The years in which osmar Ibanez (Santoña, 1988) walked the Racing de Santander shield through all the First Division stadiums. At that time, the Cantabrian was just a kid with the illusion of settling in the elite of Spanish football. Today, almost a decade later, he is a legend in the K-League, the highest category of South Korean football. “By going to Asia I gave up my future in Spanish football. I went to Thailand with a two-year contract, thinking of earning some money and coming back, but I started to watch Asian football, I found out that there was a Champions League and my mentality changed: I decided to try to make a career in Asia, play in the best league and the best possible team. In Spain it could not be, but I am proud to have found another way to enjoy football “, reflects proudly Osmar, who faces the end of his seventh season wearing the FC Seoul shirt.
“My manager thought me crazy when I told him I wanted to play in Seoul”
Osmar Ibáñez, FC Seoul player
Osmar Ibáñez defends that “footballers do not choose where to play”, but it is not a rule that he can apply himself. The one from Santoña did decide which was the club in which he wanted to make a career: “While in Buriram we played against Seoul in the Asian Champions League. That year all the teams I faced contacted me asking where I had come from and what contract I had. All but one, Seoul. I told my manager that I wanted to play there and he thought I was crazy. In Korea they did not sign Spanish and Seoul, in addition, was the best club. They told me it was impossible, but I don’t even know how things started to turn out and the coach -Choi Yong-soo-, who is already like my father, signed me and made me captain. I owe him everything. “With him on the bench began a season that ended with Seoul proclaiming himself the K-League champion after defeating Jeonbuk on the last day.” From the beginning you could see that things could happen. If we hadn’t changed coaches in the middle of the season – Choi went to China – I think we would have also won the Champions League. “
Osmar was important in the last great days of FC Seoul – they won the FA Cup in 2015 and the K-League in 2016 – which is why it is taking him so hard to assimilate that the club is going through a pothole from which it is difficult to get out. “It creates a little anxiety in me. I had to experience the good, but it has already been several years of downturn and that frustrates me. I think the club lacks ambition“, he discovers after leaving the team’s permanence in the K-League practically closed. Osmar is one of the most outstanding players in the South Korean First Division. This season he is acting as a left central in a line of three, although he would like to return to the middle to have “more impact in the games.” At 33, the Cantabrian is already thinking about the possibility of continuing his career on the bench, although the future does not take away as much sleep as having spent so much time away from his loved ones . “I feel weird when I go back to Spain. I have contact with my friends, but I just don’t feel connected. They meet to go to the beach, to the mountains … I have renounced all that. To be with my mother, my aunts, my sister, for my family to see my children … It is a great sacrifice and losing so many things begins to weigh, “he reveals, aware that his contract expires next December.” We’ll see what happens, “concludes the second-most-games foreigner in the history of the South Korean First Division.