
Further incidents would ensure that Depor went into the game with more of a sense of irritation than fear. The restaurant where Depor had their pre-match meal was festooned with Real Madrid flags, and upon arrival at the stadium, it soon became evident that the allocation of tickets given to the Depor players’ families was in a far inferior part of the ground to that of their counterparts.
Even a routine interaction between friends served to stoke Depor’s ire. As Real Madrid’s Flavio Conceição casually chatted with Mauro Silva and Djalminha before the game, he lamented to his fellow Brazilians that it was a shame they wouldn’t be able to meet up after the game — what with all the receptions and celebrations the Madrid players were expected to attend.
As kick-off drew closer, Real Madrid’s special programme of pre-match entertainment got underway, though it seemed the promoters had misjudged the crowd dynamics somewhat. Depor fans had already arrived to fill their sections while Madrid fans stuck to their usual pre-match routines, arriving just minutes before the game. The result was a succession of acts playing to a quarter full stadium — and to Depor fans more intent on piss-taking than earnest audience participation.
If the build-up had been interminable, Depor were in no mood for hanging around when the game finally got underway. They immediately forced the tempo, relentlessly attacking the goal behind which their fans were massed and flying into tackles whenever Madrid had the temerity to attempt possession.
Diego Tristán had already nearly opened the scoring before he combined smartly with Sergio González, sending his midfielder in behind the Madrid defence to finish neatly and send the Depor fans into scenes of absolute bedlam.
The game was just five minutes old. And Depor continued to swarm forward.
A few minutes later, Madrid sought respite with a Roberto Carlos-led counter that arrived at the feet of Raúl, who was clattered in quick succession by Lionel Scaloni then Mauro Silva. A mass confrontation ensued in which Mauro Silva furiously sought out Raúl. While the Brazilian was held back, Jose Molina had charged from his goal to deliver a chilling warning to the Madrid forward. “I’ll punch you so hard that it’ll kill you. Touch my teammate again, and I will tear your head off.”
That Raúl had done so little to merit such menace was testament to Depor’s emotionally-charged approach to the game, completely unwilling to give Madrid a moment to breathe.
The onslaught continued, and by halftime, Depor had doubled their lead. Valerón found space behind a dishevelled Madrid backline and fed Tristán, who swept the ball home and celebrated wildly in front of the Depor fans, whipping off his shirt to display a vest with “Riazor Blues On Tour” emblazoned on the front.
That both goals had gone through the legs of goalkeeper César only served to heighten Real Madrid’s creeping neurosis. César had surprisingly been preferred to 20-year-old Iker Casillas, who had seemingly emerged as the club’s number one until that point. TV pictures now repeatedly cut to an increasingly distraught Casillas, who was also the perfect personification of Madrid’s distress as the night unravelled. The young goalkeeper was inconsolable by the end of the game.
The second half proved to be very different to the first. Raúl pulled a goal back just before the hour for Madrid, and Depor were forced to dig deep. Once again channelling the energy from their fans — this time positioned behind them as they defended for their lives.
When the final whistle eventually arrived, Scaloni picked up the ball and booted it high into the stands. The Depor players and staff gathered in front of their fans, an entire end bouncing.
Tal día como hoy... el Deportivo de La Coruña conquistó su segunda Copa del Rey en el Santiago Bernabéu ante un Real Madrid que celebraba ese día su Centenario. ⚽️ Real Madrid 1-2 Deportivo de La Coruña 📆 6-3-2002 🏆 Final Copa del Rey pic.twitter.com/ISiRzr12vN
It was the only end still populated as Depor captain Fran had weaved his way up to the presidential palco, past Florentino Pérez, past Sepp Blatter and all the way to the king who presented him with the cup.
Back down on the field, celebrations continued until Depor’s 25,000 supporters came to the collective realisation that they had totally forgotten their manners. Using the last of what voices they still had left, they serenaded their hosts with an ironic rendition of ‘Happy Birthday to You’ before spilling out of the stadium into the Madrid night. Some lucky fans cruising down the Paseo de la Castellana for free, courtesy of delighted Atlético Madrid supporting taxi drivers who refused to take their money.
“I think you can say that the 6th March 2002 will go down as an exceptional date in A Coruña sporting history but a dark one for productivity,” joked reporter Xosé Pereiro on TVE1’s Telediario as he stood on the Rúa Cantón Grande detailing Depor’s bleary-eyed homecoming to the city the following afternoon.
The cup was paraded around the Riazor stadium with larger-than-life president Augusto César Lendoiro roaring: “The isn’t a cup like any other. This is the cup of the centenary of Real Madrid,” to raucous applause.
Amongst the delirium, seemingly the only one cognisant that the business end of the season was still to come was the old sage, Irureta. “The season isn’t finished yet, and I hope this is just a prelude to more triumphs.”
His words seemed to work. Five days later, an unchanged eleven took the field at Highbury and demolished an Arsenal side that included Thierry Henry, Robert Pires, Patrick Vieira and Dennis Bergkamp, with a performance still remembered as one of Super Depor’s apogees.
Real Madrid picked themselves up, and, as so often, the Champions League provided the trophy they demanded. Zinedine Zidane’s emblematic volley at Hampden Park also provided the moment of the centenary year.
Two decades on, any reminiscence of Real Madrid’s centenary year is usually summed up by a single word. A term that plays on the famous failure of Brazil’s 1950 side to clinch the World Cup on home soil that was christened the Maracanazo.
ElCentenariazo: The night that Depor gatecrashed the biggest birthday party of all time. And even stole their dinner reservation.
Acknowledgements
Marcos Gendre’s excellent book, Branquiazul: Historia oral de los años dorados del Dépor, provided information for this article.
It is available to buy in both Kindle and paperback versions.
“To suddenly call up a Real Madrid player and ask them to come to your club when you’re still in the second division — well, you have to be a dreamer.”
In the summer of 1995, when the Real Madrid office staff told Emilio Butragueño to expect a call at home from a Mexican club, he presumed when the phone rang he would be talking to the owner of Club América or maybe Cruz Azul. But the accent on the other end of the line was Asturian, not Mexican, and he declared himself to be the owner of a club that Butragueño had never heard of. Mind you, even in Mexico not many had heard of Atlético Celaya.
The voice on the phone outlined his grand plans for the club on the brink of promotion. Butragueño was unconvinced, but Enrique Fernández was as insistent as he was persuasive. Multiple calls per day eventually swayed Butragueño into hopping on a flight to come and see for himself. Boarding the plane, he almost felt like he was wasting his time. He was convinced his future lay east, not west — Japan’s shiny new J League had been his preferred destination — a new challenge with the added benefit of never having to play against his beloved Real Madrid.
