Nacho Rodríguez’s Interview: Inside the Controversies of His Time as Head of Sports Management in Barça

01/20/2024 Act. at 19:05 CET

At the end of March 2017, Nacho Rodríguez returned to Barça to replace Joan Carles Raventós at the head of the sports management, forming a duo with another emblematic former Barça player like Rodrigo de la Fuente.

The man from Malaga managed to revive the section at a structural level with important decisions such as the signings of Nikola Mirotic and Cory Higgins. Under his mandate the team won a League (2020-21 seven years after the previous one), two Copas del Rey and a Catalan League, but they resisted a Euroleague that could have perfectly fallen in the 2019-20 season if it had not been for a covid that destroyed the competition in the middle of the regular phase.

Despite his good work, the return of Joan Laporta to the presidency led to his dismissal in April 2021 in the middle of the season and months before achieving the aforementioned league title that fully corresponds to the Andalusian.

Almost three years later, Nacho Rodríguez has addressed the most controversial aspects of his time as head of sports management in an interview by journalist Javier Ortiz for ‘Jot Down’. . . . Mirotic, Navarro, Jasikevicius, Bartomeu or Heurtel abandoned in Istanbul… Lean, because there are messages for everyone.

Thomas Heurtel and Istanbul

For the first time, The former baseman addressed what happened with Heurtel in that scandalous episode in which the player was left in Istanbul and was not allowed to return to the team in a match in which he was not called up to play while he was looking for his future and he vilely deceived the club into believing that he would sign for Fenerbahçe when he was finalizing his move to Real Madrid.

“I spoke with his agent, Misko Raznatovic. We negotiated, because the player wanted to leave and the coach did not count on him. We reached an agreement. And The Sunday before playing in Istanbul Misko tells me that Thomas wants to travel with the team. We were going to sign Westermann, who was at Fenerbahce and everyone told me that he was going to go there. Obviously, when you reach an agreement you don’t ask where the player is going to go. We are going to Istanbul. The boy doesn’t train and I thought he was going to pass the medical examination with Fenerbahce,” explains the Andalusian.

“On Tuesday morning it began to reach me that he was going to Madrid. We had reached an agreement to pay him almost 90% of his token. I call the agent and he tells me that he doesn’t know. “Look, you can’t go to Madrid, because you go for free and I’m not going to pay for your party so you can go to the biggest rival,” I told him. I made it clear to him that the document was not going to be signed and I explained it to the player,” continued the Spanish international.

“After the game I went into the locker room. Saras tells me “hey, Heurtel isn’t traveling with us, is he?” I tell him “of course, how are we going to leave a player stranded here in a pandemic? «No, Nacho, it can’t be. “That he wanted to go to Madrid”. “I say, no, no, no, Saras, no, we can’t mix the two things.” I go outside, I talk to people from the club and they tell me that we couldn’t leave him in Istanbul. When I come back in, the entire staff is there, nine people. «Hey, Nacho, have you thought about it well?» I say: “of course. And he comes with us ». And Saras tells me that it can’t be. “What do you all think?” she asked the staff. And a debate is generated. One by one, everyone said no, that “with what he had done” he had to stay in Istanbul. «I don’t see it, but the nine of you agree, because he is already there. Well, let him stay here, we’ll get him a plane ticket and we’ll leave him the hotel,” he reiterates.

“Before, I called Albert Soler and he told me that if we had decided together, well… I informed the player that he was staying… When we arrived in Barcelona, ​​those from El Chiringuito were waiting for us. The next day, December 23, I got up early to catch the AVE to Madrid and had dozens of messages. It became an incredible ball. I’m sorry no, the following. If it happens to me again, let the nine of them stay there if they want, but you can’t do that to a player on your team.. It was a very serious mistake to leave Heurtel in Istanbul. You can put it as a starter. He thought that someone would come out saying that it had been a club decision. I called the players and they knew all this perfectly. Several called me and told me that I didn’t deserve everything that was happening,” Rodríguez emphasizes.

The signing of Mirotic

Another hot topic of that stage was the arrival of Nikola Mirotic in a story that is not wasted. “Bartomeu calls me one day and says: ‘Nacho, I want to talk to you alone. Are you in the office?’ When I meet him, alone he says to me: ‘What do you think of Mirotic?’ I have it closed. I want you to take a plane to Boston on Monday to sign the contract. His representative, Igor Crespo, will call you. I didn’t sleep for two days, I spoke to my brother Juanma and told him that I didn’t see the operation because it was a lot of money. Two days later I asked the president for a meeting and told him that there could be a ‘fairplay’ problem. He didn’t know that there was that issue in the Euroleague,” he says.

