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European football leagues have passed the first quarter of the season and their rankings are increasingly taking shape. Among the major tournaments on the continent, only in the Spanish La Liga is there an unusual presence in the top positions. After 14 games at the top of a championship that has been won by the same three teams for twenty years, there is Girona, a small club founded in the 1930s that until 2017 had never played in La Liga, the first division of national football .
On Monday evening, in the postponement of the fourteenth matchday of the championship, Girona drew 1-1 with Athletic Bilbao to return to joint first place with Real Madrid, the only other team in the championship to have won 11 matches so far. The points that separate Girona from the other two big teams in the championship, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid, joint second, are four.
Girona is a Catalan city of around 100 thousand inhabitants a few kilometers from France and the first large city across the border, Perpignan. It has never been a famous center for football, and indeed in recent years it was its basketball team that was the talk of the town, in particular after being purchased by Marc Gasol, NBA champion with the Toronto Raptors who is now finishing his career as a player in his own team.
The main stand of the Montilivi stadium in Girona (Getty Images)
But in the same year in which Girona arrived in La Liga for the first time, its football team was bought by the City Football Group, a company headed by the royal family of the United Arab Emirates and which includes the properties of ten teams spread all over the world, starting with Manchester City (plus two others in which he is a minority shareholder). Girona was the fifth team in the group, after Manchester City, New York City, Melbourne City and Atletico Torque in Uruguay, and before the last five: Mumbai, Lommel, Troyes, Palermo and Bahia.
Girona represented the group’s first European expansion, and obviously it was not a random choice: the operation led to the purchase of 44 percent of the club’s shares and a smaller percentage of shares was allocated to a company owned by Pere Guardiola, brother of Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, both originally from a Catalan town halfway between Barcelona and Girona.
Given the involvement of the City Football Group, one might think that Girona has been the subject of large investments, but in reality so far the growth has been gradual and without excesses: four years ago the team was also relegated to the second division, where it remained until two seasons ago.
The club was subjected to the “treatment” of the group, which redesigned its coat of arms making it similar to the others and has the same technical sponsor as supplier of sports material. The team itself can instead enjoy the network of players and knowledge made available by the ownership group, but in the current championship the value of the squad is only the tenth.
What is making the team go so well is the way it has been built and is made to play. There is a base of good quality Spanish players strengthened both by investments on the market and by loans received from the teams in the group, such as the left wing Savio, who arrived from Troyes, the right back Yan Couto and the midfielder Yangel Herrera, both coming from from Manchester City. The biggest investments have been made in the attack, and in particular in the Ukrainians Viktor Tsygankov and Artem Dovbyk, authors of 10 goals in total so far after costing around fifteen million euros.
The crowd gathered above the stadium to watch Girona-Real Madrid (Alex Caparros/Getty Images)
The group was then completed with more experienced players, such as the Dutch central defender Daley Blind, taken for free from Bayern Munich, and the Italian-Argentine goalkeeper Paulo Gazzaniga. The captain is the Italian-Uruguayan Cristhian Stuani, who has been in Girona for five years and previously owned by Reggina.
All together they play a markedly offensive football through a 4-3-3 which in the attacking phase becomes 3-4-3 in which verticality is always sought in the passes. In this way, and thanks to a defense that has held up well so far, 32 goals have already been scored, on average more than two per game and more than any other team in the championship. The coach is Michel, a historic Real Madrid player of the 1980s with a long series of experiences, both in Spain and abroad, having coached in Greece, Mexico, France and Saudi Arabia.
For the rest, Girona retains the appearance of a provincial team. He plays in a small stadium with just over 10 thousand seats inside the local university campus and his second shirt features the Catalan flag, also called senyera. The relationship with the territory remains very close, as demonstrated several times in recent years. Last season, for example, the space for the sponsor on the team’s shirts was granted to Open Arms, the Catalan humanitarian organization committed for years to rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, supported financially both by the team and in public by Pep and Pere Guardiola.
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2023-11-28 08:54:45
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