One of the most used verbs in football is “suffer.” Matches are basically divided into three types: when your rival makes you suffer, when your own team makes you suffer, and when the referee makes you suffer, that stubborn man who never gives you the time when you ask for it. But just as there is first division, second, first federation, etc… there are also different pain thresholds, and in general, this is higher the lower the category. Deportivo de A Coruña and its fans are undisputed champions in that discipline: they lost a league by missing a penalty in the last minute; They were relegated when no one had gone down to second with the amount of points they had earned in 2011 – two months before the championship began in the silver category there were queues at Riazor to become a member -, they faced a bankruptcy of creditors. As in the movie, wearing that shirt became a guarantee to suffer A series of unfortunate events.
The fans of Madrid, Barça, PSG… will say that they also suffer, but there is no color. In big-time football, that threshold of pain is much lower: losing a classic, finishing second, not qualifying for the competition with other big-time players. Their million-dollar budgets work as a kind of analgesic: comebacks are easier, because an individual play by one of the best players in the world can turn the game around, and if a league is lost, the next will be won, because, by saving The current crisis of Barça, the first division works like the imperfect two-party system of politics, they are cycles: this legislature will govern the PSOE, sooner or later, the PP will govern again. Now imagine that Madrid went down to second and lost a game against Barça B. That has happened to Depor, up there is where their pain threshold is.
Healthy people, like good teams, are not as aware of how important it is to enjoy good health. He takes it for granted. But when you have been sick and you recover, when you have been expelled from professional football and you return to play with the elders, the joy multiplies, it is worth three Madrid Champions Leagues. That is what explains why in a Deportivo-Barça B of the First Federation there were 33,000 people in the stands and tens of thousands in the streets of A Coruña. It wasn’t the promotion, it was the healing.
Germán Parreño, Depor’s goalkeeper, broke his arm in that match: a fracture in the left radius. And he continued playing. “With the adrenaline I didn’t even notice that he was broken, he endured everything and I didn’t care how he was. He was in pain and knew there was something, but there was little left. I am happy to add my grain of sand and that everything turned out well,” he said later. It lasts a few weeks.
As if the story were not beautiful enough or the legend epic enough, the promotion goal was scored by Lucas Pérez, a man from Coruña from the Monelos neighborhood and 35 years old who left Cádiz in 2022, was relegated two categories, gave up two million euros and He paid half of his transfer to play for the team he loves and try to return him to professional football. When they asked him what madness that was, he responded: “I’m here to help.”
Atleti said, regarding some of those small injuries that the greats suffer: “they can’t understand it.” And indeed, for ordinary mortals, that is, for fans of Madrid or Barça or the champions of the Super League, it may be difficult to understand that football is a game in which a town plays against another town and you are going to death with yours, whatever category it is in. One of the most beloved players in A Coruña is Djukic, the defender who in 1994 missed the penalty that was worth a League. The most intense part of love is the mystery, what cannot be explained. And if not, ask Lionel Scaloni, grandson of the meigas, why the day he won the soccer World Cup leading the team of one of the best players of all time, the photo that presided over his profile on social networks was, precisely , from Riazor.
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