But after three days in Guanajuato, the people, the weather, the pace of life and the overtures from Fernández had changed his mind. Butragueño called his father and told him he would sign for Celaya. “If the team can more or less function, then it will be fine. We’ll move here.”
Butragueño signed for one season but stayed for three: “From a family point of view, it was probably the happiest three years of my life.” On the field, things were more than just functional. In Butragueño’s first season, newly-promoted Celaya nearly achieved a fairytale, coming within a flick of that familiar blonde head of winning the 1996 Mexican championship in the Estadio Azteca.
Butragueño would be joined in Mexico by two more members of the Quinta del Buitre in Michel and Rafa Martín Vázquez, as well as the man who provided more goals than anyone else to that Real Madrid side that won five consecutive titles, Hugo Sánchez. Key members of one of the most revered Real Madrid sides of all time reunited by Fernández’s vision and audacity.
Heck, he even persuaded Emilio Butragueño to play against Real Madrid.
The 1983-84 season saw Real Madrid in somewhat of a funk. The previous season had ended with Madrid finishing as runners-up in no less than five separate competitions. The gloom was not helped by a first-round UEFA Cup exit to Sparta Prague. But the Madrid public found solace in the emergence of a generation of players that had powered the club’s B team — Real Madrid Castilla — to the top of the second division.
In November of that season, El Pais carried a full-page profile that detailed Castilla’s remarkable progress under manager Amancio Armario. The article was headlined ‘Amancio y la Quinta de ‘El Buitre” — ‘Amancio and the Vulture Squad’ and would become almost a sacred artefact in the annals of Real Madrid.
Journalist Julio-César Iglesias picked out for particular praise a quintet of players with a combined age of 94 years. Midfielders Michel and Martín Vázquez were joined by the winger, Miguel Pardeza, and then defensive midfielder, Manuel Sanchís, in the Quinta del Buitre. But readers were left in no doubt as to who was the pick of the bunch — Butragueño, the blonde boy who had already scored 14 goals in 10 games that season and had already been christened with one of football’s most enduring nicknames. “The Vulture has demonstrated a thousand times in Castilla that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. He advances in zig-zags, or more precisely: zig-zags of silver, like flashes of lightning. His runs into the area are like a flash — an explosion of the most rapid, dazzling light.”
The article concluded with a flourish, urging first team manager Alfredo Di Stefano that: “now is the time to mobilise the Quinta del Buitre. To call for their imagination, discipline and quality.”
El Pais, 14th November 1983
While Di Stefano didn’t exactly conform to Iglesias’ suggested timeframe of “two to three games”, each player was gradually introduced, and within a year, four of the five were regulars in the first team — by then managed by Amancio. Pardeza was the only one of the five who struggled to graduate, eventually going on loan and then permanently to Real Zaragoza.
The remaining quartet helped form the nucleus of a team that defined an era. Supported by established veterans such as Juanito, Paco Buyo, José Camacho and Rafael Gordillo and the signings of Hugo Sánchez and Jorge Valdano, Madrid won back-to-back UEFA Cups before winning five consecutive Spanish titles scoring unprecedented amounts of goals. Their tally of 107 goals in 1989/90 — 38 of which were scored by Sánchez with a single touch — would not be bettered until some two decades later.
The emergence of the Quinta del Buitre coincided with an explosion of the music, arts and nightlife scenes in a Madrid finally free from the conservatism and repression of the Franco era. With the city culturally liberated by the scene known as the Movida Madrileña and economically thriving during a period of unprecedented growth, it seemed the only thing missing for Madrileños of a Real Madrid persuasion was an elusive seventh European Cup.
But three consecutive semi-finals were as far as the side went. The third of which saw Madrid dismantled in the San Siro by Arigo Sacchi’s Milan, who repeated the feat six months later, dumping Madrid out of Europe in October. To make matters worse, another rising force — Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona — were about to end the Quinta’s domestic hegemony on their way to them becoming the side that brought the European Cup back to Spain for the first time in 26 years.
By the end of the 1994-95 season, Butragueño was struggling to hold down his place in the side with the emergence of a 17-year-old named Raúl González. Refusing a one-year contract extension on much reduced terms, Butragueño took to the field at the Bernabéu for the last time in a specially arranged tribute game against Roma. He spent the summer pondering whether he should uproot his young family and take up the offer from Japan or explore other avenues. Then the phone rang.
Flushed with business success and living in the afterglow of the wildly successful 1970 World Cup, Enrique Fernández surveyed the Mexican football scene for a club to buy.
Fernández had departed his native Langreo in Asturias three years previously, at the age of 27, to take charge of the Gigante chain of supermarkets in Mexico City. It didn’t take him long to strike out on his own, and Fernández soon founded Productos Alimenticios Asturias, a company that supplied bakeries across the country and was well on its way to becoming the publicly listed Lastur.
Along with some business associates, Fernández took a controlling stake in a second division club called Toros de Texcoco which over the decades went through various mergers and mutations under Mexican football’s bewildering franchise system. In 1994 a three-way merger resulted in the creation of a new club called Atlético Celaya, which held a license to play in Mexico’s second-tier and Fernández as majority owner.
Remarkably, the new club won promotion at the first time of asking, beating one of Mexico’s oldest clubs, Pachuca, with the only goal of a two-legged play-off final in June. A month previous, Fernández and a fellow director had been watching Butragueño’s farewell against Roma on TV when someone in the room mentioned trying to sign him. Figuring they had nothing to lose, Fernández got to work, and while Celaya were steadily progressing through the play-offs, their owner was making daily calls to Madrid trying to woo one of the world’s most famous players into playing for a club that barely anyone knew of.
With promotion secured and Butragueño finally sold, Celaya announced the signing to the world. “We were so moved when we watched his farewell game on TV that we thought maybe we could try and sign him. Back then it was a dream, but every now and then a dream comes true,” beamed Fernández, who, true to form, had even managed to work a friendly between Celaya and Real Madrid into the deal — the only time El Buitre ever faced the club of his life.
Butragueño explained his thoughts on the move to the assembled press. “It’s been a very difficult decision to make — to leave Real Madrid and take my family to a different country. But I have good friends in Mexico and it’s has always been a big part of me since I had one of the games that marked my career there.” Butragueño was referring to Spain’s 5-1 demolition of a brilliant Denmark side at Mexico ’86, in which Butragueño had scored four. That game had taken place in Querétaro, just a short distance from his new home in Celaya.
