Barcelona The Galician footballer Luis Suárez Miramontes, football legend and Ballon d’Or winner, died this Sunday at the age of 88. Luisito spent most of his career at Barça and Inter Milan, until he retired to Sampdoria at the age of 40.
Suárez (La Coruña, 1935) arrived in Barcelona at the age of 20 to play for Espanya Insustrial, a team that acted as a subsidiary of Barça. Although he immediately made his debut with the Blaugrana first team, a club where he would play for seven seasons, winning six titles: two Leagues, two Generalísimo Cups and two Fairs Cups. His last game for Blaugrana was the 1961 European Cup final, in which Barça lost 2-3 to Benfica in Bern.
Kubala’s recommendation
December 53. Barça beat Depor 6-1 at Les Corts. Among the Galician ranks, illustrious names such as goalkeeper Otero, Magriñán and Pahiño, but Kubala focuses on a debutant, the 18-year-old midfielder Luisito Suárez. Despite the defeat, he recommends his hiring and the Barbamec set off on his way to the Catalan capital. It is a restless Barça, which is beginning to feel the pressure due to the hegemony of Di Stéfano’s Real Madrid, which is going like a rocket. Luisito, of extraordinary quality, finds it difficult to convince the coaches of the first years, people with a short stay on the bench like Puppo, Plattkó or Balmanya.
Di Stéfano, on the other hand, also recognizes him just by seeing him and imposes the name that will make him a fortune: The Architect. He sees football like no one else and combines skill with the quality of an organizer, arrival at the opposite goal and an exquisite elegance in creation. Little by little, the Galician makes a hole, despite the typical and sterile controversies created in the press of the time, who prefer to keep the leadership in the hands of the myth Kubala, despite the fact that his characteristics and position on the field turn out to be as day and the night He is caught up in the division between kubalistes i suaristes, as if teacher and student, intimate in the dressing room, should be enemies. Nothing, one of the eternal quarrels of Barcelona, inexplicable by definition.
A mix between Xavi and Iniesta
With the arrival of Helenio Herrera, there is no doubt. He is the man, a mixture before the letter between Xavi and Iniesta, a natural prodigy who hangs bravely at the service of the team. He finally reaches the level of stardom, although the culers still deny him bread and salt, without reason, with spurious excuses. He bravely triumphed in the two Leagues that HH tried in the late 50s to break the white streak, but the joy never lasts in this house. The construction of the Camp Nou and the stratospheric cost of a staff full of figures causes an economic collapse. Days before the cursed final in Bern, that of the square posts, the Internazionale di Milano, presided over by the millionaire Moratti and now trained by the mentor Herrera, takes advantage of the hole in the box with a stratospheric offer for the Galician, 25 million pesetas.
The manager hesitates, but agrees after asking permission from the two candidates for the presidency of Barça, Mr. Llaudet and Mr. Fuset. In Bern, Luisito Suárez plays the match of his life, a marvel in absolute deployment, a ‘three-quarter player’ capable of covering all the roles of the auca, a category that earned him the Ballon d’Or, the only one that has got a player born in Spain.
Llaudet was quick to sign fifteen players, nothing to cover holes, and of this new transfer that had to renew a team in decline, only Benítez, Zaldúa and Pereda would end up as starters in the Barça of the sixties, the hard years of the cross the desert. Suárez disappears from the map in Italy, everyone stops following him, but there he leads a prodigious Inter, those of Facchetti, Sandro Mazzola or Corso. Two fall badgestwo European Cups, Intercontinental Cups and the unconditional recognition of Luisito, who returns to the Ballon d’Or podium on three more occasions and still leads the Spanish team in the great triumph of the 64 European Cup.
The worst sporting operation that Barça has ever done
As football lives in the moment and Barça enters a long depression, no one realizes that that transfer became the worst sporting operation the club has ever done. And that’s saying a lot, but it’s also irrefutable theory. Suárez was the leader who had to serve as a bridge between a declining Kubala and the arrival of Johan Cruyff. A space of thirteen years that a long-lived Luisito, who was a first-level professional until the age of 38, had covered in a perfect way.
Reasons? None of it intelligible, but he was never a prophet of Blaugrana. And it was cool, very cool. In a 1965 friendly at the Camp Nou, received with whistles by the stands, he would end up making a public and notorious sausage to a fan who never knew how to understand him, despite his immense category. Luisito Suárez is the Barça legend who carries bad memories and a bad conscience, a victim of turbulent times that have not dimmed his excellent level in the slightest.
2023-07-09 08:40:26
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