NOBODY F**KS WITH THE JESÚS [Part 3]

On the 30th of June, 1992, Jesús Gil had three hours left to pay several billion pesetas. If he failed to come up with the money, Atlético de Madrid would lose its professional status and be thrown out of top-flight football. (The team was sitting in 3rd at the time). “Jesús Gil and Enrique Cerezo became the heroes that would save the team,” said the man that would eventually put Gil in jail, prosecutor Carlos Castresana on HBO’s The Pioneer (2019). “Or at least that’s the story that was sold to the supporters,” his lips tighten into a wry smile. Renowned sports journalist, José María García, who supported Gil’s candidacy in 1987 and who we met in Part 2 of NOBODY F**KS WITH THE JESÚS, adds: “He saved Atlético de Madrid. And that salvation is what gave him ownership of Atleti. I’d have to reveal a lot of secrets but what he did is a feat of engineering.”

Around that same time, PSOE, the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers Party, tabled the idea of turning football clubs into sociedades anónimas—essentially, Public Limited Companies. By then, Gil had already become president of Atlético and, reader, it will not surprise you to learn that he was greatly in favour of the move. “[Before that], who owned the club? The members,” said Enrique Sánchez de León, one of Gil’s rivals in the 1987 elections for the presidency of Atlético de Madrid. “And so, what is a PLC? It is the reduction of ownership to just a mere few. That feeling of ownership, belonging, participation? It’s gone. This is now an entity. It’s now a business. And a business belonging to someone else.” Gil, speaking on television about the matter, rejected those concerns as hearts and flowers, obsolete sentimentality. “[The old model] is not viable, whatever the romantics say. For me, club members—future shareholders—they simply don’t care how the club is administered, or if the players get paid or not.” If that standpoint discommoded the Atleti faithful, Gil reminded them why they ought to be grateful. “I’m the only club president in Spain that has brought in football stars, paid for with my own money, and that has signed a guarantee with the National Sports Council that any losses will be borne at my own expense. Something that no other president has done in history.”

And it was true that Gil brought in players. For himself, to then loan to the club. “I saw the players every month come into my father’s office,” said Miguel Ángel Gil Marín in 2019, son of Gil and majority shareholder (somehow) of the club to this day. “They were coming for their wages.” By this point, despite his assurances in 1987 that he would defend Atleti and put a halt to its crazy excesses of the past, the club now owed Gil a lot of money. It had only taken five years. Like a loan shark that had started out enquiring as to the health of your family, and now, somehow, you find you’re into him for 50-large. “For every peseta that he spends on supposedly sanitising the club,” explained Castresana. “He has, in reality, accounted for as a peseta that’s owed to him.” On the 13th of July, 1991, El Mundo newspaper, one of the widely-circulated in Spain, ran the following headline:

JESÚS GIL ADMITS THAT HE AND THE REST OF THE CLUBS FALSIFY THE ACTUAL SALARIES OF FOOTBALLERS.

Spanish law stipulated that there were a number of conditions that a sociedad anónima had to meet in order to be considered economically viable. For this reason, a certain amount of capital was required upfront to cover any liabilities. Those clubs that were incapable of “sanitising” themselves economically, faced impending ruination—dissolution as a professional football club and demotion to Segunda B, the third tier in Spanish football. “In 1992, the year that these transformations are taking place,” explains Castresana. “Atlético de Madrid owes Gil around two billion pesetas (€12 million) and he has other creditors that are owed another two billion. As such, four billion pesetas are owed.” Four billion pesetas would be some €24 million—a staggering amount of money, particularly in 1992.

A decade later, in May 2002, as Gil gave evidence in the National Court, Castresana himself would rest his head in his hand, unblinking, and half-slumped in his seat, as if wearied by this enormous man’s endless endurance for excuses and fish stories. “I wanted the club to survive,” Gil protested. “Because with 4 billion pesetas of debt we were headed… Well, you know exactly where we were headed, to Segunda B—as you yourself, Mr. Prosecutor, have said so many times, it would be the disappearance of the club.”