While his family settled into their tranquil new life, Butragueño got down to acclimatising to the altitude, his teammates and a club that, while ambitious, was still a little haphazard — certainly in comparison to the palatial life at Real Madrid.
The club had yet to acquire a training ground, meaning sessions were rotated around often bumpy factory sports facilities. Most lacked changing rooms which meant a teenager on a moped would call daily at Casa Butragueño to drop off and collect training kit.
A memorable incident occurred in an away game at León, where a forgetful kit-man realised to his horror that he hadn’t packed their star man’s shirt. Fortunately, by that point, Butragueño’s shirt was one of the best-sellers with the country’s enterprising hawkers, and a replacement was sourced from a stall outside the ground. Butragueño scored twice in the counterfeit shirt — the only shirt on the field to bear a player’s name — and the relieved kit-man began a tradition of purchasing a knock-off number seven shirt at every away game.
Results on the field, though, were anything but dodgy. After a 34-game regular season, Celaya qualified for the Championship play-offs alongside the usual giants América, UNAM Pumas and Cruz Azul. A brace of away goals from Butragueño edged Celaya past Monterrey before an astonishing 6-1 aggregate demolition of Veracruz in the semi-final.
A 1-1 draw in Celaya in the first leg of the final against the reigning champions, Necaxa, sent the title to be decided on the biggest stage of them all. 110,000 spectators crammed into the Estadio Azteca with a remarkable level of support for the club that had captured the public’s imagination, their ranks swelled by a significant number of Spanish ex-pats eager to cheer on Butragueño.
Celaya spent much of the first half under the cosh, stretched by Ecuadorean legend Álex Aguinagua’s midfield promptings and surviving a scare when Mexican international Alberto García Aspe crashed a volley against the post. As the game wore on, their opponents dropped deeper, but stifling defence denied Celaya a clean sight of a historic winning goal. Until that was, the 86th minute when Celaya won a free kick on the right. As the ball was delivered, Butragueño was positioned on the penalty spot and shaping to run towards the near-post. But in a zig-zag flash of movement that invoked that famous El Pais article, when the ball arrived, Butragueño was at the back-post, six yards from goal and completely free.
But the header was poor. Seeking to flick the ball inside the far post, Butragueño didn’t apply quite enough contact, and the ball glanced horribly wide. Both hands sank deep into that curly thatch of fair hair before he quickly snapped back into professional mode, hunting down the ball for the resultant goal-kick.
La falla de Butragueño que le pudo dar el título de liga al Atlético Celaya en la temporada 95-96
Necaxa held on. Atlético Celaya decades later more fondly remembered as runners-up than their opponents who won three titles in four years.
Butragueño wasn’t finished there. And nor was Fernandéz, who went on the trail of recruiting more of the Quinta del Buitre. First came Michel –– the man who played more games with Butragueño than anyone else. Rafa Martín Vázquez joined them briefly as his career, beset by injury, wound down. Hugo Sánchez was persuaded to abandon the fledgling MLS, reuniting the strike force that had combined so potently in Madrid.
Although the addition of superstars was fun, it was no guarantee of success, and though Celaya survived in the first division, they would never again reach the play-offs.
Michel and Sánchez both retired at Celaya — Sánchez typically bowing out with a one-touch screamer. Butragueño soon followed. After three seasons and 91 appearances for the club that he had never heard of, he took to a field for the final time in the spring of 1998 with an injured Martín Vázquez watching on against a Puebla side that included Pardeza — the only one of the Quinta that had played less than 300 games for Real Madrid.
An uneventful 0-0 draw left both teams safe from relegation. Pardeza and Butragueño left the field together, the latter pausing to tell the waiting reporters that: “Everything has a beginning and an end. I can tell you with 99% certainty that I’m now an ex-footballer.”
In Amsterdam, just over a month later, the last member of the Quinta still with Real Madrid would finally get his hands on the trophy they had so strived for. Sanchís captained Real Madrid to a seventh European Cup that had been 32 years and several generations in the making.
Celaya would continue on in the topflight until a bizarre episode in 2002 when their license was purchased by airline magnate Jorge Rodríguez Marié. Rodríguez renamed and moved the team across the country before racking up a mountain of debt and having the franchise stripped just six months later.
Football returned to a Celaya when a new club, spiritually if not legally linked to the Atlético of the nineties, was born. Sadly, attempts to rename their stadium in honour of Butragueño ended typically bogged down in local politics and were blocked in 2018.
In that same year, former owner Fernández died at the age of 68 at his home in Cancún. His ashes were split, with one half sent to his native Langreo. The other half scattered in the town he put on the footballing map the day he picked up the phone and dialled the number of one of the most famous players in the world.
Con enorme tristeza lamento el fallecimiento de Don Enrique Fernández, gran empresario, arriesgado y deecho; socio del Atlético Español, dueño del Atlético Celaya y responsable de las contrataciones de Michel y Butragueño. Mi primer Presidente en Texcoco y quien me llevó a Celaya pic.twitter.com/BSJisaO02o
The ink was barely dry on Howard Kendall’s two-year contract to coach Athletic Club Bilbao but he was regretting the decision already. “I honestly thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.”
His new club had flown him out to watch the 1987 Copa del Rey Final between Atlético Madrid and Real Sociedad in Zaragoza. Kendall found it almost impossible to concentrate on the game and the trio of Basque players that he was supposedly there to evaluate. The presence of the royal family and bizarrely, Real Sociedad supporters’ audible support for Yugoslavia’s u17 side in a game against their Spanish counterparts, had heightened tensions between the two sets of fans.
Missiles rained down on the pitch and a public announcement was made threatening to abandon the match. “I remember sitting back in my seat, closing my eyes and wondering what I had let myself in for. I just didn’t know what I was going to do if every game was played out against such an intimidating backdrop.”
Fortunately for Kendall, such scenes were rare and a somewhat more genteel form of crowd management was all that exercised him as he settled into life at Athletic’s Lezama training complex.
“I don’t want anyone watching the training sessions,” he told sporting director Fernando Ochoa who responded with a shrug of the shoulders. Kendall soon found that there was no way the 100 or so elderly Basque men in berets would be prohibited from their daily routine of taking in training before retiring to the club bar for an afternoon of playing cards.
As with so many traditions and rituals at Athletic, Kendall quickly embraced it. “I soon loved having them there. The more of them that came, the better.”
So began the love affair between Kendall and Athletic, one that never faded. Even years after his departure Kendall remained wide-eyed when talking about the club that he felt nothing but affection for.
Kendall arrived at a time when British coaches were somewhat of a fashionable commodity in Spain. The opening weekend of the 1987/88 season saw four British managers in charge of Primera sides.
