Juan Gilberto Funes: 30 years since the death of an idol of Millionaires

On January 11, 1992 the heart of Juan Gilberto Funes stopped working and the idol of Millionaires Y River plate passed away when he was a player of Velez Sarsfield. ‘El Búfalo de San Luis’, as he was nicknamed, was only 29 years old.

Funes made his debut in Colombia in 84, just in a classic against Santa Fe. That day he scored two goals, but did not do more. It lasted 54 games, a full season, without putting it.

The Funes … uncle, they told the man who was a ceiba tree with fibrous thighs. But Funes was resurrected one good day: in 1985 he became a machine that scored 17 goals in the finish and 15 in the octagonal, a record for a Colombian final.

With 33, he was one of the golden spoils, the Argentine Miguel Oswaldo González, from Bucaramanga. Funes is even in the history of Millos because he scored the team’s 3,000 goal. In 1986 he left Bogotá amid a scandal of women and rumors of bullets. They say that the Buffalo entered someone else’s corral and cheated on a deceived person.

He fled to his pampa where he was champion of the Libertadores and the Intercontinental with River Plate. Then he went to the Greek Olympiakos and when he was going to France they detected a heart problem.

The gossips say that his heart could not withstand his meter and eighty centimeters, the 84 kilos of fiber and the use of stimulants. When he wanted to continue in Vélez Sarfield it was too late.

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