“You feel like telling them to go down because they are dishonest and don’t have a shred of honor.” With these words addressed to the Unión Deportiva Melilla, Javi Poves (Madrid, 1986) was the protagonist of his latest controversy in mid-December. Poves is the current coach and sports vice president of the historic Colonia Moscardó Sports Club, a team from the neighborhood of the same name in the Usera district that played a season in the Second Division in the early seventies.
The former footballer, trained in the Atlético de Madrid and Rayo Vallecano quarries, has commanded a new stage of excitement unleashed at the Ramón Valero Stadium after two consecutive promotions: in 2023 from Preferente to Third Federation and in 2024 from Third to Second Federation. Poves came down from the offices to the bench in the middle of this outstanding career. In September 2023, after two days of competition, the club whose vice-president dismissed José Luis Navarro (the architect of the first promotion). Luckily the speed with the trigger did not end up cutting the path short.
Thus, this season Moscardó has once again played league matches outside the Community of Madrid three decades later (in the nineties they did so in Second B). Poves has also managed to keep Moscardó in the fourth tier of national football. The team is eighth, seven points behind fifth place in the dispute of the playoffs of promotion. But in the midst of sporting success, the figure of the coach takes all the spotlight amidst continuous controversies from the benches and the press rooms. A controversy that has marked the career of the Madrid athlete.
He rose to fame when in 2011 he decided to leave Sporting de Gijón and, in the process, professional football. He did so by raising a media storm by stating that the sector was “a nest of corruption, money and death.” Of course, to make these statements he waited for his contract to expire at the Asturian club, which was not particularly interested in its renewal and did not receive offers from other professional clubs.
Poves even played a match in the First Division in May of that same year, but at 25 years old he had spent most of his career in Second B with the reserve team. The retirement was not eternal, since in 2014 he returned to join the Unión Deportiva San Sebastián de los Reyes, in the Third Division. His second football stage lasted the same as his experience in the First Division: one game.
Transfer denier
Perhaps imbued with the feeling of the 15M that marked that 2011, Poves imposed his clubs not to pay him by transfer to prevent banks from speculating with his money. All of this earned him the nickname of the “anti-system” footballer by the sports press.
But just as society has moved to the right in recent years with the expansion of conspiracism, Poves has been assuming increasingly particular positions. Its great milestone in this regard was the creation in 2020 of the Flat Earth Fútbol Club, the first openly flat-earther football team. Although more than created, the entity was heir to the one originally named Móstoles Balompié, founded in 2016. Still with that nomenclature, in 2017, Poves began a media tour to present the club on different television programs. In one of them he praised Josep Pedrerol as “an example to follow” for its commitment to “a different format,” according to picked up the press of the moment.
The name change came after the promotion of Móstoles Balompié to the Third Division. In the months of the pandemic and those immediately following, the Flat Earth was characterized by questioning scientific knowledge, giving wings to anti-vaccine movements or against health measures. Those responsible promoted the idea that it was the “first football club created to think” while they focused their attacks on the then Minister of Science and Innovation, the astronaut Pedro Duque. There is no evidence that the players or the rest of the club’s staff received their remuneration without going through the banks.
His flat Earth adventure was short-lived, since in December 2020 he disassociated himself from the project. Flat Earth was then renamed Club Deportivo Elemental Madrid and the following year it changed its name again to Club de Fútbol Fuenlabrada Promesas 2021. That is, the Fuenlabrada subsidiary.
Meanwhile, Poves was finding his place on the sidelines, maintaining his particular vision of life and himself: “I watch more football than anyone else, I don’t think there are many people in Spain who watch as much football as I do,” he said in June in an interview for Relevo. In it he also addressed his ideological position. Although he does not vote, he mentioned the name of the Argentine leader Javier Milei: “In the end I have so internalized the feeling that the individual himself is the one who legislates… They tell me that it would be something like capitalist anarchistas if everything you generate you decide what to do with it, without there being a regulatory entity like the State. It is a speech similar to Milei’s but without being it. I know what I have to do, and what is right and what is wrong.”
From tactical analysis to zascas: press conferences as speakers
Since taking over as coach at Moscardó, Poves has returned to the eye of the storm. This time, however, he has not featured in any news as striking as that of the “anti-system” footballer or the flat-earther team. It has been more of a drip of inflammatory statements with resonance on social networks.
The most notorious came for his attack on Real Betis footballer Héctor Bellerín. The Catalan defender has supported equal pay between men and women in football in various statements. Asked about this, the formerly anti-capitalist Poves defended that the salary is generated based on the economic return provided by the sector: “I think Bellerín has no idea what he is talking about. In this world there is little freedom of expression and he has taken the path of saying things that will go down well socially. It’s even insulting.”
Poves, who became famous for launching socially well-accepted messages by denouncing corruption in football without pointing out any specific case, also supports other statements at a press conference the return to the stadiums of flares and “smoke bombs that do not harm anyone.” He states that these elements “are as dangerous as a loaf of stale bread” and believes that due to the contrast between environments “they are eating our toast in Latin America,” despite the stagnation of Latin American leagues in recent decades.
Another of his hallmarks is his toughness with his players, manifested in statements such as those he left in November after their defeat against Móstoles URJC: “Today I could have become a millionaire. I knew we were going to lose and I told the players that, but apparently the coaches don’t let us bet. I also knew we were going to lose by making fools of ourselves. People will tell me why I didn’t change the plan if I had it so clear, but it’s not possible if the players give 0% of what they have.” From the press room he has also confronted journalists and despised fans because of his physical appearance.
Their last confrontation, the one that opens this article, came in December when they visited the Melilla stadium and lost by 3 goals to 1. “We were much superior. I was looking at it to win 0-3 easily. They are not even close to our level. But you have to fight against a battalion and not just because of the referees,” Poves said in a video for networks, since according to him he was denied the use of the press room “although he supports himself with subsidies that I also pay.”
The version confronts that of journalist Javier Roldán, also present at the Melilla stadium: “The team that is incomprehensibly and unfortunately led by a man of this condition, Moscardó, has had a footballer unfairly expelled when the match was completely even. , and of course anyone could win it because the quality of the lineups is even. So this very offended man has shown his unpresentability by deciding to go up to the stands. [se encontraba en el primero de sus cuatro partidos de suspensión después de ser expulsado una semana antes] to shout at the referee in every play to play the victim and at the same time stir up the Melilla fans.”
Roldán affirms that the fans of the local club behaved “in an exemplary manner, contrary to what he clearly sought.” “I know this because I was right behind him and I thought that the unpresentable man was just another fanatic, like so many other unpresentable fanatics of any color,” he says.
In the midst of the tension, Poves has announced that he will leave Spanish football “at the end of the season” so that this type of things “can be swallowed by someone else.” Perhaps because, at least in his mind, he has no shortage of suitors: “If the largest shareholder of Manchester United sees what we have done at Moscardó in two years, he will give me the reins of the club,” he stated in an interview for Marca last October. Of course, according to that same head, the earth is flat.
#antisystem #footballer #founded #flatearther #club #attacks #Bellerín #resurrects #Moscardó #controversies
