This is a morality tale, only the moral of the story is the wrong way round.
When Luis Sabalza took over at Osasuna in December 2014, there was darkness. They had just been relegated, but they hadn’t stopped falling. The electricity had been cut off, the players who hadn’t walked away had reported the club for not paying them, and the youth team was wearing old kit, whatever they could find. They were €80million in debt. There was a big, gaping hole in the accounts, the only explanation the worse explanation you could ever imagine: an ethical, emotional and institutional crisis to go with the economic one, dragging them down and tearing them apart, their very existence precarious.
– Stream on ESPN+: LaLiga, Bundesliga, more (U.S.)
The new president mortgaged his own home and possessions to provide the guarantee to be able to take over when no one else would and to keep them afloat. He was forced, one staff member says, to borrow from friends to shop for groceries, while everything a proper club is supposed to have, Osasuna lacked: from reports on players to basic materials, and for some, even the will to go on. The fans wouldn’t abandon them — they never do — but they came more through a sense of duty and loyalty than joy, reduced numbers resisting, refusing to give in. But no one else really wanted a part of this.
There was, says one of the men trying to resurrect the club, “a cloud of sadness.” It was their task to lift the gloom, get people to believe in them again, which wasn’t easy. It almost became impossible.
In the 17th minute of the final day of the 2014-15 season, Osasuna were already 2-0 down, on their way to the Second Division B. Spain’s 80-team, four group, regionalised third division which is anything from a third to a seventh tier, a place where there is no money and less hope, they call the Segunda B the well because it’s easy enough to fall into but almost impossible to climb out of. In the 90th minute, Osasuna were still there. “If we had gone down, that would have practically meant the club going out of business,” says Fran Canal, the director general. In the 91st minute at Sabadell, a Javier Flano header saved them, the first miracle of many.
Instead, how easy it would now be to reduce it all to: Osasuna. Banned. Match fixing.
How unfair too. And how counterproductive. “It’s mad to punish the people who tried to clean up the club,” president Sabalza said. The moral of the story, all wrong; the example it seems to set so skewed. The club’s statement “lament[ed] the mistaken message UEFA sends the world, punishing those that denounce corruption, instead damaging them legally.”
And that may be the most troubling part of it all.
UEFA’s rules make sense at least on a basic level and they do not allow much room for argument. The risk of reinterpreting them may open them to abuse: it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which it a club, seeking a loophole, could “justify” corruption, disown it and “cleanse” their record simply by replacing a president and claiming to effectively be a different institution now. And it is simple enough to understand why UEFA wish to prevent offenders from simply carrying on: remember Calciopoli in Italy? They do.
There is a legitimate doubt to be had over how to define a club, how to judge responsibility and prevent institutions evading it or, worse still, effectively benefitting from corruption. And it is possible to wonder if Osasuna could have managed this differently; if, knowing the criteria, the might have foreseen trouble ahead, if there was some early preventative measure they could have taken, some case to present or explanation to be made, as soon as they knew European qualification was possible. Nor are they the first club to be banned for match fixing: Besiktas and Fenerbache were both barred in 2013 and both failed on appeal.
But at the end of it all, it is hard not to feel sympathy for a team, a club, who gave everything for this and will embrace the Conference League like few others, one that deserves it; for a group of players, a coach and a board of directors who are blameless — heroes, in fact — and fans who have suffered enough. It is tempting to compare them to more powerful clubs able to play the system or just take the hit one year and be back the next. It is hard to avoid a feeling that this is unjust, that first instinctive sense that they of all clubs don’t deserve this. It is hard not to feel that somehow, this is not the way it is supposed to be.
Honesty pays, do the right thing, they say. Tackle corruption, take it on, root it out. Act. But the moral of this story is: actually, don’t. “You can’t cover it up,” Canal says, and he remains convinced of that. Yet right now, Osasuna fans could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. And other clubs, seeing this, might think about looking the other way. Some lesson, huh? Who is going to blow the whistle next time?
“How do you tell a president who sees something illegal to denounce it?” Canal says. “They are de-incentivising the fight against corruption and that should make us all reflect.”
