Who is the owner of Elche who has threatened the referees: “You will not leave here”

BarcelonaThe owner of Elche, the leader of the First Division with only 9 points – one win and six draws in 23 games – has lost his role. After the painful defeat in added time against Betis (2-3) this Friday, there were insults and threats to the refereeing quartet. The angry reaction of the owner of the illegal entity came after the Galician referee Javier Iglesias Villanueva sent off three Elche players – one of them on the bench – and whistled three penalties against them. The last maximum penalty came in the last minute of the clash and was the definitive 2-3 that condemned the Valencians to another defeat. While the club’s communication department was preparing a message of complaint on social networks, the owner of Elx went down to look for the members. “Please, we want to be treated with equality and respect. No more and no less than the rest. We are a historic and centenary club. It’s the least we deserve.” published the entity on Twitter, shortly after the Catalan goalkeeper Edgar Badia bit his tongue in the interview on television with rights after the match.

The serious accidents occurred in the dressing room tunnel and in the referees’ dressing room itself. This is recorded in the minutes of Iglesias Villanueva. “Once we enter the dressing room tunnel after the end of the game, the director of the sports area of ​​Elx CF, Sergio Martínez Mantécon – identified by the police – turns to my assistant referee in these terms: “You shameless, son of a bitch”, on repeated occasions, and had to be restrained by several members of the National Police. Likewise, he goes towards my assistant Pedro Schinocca – general manager of Elche’s operations – in the following terms: “I’m recording you son of a bitch”, while holding his mobile phone to his face. Similarly, already at the door of our locker room, he heads towards the refereeing team Christian Bragarnik – owner of the club – in the following terms: “You shall not leave here”.

An angry reaction, with insults and threats, which is already in the hands of the Competition Committee and which exposes them to a financial fine for their serious behavior. Especially, because of the threats from both Bragarnik and Schinocca, his right-hand man and son-in-law. The sporting situation experienced by the Alicante club – 13 points from salvation, which could be extended this day – has the club’s Argentine leaders in permanent tension, who have already changed coaches three times this year: Francisco, Jorge Almirón and, the current one, Pablo Machín. Bragarnik came to control the majority of Elx’s shares in December 2019, the season in which the team consummated promotion to Primera, a category in which it has managed to maintain the last two seasons. For the financial aspirations of the owner of the club it is crucial to keep the entity in the highest category of state football.

Who is the Argentinian owner of Elche?

But who is Christian Bragarnik? “People like to talk. They say I got rich with drug traffickers, but it’s not true. I came to Mexico to work in soccer, my passion. And it turned out that the club I was at had some partners who, apparently, had become rich with drug trafficking. And an unfair image of me was created,” he explained, about his meteoric rise in the world of football. An amateur footballer without much quality, Bragarnik was unknown to most Argentines, but in a few years he has built an empire that allows him to control more than 100 players – some of whom have been through Elche -, 20 coaches and have being the last representative of Diego Armando Maradona.

When he retired from football, he took out his law degree by combining his studies with a thousand jobs, until in 2001 he met the footballer Mariano Monroy. Bragarink offered to make a video of his best plays in a time when not everyone had access to footage of matches. And that VHS served to close the signing of Monroy by Irapuato, a Mexican Primera team. The leaders of Irapuato sensed that Bragarnik had ideas and ambition. And in six months he was Querétaro’s sporting director. Bragarnik brought a lot of Argentine players and coaches to Mexico for two seasons, and even held the position of president of Querétaro, until in 2002 these two clubs were sent to Segona after an investigation showed that they were controlled by companies linked to drug trafficker Tirso Martínez Sánchez.

Bragarnik, however, had taken advantage of that adventure to make many contacts in Mexican clubs. In 2011 he returned to Argentina to found the soccer representation company Score Fútbol, ​​with which he currently controls more than 100 players. “He is the most powerful person in Argentine football, right now. He has tentacles in many clubs. One of the new things he has brought is that he is the representative of many technicians at the same time. He moves them from one club to another.” explains journalist Roberto Parrottino. When Parrottino interviewed him in his office in Buenos Aires, Bragarnik greeted him under a large photo of Al Pacino playing gangster Tony Montana in the film Scarface. Bragarnik had two bullets on the table and joked that after going through Mexico he liked to play with what people said about him.