Celta strikes down Rafa Benítez and puts Giráldez, coach of the subsidiary, in charge of the team

The long-term project with which Celta was trying to build its future has been blown up with the dismissal of Rafael Benítez, the reference on the bench with whom an agreement had been reached last summer for three seasons, perhaps one. stazione termini for a 63-year-old trainer. The new president of the club. Marián Mouriño assumed that management as the cornerstone of his mandate to take over from his father, top leader of the Galician team for the previous 17 years. A stability was longed for that the results and fears have dynamited: Celta has barely won five games in 28 days and after Cádiz's victory against Atlético it is only two points away from the relegation places. By Christmas he had already broken up with Luis Campos, who was in charge of an unprecedented external sports consultancy. Shortly before Easter, the coach falls. “It has not obtained the expected results,” the club explains in a statement. With ten days to go, Claudio Giráldez, coach of the subsidiary, takes over.

The new Celta driver is 36 years old and in just three years at the club he has built a prestige that has led him to be on the radar of professional football. The subsidiary that he managed until today qualified last season to play in the play-off for promotion to the Second Division, a position in which it has settled this season after achieving such iconic victories as the one obtained in Riazor against Deportivo. His election also connects with one of the demands that most objected to Benítez's work, which was blamed for not giving opportunities to young people. Just fifteen days ago, in the match that Celta played in Almería, a streak of 675 games in which the team had started a footballer who emerged from its nursery was broken. It was fifteen years without a similar absence.

However, Benítez's journey at Celta was conditioned by the club's relationship with Luis Campos, the supposed guru he directed, while he combined his work with the sports management of Paris Saint-Germain, a technical secretariat that made decisions such as transfer Brais Méndez to Real Sociedad in the summer of 2022 for 14 million euros. A year later, the one who left the club was Gabri Veiga, another leader of the youth team who went to Arabia for 30.6 million euros, despite the fact that his termination clause was set at 40 million. The income from the young playmaker was used by Celta to pay for the transfers of Douvikas, Carles Pérez, Starfelt, Tadeo Allende, Dotor and Ristic, players with hardly any weight in the team. In addition to them, Bamba, Manu Sánchez and Guaita also arrived with the letter of freedom, to which Manquiillo and Jailson were added now with the sports direction in the hands of the Mexican Marco Garcés.

In the last two years the Celta squad has lost talent and identity and Benítez, who always presented the endorsement of his career to defend himself from criticism and slipped that he had been given a squad with deficiencies and that the club should improve its scaffolding to able to grow, can be considered a collateral victim of erratic management. “It's a dream that he is with us,” said Carlos Mouriño when the Madrid coach arrived in Vigo. “We brought an architect (for Campos) and now a good engineer is coming, who will lay the foundations for a splendorous future,” Mouriño warned. Now Claudio Giráldez, whose commitment to the club expires at the end of the season, will be the team's twentieth coach in the last 17 years and will make his debut next Sunday at Sevilla's field before a break after which he will host Rayo Vallecano in Balaídos. .

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