Eibar the Brave

Euan McTear

Description

Sociedad Deportiva Eibar is the Basque side from a passionate football town one-third the size of the Camp Nou. Eibar the Brave tells the amazing Cinderella story of La Liga's smallest club, which has seen Barcelona and Real Madrid playing top-tier football at Ipurua, the 5000-capacity stadium that Eibar calls home. Promotion-party pitch invasions are not uncommon; but the night of 25 May 2014 saw a promotion with a difference, involving a wildly unorthodox club. There weren't enough fans to cover the pitch. The celebration was 45 minutes after the final whistle. The team was wearing their away kit despite having played at home. And Eibar could still potentially be relegated! Having followed Eibar and witnessed the madness first-hand, Euan McTear documents the club's first season in La Liga and discusses all the pieces put into place over the years to make 2014/15 a season like no other.

Sujets

• Spain
• Spain (groupe)

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 22 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785311031
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2015
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Euan McTear, 2015
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978-1-78531-036-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78531-103-1
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
1. A Fairytale Season: Act 1
2. Modelo
3. A Fairytale Season: Act 2
4. Ipurua
5. A Fairytale Season: Act 3
6. Ascenso
7. A Fairytale Season: Act 4
8. nimo
9. A Fairytale Season: Act 5
10. Justicia
Acknowledgements
I am extremely thankful for the input and advice of so many people for this, my first book.
I d like to thank my girlfriend Rebecca and parents David and Petrina for allowing me to lock myself away from real life for so long to focus on this work, while also dragging me away from my desk often enough to keep me sane.
All of the staff I have come across at SD Eibar for their help, particularly president lex Aranz bal, I aki Duque and Patricia Rodriguez Barrios. I d also like to thank Colin at the press office of Derby County for allowing me to speak with their new signing Ra l Albentosa.
Those who took the time to speak to me about Eibar, in alphabetical order: Ra l Albentosa, Guillem Balague, Andr s Basurto, Henry Boguslavsky, Chris Clements, Joseba Combarro, Ver nica D ez, Jose Enrique, Unai Eraso, Alba Garin-Muga, Sid Lowe, Mikel Mandinabeita, Javier Ortiz de Lazcano, Jason Pettigrove, Paul Reidy and John Sager.
Revista L bero, Diario Vasco and El Correo for granting me the rights to some of their exclusive interviews to be featured in this work.
F lix Morquecho, who has been photographing Eibar since 1999 and whose excellent and iconic images can be found in the centre of this book.
Paul and Jane at Pitch Publishing for giving me the chance to write this remarkable story, Dan Tester for editing, and also to Duncan Olner who used F lix s photos to design the beautiful cover.
And finally, I d like to thank SD Eibar, their players and coaching staff for providing me with a wonderful story to write about. No work of fiction could have come up with a tale so interesting, which is a testament to the monumental achievement of this plucky underdog.
Living On A Roller Coaster
A Foreword by Eibar President lex Aranz bal
The past 16 months - from February 2014 to July 2015 - have been for me, as president of Sociedad Deportiva Eibar, a vertiginous experience; it has been a continuous roller coaster of valleys and peaks, of climbs and falls.
In February 2014, when we found ourselves in prime position to try to achieve the greatest sporting success in the history of our club - a first promotion to the Primera division - our foundations were shaken by a legal requirement from the sport s ministry which was as absurd as it was unfair.
Despite being a healthy club with no debts and zero deficit, the country s sports law obliged us to undertake a raising of our social capital by almost 2million and we had to do so in a period of six months. Failing to achieve the target would not only have meant forfeiting the possible promotion to the Primera , but would have ended up with the club being relegated to the Segunda B.
After passing from amazement to incredulity and from incredulity to fear, we got to work and, conscious that we would not be able to achieve the objective on our own, we launched an international marketing campaign that quickly went viral and which allowed us to achieve success in the middle of July, before the deadline.
The end result was that we had a massive group of shareholders, with more than 10,000 shareholders from more than 70 countries and from all corners of the world.
To reach that moment, the team had secured a spectacular sporting success which was practically unheard of in the history of Spanish football; they won two consecutive promotions to reach the very top at meteoric speed, with a stadium capacity of hardly 5,000 and from a town of fewer than 28,000 residents.
The beginning of our Primera division debut was spectacular, with an excellent first round of fixtures leaving us in eighth position in the league standings and as the best Basque team. The dream was not ending.
