The survival of Nàstic de Tarragona in a shark pool

TarragonaLluís Fàbregas (Tarragona, 1967) has spent half his life at Nàstic. In the 1980s, he stood in goal for the club in the Third and Second B divisions, and in the 21st century he joined the club's organizational chart, where he has done everything from leading the commercial and brand department to being its general manager for fifteen years. In the summer of 2024, he replaced Josep Maria Andreu as club president. The change came shortly after the fateful night against Málaga, marked by the decisions of Eder Mallo, which frustrated the team's promotion to Second Division nastiquer and led to an unprecedented complaint against a member of the court, admitted for processing because the judge warned of signs of "document falsification and corruption in sports."

"We couldn't remain silent in the face of such a blatant and proven injustice. We were humiliated and mistreated, especially by the lies the referee wrote during the match, which led to a severe financial and sporting sanction," Fàbregas explained on Ará from his Tarragona stadium, the site of the events. "The case is currently being brought to court, and we're waiting for the former president of the CTA, Medina Cantalejo, to testify," the Grana president added about the complaint.

Last June the people of Tarragona experienced another tragic outcome with the defeat against Real Sociedad B; again, with refereeing controversy in the second leg of the final play-off, played on "a training ground that didn't meet the requirements of the category" – the minimum capacity is 4,000 spectators. "The lack of VAR was a huge detriment to us. And, since we'd learned our lesson, before the knockout stages I called the clubs involved to jointly request the federation to allow VAR to be used, but they told us there wasn't enough time to implement it," Fàbregas reveals. Two months later, a low-cost video refereeing system was introduced in the First Division RFEF.

First RFEF: an unequal and deficient category

"The First RFEF has been a completely loss-making competition since its inception. It has an average annual loss of 40 million euros—more than a million per club without counting the reserve teams—because income doesn't match expenses. In the Second Division, you receive at least six million euros in television rights, while in the First RFEF, Tarragona. Therefore, to be self-sufficient, a club must reach professional football, and since only four teams are promoted per season, the category has become a shark tank: "There are huge inequalities and brutal inflation with the salaries paid by some teams. There are players who earn more than in the Second Division."

Coexistence with the reserve teams—eight of the forty participating teams are—is another cause that explains the imbalances in the category. "They don't play by the same rules because they have the resources generated by their first teams in the League and have much higher budgets to sign more expensive players and pay better salaries. We defend that there should be a league of affiliates or that, if they compete with the rest of the clubs, they should do so in a limited way, without the possibility of promotion," the president declared. twice in the final of the play-off against a reserve team. In 2022, his executioner was striker Nicolas Jackson, who a year later was transferred from Villarreal to Chelsea for 37 million.

For all these reasons, the garnet club wants to escape from Primera RFEF as soon as possible and this year, despite the hesitant start, its objective is once again to move up a category. "We think that Nàstic should be in professional football because it is its natural place. In fact, we maintain the structure of a professional club and, in addition, we represent an important city like Tarragona, and we are part of its DNA in the same way as the human castles, Santa Tecla or the Roman legacy of the municipality," proclaims the spokesperson for a sky in an entity with a Division entity and that, despite the two consecutive setbacks in the play-off, is more socially alive than ever: it has surpassed 7,500 members – it hadn't seen such high numbers for fourteen years – and is the fourth most popular football club in Catalonia, behind only the three in the First Division.

The voice of modest Catalan football in Madrid

But promotion isn't the only fight for Nàstic, which, together with Olot, represents the non-professional Catalan teams in the RFEF assembly. "We believe that a federation like the Catalan one (FCF), which is currently known more for judicial issues that for sporting achievements, it is there to serve the clubs and not be served by them. And since we understood that it did not defend the interests of Catalan football in Madrid, we stood for election," explains Fàbregas. His main objective is "to recover recognition and representation on the national scene in Catalonia," which is the autonomous community with the most licenses – there are more than 200,000, 20% of the total in Spain – but only 4 between 2 and 4 between 2 and 20% of the total in Spain.

One of his proposals to achieve this is that Catalonia has three groups in the Third RFEF instead of just one, because they would be eligible due to the volume of players in the region. This would ease the bottleneck between the Third and Second RFEF and allow Catalan teams and players the same opportunities to enter the semi-professional league as those from smaller autonomous communities.