José María Minguella, 80 years old, former manager and Spanish businessman with great ties to Barcelona, in an extensive interview with the magazine Libero, tells about the hiring of Maradona for Barça.
“My first job was at Cirefilms, but at the same time I took a coaching course and they called me to help young people in Barça. I reconciled the two things until the 70s, with the arrival of Vic Buckingham [treinador inglês] at the bank there was no one in the club who spoke English. I had gone to England for a few summers and, although I couldn’t speak fluently, I volunteered and that’s how I joined the first team. Then I was assistant to Rinus Michels [treinador neerlandês], with Cruyff as a player and when Rinus left I wanted to go see the world, travel around South America, watch games and, in one of them, I saw Maradona», he began by telling.
So how did you manage to bring Maradona to Barcelona?
“It was a long and complicated process. In the Argentine government there were soldiers from Videla [antigo ditador da Argentina] that, somehow, they needed a figure like Diego. We closed a deal with Argentinos Juniors in 1980, but the government issued a note saying that Maradona was a national heritage and that he could not leave before the 1982 World Cup in Spain, despite the Barcelona leaders having already gone to Buenos Aires to sign with the player. In early 1982 I had to return to Argentina because that first contract was no longer valid. Prospero Consoli, the then president of Argentinos Juniors, was no longer in office and the new president was a police officer… When I arrived to talk to him, we went into a restaurant with the Barcelona treasurer and he put a gun on the table. We laughed, but we were surprised, we weren’t used to negotiating with a gun on the table», he recalled.
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