Isn’t the bearded boy who appears near Florentino Pérez Ascen’s nephew? «He looks like Matilde’s son, yes. “I didn’t know he worked on that American thing.” The conversation is real between two countrymen from Yunquera de Henares. And yes, on Sunday, November 16, in the images prior to the historic match between the Miami Dolphins and the Washington Commanders, on the pitch of the Santiago Bernabéu and then in the box, between Díaz Ayuso, Martínez Almeida and the president of Real Madrid, there was Rafael de los Santos Navarro (Madrid, 1972), who in Yunquera is Matilde’s boy, Ascen’s nephew and Lauri and Mariano’s grandson. He is the general director of NFL Spain, a responsibility he accepted just a few weeks before the official National Football League match. «I entered on October 1 and, as you can imagine, everything was already more than on track. “It was a very intense month, with many coordination efforts between us, the City Council, the Community and Real Madrid, but my real challenge began the next day.” That challenge involves leading the business development and expansion of the American football league in Spain after the resounding success of an event that filled the stadium with the largest attendance recorded since the renovation of the Bernabéu.
Rafael de los Santos is not new to the assignment, neither because of his extensive professional career nor because of his knowledge of this sport. «I studied my third year of BUP in Oregon, where I lived with a host family. I remember perfectly the first time I had the opportunity to play an American football game. “A bugger ran over me and it was like a Miura caught me.” He tells us that the NFL has always attracted him and that, every time he travels to the US, he tries to go to a game. “I’ve been lucky enough to be in two Super Bowls and I’ve pitched in Giants Stadium.” To this he adds his great knowledge of the sports industry after accumulating positions of different responsibility that have led him to the world of sports. «I studied Economics at the Complutense University and my first great work experience was precisely in the US. I spent three years in Miami working for Amadeus, a company dedicated to promoting the global travel and tourism sector. “At that stage my eldest son was born.” After his time at Microsoft and in the digital product development area of Grupo Prisa, he landed at Real Madrid. When he joined the white club in 2012, he led its digital transformation, multiplying by 10 – in just five years – the growth of its direct income through this field. Before a headhunter contacted him to join the NFL project in Spain, he assumed the strategic and business part of the Girondis de Bordeaux, in France, for several years and returned to our country to work at Amazon Web Services, collaborating with the Bundesliga, with the League on piracy issues, with FC Barcelona, Formula 1 or the company organizing the MotoGP championship. «Amazon is spectacular. There are few companies in the world – and I have worked in very good companies – with such competent and intelligent professionals.
The game between the Dolphins and the Commanders has only ratified the NFL’s plans throughout Europe. «We do not intend to compete, much less with football (soccer). There are other spaces that we do want to occupy and Spain plays a strategic role in our plans, looking at the rest of Europe and also Latin America. Here we really like sports in general and especially team sports. Right now it is the only professional sport that can be seen openly. Furthermore, we want to grow within that family environment that characterizes American football. It is a very global and different show.
We spoke with Rafael de los Santos in one of the cafes at Barajas airport about to catch a flight that will take him to London. He spends much of his life traveling and values, more and more, returning to the town where he has his origins. “I bought a house in Yunquera a few years ago and the weekend I don’t spend there is like it doesn’t matter to me.” We talk about his summers with his grandparents, the freedom of the countryside and the potato omelet contests that his family continues to organize. And shortly after finishing the talk, he reminded me of a quote from Dostoevsky: “The man who keeps many memories of his childhood is saved forever.”