John Toshack was well established at Real Sociedad and had just led them to victory in the Copa del Rey final that had so horrified Kendall.
Terry Venables was coming to the end of his three-year spell at Barcelona. He’d brought a long-awaited league title to Camp Nou. Still, the subsequent season’s European Cup final penalties defeat to Steaua Bucharest had cast somewhat of a depression over his tenure.
Down in Seville, John Mortimore had arrived as the new Real Betis manager having just won a league and cup double with Benfica.
It could and probably should have been more than a quartet of British coaches on the sidelines that weekend.The Seville derby was due to pit Mortimore against Jock Wallace but Wallace had been sacked as Sevilla boss just days before. A miserable pre-season had confirmed the existing doubts of the board.
Wallace was irate, but if anyone had the right to feel a sense of injustice at missing out that season it was Colin Addison. Addison had guided Celta Vigo to promotion but was cruelly dismissed by Celta president José Luis Rivadulla after taking a few days away from pre-season preparations to look after his sick mother. Addison would eventually get a taste of Primera action the following season when he arrived at Atlético Madrid with Ron Atkinson.
Kendall’s own Spanish adventure could have been very different. The Barcelona board were unabashed admirers of the man who had guided Everton to the top of the English game and to European silverware. When Venables looked set to leave Barcelona at the end of the 1985/86 season, it was Kendall who they turned to as his replacement. A provisional contract was signed but Venables chose to continue.
Nevertheless, a seed had been sown and with the ban on English clubs in Europe depriving Everton of their place in the European Cup, Kendall was certain he would take an opportunity abroad soon.
The chance arose just as Everton were clinching their second title in three years. Athletic sent a delegation to Liverpool and found Kendall more than ready to listen. Far from being deterred by the Basque-only selection code that Athletic firmly outlined, Kendall saw it as an opportunity to become a training ground manager once again.
As a keen cricket fan, Kendall also understood the policy in the context of an example from that sport. At that time, Yorkshire Cricket Club were still five years away from breaking with their own equivalent of the rule with the signing of a 19-year-old Sachin Tendulkar.
Kendall certainly got his wish to spend more time at the training ground. Having decided against uprooting his family, he was wary of being closeted away in a city centre hotel. The club’s vast training facilities featured some spartan accommodation, principally designed for players to rest between pre-season training sessions. Kendall struck an agreement with the family that ran the block to rent a room and so woke up each morning to the views of the rolling hills around Lezama and the shortest of strolls to training.
Kendall spent his spare time at the complex engrossing himself in the history of the club. He was delighted to discover its connections to his native north-east. He was further intrigued by the succession of Englishmen that had managed the club during its early years including the legendary, bowler-hatted figure of Fred Pentland.
But it was tales of the title-winning homecomings of 1983 and 1984 through the city, along the Nervión on the club’s own barge — La Gabarra — that made Kendall eager to bring success. “I was shown a video of it and it was unbelievable. I wanted some of that.”
That desire made Athletic’s early elimination in the Copa del Rey a disappointment but Kendall’s first season was nevertheless a success. After a strong run of results around the turn of the year, Athletic finished fourth. Qualification for the UEFA Cup gave Kendall back those European nights he so craved.
While other teams celebrate winning titles by going on a open-top bus ride through the city. Athletic Club historically have done it by going on a open-top boat ride through the city. On La Gabarra. pic.twitter.com/Zy7cdenEZi
There was much to toast during the long Basque lunches that Kendall became fond of. Though his living arrangements were of the budget variety, the weekly board meetings that rotated around the city’s many fine restaurants afforded him some luxury. “Do you like the house red, Howard?” was the question asked with a wink as the best wine in the establishment arrived in a humble jug — just in case any eagle-eyed fans objected to the board’s expenditure on Gran Reserva.
Kendall’s second season was to prove a more challenging proposition. Barcelona, who had finished below both Real Sociedad and Athletic, raided la Real signing José Mari Bakero, Txiki Begiristain and Luis López Rekarte. That swoop had the dual effect of weakening la Real while taking away transfer targets from Athletic. Kendall could not help but admire their ruthlessness.
There was another dispiriting cup exit and the UEFA Cup campaign quickly became complicated when they were drawn against the might of Juventus in the second round. Athletic started the first leg nervously in Turin and were torn to shreds by Michael Laudrup and Alessandro Altobelli in a 5-1 defeat. Despite a second leg victory which briefly threatened to panic Juventus, Athletic were eliminated.
With a seventh-place finish the season was by no means a disaster. Indeed, with Kendall courted continuously by other clubs, Athletic happily offered a contract extension for a third season.
Despite a solid start to that season, November brought a brutal stretch of games culminating in a 4-0 defeat to Real Madrid’s Quinta del Buitre in the Santiago Bernabéu. At a tense post-match press conference, Kendall struggled with the tide of questions coming his way and unwittingly walked out before the end, causing a minor diplomatic incident.
That night, Kendall had dinner with his wife, Cynthia, and some friends who had flown over for the game. He confided in them that he felt his time in Spain was up.
With the board midway through a re-election campaign, they too were keen to make a change. Kendall’s departure was amicably agreed at the regular Tuesday board meeting after which he and president Pedro Aurtenetxe held a press conference to announce the news.
His send-off was befitting of the mutual appreciation that had grown between Kendall and the club. The board hired Kendall’s favourite restaurant for a farewell party and even managed to find a singer that could play a few Roy Orbison numbers — Kendall was a huge fan. Kendall stayed on for Athletic’s next game and was given a standing ovation as he took his seat for the 2-0 win against Real Zaragoza at San Mamés.
That was a scene that was repeated many times over the years as Kendall frequently returned to visit old friends, catch up with the latest happenings at Lezama and take in a game at his beloved San Mamés. He was able to glimpse the future of the club as he visited the new San Mamés in 2014 for Athletic’s 3-0 victory over Malaga just over a year before his death.
Whilst Kendall always treasured the experience of managing Athletic over 100 times, he always regretted not being able to bring a trophy to the city — “I never did get my boat-trip down the river.”
Acknowledgements
Both of Howard Kendall’s autobiographies provided information and quotes for this article.
Leyland Video Club, close to the intersection of Yerbal and Avenida Boyacá in the Buenos Aires barrio of Flores was a fairly typical neighbourhood video store. Members would pop in, browse the rows of latest releases and take their choice to the counter. A chunky VHS tape was snapped into a generic branded case, the customer paid and went home to enjoy their selection.
