Wild tales of football: "I didn't sign him because he was a fagot"

Jesús Gil, president of Atlético de Madrid (1987-2003): “I was going to sign an important player and I didn't because I found out he was a fagot.

I've been frozen.

I don't put that one in the locker room.

They just needed to say that Gil has one of these there. "

The journalist Ana Cristina Navarro, in 1995, to Ramón Mendoza, president of Real Madrid between 1985 and 1995.

—Would it have bothered or disturbed you to have a homosexual son?

-Not at all.

-And a daughter?

"Lesbian, then."

Not at all.

The inclinations, tendencies, deviations or psychic problems are the product of a person and there is nothing to do there.

Almost.

These are statements collected in the documentary series

(Movistar), which has currently interviewed some of the most histrionic, controversial or charismatic football club presidents of the 1990s and early 2000s: Manuel Ruiz de Lopera at Betis (1996-2006), who paid players extras in a kind of

deluxe;

José María del Nido in Sevilla (2002-2013), sentenced to seven years in prison for embezzling money from the Marbella City Council;

Augusto César Lendoiro at Deportivo (1988-2014), who invented the Superdépor and left a superdebt;

Joan Gaspart in Barcelona (2000-2003), who every night since he was a child kissed a photo of the Virgin of Montserrat and another of Barça (until his wife complained) and José María Caneda in Compostela (1988-2003), is That is to say, half of the most famous fight in Spanish football - the other is Gil -, although the worst part was taken by his manager, José González Fidalgo.

The exercise proposed by the series is to look at that time with today's eyes and see that it was not only another football, it was another country, another language, other heads.

Going back to the nineties is traveling to a time when women could not enter the boxes of certain stadiums: "Why this racism that women do not occupy the same space as men?" Caneda asks.

And Del Nido says: “In the 19th century, women did not vote.

Did you have to kill them all?

Cut their throats?

Were they all murderous machos?

We are going to end up talking about politics, not football, but well...”.

It is traveling to the moment when the teams, after multiple puffs and debts, became sports companies —Lopera: “I need 800 million net in 25 minutes or Betis can die”—;

?

And yet, the protagonists of that time, who admit that that —presidents in jail, heels on their thighs…— was, indeed, a bit wild, reveal a certain nostalgia.

Says Mijatovic: "I would not change my football and my generation for any later."

But there is something disturbing, contagious, in that homesickness for soccer before.

Kind of a guilty pleasure.

No one misses, obviously, that unbridled corruption, machismo and homophobia, but part of the show that these crazy presidents caused in front of the bland sheikhs —when not worse— that now control some clubs.

On good days, when they weren't saying outrageous things, a man like Lopera could say that he convinced a fan who wanted to enter the stadium with his father's ashes in a jar of glass peaches (forbidden) to move it to “a container of Puleva”.

"And the boy looks at me every day when Betis scores a goal and hugs his father," he explains in an interview millions of years ago.

It is also easier to laugh at those wild stories when sport —it is true that in another discipline, tennis— has just produced a beautiful, modern image, and more powerful than a thousand campaigns against machismo, homophobia and stereotypes: the of Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer crying, holding hands, for the withdrawal of the Swiss.

Jesús Gil's head would have exploded.

Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal, very emotional, at the Swiss tennis player's farewell on September 23 in London.

She Ling

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