Three Kings in the transfer market

I admit that the Three Kings party is the one I like the most of the saturated Christmases.

The magic, the illusion, the lack of batteries on the morning of January 6 is something that fills me with joy, it gives me that smile that lasts at least 24 hours.

And I also like, I admit, planning the gifts, thinking about them and seeing if they have been successful in the morning or, on the contrary, you have to look for a substitute for some wrong color, some misfit size, some original idea that has ended by looking ridiculous once the wrapping paper has been stripped.

As you may also know, there have been Kings' Eves that have been darker, but the Three Wise Men have always done their job, always effective, always attentive to what is really important in this life.

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All articles by Andoni Zubizarreta

Sometimes, sometimes, when I was working as a sports director, I thought that my work was similar to that of the Magi from the East and I had to plan what, how, when and by how much that piece that completed the soccer puzzle I was working with could come out. And I liked to work with the stealth of the good creator of the magic of the morning of Kings who seems to obtain that exact piece after much exploring, asking for sizes, tastes or colors, so that, once all the information is gathered, get down to work to find, locate, negotiate and put in the best packaging the coveted piece, the desired objective, sometimes with a surprise point, sometimes confirming the expected, sometimes right, sometimes not so much.

Those were times of planning in privacy, of working, as fashion works, with advanced seasons. I remember a coach to whom at the time of closing his hiring I confessed that I was young, inexperienced, daring and, perhaps, too sincere, who at that very moment began to work on finding him a replacement in case things did not go well, or it was going too well and flying away from our club. His response was a word that I cannot reproduce here but from which I learned that such attacks of sincerity could backfire.

There was a time when we worked with the profiles of the players taking into account the club profile we were in and, decisively, the idea of ​​the game that the coach held and to which, necessarily, the newcomer had to adapt.

Mandatory?

Well, yes, to a greater extent but without ever forgetting that we also had to challenge ourselves and add letters to our dictionary of solutions.

And I think about all this when I see these new markets in which the economic opportunity, the end of the contract, the lowest clause, the most savvy or less scrupulous agent decides.

In these markets where we receive a soccer microeconomics course every day in which a few days they tell us that A and another that B ... and that all the solutions are valid, come on, as in our daily lives.

It would seem that the objective is that everything economic fits so that later we ask the coach to fit all the pieces in a puzzle of which we no longer know if it represents a landscape or a locomotive. Come on, let him take out 11 guys to play with the same shirt (well, 10 and the rare one from the goalkeeper) because he will have another coach with the same difficulties in front of him, let the game be played whatever the TVs pay for that and then, In what remains until the imminent next game, you ramble, disqualify yourself, praise yourself, value yourself, criticize yourself and create enough noise to get to the next opening whistle, the next game, the next we do not know which competition for that the Ferris wheel keep turning.

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