Now, reader, as I’m almost certain that you will be aware that Atlético de Madrid did not disappear. You already know Gil ‘saved’ the club. So, how did he manage to scrabble together four billion pesetas? The back of every sofa in the world still would have left him short. “My father was advised by a lawyer,” explained a grinning Miguel Ángel Gil Marín on The Pioneer. “And they created an atypical model, as was so often his way, which was to disavow the debt and say: I do not acknowledge this debt the club owes me because if I do, and there will be no-one that can save Atlético de Madrid. And what he acquires, in exchange for those two billion pesetas, is the future capital gains in the event of the sale of players by the club, once it was a PLC. This was the strategy so my father wouldn’t lose any of the money he paid in between 1987 and 1992.”

Atypical, indeed. If it sounds dodgy, that’s because it was. The State’s prosecutor certainly saw it that way. A bemused Carlos Castresana analysed said atypical model thusly. “Expected future capital gains from the rise in value of players?” he shrugs his shoulders incredulously. “You, sir, are selling me smoke. Because players can become more valuable, but they can also devalue. Future perspectives can’t be objects of commerce to be bought and sold because nobody has a crystal ball with which to see the future. But all the same, they cancel the debt. [And he declares] the club doesn’t owe me anything anymore.” Back to Gil sitting in the National Court in 2002, referring to himself in the third person, and addressing a visibly frustrated Castresana. “And I’ll tell you what’s more. The board, the last thing they probably wanted to know was how my debt was cancelled. But here’s the thing, the board isn’t stupid. If Atlético de Madrid doesn’t have two bob to rub together, and Gil, who is owed 1.9 billion, from one day to the next, suddenly says he isn’t owed a thing, has the Holy Spirit visited us? Or has someone come along and given me the tip jar? The truth is one that everybody knew perfectly well.” At the time of his atypical model in the early 90s, Gil had made a wager with the Spanish State: you know what I’ve done. I know what I’ve done. But all the same, you can’t afford to kill me off. And, as he often was, he was on the money. “The politicians back then decided that they shouldn’t shoulder the political cost of allowing one of football’s historic clubs to disappear,” Castresana smiles between gritted teeth. “Because what happens afterwards? Well, there are elections. And so, the National Sports Council accepted it, and said, ah, so you, sirs, are saying that this debt has disappeared from the books? Okay, fine. Then you only have to pay the two billion [outstanding].” That was the price to avoid dissolution. The price of survival. Now Gil just had to find the money. Somehow.

On the 27th of June, 1992, Atlético faced their blood rivals, Real Madrid, in the final of the Copa del Rey, and in their own back yard to boot. The headline in El Mundo leading up to game read: GIL MORE WORRIED ABOUT FINDING 2 BILLION THAN THE FINAL.
Come the day itself, 70,000 spectators filled the Bernabeu to witness Atleti beat their ‘eternal rivals’ 0-2. With little more than five minutes gone, former Madridista, the bowl-haired Bernd Schuster, scored a torpedo of a free kick from a mile out. To cap it, Gil talisman and now club captain, Paulo Futre, collected a perfect counter-attack ball on 29 minutes from Manolo to smash it into the top corner at Buyo’s near post. “It was a very, very special day,” Futre told HBO. “For everything that had happened, and for the Atleti faithful, we’re talking about winning the cup at the Bernabeu. What I felt there?... If ecstasy exists, I felt it then. Because I’ve never felt what I did in that moment since, and I never will again,” he inhales shakily and then smiles. “It was incredible. It was incredible.” Gil embraced and kissed every single one of his players on the cheeks as they passed him on the VIP box towards the cup. The joy in his face gave no hint of the fear that had to have been churning in his guts. The tears of joy were barely dry on the surface of the trophy but for all the elation of the moment, disaster, as it so often was with Gil, was just around the corner. And just like his slipshod job in Los Ángeles de San Rafael had collapsed on 58 people in 1969, it seemed as if the third biggest club in Spain, was also about to collapse and die too.

Three days passed. It was deadline day. 30th of June, 1992, 9pm. Gil had three hours left to pay two billion pesetas. Atlético de Madrid stood on the precipice of an abyss. There were only two outcomes. Either Gil found the money however humanly possible. Or Atlético would simply die. During a TV interview on the day, he was asked where things stood with the club’s situation. Gil, as was his trademark, made the question about himself without giving a great deal away in terms of actual detail. “I feel a certain optimism,” he puffed out his great chest swaddled in a flamboyant white silk shirt punctuated with little birds. “At 9:05am, things were bad. At 9:30am, things were better. At 10am, back to bad. It has been a day of great intensity full of lovely gestures. Even a homeless man, who was given 5,000 pesetas, brought them to me.” The TV anchor cut in. “But Mr. Jesús, let’s get to the point. In this moment, is there anyone willing to put two billion on the table, yes or no?”

