The former Spanish striker revolutionizes the city after taking over a Preferred Regional club, with just 200 members, and a budget of 100,000 euros
Racing Club de Ftbol Benidorm has come up with a ‘sheikh’ from Langreo. “He has won the lottery for us,” says Jos Santiago Lpez gherkin, that when he is not acting as president he runs a frozen food company. Not long ago the mayor called him into his office. Toni Prez, of the PP, he had just received a visit from the emissaries of Guaje Villa. They wanted to change their lives. And not because the top scorer in the history of Spain had regretted his retirement three years ago, and he wanted to score goals again in the Regional Preference. He wanted to buy the club.
He Guillermo Amor Municipal Stadium has capacity for 9.000 personas, and this Sunday some 200, almost as many as members, came to see how Racing was escaping promotion to the Third Division after giving up a discount tie against Crevillente. Next to gherkinin the box of authorities, the new president was inaugurated, Jordi Bruixola, former communication director of Valencia, where he met Guaje, later Zaragona, and later general manager of Castelln. “We took it from nothing and in two years we took it to Preferred, now we need people who know more than us,” he sums up. gherkin. And the first thing to know, apparently, is that “football neither wants nor understands rushing,” says Bruixola.
The career of the new president could not be more particular. He starts in the Champions League with Valencia, continues in the Second Division with Zaragoza, then in the First Federation with Castelln, and now continues in the Preferred Division, his most ambitious project, “because it is a blank sheet.” Or even less. The club has a budget of 100.000 eurosand its star is a almost 40-year-old English teacher who is called Gatoand who plays as a midfielder for 500 euros a month.
Guillermo Amor continues to be the greatest football pride of a club founded in the 1960s, and refounded in 2017, although he only played until the Infantiles, before Bara took him away. Pepper Mel y Bordals They also started here as footballers, and the last one even as a coach. His greatest historical achievement thus far has been an unsuccessful promotion of promotion to Second Division against Rayo Vallecano in the 2007/08 season.
Hence, David Villa points to a historical fact. gherkin He has already gone to eat a couple of times with the Asturian so that he could tell him about his project, and “there was a feeling”, he points out: “And that I am from Real Madrid“. Nor was he the first to sit at the table with the intention of staying with Benidorm, although no sheikh, American billionaire, investment fund or former footballer of Villa’s level. The former from Sporting de Gijn, Valencia, Bara and Atlético , among others, he took to lunch “photos in which he was seen as a child with his family in some apartments in Benidorm”, where apparently he had spent the summer five years in a row, he says gherkin.
Nor was it the first time that Villa had taken over a Club. During his time in New York, founded a team in the borough of Queensthrough his company DV7, which he created together with another ex of Valencia, his former marketing director Victor Oate. Hence, the logical thing was to look for a team within the Community, and from Benidorm they looked at “the potential of their brand”, says Pepillo. The objective? For the moment “grow without haste”, insists Bruixola, and make a hobby, including the thousands of british who reside in or visit the city every year, and sit with their pints on pub terraces to watch their club play. “Maybe we’ll get Benidorm to be his second team,” says the new president.
Until now the main task of DV7 Group was the creation of football academies not only in Spain, but also in United States and Japanwhere the Guaje played part of his career, as well as in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
Although everything is already signed, the agreement will not be official until this Tuesday, with an act that will be held on the 46th floor of the Intempo skyscraper, the tallest residential building in Spain, which means that despite the prudence of its new owners It is hard to believe that Benidorm does not aim high.
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