Christian Bragarnik, who worked at the store, noticed that Leyland did well with the latest blockbusters — Ocean’s Eleven, Hannibal and Jurassic Park III flew off the shelves. Older and less mainstream titles weren’t so popular which left Bragarnik with hundreds of redundant VHS tapes and a lot of time on his hands. With some basic editing skills, he began making compilations of football matches and player highlight reels, taping over old cassettes.
When video club member and Talleres winger Marian Monnroy mentioned one day that he was looking for a new club, Bragarnik put together a promotional tape. Ingeniously, he asked another Leyland member, Eduardo Fuentes, an ex-professional who had played in Mexico to circulate the video amongst his Mexican contacts.
Monrroy was signed by Mexican club Irapuato for an impressive fee of $400,000. More significantly, the move set in motion a chain of events that catapulted Bragarnik to the top table of Argentine football. Nearly twenty years later, Bragarnik is regarded as one of the most powerful figures in the Argentine game looking after the interests of over 100 players and several high profile coaches.
That influence now even extends to Spain’s top flight. In December of last year, Bragarnik took a 58% stake in Segunda side Elche. By July that stake had increased to 93%. A month later, at the very end of one of the most bizarre and chaotic Segunda seasons on record, Pere Milla’s winner sent Elche to Primera.
The clerk from the video store in suburban Buenos Aires was now a football club owner in one of the world’s biggest leagues. His journey there saw him encounter a cast of characters that wouldn’t have been out of place on some of the movie posters on the walls of the Leyland Video Club.
Player representation was undoubtedly more of a natural fit for Bragarnik than collecting late fees at Leyland Video Club. He’d graduated in law from the University of Flores and had played to a decent standard at fifth level Yupanqui. In the final game of the 1999 Primera D Apertura, Yupanqui beat Atlas 7-2 to drag themselves off the bottom of the table. Bragarnik played up front that day but couldn’t get on the scoresheet. In fact, he hadn’t netted all season. He figured that if he couldn’t score when his team hit seven, it was probably time to hang up his boots.
The Monrroy deal in 2001 proved to be a revelation and drew admirers from all sides. Irapuato’s parent club, Querétaro brought Bragarnik to Mexico as an adviser and he was soon made president of the ambitious football operation. The burgeoning enterprise came to an abrupt halt, though, when it was revealed that Querétaro’s ultimate source of funding was Tirso Martínez Sanchez – an associate of drug baron Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán. At Guzmán’s 2019 trial in New York, Martinez Sanchez – nicknamed ‘El Futbolista’ – testified that he’d helped smuggle 30 to 50 tonnes of cocaine into the United States between 2000 and 2003 on Guzmán’s behalf.
Bragarnik returned home to Argentina, working with second division clubs and players. His work soon saw him fall in with Julito Grondona, son of Julio Grondona who was the president of the Argentine Football Association for some 35 years until he died in 2014. Grondona senior was a Godfather-like figure in both Argentine and South American football. He even rose to become Sepp Blatter’s right-hand man as vice-president of FIFA. Indeed his legacy is so storied that a recently released eight-part Amazon Prime drama, El Presidente, features Grondona as the primary narrative device.
Bragarnik’s work with the Grondonas’ beloved Arsenal de Sarandí led him back to Mexico once more. He travelled north to watch Arsenal’s impressive 3-1 victory over Guadalajara in the 2007 Copa Sudamericana. At the game, Bragarnik was introduced to Jorge Alberto Hank, president of the newly established Club Tijuana.
Bragarnik was recruited as an advisor to the ambitious club, who would be guided to an Apertura title in 2012 by future Celta Vigo manager Antonio Mohamed. Mohamed being one of several Argentine coaches from Bragarnik’s stable to have taken charge of los Xolos.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Tijuana if there wasn’t a colourful tale to tell. President Jorge Alberto Hank is one of the 19 children of Jorge Hank Rhon, owner of Grupo Caliente a vast sports betting and casino operation and the owners of Club Tijuana.
Hank Rhon is one of Mexico’s richest men and a former mayor of Tijuana. An almost mythical figure, Hank Rhon is essentially a composite of the characters you would find when browsing for a new series on Netflix. Widely known for his extravagance, he maintains a populist touch — as evidenced by the 150 or so local children per day treated to visits of his private zoo around the time of his election as mayor. The zoo reportedly houses over 20,000 exotic animals, five times that of the San Diego Zoo just a few miles across the border.
In 2011, soldiers raided the Hank Rhon compound, seizing 88 guns, 9,298 bullets, 70 ammunition clips and a gas grenade. But much to the dismay of anti-crime activists, after nine days in custody Hank Rhon was released with no charges
In a rare interview, given to La Nación in 2016, Bragarnik addressed the questions that had been raised due to his Mexican connections. “I am a lawyer in sports law and I advise the club and that pays me a salary. Given my previous situation in Mexico and what Tijuana signifies in Argentina, the public imagination runs wild with the theme of drug trafficking.”
Bragarnik has established himself as the main conduit between Mexican and Argentine football. Something that has proven to be immensely profitable. When Bragarnik brokered Darío Benedetto’s move from Club América to Boca Juniors in the summer of 2016, he chose to forego any commission on the deal. Instead, he negotiated a higher cut of any future transfer — a move that paid off handsomely when Benedetto was purchased by Marseille for €14 million three years later. As well as a handsome commission, the Benedetto deals drew Bragarnik into the inner circle of Boca president Daniel Angelici.
His connections have even provided Diego Maradona with one of the more tranquil and successful spells of his management career. Bragarnik was the driving force behind Maradona’s season at Dorados de Sinaloa —another Grupo Caliente club — where they narrowly missed out on promotion.
Back in Argentina, Bragarnik’s empire has continued to grow. His partnership with Defensa y Justicia helped the club rise from the second division to title contenders and Copa Libertadores qualification — and increased demand for his services. Bragarnik now partners several clubs either officially or less formally in a style similar to that of the Portuguese super agent Jorge Mendes.
Naturally, Bragarnik’s rapid and colourful rise to the top has drawn some suspicion. But Bragarnik remains phlegmatic in the face of rumours of his overreaching influence, as he explained to La Nación. “We live in a time when it is difficult to recognise that someone does well from hard work. It is always easier to say that you are doing well because you did something dirty or ugly. This happens a lot in Argentina.”
Answering allegations that Defensa y Justicia was being used to launder money he told Infobae: “That makes no sense. Defensa has one of the lowest budgets in the league. If we were bringing in players from River and Boca, then yes, maybe you could ask questions. The only money that gets laundered at Defensa is any cash that players forget to take out of their tracksuit pockets.”