There was no answer.

But the Atleti faithful weren’t going to go down without a fight. Everybody chipped in. Once all the donations were totted up and every lovely gesture was taken into account, what was put on the table from the Colchoneros was 112 million. It was an incredible amount from a largely poor and working class fanbase. “Thousands of members bought shares,” said Castresana. “Some buy for themselves, others buy for their kids, the families of supporters buy shares, so on. But those shares represented around three percent of what was needed. So, who puts down the remaining 1.9 billion? Jesús Gil and Enrique Cerezo. And they did that for that day and that day alone. The 30th of June. How? Gil shows 1.3 billion [to the sports council] that isn’t his—that money belonged to Dorna (Dorna Sports S.L.) who have lent it to him. And Enrique Cerezo shows 600 million loaned by Crédit Lyonnais. And that same day, the 30th of June, and not the next day, they take the money back out. These two gentlemen, as such, appropriated 97% of Atlético de Madrid without paying for it. They’ve acquired shares without paying for them.”

So, how did it work? Reader, suspend your disbelief, but the way in which these two men ‘saved’ the football club was via another atypical model. Gil, using Banco de Vitoria, receives a loan from Dorna for 1.3 billion pesetas. He opens an account in which to receive this money, one that has nothing to do with the football club itself, but a personal one, of which he is the sole authorised holder. And he has the bollocks to call this account ‘Atlético de Madrid PLC in Transformation’. Into this account, he transfers the 1.3 billion. It is here, in this account, that the National Sports Council views the necessary money. A snapshot is taken, if you will. Enrique Cerezo does the same thing at his end and another snapshot is taken. Thus, the Council accepts their money as kosher and, therefore, the club is correctly transformed into a PLC, all done on the up and up. “That same day,” Castresana says. “In the very next minute after the money touches the ‘Atlético in Transformation’ account, it goes straight back to Dorna’s account. The money never really left the Banco de Vitoria. And it never reached Atlético de Madrid. Enrique Cerezo did exactly the same with Crédit Lyonnais.”

*Enrique Cerezo, current Atlético president*

Two perfect triangles. Two men dressed as firefighters, rush into a burning bank, extinguish the fire, and when they walk out triumphantly, all the money in the vault belongs to them. The perfect heist. Cerezo, today president of the club (somehow), defended himself thusly, although in almost Dr. Seussian fashion. “Listen up. The money was real money, because it was money. The bank gave it as money, and the notary saw it as money, the Council accepted it as money. If five days later, Jesús took that money in payment for what he was owed, then mate, I don’t think that has anything to do with a PLC being formed correctly or incorrectly.” Gil’s son, Miguel Ángel Gil Marín, was frank in his opinion. “That the money was there is undeniable. It’s another matter if the money was taken back a few days later. And I’m clear about it, the money was taken back in repayment for what had been paid out between ’87 and ’92. And for me that was wrong. He [my father] should have respected the agreement and waited for the capital gains if they occurred, which wasn’t guaranteed, that was his mistake. He wasn’t a thief. But I am certain that he said to himself in that moment: I paid this money, it’s now sitting here in an account, it’s available, why the fuck wouldn’t I take it back if I put it there in the first place?” José María García described Gil in 2019 in the following way. “He was a bloke that would never give up. He would never throw in the towel, even if all he had was faith. He was a poker player that went around with two 7s. Only a bloke like him, grazing illiteracy itself, but cum laude in mental agility, could have achieved what he achieved.”

So, what are we left with in this counterfeit come-to-Jesus moment? The answer is 3% of the club, untainted by financial quackery or atypical models, that the fans actually paid for with real money. And even the money from that 3%, the very next day, the 1st of July 1992, Gil removed from the club account and placed into one of his shell companies. That is to say, not only did Gil and Cerezo not pay 1.9 billion pesetas to save the club, but they also plundered the 112 million pesetas the fans stumped up who actually tried to.

