Saved by the bell – AS.com

“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.

It seems that the new owner is going to work, who as soon as the change of hands of the club is made official, this Wednesday, released a part of the debts with the players, that between the current ones and that of last season exceeds 250,000 euros. “The next thing we have to try to do is sign, because the squad is very fair at the number level“, he warns.

And where does Pereira come from? It’s about a Galician businessman who between Spain and Switzerland has eight companies of various kinds –from the real estate sector to food–, which already tried to acquire Sporting de Gijón and Córdoba, and that played for Lleida in the 1980-81 financial year. “I became interested as a result of the potential disappearance of the club and seeing later that the situation is much more serious than advertised. If we didn’t get in, everyone lost,” he says.

Beyond the grass, that the Lleida Esportiu-Badalona is played in conditions, the future of the Camp d’Esports goes through a new agreement. This is how the Councilor for Sports considers it, at the gates of a Friday when on paper the plenary session of the City Council was going to vote unanimously to rescind the current one, which dates from 2017, and that in practice would leave the club out of the stadium.

“The Sports Field is the jewel in the sports crown of Lleida“, assures Ignasi Amor, who would not see with bad eyes that from now on he had not one but two tenants. “We believe that two projects can coincide, that it serves four games a month, and considering that the costs can be shared between both”, he points out. And that is where another actor can come into action, such as the Lleida Athletic Sports Club.

Founded in 2019, and based until now about 20 kilometers from the Camp d’Esports, in Almacelles, they are considering the option to carry out a capital increase and move to the stadium in case of promotion this season from the First Catalan, where the leaders march, to the Third RFEF. They even aspired to be the first club in the city if the Lleida Esportiu, to which many managers were passionately and professionally linked – they put up advertising and even, in the case of Marc Ceron, came to pay for a charter in the 2016 promotion playoff– before the entry of the Esteves.

With the brothers who have put the club on the edge of the precipice out of the equation, the captains repeat the word “hope”. “The last Sunday, Pereira invited us to breakfast and gave us a message of encouragement, union. At least it gave me confidence and optimism”, underlines Vicente. And the new owner more than returns the ballot: “The current template has qualityHe plays very well and interprets football wonderfully”.

“It’s not that you have to go up this year -despite all the adversities, they are incredibly only four points away from promotion to the First RFEF-, but yes We will do everything on our part so as not to be able to reproach ourselves for anything“, says Pereira, who culminates with a statement that makes it clear that he wants to become not only the savior of Lleida Esportiu, but much more: “We have a roadmap; and, in relation to the city, the stadium or the history, the normal objective would be to be in the Second Division“.