The parakeet novelist obsessed with footballers' rights

BarcelonaAt 17 years old, Jaume Sabaté (Badalona, 1947) was forced to abandon his electronic engineering studies because of the ball. His family ran a plumbing business, but since he played as a defender for Badalona in the Second Division and traveled constantly, he didn't have time for books. It was the 60s.

“Football was very different. Look, I remember that at Badalona I had a thigh injury and the masseur started rubbing it with an empty bottle of Anís del Mono, which had raised lettering. «What the hell are you doing?», I told him. And he replied that he was the inventor of anisotherapy”, Sabaté explains, laughing. This is one of the autobiographical anecdotes that appear in Misterios en el palco, the latest work by the former player for Betis and Espanyol, the two teams of his life, who face each other this Saturday in Seville (6:30 p.m., Movistar+).

It is a novel, Sabaté's first, set in the Spanish professional football of the 70s and 80s, which he knows so well. “There are real estate dealings, corruption, illegal betting and murders”, adds the former Catalan footballer, who hasn't stopped since he retired: “This business of watching TV sitting on the sofa or investing in the stock market isn't for me. That's why I started writing. I also learned to play the piano”. Six years ago he published his first work, AFE: creation and birth, in which he recounts the founding process from within the first players' union in Spanish football, born in 1978.

“They screwed me everywhere”

“It all started with a goalkeeper from Atlètic de Madrid, a certain Zubiarraín, who wasn’t getting paid. There were non-payments, there was the right of retention... and a generalized discontent began to build up, which ended with the creation of the footballers’ association, which defended the players’ rights”, explains Sabaté, who was then playing for Betis and served as a union representative in Andalusia, and became one of the pioneers who established AFE.

“I was present at all the meetings from the beginning; the Diario Pueblo, Abc, the Suroeste... they attacked me everywhere for being a unionist. Franco had recently died, and the structures were still Francoist”, reveals Sabaté, who was also a protagonist in the first strike in Spanish football in March 1979. “The matches in the First and Second divisions were postponed for a week. Betis was playing against Múrcia, and the coach didn’t start me because the crowd would have booed me severely. But it turned out that my substitute got injured, and I had to come on after halftime. The whole stadium started shouting at me and giving me a hard time”, comments the former player from Badalona, who was then accustomed to receiving insults and threats.

A cigarette at halftime of a final

Shortly before, in June 1977, Sabaté lifted with Betis the first King's Cup in democracy after 40 years of dictatorship –until then, it was called the Generalissimo's Cup–. “It had political connotations. The media gave Bilbao as the winner, but since ETA was assassinating many people, at the final people were with us,” reveals the defender, who took the sixth penalty in an eternal shootout that decided the champion.

“21 were taken because the referee made Chechu Rojo retake a penalty”. It was a very special title for Betis, the second in their history, after the 1935 League, and in 2023 Sabaté dedicated a book to it: Secretos de una final histórica. La primera Copa del Rey. “It is a work that portrays what we players lived, with firsthand experiences. One of the things I explain is that at halftime a teammate smoked a cigarette in the bathroom,” describes Sabaté, who played more than a hundred matches in the First Division.

The first ones were with Espanyol, who had signed him from Badalona in 1965 after convincing Ladislau Kubala, the periquito coach, in a trial they held for him at the Olympic Stadium. Military service, which forced him to go on loan to Lleida and Olot, and a clash with coach José Emilio Santamaría prevented him from making a place for himself in the team of his heart.

Upon returning from Andalusia, in 1980 he hung up his boots at Badalona, and shortly afterwards he moved to Ripoll to manage a bank branch and coach the local team, in Primera Regional: “They were my practical training to get my title”. The versatile Sabaté went through the benches of Badalona, Sant Andreu, and l’Hospitalet before taking a leave of absence from the bank to coach Espanyol in the 1991-92 season. He was ten games in charge of the first white-and-blue team and, replaced by Clemente, he returned to work until he retired and became a writer.