While I have focused more in this series on Gil’s time as club president/owner of Atlético de Madrid than his 11 years as a mayor, you can be certain that he played these same games with the municipal funds of the Marbella city council. To grossly oversimplify, he took public money and disseminated it across a series of shell companies through which he took care of city business. To this day, the Marbella council is trying to recoup money from Gil’s inheritors. And the suggestions of relocation of money from the public to the private is not, unsurprisingly, exclusive to his dealings on the south coast. Even Atleti’s old stadium itself, the very platform on which Gil had reinvented and enriched himself, has been dragged into this soap opera of suspicion and financial puzzlement. Could Vicente Calderón, the man after which the stadium was named, have imagined that the son of the impresario he had earmarked as his successor would one day demolish the altar of their common god? “The demolition of the stadium means a significant financial kick for the Gil family,” said journalist and biographer, Juan Luis Galiacho, to Antenna 3. “They say that, in theory, it will be re-invested into La Peineta (the site of the new Atlético de Madrid stadium) but we’ll have to see. What’s evident is that here [at Estadio Vicente Calderón] houses will be built and that represents a huge capital gain for the heirs to Gil’s wealth.” Seeing as the new Atleti stadium, the Wanda Metropolitano, bears the name of a Chinese conglomerate in its very name, it’s reasonable to conclude that the Gil family had some outside help with that re-investment part. It’s hard to picture a future where apartments are bought and sold on the site of the old Calderón stadium, without a single euro crossing the palms of the Gil family.

And yet, for all this, it’s easy to forget now, when the lows are so viscerally evident, how heady and intoxicating the highs were. How easy it was to let yourself go in the glory, the seductive thrill of, as Paulo Futre said, a man with whom anything was possible. There was no strategy but for all the chaos and teetering over the precipice of catastrophe, it was also undeniably exciting. Your average Colchonero didn’t know what would happen next. Who would sign on? Who would get the chop? Who Gil would sack next? His running of the club was shambolic in the conventional sense. The team hardly ever could rely on stability, always aware of some looming legal existential threat. Not to mention, they couldn’t take their wages for granted, either. “There were times,” Futre reflected. “When we didn’t see a salary for eight months out of the year.” But it’s also true that the team would never be allowed to languish in a rut, if a philosophy was not working, it would be changed. Gil knew nothing about football but he knew that if Mr. X wasn’t delivering results, then there was always Mr. Y waiting in the wings. If one rolled the dice enough times, eventually one would come up with a pair of sixes.

In 1995, Radomir Antić arrived as Atlético de Madrid manager. “We changed something very important at the club,” he would later say. “And that is learning to get along with each other. From there, we started to build a winning team, a team with good vibes.” Miguel Ángel Gil Marín characterised Antić’s arrival as “a breath of fresh air—we got off to a good start, we were winning, we were playing gorgeous football, and Radomir generated enthusiasm.” One Kiko goal that season would famously have Gil up on his feet dancing. Like a snowball gathering pace, then becoming an avalanche, Atleti’s optimism turned into belief. And that belief became conviction. “His obsession was the league,” Futre recalls. “La Liga, La Liga, La Liga. If he put down enough money, he didn’t see why it couldn’t happen.”

He was right. After eight years with Gil at the helm, Atlético finally did it. And how.

They won the league conceding only 32 goals (Valencia came second and conceded 51) a full 17 points clear of Real Madrid who were left without so much as a UEFA Cup qualifying place. As if that weren’t enough, they beat Barcelona (for the third time that year), despite Hagi and Figo et al, in the final of the Cup. Milinko Pantić, the ingenious Yugoslavian midfielder, scored the only goal of the game. It was Atleti’s first league and cup double in their history. Gil would break down in tears after the match. “I don’t care if I die now.” It was a perfect moment for the team. And for the man that had done so much to conquer it. “I can’t love anything more than I love all of you!” he would shout down at the amassed fans celebrating below near Neptuno, the Madrid fountain which is home to Atleti’s triumphs. (Real Madrid celebrate at Cibeles, just up the road). That night, Gil would go back to referring to his own mortality in a live interview with Telemadrid: “If I kicked the bucket right now, at least someone would be able to say: well, there was a Quixote, who thought he knew something. The poor man, he didn’t know anything, but hey, look, he won the double.”

