Almost a year after leaving Espanyol (“I submitted my resignation before they fired me”), Josep Maria Duran, who was CEO of the club from January 2020 to March 2022, has broken his silence on the Twitch of the journalist Javier de Haro, where he has spoken in detail about how his departure was and how he sees Espanyol in the future, where he gave some resounding arguments: “What is worrying is next season. If you lose money, they subtract it… If there are no sales, you will lose income. The salary cap will drop drastically. It is essential to do another capital increase again. We may be at 50 something million limit (now it’s almost 70)”, commented the former manager, who insisted “we must make another extension”.
LaLiga Santander 2022/2023
*Data updated as of February 23, 2023
Durán was clear and commented that Espanyol is the club “with the most potential and, therefore, the most wasted”. Even now there is an opportunity that arises, which is the situation of Barça, due to its economic problems and the scandal with the payments to the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees José María Enríquez Negreira, which place him in a position to grow in Barcelona , always in the shadow of the Catalans: “It seems that we are in a feudal system and that there are two clubs that have the right of seigneury. They should do the same with Barça if everything that is intuited that with Juventus is demonstrated, relegate it to Second. It is a shame. Now he is with a debt that can reach 3,000 million… That is a great opportunity for Espanyol”.
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Durán’s departure: “Chen is cold, if he wants something, he executes it”
Regardless of the future and the present, and the potential that Espanyol has, the CEO explained for the first time how he left the club in a sale process to an American group that was finally cut short because “they changed the offer, they offered less money”. Durán explained how those negotiations went and how the president lost confidence in him: “I received investors with Mao by my side. It was my shadow. It was a transparent process but it had a lot of prominence. They wanted to lean on me and that made Chen uncomfortable. When the negotiation broke down, both Chen and Mao lost confidence in me and that’s why they were going to take the step, I already saw strange things”.
The former CEO of the club, who spoke openly with big headlines, acknowledged that Chen’s problem is “that he does not trust Westerners” and that his dream was to manage the entity from Barcelona: “He wanted to manage the club, he wanted to live here for one or two years. He was the one who wanted to take him… Chen is cold, if he wants something, he does it. Mao is a professional, he was correct. He is pragmatic.” And that episode closed: “Chen felt uncomfortable with my role and now he has Mao, a disciplined person. They both talk every day and Mao does what Chen tells him.”
Durán reiterated his plans at the head of the club in the event that the Americans (Paul L. Foster was one of them) had bought the entity. The sports director would have been Ramon Planes, who even had the approval of the president Chen Yansheng, although he confessed that the former sports director only wanted to come in case the Americans had bought the entity. They already had several coaches on the agenda, including Diego Martínez. And even he made it clear that since the promotion was achieved, Durán considered that “Rufete had to leave the club, we needed a change”. He also revealed the CEO who contacted Mauricio Pochettino although at that time it was impossible. “That Planes and Pochettino came was a dream”, sentenced.
