BarcelonaMarcos Alonso Peña has died at the age of 63. The former Barça player and father of the current Blaugrana left back has lost his life due to cancer. He played five seasons at Camp Nou, between 1982 and 1987. He also competed in two stages at Atlético de Madrid, at Racing de Santander, the club where he was trained, and at Logronyès. Alonso shared a team with Diego Armando Maradona and Bernd Schuster, among others. The former Cantabrian footballer scored his most important goal as a Barcelona player in the 1983 Copa del Rey final against Real Madrid.
Alonso was part of a line of footballers who had defended the colors of historically opposing clubs. His father, Marcos Alonso Imaz, known as Withered, was a legend of Real Madrid, where he played ten years in white and won five European Cups. The Alonsos came from Santander, where Marcos Alonso Peña was born. And it was precisely at Racing de Santander where he trained as a player and made his debut in Primera in 1977, playing as a winger. In 1979, Atlético de Madrid signed him, and just as his father had done in 1954, he moved from Cantabria to Madrid. In his case, however, to defend the colors of Atlético. The Cantabrian was already an international in lower categories with Spain and had played in the 1979 World Youth Championship in Japan and the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In 1981 he would get the great opportunity to make his debut with the absolute selection in a match where Spain defeated for the first time the English in the United Kingdom. He was capped 22 times and took part in the famous 12-1 thrashing of Malta.
Marcos Alonso would play three years at the club mattress maker. In 1982, Josep Lluís Nuñez’s Barça, which wanted to make a good team to break the dominance of the Basque clubs, recruited him. With Barça he played five seasons and won the League with Terry Venables on the bench in 1985, the 1983 Copa del Rey against Real Madrid in Zaragoza, in which he scored one of the goals, a Spanish Super Cup and two times the League Cup, a tournament that no longer exists. Romareda’s goal would be one of the most celebrated by Barcelona fans during the 80s, with Bernd Schuster’s famous celebration making sausage for the white fans. “It was a very tough, very violent final. Both teams committed very tough fouls, especially Madrid. The cross was very good and I jumped with my heart,” he would remember.
From those years, he would always remember how lucky he was to have played alongside Maradona. “The best player I’ve ever seen. Every practice, every game, he was doing amazing things. But he had hepatitis and an injury, he was unlucky. But he was a great person. The first day he came into the dressing room, he started to do touches with socks, as if they were a ball. During one birthday, an American friend brought him an oval ball and he also knew how to do touches with it,” he said. The Argentine, who died two years ago, also spoke well of Marcos, of whom he said “he was all speed and talent, a crack”. At Barça, the Cantabrian was dubbed as the pigeon. Then the Barça players used to have lunch at Can Fusté, next to the stadium, where they used to play cards who paid. And Marcos almost always won. On the other hand, the one who used to lose the games was the Asturian Enrique Morán, who had arrived from Betis. The waiters at the restaurant would have named Morán as the Squab, but things in life, Alonso stuck with the word. In Barcelona, by the way, he would meet his future wife, Mercedes Zabala. Mercedes was the granddaughter of Luis Zabala, a former Basque football player for Athletic Bilbao who, after the Civil War, had played for Barça and stayed to live in Catalonia. If the Alonsos were already a football family, with this marriage Marcos added even more passion for football. Thus, Marcos Alonso Mendoza, the current Barça player, can say that both his great-grandfather and his father defended the colors of Barça.
In 1987, Marcos Alonso returned to Atlético, but was injured and his career was never the same. He would spend his last years as a player first at Logronyès and finally at his Racing de Santander, with whom he would rise from Segona B to Segona. Once retired, he started his career as a technician. He did the training for the coaching course at the Sant Agustí College in Madrid and was quickly in the Atlético de Madrid quarry. And just then Jesús Gil y Gil kicked out the Colombian coach On it Maturana, opening the door for him to be Jorge D’Alessandro’s assistant. Then he tried it alone with some success in teams like Rayo Vallecano, Racing de Santander, Sevilla, Valladolid, Granada or Zaragoza. At Sevilla he promoted it to Primera. And he would also be the one chosen to try to pull Altétic de Madrid out of the hole when they went down, but they kicked him out. In recent years he had been a television commentator and had worked as a manager at the sportswear brand Puma.