When loving a club can cause a mental health problem

GIRONAÀlex Granell, a Girona player between 2014 and 2020, hung up his boots this January. He retired with a final spell at Bolívar after an atypical career in which he played in all the categories existing in amateur and professional football. Granell, in his early days, combined work as a school teacher with games in the Third Division. He has ended up winning titles in La Paz under the watchful eye of his son.

In his farewell from the pitch, the Girona native confessed that he left Montilivi for health reasons. "I wasn't aware that anything was wrong with me, but I had unhealthy episodes of mental health. I felt a lot of anguish. I never got to the bottom of the matter, I just kept saying "I'm not well, I'm not well." In reality, I suffered anxiety attacks. I couldn't breathe properly. And I thought it was nothing more than the pressure."

These symptoms appeared between the 2018-19 season, the unexpected relegation of Eusebio Sacristán's Girona, due to nine defeats in the last ten games, and the non-promotion of the 2019-20 season, with the painful setback in Mont. English: NOW: "I understand it perfectly, because we all had a very bad time. We lived through a real drama, in there. He, in addition, had a lot of responsibility. He feels part of the house, and at that time as captain, wherever he went, he had to give a job in which everything was a demand." , he felt and defended the dressing room like no one else, he never said a bad word. day, but all this wears you down, of course."

The communication strategy, moreover, pressed him to the extreme. It was always the footballers themselves who, setback after setback, stood in front of the microphones to show their faces to try to argue a situation that was beyond them and they did not even know how to describe. Many players did not want to talk. They hid. Granell, no. He never did. To the point of sharing a pre-match press conference with Eusebio on the decisive day against Levante to continue in the elite, an anomaly that had not happened before or happened again later. "The club already knew what each one of us could say.

The next step was to talk. "Honestly, we didn't notice it at the time. But he wasn't the only one who fell. Many of us were affected by the pain for months and months. We were just getting by, as best we could." "It's crap. A relegation and a non-promotion are crap. It stays with you. You go on holiday, you think you'll switch off and clean up your mind, and everything reminds you of it. It's impossible to get it out of your head," other main players in these defeats summarise privately – and some already in public.

"We'll hurt each other"

Granell was, in fact, booed at Montilivi. And he was the subject of undeserved criticism and insults that made him decide to delete himself from social media. "People pointed at me a lot because things weren't going well enough. It's obvious that the captain and the home player are the ones who have to be told that we're not happy, and not someone else. But I felt a lot of social pressure. I always had to be polite and respectful and do things well, so that everyone was watching me. And I also had to say "Álex, you have to go, because we'll hurt each other," he explained in an interview on RAC1, in which he explained that, despite considering it, he never worked on these problems with a professional, and that it was Mireia, his wife, who acted as "psychologist."

"I remember asking him why he was leaving us, and his answer was very clear: 'I can't go on, I can't go on, I want to go, I need to go.' He had to get away," says the source, who concludes. "It's just that we suffered a lot, a lot. It was too hard."