The words of Quico Catalan once the descent was completed at the Santiago Bernabéu they conveyed many things and none that is in their plans to leave. It was he who said in January that he would make his position available, although he did so without detailing how he would do it. There is no need for him to do it now. Quico has to continue because whoever entered comes out of the mud, as he did in 2017, and from today begin to “Analyze, learn, correct and make a project to ascend”.
The diagnosis of what happened this course, with the body of the deceased still present, is simple to do: a template confection in which the successes blinded, perspective was lost and in which it was not wanted to see that It took more than just tweaks like Soldier or Mustafi. All this in a locker room with internal ruptures due to outdated renovations, in a management in which he delegated less and less, and the icing on the cake were outdated decisions on the bench: one due to haste, the dismissal of Paco López, which was done at the wrong time and in the wrong way, and in another for tenderness, the bet on Javier Pereira, seven games that undermined the morale of Granota. Pereira’s election and failure led to what began as a crisis of results, circumstantial, will take ahead the sports management, adding later the departure of the club of people close to the president, transforming the crisis into a structural one, to the point that Quico had to leave to say what “in June I will make my position available” to at least try to avoid six months of social tension. Those were times of chants against the president in games and of a hostile reception for the team after being thrashed at La Cerámica.
In that elapsed time of truce, Quico Catalán laid the first stone of the road towards the ascent and made the decision to incorporate Felipe Miñambres, who arrived with Alessio Lisci already as coach. These months have served Miñambres to take the pulse from within and also to help Lisci become a better coach of what already was, is and will be. Miñambres has had no problem recognizing that she has gone down to the locker room to add with her advice and, cause, effect or chance, a team that ventured who would arrive in March being mathematically Second He has arrived with the calculator in hand until the penultimate day.
Miñambres will now have to value the 22 points added by Lisci in his 20 games as coach of the first team and, most complicated of all, deciding if he is the right one to lead the return to the First Division. And that decision should not be delayed in time beyond the day after the last day, because Lisci has earned respect and, everything is said, Miñambres has been with him, because he said when he arrived that in his plans There was no change of coach and Lisci has reached the end of the League.
Levante, with the coordination of Vicente Blanco, Tito, and Carmelo del Pozo, cemented its rise in 2017 in the signing of a specialist in the category, Juan Ramón López Muñiz, and in detecting with surgical precision which players were going to be involved and who had to be removed from the locker room. 9 of the 28 footballers that Levante currently have on their payroll end their contract, among them Pepelu, the referent of the quarry that the club tries to renew at the wrong time. That means that the Levant has 19 footballers with whom to raise the 10.5 million that it has budgeted for the sale of assets before June 30 and with these sales it must also incorporate cash.
Levante goes down to Second in full stadium remodeling, with some sports city works to start and after a year in which the pandemic brought with it the worst economic data of the Quico era (23.2 million losses). The club knows that next year it will have between 14 and 18 million of help for the descent, a plus compared to most of its rivals in the category that it has to know how to manage. And that is where Quico Catalán has to put himself, leaving no poses in the face of the gallery to make his position available, because what Levante needs they are not gestures but not making the mistakes that were made from July to December and that its management be what it was in other years.