There are stories that only fit in a football that today would be impossible without social networks burning. Keko Gontán, Atlético’s youth player and former Eibar, Málaga and Deportivo player, has uncovered an anecdote as absurd as it is revealing: a coach even included pornographic fragments in video sessions to keep the locker room awake. A practice as unusual as it is difficult to imagine in today’s football.
The diary Sport It includes the surprising story, which occurred in 2010, when Keko was barely 18 years old and was playing on loan for Cartagena. She told it without makeup, with the naturalness of someone who shares memories that still smell like a locker room. A confession that mixes youthful innocence with the rawness of an unorthodox method.
The context helps to understand the delirium: the tactical analysis was artisanal, with television recordings and little technology. Juan Ignacio Martínez, the coach, assumed that the footballer’s attention would evaporate in minutes. That’s why he decided to break the monotony with an immediate and brutal stimulus. Three seconds were enough to go from yawning to absolute focus.
The scene, narrated by Keko, borders on surrealism: “It was three seconds in and we were all like meerkats.” The trick was repeated so many times that it stopped being a surprise and became routine. The players waited for him with a “coming, coming!”, a mix of humor and discipline. A method of concentration by impact, without anesthesia.
The irony is that the invention did not create an unstoppable team. That Cartagena finished the season in the middle of the table, without promotion and without drama, demonstrating that not even the most extreme coup d’effect gives you points. But history did leave a more lasting mark than any result: a photograph of a time in which football was more instinct than laboratory. And where the locker room was managed based on occurrences that are impossible to replicate today.
Later, Keko lived the career of the nomadic footballer, with stops in Italy, Albacete, Eibar, a Málaga team that paid five million for him, Valladolid, Deportivo and the United States. In Sacramento he found stability until he was left without a team at the end of 2023. And yet, his name now returns to the forefront for something that has nothing to do with a goal, but with a memory that portrays football like few others: everything may be modernized, but the player’s mind will continue to be the true game. @mundiario