*Neptuno — where all Atleti major triumphs are celebrated*

But like all who scale peaks, eventually one must come down to earth. And the invocation of Quixote was, perhaps, either unfortunate or prescient—the end of his story, of course, being sickness, renouncing chivalry and fictions, then death. Then again, ecstasy is to be enjoyed in the moment, not built to withstand the long-term. Nobody that day would have noticed the dark clouds gathering overhead. Even if they had been visible, nobody was interested in looking up. Who among those jubilant Atleti fans gave a thought that day to the uncomfortable fact that since Gil had arrived, they could no longer vote him in or out? (Dictatorships, after all, so often begin in democracies). That their club was no longer a club, it was a PLC? Who among them were thinking about the enviable youth system that Gil had scraped? And while Raúl González had scored an impressive 19 league goals despite only being 18 that year, who there that day gave him a second thought? Having captained Atleti’s under-15s to glory, Gil earmarked him for great things back in 1991. “These are my lads,” he would tell TV variety show Tan Contentos. “This team are the champions of Spain; they won the league scoring 264 goals in 22 matches—” he points to a small boy in the squad. “And look over there, Raúl González, my captain. He scored 55 goals! Remember his name, he will be a phenomenon.” Gil wasn’t wrong. Only he didn’t become one for Atleti but for bitter rivals, Real Madrid. Despite being fiercely antimadridista as a boy, Raúl was forced to swallow his pride and don the famous white of the club where he would become a legend. The thing that would surely rankle with Gil later on, above all, was that he’d signed with them for nothing. Zero. And finally, who among those deliriously happy fans, had wondered if this was as good as it would get?

I ask those questions with the benefit of hindsight, of course. And those were all worries for another day. On that balcony, above a singing surf of happiness and pride, Gil was holding two trophies in his hands. Surely, this was the moment when the plan would all come together and Atleti would usher in a great age of football dominance. With this squad and this manager, surely conquest was his for the taking? Radomir Antić didn’t see it that way. “Gil’s ambitions,” he smiles. “Exceeded reality.”

The man had succeeded in football. In politics. He was a winner. And he had the track record to show for it. But he was also over 60 years old. And he made a lot of enemies. That’s the price of success. And that’s the price of thumbing your nose at the world. Gil’s luck was about to change. Could he have imagined then, that while he had just brought his football club to the zenith of its success, he would also bring it to its lowest point within just a few years? And could he have had any conception that he would be going back to jail?

*The old Carabanchel jail—where Gil would be sent*

All those years of monetary monkey business had, unsurprisingly, resulted in a fair few legal banana skins. “A mayor cannot take out 450 million pesetas (from public funds) for sponsorships,” said Gil’s political opponent, Isabel García Marcos. “Unless it’s consigned by the municipal accounts, having been properly debated and approved by the comptroller. There came a time when we legally denounced [filed a lawsuit against] him for embezzlement of public funds.” Carlos Castresana himself, the prosecutor leading the corruption taskforce, recalls a letter that arrived in his office one day. “That’s how it all began. The letter was anonymous, postmarked Marbella. Opening it, I found it was photocopies of the municipal accounts from Marbella. So, we started asking them for documents.” It would, eventually, lead to police raids in 1998.

Gil would wonder why it had taken the authorities so much time, given his teams (and others) had carried the name Marbella for a good few seasons now. It was his belief that it was a politically motivated State aggression given his political inroads across not just Spain but North Africa now, too. “I’ve always thought [football shirt sponsorship] was the best way of promoting cities,” he would say on the night of the police raid, again using the third person. “There is a principal objective in this: to disqualify Gil [from office].” The man seemingly failed to understand that, once you are in politics, everything is politically motivated. As ever, he played the victim card. It was Gil’s go-to move, even when he had thrown the first punch.

A year later, he would tell the press outside his office: “Look, they can put me in jail if they want, they can call me ‘mafioso’, ‘narco trafficker’, they can call me everything. But I think they’ve gone to hit me directly in the centre of my heart. That I can tell you. Because for me, Atlético de Madrid is my symbol, my life. It’s not a business. It’s not a business.”

He was right. In a way. Because it wasn’t a business. By now, it was a crime syndicate. El Mundo revealed in 1998 that Atlético de Madrid had defrauded close to 500 million pesetas (around €4.5m in today’s money). It was as simple as declaring one official salary for a player, and then paying them far in excess of that. Santi Denia (today Spain’s u19 manager) would officially earn 46 million pesetas, yet, in actuality, was paid 130 million. Goalkeeper José Francisco Molina declared 72 million but took home 150. Kiko (my childhood idol) officially earned 154 but was, in reality, paid 250. And star players Juninho Paulista and Cristian Vieri declared 154 and 160 respectively but both actually enjoyed a 300 million peseta pay packet. Midfield maestro Juan Carlos Valerón, who Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Roy Maakay would describe as the best player they ever played with, would shun the report. “This article doesn’t even merit any comment. For me, this newspaper has fallen very low and it doesn’t deserve my comment.” Kiko would simply call it a lie. But then again, what were they going to say given Castresana et al were breathing down their necks?

