In the mid-nineties, soccer had not yet succumbed to its total conversion into a commercial and planetary mega-show, but Arsenio Iglesias was already walking around like a character out of time. In those years, trends that would mark the future were forged, on and off the pitch. He dream team Johan Cruyff was at its peak, television competition was beginning to pour out a manna of money on the clubs and the Bosman sentence was about to fall, which would leave the face of European football unrecognizable. In the midst of this landscape, Spain experienced the improbable history of the superdepor and his even more unlikely coach, Arsenio Iglesias, who died this Friday in A Coruña at the age of 92. A humble and incredulous villager, already in his sixties, who was called O Vello (The Old Man) after a life trotting through second-row benches and a discreet career as a footballer that began in the fifties, when Spain was still hungry and the teams They used several days to cross the Peninsula by bus to play their games.
That countercultural figure, who despised professional winners and claimed the humanity of failure, placed Deportivo among the greatest, earned the eternal love of his fans and dazzled an entire country. Arsenio, the son of peasants who never denied his origins, was a living treatise on the retranca, that rhetorical weapon of the Galicians, between humor and melancholy, concocted by the humble to protect themselves from the intrusion of others. This is how he deactivated questions such as that of a journalist who approached the field at the end of a game that Depor had won after the referee ignored two obvious penalties against him:
-Arsenio, the rival has requested two penalties…
-They do well. You always have to ask.
TO or Bruxo -also called El Zorro- liked to play puzzle. He did it when he announced his withdrawal at the top of the Superdépor, after achieving their only title in almost half a century dedicated to soccer, the 1995 Cup. A few months later, an ephemeral and unforeseen extension would be allowed. Madrid called him as an emergency solution, in the midst of a great crisis and after the dismissal of Jorge Valdano. Real Madrid sympathies, Arsenio dragged the frustration of a failed transfer to the club in his days as a player and could not resist the temptation to take advantage of that opportunity. It turned out to be a complete disaster. The problems of the club, the egos of the locker room, the Madrid media wars… After just a few weeks, he confessed ruefully: “There is no one who can stand this madness. I can’t wait for it to end and run away.”
He was a man as prone to joke as to show a trace of tragedy and bitterness. From his career on the bench, he evoked above all the suffering for having led teams whose objective did not go beyond escaping relegation or a stage in Second Division purgatory. The conservative stigma haunted him for decades. He defended that he only sought to impose order on his teams: “I don’t know if I’m a conservative, what I’m not is reckless.” He lived through traumatic episodes of frustrated promotions with Depor -which, after relegating in 1973, spent 18 years without returning to the First Division- and above all what was surely the most dramatic outcome in the history of the League: the loss of the championship in 1994 for the penalty missed by Djukic in the last minute of the last game.
Over the years the emotional and multitudinous tributes in A Coruña multiplied. They erected a bust of him in the Riazor and before that they dedicated a street to him in Arteixo, his hometown. He attended gratefully, although always with that certain distance that was so much his, as if he were thinking about what his countrywoman Julio Camba said that “all pompas are undertakers.”
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