“I didn’t see paying that amount for a basketball player. It was more typical of football. I also told him: «Do you know what Mike James and Shane Larkin, the highest paid in Europe, earn? Three million euros, much less than what we are talking about with Mirotic. “This is a bomb in the locker room, a savagery.” Anyone else would have said nothing and would have taken that plane to sign a great player, but he had to be responsible. For several days only he and I knew about Niko’s signing. “He trusted me a lot,” he reflects.

“A few days later a meeting was held with the top managers and it was decided not to sign him. They listened to me. This was February-March. Three months later we spoke again with Igor Crespo about the signing of Alex Abrines and he told me that he I have to help out with Niko, who wants to come to Europe for personal reasons. I told him that the first contract was unaffordable and that we would make him a new offer, but adjusted to European basketball. I spoke with Albert Soler and what we offered him was something higher than what Larkin and James were charging, But nothing more. The next day they responded saying that they would come for a little more and we accepted with our eyes closed,” says the man from Malaga.

“The CEO of Barça, Óscar Grau, congratulated us for the amount of millions we had saved the club regarding what the president wanted to sign if I had traveled to Boston at the time. I also know that Niko’s first option was to go to Real Madrid and it was where their representative offered it, but they didn’t want it,” reveals the Mayoral Maristas youth player.

Laporta dismisses him

Nacho Rodríguez remembers with regret how he left Barça in the middle of the season: “I’m one of those who think that just as they appoint you, they can fire you. Hey, well, I’m very grateful that they thought of me. What didn’t sit well with me at all is that I was the only section manager who, in the twenties of April, without finishing the season, they throw them out from one day to the next. Not the soccer player, nor the futsal player, nor the handball player.

“I arrived from Gran Canaria, where we were playing a game that day. The night before I didn’t have dinner with the team because I was preparing a Euroleague report about what we were doing so that the new players who had joined would know. I arrived from a trip and they called me up. to kick me out “I felt like I had stolen something and got caught,” he admits..

Juan Carlos Navarro

The relationship between Nacho Rodríguez and Juan Carlos Navarro became very confused in the Malaga native’s first season in the offices that coincided with ‘La Bomba”s last on the track. “Let’s see, with Navarro we had different ways of seeing his retirement. He should one day explain how he retired. From a sporting point of view, both Pesic and those responsible for the sports area understood that he could not contribute more on the court and that is how we transferred it to the Board”.

“He went to speak with President Bartomeu and they decided several issues between them. I will never speak badly of him. I have great respect for him as a player.. I have helped him a lot because I proposed him as youth academy director and we proposed the 10-year contract that he signs with the club. It is true that he helps in the first year by lowering his salary, but he defers,” he continues.

“In his last year as a player, which was my first year leading the section, He thought he had to play more and he didn’t handle it well. And we don’t communicate well. Madrid managed Felipe Reyes much better. In his last year, Felipe wasn’t up to par either, but the club managed it much better than we did. “We didn’t know how to do it right,” he says.

“For me, the most important thing about my time at Barcelona came when, a few days after my dismissal, I was going to hand over my phone and my computer to the club and between 40 and 50 Barça employees say goodbye to me surprise,” he points out proudly

The section, a structural disaster

Perhaps the most serious thing is what Nacho Rodríguez commented to ‘Jot Down’ about the structure of Blaugrana basketball in this masterful interview by Javier Ortiz, an emblem of the sports section of El Periódico Extremadura: “The sections have few personnel working directly, almost all of them are transversal departments that you can use. I was lucky to work for three months as an observer and “I shook my head when I saw how it worked”.

“I wondered where the hidden camera was, if I had signed for Barça or for an EBA League team with no structure or anything.”. For example, there were first team coaches who taught at the university and did not come to training. There was no relationship between the youth team and the first team. Player tracking barely existed. There wasn’t even a database. There were constant leaks to the media. And when we started meeting with representation agencies, some were surprised that we were going to work with them because then we only spoke to two or three,” he explains sincerely.

“The relations with the ACB and the Euroleague were that way. And there were some agreements with some clubs that, let’s put it mildly, called your attention with compensation in exchange. We started to work and turn the management around. For us the The first objective was to create a section structure for a serious team that could aspire to things and be respected by the media, agencies, institutions, federations, the ACB, the Euroleague. We turned the management of the section around like a sock and the current structure is completely inherited from ours.“

“Before Efes eliminated us in the fifth game of the Euroleague quarterfinals, a journalist from Barcelona congratulated me. I asked him why and he replied: «You have achieved stability in the section in a short time and put Barça in the first level. Now you can win or lose, but we only talk about results. Before, they talked about everything except that,” concludes the emblematic man from Malaga, Euroleague champion as a Barça player in 2003 at the Palau Sant Jordi.

2024-01-20 18:05:01
#truths #Nacho #Rodríguez #expose #Barça