Twenty years later, Paolo Futre, laughed. “You’ve got Contract A, and Contract B. Put yourself in the shoes of the players. They came in [the authorities] and said hands off, nobody touch anything, give us the contracts. All the clubs did something like that. But of course, how are you going to play that? You’d go to jail. These players could have gone to jail.” Miguel Ángel Gil Marín, Atlético de Madrid CEO and son of Jesús Gil explained it thusly. “He [my father] would say, how can we have all these players and pay them all this money and the club survive? Well, by paying less taxes. So, we’ll make one type of contract. And then we’ll make another type.” Carlos Castresana spelled out what that meant for the club. “That’s why, in the club’s accounts, a new type of debt had been growing towards Gil himself and Atleti now owed him money.”

And if things were looking bad for the club president, they weren’t much better on the pitch. The 1999-2000 season was Atleti’s nadir. The quality in the squad was not the issue. It contained the likes of Rubén Baraja, Santiago Solari, Celso Ayala, Juan Carlos Valerón, Kiko, José Chamot, José Mari, Vladimir Jugovic, Juninho Paulista, and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. Yet by the season’s end, half of that contingent would have left and Atlético would be sitting second from bottom, a full seven points beneath Numancia in 17th. At the other end of the universe, the exciting Súper Dépor team were winning their first league title. (Spare a thought for Deportivo de La Coruña today, not only are they playing in the third division, but this past December they lost at home to fiercest rivals, Celta Vigo—not their main team, but their youth team). While Atleti had beaten Real Oviedo 5-0 the first time around, the season-defining match would come against them in the return on the 8th of May, 2000. Oviedo were managed by the ever-sagacious Luis Aragonés and the match would be a tight affair with Chino Losada and Paulo Bento putting the home team in a solid lead. But Atleti were fighting for their lives. A young Joan Capdevila would pull one back (and go on to lift the 2008 Euros with the opposing team’s manager eight years later). The best Colchonero player that season, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, had notched a whopping 35 goals, and would drag the game level with 13 minutes to go, scoring a trademark ballistic header after Kiko floated in a sumptuous cross-box ball. And with five minutes left on the clock, Hasselbaink skipped away from two Oviedo players only to be hauled down in the box by Sergio Boris. The Dutchman rolled up his socks, an uneasy yet determined expression on his face. Salvation beckoned. A point would do it. He stood over the ball, hands on hips, as though a gunslinger waiting for his opponent to draw. The referee that day, José Luis Prados García, held up the penalty to remind Oviedo goalkeeper, Esteban, to stay on his line. The back and forth would cost the Asturian goalkeeper a yellow card but it would also create a delay. A delay in which, perhaps, doubt could set in. Prados blew his whistle, Hasselbaink struck the ball well enough, but Esteban elegantly palmed it away. By the first replay the commentator was already prognosticating: “It seems as if Atleti are already condemned to be in Second Division next year…” And it was true. They were, unthinkably, relegated—along with top-flight mainstays Real Betis and Sevilla. After the match, Esteban would speak almost apologetically: “I don’t want to go into the history books as a player that relegated them.” It was as if, somehow, the goalie had looked into Atleti’s future, witnessed the darkness to come, and was already washing his hands of it.The calamity almost felt cosmically-ordained. It didn’t matter how good the squad was. It didn’t matter that Hasselbaink scored 35 goals. Claudio Ranieri couldn’t stop the rot across 26 matches. The beloved Radomir Antić (his third stint) couldn’t save them in 11. Let alone Fernando Zambrano in the final game.

