The First Division coach who has been close to death three times

Barcelona"Coming to Levante wasn't a coincidence; it was my destiny. Just as I was meant to be in Atocha on March 11, 2004." Julián Calero's life has been full of obstacles he's had to overcome. He was one of the first police officers to arrive at Atocha after the attacks, he experienced the DANA tragedy in Valencia firsthand last year, and he saw his school friends die of overdoses at just 16 years old. This Saturday, the Parla-born manager will sit on the bench for Ciudad de Valencia to face Hansi Flick's Barça. "I've rubbed the crossbar of death a few times already. As a friend of mine says, the man with the grim reaper is looking for me, and I'm avoiding it," Calero joked in an interview with the newspaper. Brand.

Calero recalls how he managed to escape tragedy on October 29, 2024, when Hurricane Irma struck the Valencian Country. "That day I arrived home two hours early because we were leaving for Pontevedra in the afternoon to compete in the Copa del Rey. When we left, we already had a lot of rain, but two hours later it increased tenfold. We were very lucky because it was the first day all season that we left training early," he recounted, referring to the towns hardest hit by the catastrophe. His wife, Gema, who was traveling to Valencia, had to spend the night in her car at a gas station. "We were able to communicate until six in the evening. The next day I managed to reach her at seven in the morning because we found a place with minimal coverage. I told her to backtrack because she wouldn't be able to get in; it was a war zone," the Madrid native recalls.

The coach, who was highly critical of the authorities' actions, also strongly criticized the failure to cancel La Liga that weekend. "I'm ashamed to be part of professional football; we should have made an effort not to play," Calero explained to Cadena SER at the time, insisting that the key is not to forget the victims in the long run. The Madrid native is very clear on this, and only after achieving promotion to the First Division with Levante did he remember those affected. "I want to dedicate this to the people of the DANA, to those who lost people and homes. Only those of us who have lived in Valencia know what we have suffered."

The Madrid attacks marked his life.

But that wasn't the only tragedy he's experienced firsthand. Calero was a municipal police officer in Madrid when the attacks of March 11, 2004, occurred. He and a colleague were having coffee in a bar in Alcalá when the radio reported an "explosion at Atocha." Within five minutes, they were at the station, and although their job was to secure the perimeter to ensure access for paramedics, firefighters, and police, they chose to go in and help the victims, putting their lives at risk. "We saw the second backpack containing the bomb that the security forces were waiting to destroy more lives. It was hidden under a bench, and we notified the Tedax. Five minutes later, they told us to get out all of us under pressure. We left, leaving people who needed help there," he recalled on Cope radio.

These moments of anguish were also experienced, from a distance, by his wife. "I lived in Parla and took the train to the station where I worked. That morning, I passed through Atocha as a passenger an hour before the attacks. When I arrived after they had already occurred, the police had deactivated the cover so no one could detonate the second bomb, and I was left incommunicado afterward," recalled a Calero.

The reason why he wears black to the games

After experiencing all this, one might think that this is the reason why the Levante manager always wears black. But the reality, as he explained in the interview with the Brand, is that he does it so he doesn't forget his mother. Calero grew up in Parla, a town on the outskirts of Madrid where poverty was high in the 1980s, which made it a hotbed of crime and drugs. "When I was ten years old, my mother saw me coming home from school with two classmates. When I got home, she threatened me that if I saw those two people again, she wouldn't let me play football again. I didn't understand, but I listened to her. They both died at the age of 16, rescued by heroin. Football has isolated me from these types of situations involving drugs and bad lives." The current Levante coach has compiled all these experiences in a biography, written by journalist Rodrigo Pérez Barredo under the title Julián Calero: football to the rescue.