The city of Elche is somewhat of a hidden gem. Particularly for the crowds that land at the nearby airport and head in the opposite direction for the coast. Arriving at Elx Parc station, a stroll through a vast and beautiful palm grove takes you into the Moorish old town. More palm trees decorate Plaça Glorieta, the main square lined with cafes and restaurants.
The peaceful ambience there belies the fact that Elche is a decent-sized, working city. It’s an important hub in the footwear industry and its two universities attract a student population of over 20,000. The entire Elche-Alicante metropolitan area is home to over 800,000 people. With Hercules of Alicante floundering in Segunda B, Elche potentially commands a vast catchment if they can consistently bring Primera football to the area.
Shutterstock/Lunamarina
That sort of potential was no doubt what Bragarnik was explaining to his good friend Angelici as they took in Elche’s 1-1 draw with Lugo at the beginning of last season. The pair viewed the game from the presidential palco of Elche’s 33,000 Estadio Martínez Valero — the 12th biggest in the country and a regular stopping point for the Spanish national team. Coincidentally or not, the stadium would play host to the Argentine national team a month later as Bragarnik prepared to take a controlling stake in the club that December.
With that stake increased now at 93% and with Elche’s surprise promotion to Primera, it will be intriguing to see how Bragarnik’s management of the club develops. Some eyebrows were raised when Pacheta, the coach that had led them to Primera from Segunda B, was replaced by the Argentine Jorge Almirón. Almirón comes highly rated, having taken Lanús to a league title and a Copa Libertadores and is one of the most trusted coaches Bragarnik represents.
Despite Almirón’s appointment, Bragarnik explained to Las Provincias that his ownership is not merely an exercise in filling the squad with Argentine players. “The idea is to bring the best players in Spain, within the constraints of the budget. There are Argentine players who could help, but you have to be careful. This is another type of football, the grass is shorter and watered. The game is faster and it takes time to adapt.”
For all of the conjecture and colourful history that surrounds Bragarnik, it was an answer that implied a fundamental understanding of the details of the game. Bragarnik seems a serious football man who eschews the spotlight – something which stands in stark contrast to some of the takeovers in Spanish football in recent history.
Whatever happens, it’s been a remarkable journey from a video store clerk in the barrio of Flores to the agent of Diego Maradona. Although, perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise that someone from Flores could work their way up to represent a deity. After all, in 2013, local priest Father Jorge Bergoglio was inaugurated as Pope Francis.
A young Julen Lopetegui alongside his father Aguerre II holding twin daughters Miriam and Idoia. Photo by Paco Mari licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
The beginning had been warm and emotional. The end, though expected, was cold and brutal.
Julen Lopetegui’s unveiling as Real Madrid manager had been a poignant affair. “If yesterday was the saddest day of my life, since the death of my mother,” he said, choking back tears, “then today is the happiest”. Madrid and their president, Florentino Perez, put their arm around him — figuratively and literally — welcoming Lopetegui ‘home’.
The statement that communicated his dismissal, just 137 days later, was stark. Haughtily outlining the quality of the playing squad in contrast to results on the field, before signing off with the most perfunctory of best wishes to Lopetegui and his staff.
The beginning had come barely 24 hours after one of the most dramatic chapters in Spanish football history. Livid with the handling of his appointment as the future Real Madrid manager, Luis Rubiales, the Federation’s president sacked Lopetegui as head coach of the Spanish national team on the eve of the 2018 World Cup.
The end came the day after a humiliating 5-1 defeat to a Messi-less Barcelona in Camp Nou sank Madrid to ninth in the table, seven points behind their greatest rivals.
Ten league games had separated the two.
For the general public, it was an episode consigned to football trivia forever. For Lopetegui it was crushing, having spent years climbing steadily to the summit of the management world only to come tumbling down. He had lost two of the most prestigious jobs in Spanish football in a matter of months.
In the midst of it all, there had been some support. On the morning of that fateful clásico, El Mundo carried an interview with an elderly, broad-shouldered gentleman in the town of Asteasu, a small town in the region of Gipuzkoa — around 30 minutes from San Sebastián.
“They lack a goal scorer. They haven’t brought in anybody. They have taken away 50 goals from him,” he argued, referring to a Portuguese forward who had left the club in the summer.
More personally, he vouched for the character of the embattled head coach. “He has always been strong.”
And if anyone knew anything about strength, it was Julen Lopetegui’s father.
Lopetegui was born and raised in that same Basque town, where he had somewhat of a unique upbringing — certainly by footballing standards.
His father, José Antonio, was widely known as Aguerre II* — a formidable, record-setting levantador de piedra, a stone lifter competing in a sport popular throughout the rural Basque country.
Julen Lopetegui’s father demonstrating his stone lifting technique and tending the grill at the family restaurant — a prophetic picture scrawled on the wall behind him. Photos by Paco Mari licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
Aguerre had modernised the traditional training methods used in the sport at the time, incorporating a more rounded level of general fitness. Around the end of the 1960s, he had become a star turn, once lifting a 100kg cylinder 22 times in one minute. So widespread was his reputation, that when General Franco decided it was a good time to ‘manufacture’ a heavyweight boxing champion, he and his coterie naturally looked to the Basque country — the home of the legendary Paulino Uzcudun — and to Aguerre.
Uzcudun had fought the toughest heavyweights of the 1920s and 1930s, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling included, and was himself a convert from a traditional Basque sport — that of wood-chopping. Predictably enough he carried the nickname of the Basque Woodchopper throughout a 69 fight career.
With his strength and enlightened training methods, Aguerre was identified as the ideal candidate to convert to the noble art and an intermediary, Miguel Almazor, was dispatched to persuade him of the fame and fortune that would await. Unconvinced, Aguerre refused the offer, preferring the life he had in Asteasu with wife Julita and young sons Joxean and Julen.
Almazor quickly moved on to his second option, another stone lifter, 20km away. José Manuel Ibar took up the opportunity and was swiftly converted from rural Basque sportsman into the pseudo superhero ‘Urtain’.
Urtain quickly rose to world level and for a few glorious years gave the regime the idol they craved — becoming the only ever Spaniard to appear on the cover of The Ring magazine. Ultimately, poor boxing fundamentals and a lack of genuine stamina caught up with him, and the losses arrived with frequency. Indebted and forgotten, Urtain died a tragic death before his 50th birthday.