The next season, Betis and Sevilla immediately returned to La Liga. Atleti would finish level on points with Tenerife in third but six goals shy of promotion. The only bright spot was the debut of Fernando Torres, the teenage talisman. It would take Luis Aragonés himself, who had masterminded the coup de grâce of their relegation, to drag Atleti back where they belonged in 01/02. In another one of football’s never-ending quirks of fate, he would also sign goalkeeper Esteban, who competed with Germán ‘Mono’ Burgos, the corpulent assistant manager under Cholo Simeone today. The return of the club to the top flight was a relief for the red and white side of Madrid. But it wasn’t much of a redemption for Gil. Mounting legal perils, financial realities piling up, success might well have seemed hollow to him by now. Having taken the club to incredible highs where everything seemed possible, he had also sunk them to historic lows and turned them into a corrupt mess of a club. Not for nothing had the club, so often the bridesmaid and not the bride in Spanish football, been given the patronising name Pupas—something close to Diddums. If the initial laughter from their cross-town rivals had hurt after relegation. What hurt even more was that Real Madrid fans simply forgot about Atleti. It was one of those perverse epiphanies that only football can bestow: the humiliation of losing to your rivals is better than the irrelevance of not competing with them.

In 2002, Gil’s many cut corners, atypical models, and misdeeds caught up with him at last. All those long years of malfeasance and misappropriation of funds, across Madrid and Marbella, finally came to light. Facing charges of prevarication and influence peddling, (frankly, it seemed as if the State was just getting started) the Supreme Court handed down its sentence: six months of prison. But worse than that, Gil was barred from running for office for 28 years. He was 69 years old. It was over. In jail, he would be placed in solitary confinement. All those that had pressed themselves to him and elbowed their way into photographs alongside him, now flitted away, afraid of being touched by the scrofula of his corruption. All those that had opposed and questioned Gil, Isabel García Marcos and Juan Luis Galiacho and several others, who for so long were reviled and ignored, now stood vindicated.

As Gil would say, ideology is the pretext of the vain and the incapable. But maybe that was just a fancy rephrasing of: principles get in the way of action. In the end, many of those that had made their Faustian bargain by betting on Gil would find that their bargain proved to be, well, Faustian. Due to various legal wrangles, while Enrique Cerezo would find himself convicted in a court of law, he was never imprisoned due to the statute of limitations being exceeded. He took over as club president. Miguel Ángel Gil Marin, implicated in so many of his father’s deals and ventures, also avoided the judge’s gavel. He remains today the single largest shareholder.

Jesús Gil died on the 15th of May, 2004. His funeral turned into a national event. 25,000 people turned up to pay their respects—where else, at the Estadio Vicente Calderón. The hearse circled the stadium three times. The masses applauded, as if Gil had given the Atleti faithful one last trophy, one last success.

*Almudena Cemetery, Gil’s final resting place*

So, where do we go from here? Seven years after Gil’s death, Diego Simeone, who had marshalled the club’s midfield like a bodyguard and captained Atleti to its first double in ‘95/’96 returned as a manager. Success would follow, both domestically and in Europe. But more than that, a strange sense of stability. Simeone has now been at the club for a decade and would mould the team around a new ethos: nobody fucking beats us. Even today, there are few worse places to be in world football than 0-1 down to Atlético de Madrid. It could hardly be said to be a representative legacy of Gil’s running of the club. But more in spite of it. So what is Gil’s legacy?

Jesús Gil was never a football man, no matter the platitudes served up by that silver tongue. Ironically, for all his protestations to the contrary, for all the times he put his loathing of politics on record, the man was a born politician—even when he was still only a used car salesman. Because for Gil, every waking moment was an opportunity for spin. PR was oxygen. And none of it was bad. He felt he could talk his way in, or out, of anything. And he understood, in a far more nuanced way than Donald Trump ever will, that while fear motivated people, it wasn’t just enough to scare them. You had to install yourself as the answer and occasionally deliver once in a while. The schismatic nature of Spanish politics allowed Gil to become an exponent of modern dead cat politics long before Lyton Crosby was a twinkle in David Cameron’s eye, constantly hitting play on the same soundbite: them and us.

In Part 1 of this series, I asked the question: what was Gil beneath the mask? Reader, by now I’m sure you’ve guessed that it’s an impossible question to answer. For he was a man that understood that, in political life, it was much easier to succeed if you were whoever or whatever people wanted you to be. He himself would say in an interview: “At 9 in the morning I can be a communist. At 10, I can be a socialist. And at 11, I’m right-wing.”

