The wound of Girona begins to be incurable
GironaWhen Girona was winning, its president, Delfí Geli, took the opportunity to recall that the greatest virtue of the current owners' arrival at the club was not the victories themselves, but the fact that people in the city were simply talking about football. The current president, and former footballer, knows what he's talking about, because he experienced embarrassing situations firsthand. Times when players locked themselves in the dressing room because they weren't being paid. Geli, then a mere 17-year-old, saw how respectable and established men couldn't feed their children or pay their mortgages.
Girona was making headlines, always negative, for what was happening off the field, not on it. You don't have to look far for precedents, just travel back to 2015. That's why the arrival of City Football Group, of Pere Guardiola and, later, of Marcelo Claure, along with their presence in the First Division, changed the perspective of thousands of Girona fans, who fell in love with a football club that even they themselves hadn't taken seriously.
But in 2026, and after having reached the unimaginable beyond, Girona is once again a protagonist for non-sporting reasons. The relationship between the fans and the owners is broken since the Champions League stint. I wouldn't be mistaken if I said that the wound is now incurable and that defeats have little to do with it. The owners have lost the credibility they had by destroying the identity model developed with Míchel Sánchez, which everyone boasted about.
In a decade, we have gone from the Girona midfield trio of Eloi Amagat, Àlex Granell, and Pere Pons, who had great sporting and sentimental performance, to starting a Second Division League after squandering record budgets of 200 million in two years, incorporating footballers from very different corners of the world, with little intention of putting down roots in the project, who have isolated the team until it has become a sum of individualities of questionable talent, and not a collective with which the people of Girona can identify.
The show is such that this Monday a press conference was scheduled by Viktor Tsygankov's representative, who has an open case for refusing to play, in which it was hinted that he would lash out at everyone, starting with Pere Guardiola, to whom various graffiti have been dedicated in the city with the word commission agent next to his surname. There is no evidence, but the shadow of suspicion surrounds him, in this dual role of agent (he is a strategic partner and shareholder of a representation agency) and minority owner of Girona, where the lines of conflict of interest often blur. The act has been suspended and Girona has finally accepted a lower offer than it intended to earn. The saga has been resolved, but the club's image is once again damaged.