Five days from the end, with a play off to play and the obligation to make the category jump (to Second), Deportivo terminated the contract of Juan Carlos Menudo, the footballer who wore his number 10 shirt, the same one that Fran honored for almost two decades, one of the banners of the best time of the club. Little or nothing refers to that time in A Coruña, where the news that football leaves are different while the team revolts against its destiny in the First RFEF, the third echelon of Spanish football, and does not stop chaining skits. The one who signed Menudo deserved that the club invited him to put another rubric, but this time with a settlement in front: he claimed that he had contracted covid-19 so as not to complete the training sessions last week and thus ruled out for an uncomfortable trip to Talavera, where everything pointed to the fact that he was not going to enjoy playing minutes. The new protocols did not force him to confine himself, but he made a fatal decision for his continuity in A Coruña, that of moving to Seville to witness the Copa del Rey final.
Menudo, who is 30 years old and was a youth squad player for Sevilla, is an unrepentant Betis fan. And he had a plan: go to his city to witness the most important game played by the team of his heart in almost two decades and that ended up winning on penalties against Valencia. The idea could be realized because since last January the days and times of the First RFEF matches had been set until May. And Deportivo’s appointment in Talavera was scheduled for Friday, one day before the final.
That Betis was passing rounds fueled Menudo’s illusion to be in the stands of the Cartuja stadium. But a week before both appointments, the Federation accepted a request from Talavera, who used some replanting work on his soccer field, called El Prado, to request that the game against Deportivo be played on Sunday morning, just a few hours after the Cup final.
Menudo already had his ticket to see Betis and during the season he had hardly entered into his coach’s plans. On Thursday he went to morning training and in the afternoon he contacted Deportivo’s medical services to explain that he felt unwell and that he had had an antigen test with a positive result. On Friday and Saturday he did not train and the coach, Borja Jiménez, made public a call to travel to Talavera in which he obviously did not appear. But while his teammates guarded weapons in the ceramics town, the club accumulated evidence that placed him in Seville as one more Betic and not in A Coruña. By then he had already reported that he was feeling a little better and that in a few hours he could return to training.
After the weekend, Deportivo called Menudo to a chapter, who initially denied that he had traveled to Seville. He ended up confessing it, but the environment around him slipped that he was not the only uncalled footballer who spent the weekend outside A Coruña. In the other case he mediated permission. Often he did not ask for it. They wouldn’t have given it to him either. And the club argues an accumulation of serious offenses against the entity’s internal code to resolve a link that lasted until June 2023 with one of the highest contracts on the squad. “The sports management tells me that after what happens, the club makes the decision based on the values that it believes should be respected by the shield and what we want Deportivo to be,” settled the coach, the only voice that has spoken in public to comment on a situation in which both parties accumulate tricks to take them out before a foreseeable resolution in court.
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