For all his flaws, he was a man from humble beginnings that touched the sky. But he was, and always would be, a convicted criminal, guilty of manslaughter. Those 58 people those lost their lives in 1969 are are still dead. And that was not the only harm that Gil caused in this world. He left financial black holes across Spain, including the fact that only 3% of Atlético de Madrid actually belongs to Atleti fans. Gil played on the hopes and dreams of ordinary people. Many of them working class and poor. From the Atleti faithful such as the homeless man that gave him his last 5000 pesetas, to the voters of Marbella, to Limamou Mbengue who today finds himself back in Senegal. He lives in a cabin in Dakar with his wife, his son, and 13 other people. “I was with Atlético de Madrid for five years without receiving a single cent. They didn’t even pay my public transport.” He makes his living today selling fruit in the street. When the scandal about the ‘fake’ players broke, Gil’s son, Miguel Ángel, approached Mbengue and promised him a good future if he would testify in their favour. “So, the judge asked me, are you worth 300 million pesetas? And I said, yes. When I finished up my contract, and here I swear on my mother’s tomb, I swear on my son’s life, I went to the stadium and I spoke with Miguel Ángel Gil and asked him about the future he promised me and he laughed in my face. He told me, no, I don’t remember that.” Holding back his emotion while speaking to Antenna 3, Mbengue added. “I would like to speak to the supporters of Atlético de Madrid because I have a lot of respect for them, and for me, they are the most noble fanbase in the world. But I sweated in that shirt for five years for free, and I defended it all over the world. And I believe that Miguel Ángel Gil and the Gil family are a cancer to Atlético de Madrid.”

Gil also fanned the flames of populism and pre-democracy nostalgia in a country which really, really could have done without it. Franco’s totalitarian regime in Spain lasted until his death, well into the 1970s. They are still digging up unidentified bones to this day. (Amnesty International puts Spain only second to Cambodia in the world for mass graves).

Did Gil spend sleepless nights wondering how things would have turned out if only he’d paid for a damn surveyor. Turned down the money from the SPAR dinner? Or was it the tragedy that made him? Forcing him to cover a mountain of compensation, driving him towards greater and more visible platforms on which to build his castles in the sky?

And yet, for all the savvy and cunning, for all the aces up his sleeves, for all the thousands of people who queued up to believe him, to vote for him, to anoint him as their leader, in the end, the ultimate naiveté was that of Gil himself—to believe that he could go forever. Like the figure of Don Quixote he likened himself to on the night of winning the double, all those years of charging at giants would, in the end, prove futile. The giants are immoveable.

By the end, his whole life had become a tessellation of transgressions. Did he wonder how it had all gone so far? Did he ask himself why he had taken the path that he had? And did he question, in quiet moments alone with his horse, who he had become in his old age—titan? Tycoon? Tyrant? I wonder if even Gil knew who he was in those final days.

As his son, Miguel Ángel Gil Marín said: “I always drew a distinction between the man and the character. As a person, he was one of the best human beings I’ve ever met, for his values, and as a father. But as a character in the public eye, as a populist, the pendulum swings from love to hate… I tried to hide from that character. Because I loved the man. When you live so many hours next to a persona such as my father… I wouldn’t like it, for example, as his woman. To suffer it. Because in the end it is suffering, more than enjoying it. Because he was always in the eye of the hurricane, both in politics and in business.”

If his own son was bisecting Gil’s personality into different categories, sixteen years after his death and never having met him, I certainly have no definitive, black and white answer. Can a man’s actions and convictions define him? In Gil’s empire of shadows and half-truths, perhaps the most plausible answer is that Gil was who his mother had made him into. As Gil’s brother, Severiano Gil y Gil, would say to HBO: “our mother would tell us: even if you’re miserable, you hold your head up high like a serpent, never let them see that you’re sunk because they’ll crush you underfoot.”

How will he be remembered in time? A larger than life figure who made fortunes, both for himself and others, forged destinies, but also heralded ruin and death? How many have done what he has done? How many men or women have built towns out of thin air? How many have brought glory to thousands of supporters flooding the streets of their city in historic jubilance? There again, how many are responsible for the death of 58 people? Incalculable financial damages that destroyed dreams? As for what Gil’s legacy is, even now I’m honestly not sure. Maybe it’s simply this: nobody fucked with the Jesús.

But I give the last word to the man himself. It’s what he would have wanted. To the question: what epitaph would you have on your gravestone? Gil responded: “I don’t know. Maybe something like: Here lies an imbecile who thought things could be better. Yes, that’s it. And the only bitterness I will take with me to the next world? That I believed that Spain could have been better.”

Daydream believers and a Stadium of Light

NOBODY F**KS WITH THE JESÚS [Part 2]