Urtain on the cover of Ring Magazine, July 1970 (Photo by: The Ring Magazine via Getty Images)
Aguerre had chosen the quieter life in Asteasu. Although the quiet life was rather busy. The Lopetegui family has something of a talent for business and at that time had a hostel, a fleet of buses and a bustling local restaurant on the go. Aguerre somehow also found time to be the town’s mayor, and it was in that capacity he received a pair of journalists keen to chronicle a day in the life of the local legend. The famous photo that emerged from that report was that of Aguerre holding aloft his twin daughters Miriam and Idoia with a young Julen standing devotedly at his father’s side.
Despite his successes, Aguerre was at heart a frustrated pelotari, and in the Lopetegui household, the game of pelota was king — to the exclusion of football, a game in which Aguerre held scant interest. Julen would spend his mornings on the pelota court — practising the sport in which his father hoped he would play professionally — before slipping away in the afternoons to keep goal. While his brother, Joxean, became an influential personality in the pelota world (where he went by his father’s nickname), Julen was progressing through the youth ranks at Real Sociedad almost unnoticed by his own household.
It took until 1985 and an international youth tournament organised by la Real for Aguerre to first watch Julen play. Even then it was purely because the local Basque TV station, ETB, had chosen to broadcast the final. Julen put in an outstanding performance as la Real lost 0-2 to Real Madrid. Aguerre finally realised his son’s goalkeeping talent just as Real Madrid reached the same conclusion, whisking him away to the capital.
Lopetegui’s playing career was, in some ways, portentous of his coaching career — tantalisingly close to hitting the heights. A story of opportunities slipping away at crucial moments.
After a few seasons developing at Real Madrid in the B team, Castilla, he was unable to dislodge Paco Buyo in the first team. He moved on to Logroñes where three impressive seasons earned him a ticket to USA ’94 as the third-choice goalkeeper in the Spanish squad.
That recognition earned him another shot at the big time, and he signed with Barcelona to compete for the departing Andoni Zubizaretta’s number one shirt. His rival for the job, Carles Busquets (father of Sergio), auditioned smoothly with a clean sheet in Zaragoza in the first-leg of the Spanish Super Cup. Lopetegui, though, fluffed his lines disastrously. In the second-leg at Camp Nou he conceded five before being sent off late in the game as Barça barely clung on to what should have been a commanding advantage. After three seasons as a back-up in Barcelona, he finished his playing career with a spell at Rayo Vallecano.
Rayo would be his first foray into management in 2003. Still, it would be a few years before Lopetegui made eye-catching progress within the Spanish Federation coaching set up, winning the UEFA u19 and u21 Championships. When the historic Vicente Del Bosque era finally came to an end, the Federation turned to Lopetegui. He guided the senior side smoothly through World Cup qualification and twenty games unbeaten before the events of those fateful few days in Moscow and the subsequent misadventure in Madrid.
Just as he had done throughout his playing career, Lopetegui dusted himself down once more, and this season he was back. Sevilla’s sporting director, Monchi, had returned from his spell in Rome to a club in transition and had chosen his fellow ex-goalkeeper to partner him in the rebuilding process.
In November, as the final whistle of the Seville derby finally blew, Lopetegui exploded with relief at his first signature win. “He wore a wild look in his eyes and punched the air with the kind of force that dislocates shoulders.” wrote Sid Lowe for The Guardian. That victory on the home turf of their bitter rivals, Real Betis, put Sevilla fourth and just a point behind the league’s leaders.
That evening as Lopetegui prowled the technical area of the Benito Villamarin, slightly bemulleted and in a black, hooded tracksuit, there was more than a hint of the boxer about him. A look that wouldn’t be at all out of place in a montage of Rocky Balboa’s opponents in a fictional 1980s heavyweight division.
The son of the man who could have been a contender was back on his feet once more.
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*To avoid confusion after initial introduction, Julen Lopetegui’s father, José Antonio, is referred to as Aguerre — his widely known stone lifting nickname
An eventful weekend in Argentine football some 17 years ago. Fútbol es la leche was lucky enough to be in Buenos Aires to witness it all.
Saturday July 3rd 2003
He’d watched just over an hour of insipid, end-of-season football and Oscar Ruggeri had seen enough. His Independiente side were trailing 0-1 to San Lorenzo in what was ordinarily a big game – a clásico. But this mattered little. An abject Clausura campaign from both clubs had reduced this final match to a dead rubber. The home side were auditioning some reserves while San Lorenzo had rotated with eyes firmly fixed on an upcoming Recopa Sudamericana in sunny Los Angeles. Here on a chilly Saturday night in Buenos Aires, Ruggeri — no stranger to Argentine football lore as a World Cup winner himself — decided it was time to give the people a little bit of history.
It was fairly routine for Ruggeri to dispatch Pepe Sosa, the ballboy who stood near the home bench, to tell those warming up that it was time to come on. Although this time was a little different as Sosa bounded excitedly down the sideline to tell his friend that his time had come.
“He has a baby face although the legs not so much,” observed the TyC Sports commentary duo as Ruggeri gave some final instructions, his arm around the shoulders of the young substitute in his blue tracksuit top — oversized even by the fashions of the time. “Here then, is a historic event in Argentine football. A boy who has just turned 15 making his debut in the first division.”
15 years and 34 days to be precise. 322 days younger than the previous record — held by a certain Diego Armando Maradona. Wearing number 34 on his back and coltishly taking up a position just behind the central striker was Sergio ‘El Kun‘ Agüero.
Sosa watched on intently — eager for his friend to get involved. He soon was — making a swift interception but misplacing his pass and setting San Lorenzo on a counter attack that he had to thwart himself. Agüero’s first meaningful action in the professional ranks a crude but necessary hack in central midfield.
Soon though, he was making highlights for the right reasons. A lovely dummy-and-go exposed San Lorenzo on their right flank and when the ball was eventually worked back to Agüero — played to him in-behind an 18-year-old Pablo Zabaleta — he was able to send a decent cross to the far post.
Picture of 15 year old Sergio Agüero during his debut fighting for the ball against Pablo Zabaleta… pic.twitter.com/hpS5EqziRi
— Man City | Superbia (@SuperbiaProeIia) May 1, 2018
300km away in Rosario, a 16-year-old on his holidays was following the game on TV, his interest piqued by the mention of a boy a year younger than him making his professional bow. It would be a couple of years yet before the paths of Lionel Messi and Sergio Agüero would meet. They teamed up for the first time in Argentina’s 2005 FIFA u20 World Cup triumph — Zabaleta lifting the trophy after Messi and Agüero had combined for the decisive goal in the final.
