Saved by the bell – AS.com

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“We’re giving it our all now, because It is the moment of truth“. They are surely the words that best encompass the situation of the Lleida Esportiu, saved on the verge of eviction that the City Council had to approve unanimously and over the vanishing bell. and pronounces them AS precisely the architect of that rescue, which materialized on Wednesday, as this newspaper had advanced. This is the businessman Luis Pereira, who will become the new owner of the club that currently plays in the Second RFEF.

“The situation has reached the limit“, he admits Toni Vicente, the captain of a staff that today only has 14 federative tokens, the minimum that the Spanish Federation requires to compete, and that to top it off, he faces the next match with three cases of COVID-19 and two injured. An insurmountable setback for any other club, but only the tip of the iceberg for this Lleida Esportiu established in 2011, after the dissolution of the historic Unió Esportiva Lleida, which came to compete in the First Division. Non-payments, complaints, records of the Civil Guard, disapproval by the consistory, departure of emblematic players like Quim Araujo or Víctor Vidal, who had been with the club since he was four years old… And the concealment of its until now owners, the brothers Jordi and Albert Esteve, who have not responded to the invitation to participate in this report.

“Does years that the club has problems, because it has already gone into debt with Social Security and the Tax Agency, and we stopped the subsidies”, warns the Councilor for Sports of the Lleida City Council, Ignasi Amor. “It is giving a bad image of a city that it has a basketball team that can fight to go up to the ACB, another women’s soccer team that is in the Second Division, or the roller hockey team, which is third in the OK League,” he lists.

Players nod when asked about all those problems. “We can’t go worse“, maintains another of the captains, Roger Figueras, injured but willing to force this Sunday against Badalona in case the trainer, the ex of the Barcelona Gabri Garci’a, do not cover the minimum number of chips. “We know how modest football is, that the clubs have difficulties, but here there have also been issues unrelated to money, such as that they have not wanted to give us our own contracts. For this reason, because the words did not match the facts, since the beginning of the season there was no communication with the club, “says Vicente.

“The predominant tone among the players is have received two monthly payments“, he explains, noting that “some can’t pay their rent and have had to ask for help“. It is the case of Abdoulaye Fall, the only one in the current squad who has not received a single euro of this season and to whom friends have had to lend money and buy clothes and food. And, to make matters worse, an incomprehensible bureaucratic failure of the club has not allowed him to play the entire course yet.

But the most urgent problem is on the lawn where it should be played this Sunday. The state of the Camp d’Esports, which AS was able to access, is deplorable. A stadium that has shone in First division Now it presents a playing field typical of a mudflat, broken benches full of bottles, a grandstand full of excrement from the multitude of pigeons that have nested on the deck… There has been no security or public address system for days. And the same in the annex, where they train. “We can’t even give three passes“, denounces Figueras. “We have to clean the field, prepare the grass and prepare the logistics against the clock for the weekend. In recent times it was the Sahara desert“says Pereira.