However, nothing has ever been easy in the town of Eibar. The results started to turn against us, the team s form collapsed and, after picking up just eight points in the second half of the season and after a cruel final day in which the team fell from heaven to hell in hardly ten minutes, Eibar was relegated to the Segunda division.
We still hadn t fully recovered from the tremendous disappointment when a window of hope was opened to us because of the disastrous financial situation of Elche, a club with debts on all fronts and at serious risk of administrative relegation because of its repeated non-payments to Hacienda , the Spanish taxman, and to its players.
At the beginning of June, the Spanish Football League relegated Elche and just over a month later the Court of Sporting Discipline confirmed this ruling, one which returned Eibar to the Primera . The final ruling lay in the hands of the ordinary courts, to which Elche then turned in an attempt to save their position in the top division.
In reality, all of this, that which has occurred in the last year and a half, is a summary of the whole history of Eibar. It is a history full of great successes and deep disappointments and one which is, above all, characterised by the same spirit of resilience with which the city of Eibar was able to literally rise from its ashes after lying devastated at the time of the Spanish Civil War following a long and bloody siege.
Ten years have already passed since I became a director at Eibar, six of them as president. They have probably been the most exciting and enriching years of my life and they have helped me to understand the significance of a quote from the Nobel Prize in Literature winner Albert Camus which seemed to me a great exaggeration when I heard it for the first time: Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football.
Eibar is a football club, but above all it is an expression of the identity of a town. For that reason, as president I have tried to ensure that the football becomes more than just football and that it permeates all of society, at the same time spreading all of the positive values that this noble sport is capable of passing on.
I firmly believe that football is more than just football and I strive each day to instil a fairer and more democratic management model in which all, even the very smallest, have a place and are respected.
Each little step in this journey is a great triumph for everyone.
lex Aranz bal,
Eibar,
July 2015
Introduction
I first came across Sociedad Deportiva Eibar in Tom Shields s sports diary in The Glasgow Herald in 2005. I was just a teenager at the time and I m sure I was only attracted to the piece because of the pictures, but the links between Eibar and Scotland were immediately laid out and over the next decade - particularly as my interest in Spanish football grew with a move to Barcelona - I took pleasure in fleeting glimpses of lower league Spanish football scores whenever Eibar s name popped up in the wins column.
Then, in 2014, Eibar s story escalated and I began to seriously investigate this amazing football club.
This book tells Eibar s fairytale, a story for football s frog princes, beanstalk scalers and sleeping beauties. It is a Cinderella story in which our protagonist is the ugly sister of Spanish football and was never supposed to go to the La Liga ball. That was indeed the case until a footballing miracle elevated this modest and tiny club to the heights of La Liga in 2014. In the club s very own words: To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the club by playing in stadiums like the Camp Nou, Bernab u or San Mam s was not even in our wildest dreams.
It is a tale that Hollywood script writers would discard for being too far-fetched. Thankfully, however, the footballing gods have allowed Spanish football s most extraordinary story to be told; a story that is greater than a Messi dribble, greater than la d cima and greater than that night in Soccer City.
This is no Middle East oil or American sugar daddy-backed fairytale. The scene of the heroics is Ipurua, a stadium which does not carry the name of any airline or energy drink. The closest the fans get to the players is not a life-size cardboard cutout in the club megastore; rather the players meet with and know the fans by name.
Eibar s story may not generate the good traffic that some modern journalists strive for and that a story about Neymar s new tattoo or Ronaldo s romances might. However, this is a story actually worth telling.
In my research for this book, my understanding of Eibar s history and values has increased infinityfold from that Sunday afternoon reading Tom Shields s sports diary. I aim to share that insight with you through the following series of tales.
1
A Fairytale Season: Act 1
We have a lot of respect for the game and for Eibar. It s not easy to play on this pitch.
Carlo Ancelotti
Saturday, 22nd November 2014. Ipurua Stadium, Eibar.
It is 133 days since Toni Kroos cradled the World Cup on the confetti-laden pitch of the Maracan in Rio de Janeiro, in front