Back in Buenos Aires, what remained of the Saturday night crowd gave half-hearted applause as Independiente completed their season with a defeat. Agüero’s debut had been a portent of the rebuilding that needed to be done and the squad’s most valuable asset — centre-back Gaby Milito — had said his goodbyes as he was substituted late in the game. The home fans replied with a generous ovation — partly a plea to stay but mainly an acceptance that their captain was almost certainly the next departure for Europe.
On the same night, just a few kilometres away, the team from the brewery were having a piss-up — sort of. Quilmes Atlético Club, sponsored by their namesakes and neighbours the Quilmes brewery, had secured an emotional and long-awaited promotion after a goalless second leg at Argentinos Juniors. In classic Argentine football scenes, the players — stripped to their underwear — celebrated in front of the 12,000 travelling supporters on a pitch carpeted in ticker tape. The start of the match had been held up while one poor soul with a leaf blower attempted to rediscover the grass.
“Champagne to celebrate?” “This is Quilmes Papá – beer for everyone”, chimed Diario Olé who dedicated their front cover and decidedly more Sunday edition column inches to Quilmes’ feat than their more illustrious counterparts who had played that Saturday night.
Front cover, Diario Olé, Sunday July 4th 2003
Sunday July 4th 2003
Whilst Quilmes were waking up with a headache, many in Buenos Aires were just getting ready to party. Indeed the central theme of that Sunday was who could party hardest and crow the loudest.
The previous weekend, Manuel Pellegrini’s River Plate had clinched the Clausura, having reeled in their eternal rivals, Boca Juniors, on the run-in with four straight wins. The result of their one remaining game, at home to Racing Club, was irrelevant. Nevertheless the Estadio Monumental had sold out with fans eager for the presentation and celebrations.
Boca had upped the ante in the intervening midweek — convincingly beating a Santos side that included the likes of Robinho and Diego Ribas over two legs to seal a fifth Copa Libertadores win. Returning from Brazil they announced their intentions to celebrate too — selling 45,000 tickets for a Sunday night soiree in La Bombonera. The fact that they had a fixture three hours away against Rosario Central at exactly the same time was regarded as mere trivia. The kids would go to Rosario; everyone else would be at the carnival. And it had better be bigger and brasher than whatever River had planned.
For all the festive atmosphere in the Monumental, the game between River and Racing started on a solemn note. Beneath the firework smoke and the vast scoreboard proclaiming ‘River, Campeon‘, the players paused at kick-off in silent protest against the level of violence in Argentine society. Ten minutes later, one of the victims of that violence, River’s centre-back and captain, Leonardo Astrada, advanced into an unfamiliar attacking position and blazed a shot high and wide. Turning promptly on his heel, he warmly shook the hand of the nearby referee, removed the captain’s armband and strode off the field in tears and into retirement. Embraced by his teammates, he kissed and held aloft the famous River colours he had defended for over a decade and a half. The T-shirt he wore beneath bore the picture of his father – Rubén, kidnapped eleven days previously, alongside the message “Papá we are waiting for you”.
Astrada left the stadium immediately, returning home to continue negotiating for the release of his father having urged his colleagues not to ease up on the celebrations on his part. After a distracted 1-3 defeat, his teammates granted Astrada his wish, celebrating extravagantly with music, wigs, pyrotechnics and some feats that would likely have given the club’s insurers a few weeks of sleepless nights.
Over the other side of town, Boca had turned La Bombonera into something that more resembled a U2 concert, with a gigantic screen hovering above a massive globe of a central stage. Various bands and DJs span through sets before the players were eventually introduced on stage one by one. Then as a group, they took that famous trophy on an obligatory lap of honour. Carlos Bianchi’s return as coach had led them once again to South America’s biggest prize, spearheaded by a 19-year-old Carlos Tevez who had been outstanding in both legs of the final.
Amid the revelry and mandatory baiting of River, it is unknown as to whether it dawned upon anyone at any stage to check in on how things were going in Rosario. The answer was very badly.
Central were taking full advantage of the shadow side that Boca had sent. Luciano Figueroa, in particular, had decided to fill his boots. An unprecedented five-goal haul propelling him to the top of the scoring charts and catching the attention of one particular Premier League club. Central’s 7-2 win a bizarre footnote in an odd weekend.
The Postscript
When the hangovers cleared and the ticker tape and toilet roll were finally all swept up, what would become of the protagonists of this most whimsical of weekends?
The boy from Rosario and the boy on the TV would play for their country 77 times together — dragging the Albiceleste so close to history but more often through muscle wearying disappointment. They would win Olympic gold together in Beijing in 2008 on one of their happier travels together.
The ballboy, Pepe Sosa, would travel the world too. A constant companion who would help Agüero settle first in Madrid and eventually in Manchester.
Agüero’s captain on that first night, Gaby Milito, would be announced three days later as Real Madrid’s second summer signing. The centre back agreed to a four-year contract to join David Beckham as a new addition to Carlos Queiroz’s squad of Galacticos. Madrid’s medical staff, though, voiced concerns over the health of Milito’s right knee and the transfer was abruptly terminated. Real Zaragoza, though, took a chance and ten months later Milito capped an excellent season with a dramatic Copa del Rey win over a Real Madrid fielding Raul Bravo at centre back. He would go on to play 174 games over four seasons in Zaragoza before Barcelona came calling.
Quilmes not only stayed in Primera but briefly thrived. Within two seasons El Cervecero (The Brewers) were mixing it with the likes of Colo-Colo, Universidad de Chile and São Paulo in the Copa Libertadores before the party ended and they sunk slowly back down the divisions.
Leonardo Astrada would get his father back. Rubén Astrada liberated, unharmed and in good health onto the streets of Buenos Aires 16 days after his son left the Monumental in tears and a total of 27 days held captive. Astrada would soon return to River for an 18-month spell as manager, succeeding Pellegrini in January 2004. Pellegrini apparently exasperated at the break up of his squad with the likes of Andrés D’Alessandro, Martin Demichelis and Matias Lequi having departed for Europe after the title celebrations.
Luciano Figueroa’s five goals against the superpower of South American football — albeit a Boca reserve team — tempted Birmingham City to splash out a £2.5m transfer fee for the striker. City boss Steve Bruce was enthusiastic about his new signing. “He’s someone I believe will be a terrific signing for us. He’s just broken into the full national side and, with players like Batistuta, Crespo and Lopez around, you’ve got to be pretty good to do that. In the last game of the season, he scored five against Boca Juniors, who were just pipped to the Argentine championship.”
Figueroa, though, saw just four minutes of Premier League action and the five-year contract was cancelled by mutual consent that December.
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Acknowledgements
Sergio Kun Aguero: Born to Rise by Daniel Frescó contains some of the details used above especially in the Foreword by Lionel Messi
