BarcelonaEspanyol embraces Galician popular culture. With the arrival of Denis Suárez on the last day of the winter market, the white-and-blue club already has two witches to undo the sore eye it has suffered throughout the first round of the League. A decade after helping to financially save Celta de Vigo, Denis and Joselu will coincide for the first time in the same team, Espanyol, where they aspire to create a society that will help raise the flight to a team that does not want to conform- se with permanence.
The Salceda de Caselas midfielder and the forward, Galician by adoption despite being born in Stuttgart, met in the lower categories of Celta when they were two teenagers. They got to share some training sessions with the Vigo team’s first team, but they still don’t know what it’s like to play an official game together. They could do it for the first time this Saturday, against Osasuna (2 p.m., DAZN), in what would be the debut of the former with the Espanyol shirt.
Denis, two years Joselu’s junior, landed in Celta’s lower ranks in the 2009-10 season, the same season in which the striker was starting to make a dent in the first team. “At the beginning the sports management thought that Denis was too young to be in Segona B, and that’s why we moved him from the subsidiary to the youth team. But after a while they had to rectify”, he reminds ARA who was his coach at Celta B, Milo Abelleira. “As a person he was an exceptional boy, different in many ways from the rest. He totally threw himself into football, he was reserved and very serious for his age, contrasting with other players who were more joking like Iago Aspas or Hugo Mallo. Being young, Denis already looked like an adult”, recalls former Espanyol sporting director Paco Herrera, who coached Celta’s first team in the 2010-11 season.
Two sales that saved Celta
The Catalan coach, who gave opportunities to the first team to several youngsters from the youth system, was unable to do so with Denis. “When he was ready to make his debut, the club told us not to let him play to prevent him from getting injured, because he had already been sold to Manchester City”, he remembers. The midfielder left for England when he was only 17 years old in exchange for a million more variables. Herrera had also not been able to train Joselu because he had been transferred to Real Madrid for 1.5 million euros the previous summer. The planter turned out to be the lever that saved Celta, which years before had started a creditors’ competition to guarantee its survival.
With the sale of two of its pearls of A Madroa, the Galician club was able to solve a large part of the financial emergencies it was dragging and which had threatened its viability. “If we don’t sell any players we may have a problem”, the president of the club, Carlos Mouriño, had warned. Yes, the same one that condemned Denis to ostracism years later. “They decided to sell me and I had no problems accepting their decision because I knew that the club needed it, and for me it was also a good opportunity to go to England”, acknowledged Denis himself years later.
“He was a boy who, with all the conditions he had, both physical and technical and tactical, we knew he could achieve great things. We saw him for the first team; from a young age he had always been successful in front of goal”, Abelleira completes, who emphasizes in which facet he had to improve the most: “What made us doubt him the most was the defensive aspect, but over the years he worked on it well and he improved a lot when it comes to pressing and covering”.
After developing two quite successful careers in parallel, Joselu and Denis have landed at Espanyol at practically zero cost: for the striker he only had to accept a signing bonus whose amount has not exceeded, while for the midfielder he will pay 200,000 euros which could be tripled in case of permanence.
“Denis will raise the level of the staff; he will do well at Espanyol, he has a lot of quality and knows how to give meaning to attacking football”, analyzes Herrera, who has no doubts that he will form a great partnership with Joselu: “If there is one thing I learned in Vigo is that the Galicians ‘they help each other a lot. I’m sure it will be close to him.” The striker, who managed to score 11 goals in the first round, celebrates the arrival of one of the best assistants in the League. It is also done by another Galician, Diego Martínez, who celebrates having an argument with more weight in attack. “I haven’t forgotten to play football in six months”, explained Denis in his presentation. Espanyol keeps them away sweet.
