Sergio, Moreno, Perarnau and Rufete: a story of 63 million

Espanyol, without time to digest the elimination in the round of 16 of the Copa del Rey, faces Cádiz this Tuesday, a special match for the reunion with Sergio González, who debuted with the yellow team in LaLiga (went to the quarterfinals of the Cup after eliminating Sporting on penalties). Former club player (he has a door in the stadium) and former coach, he led the first team for a season and a half in which he achieved a Copa del Rey semifinal and numbers similar to those of Vicente Moreno.

With the Valencian coach, the architect of the promotion the previous year, the blue and white team has achieved 43.3% of the points at stake (26 out of 60) compared to the 42.5% achieved by the L’Hospitalet coach (66 out of 155). Two similar trajectories also in terms of styles. Sergio’s team was always blamed for his way of playing, which was not able to dazzle the fans, critical of him in the defeats as it happened from matchday 1 of the 2015-16 campaign, prelude to the purchase of the entity by part of Chen Yansheng.

But among so much similarity there are notorious differences, especially in terms of the waste of sports directions. Between the markets of 2013 and 2015, the one before the arrival of the Catalan coach and the one of his last campaign, Óscar Perarnau dealt with a trench Espanyol, unable to invest due to the pressing debt. The entity chaired by Joan Collet spent 6.2 million euros between those three windows.

Between 2019 and 2021, with Francisco Rufete, a person appointed by Perarnau himself, and with a higher economic capacity, Espanyol has spent 70 million euros to configure its squad with some results, for the moment, that they do not substantially improve those stages of post ‘danismo’ and before the arrival of Chen.