Great story, hope Eibar can remain in the La LigaEIBAR, Spain — This month, Toni Kroos and Lionel Messi played in the World Cup final in front of nearly 75,000 people at Rio de Janeiro’s Estádio do Maracanã.
Soon, however, these star players will discover the challenge of playing at Ipurúa, a hillside stadium with 5,250 seats that is home to Eibar, the new kid on the block in Spanish soccer.
Tiny Eibar has needed more than just victories to join La Liga, Spain’s top division, and earn the right to challenge Kroos and his Real Madrid teammates or Messi and his fellow Barcelona players. After winning promotion in late May from the second division, Eibar faced a race against the clock to raise 1.72 million euros, or $2.32 million, and meet regulations on how much capital a top-division club should have.
It closed its capital raising Monday, two weeks before the Aug. 6 deadline, after selling €1.98 million worth of shares to fans. It was another significant achievement for the club, but one that its management, proud of having kept the club debt-free, believes shows just how skewed the rules of Spanish soccer are.
“When you know that Spanish soccer is in financial chaos, it seems both ironic and unfair that the rules have been designed to try to sink one of the few clubs that is financially sound,” said Alex Aranzábal, Eibar’s president. “This has turned out to be a fight between David and Goliath, not only on the soccer field but also in lawyers’ offices.”
Although Spain’s financial rules for soccer were tightened last year, the clubs of Spain’s top two divisions have still accumulated debts of about €3.6 billion. The government recently said clubs owed a total of €663 million in taxes.
To increase its capital base, Eibar sold shares for €50 each. It prevented individuals from buying more than €100,000 worth of shares, which carry voting rights, to keep the club from joining the swelling ranks of teams owned by tycoons.
“The last thing we wanted is for some businessman to swoop in and turn Eibar into whatever he wants, as if he had picked up some candy,” Aranzábal said.
Iker Etxeberria, a teacher who can watch Eibar play from the balcony of his apartment, shares that philosophy.
“It’s about doing the best we can, not about winning at all cost and then leaving a club in bankruptcy,” he said. “Eibar should never belong to a sheikh but always to the people of our town.”
About 8,000 people bought shares. Most were Spaniards, but people from 47 other countries also bought shares, including 400 American investors, the biggest foreign contingent, with Chinese purchasers second.
Aranzábal acknowledged that some of the new investors would struggle to locate Eibar on the map. Wedged in a valley of the Basque Country and home to 27,000 people, Eibar has a dwindling gun manufacturing industry, which has given the soccer team its nickname, the Gunners (also the nickname of Arsenal, a more famous London club.)
“Even if some people didn’t know anything about Eibar, they could sympathize with our struggle against an unfair system,” Aranzábal said.
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Still, Manuel Martín Domínguez, a sports lawyer at the Spanish firm Gómez-Acebo & Pombo, predicted that being forced to raise additional capital would turn out to be in the club’s interest. Joining La Liga, he said, “means almost inevitably that a club starts to spend and invest more and that its salaries rise.”
Eibar won Spain’s second division last season with a budget and a stadium smaller than those of any of its rivals. The year before, it won promotion from Spain’s third division, known as Segunda B.
The club had a budget of only €3.9 million last season. That figure is set to swell to about €16 million this season, thanks to marketing and television revenue from playing in La Liga, but it is still a fraction of the payroll for Barcelona or Real Madrid, each of which has paid fees approaching €100 million to acquire one top player.
Aranzábal, Eibar’s president, credited the club’s coach, Gaizka Garitano, with its meteoric progress. Another key factor has been an austere but astute recruitment policy, focused on adding players on loan from bigger clubs. Even before its recent triumphs, Eibar had acquired some fame for nurturing talented players. Both Xabi Alonso and David Silva, who played for Spain as it won the World Cup four years ago, played on loan at Eibar earlier in their careers.
Silva, who now plays for Manchester City, “would probably not be the player he is today had he not gone through Eibar,” said Iñaki Sáez, a former coach of Spain’s national team.
“Eibar is the kind of club where you really get to learn what it is to fight for the ball and where the team trains just as tough as it plays,” Sáez added.
Aranzábal said the team’s “near impossible” mission this season was to avoid relegation from La Liga. But facing Eibar at its home stadium is also not likely to be a stroll in the park, even for the bigger clubs.
“I think players like Messi will feel pretty uncomfortable because they’re not used to such a small stadium, where the crowd is so close to you and where you’re not playing on the perfect carpet of the Camp Nou,” said Javier Irureta, one of Spain’s most successful coaches, notably at Deportivo de la Coruña, which he led to the title in La Liga in 2000.
The Ipurúa stadium, however, is being expanded, against the club’s wishes, to comply with Spanish soccer rules. Under the rules, clubs that join La Liga have two years to provide at least 15,000 seats. For now, Eibar is building a new stand to increase its total to 6,700 seats.
“Let’s first see whether we can stay in La Liga before investing more,” Aranzábal said. Given that Spain has endured a major crisis in its construction industry, he added, “We’re again talking about nonsense rules, to encourage Pharaonic works and leave clubs with stadiums that can’t be filled.
The team’s rise to La Liga has generated significant excitement in Eibar, with its scarlet and blue colors (similar to those of Barcelona) hanging from many of the town’s balconies. But it has also created a conundrum for people who had instead long supported either Real Sociedad or Athletic Bilbao, the two main Basque teams, each about 30 miles from Eibar.
With the next Liga season starting in late August, Eibar faces one more major challenge: rebuilding its roster. As of Monday, Eibar had 16 players, well short of its target of 24, following an exodus after last season that was partly due to other teams’ reclaiming players they had lent to the club.
“Really nothing about joining La Liga has been easy for us,” Aranzábal said
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