Alfredo Relaño: "After 49 years without stopping, today is the first day of the rest of my life."

One day, Alfredo Relaño (Madrid, 1951) showed up at Marca with an interview with his neighbor Mariano García Remón , and they published it the following morning. It happened in the early 1970s, and since then, he hasn't stopped covering sports in the media. On Friday, without warning, he was fired from Prisa , the group that hired him 49 years ago and where he has been head of sports for SER, El País, and Canal+, as well as the eternal director of As. He was the last surviving member of El País's founding photo .

In these years, Relaño has revolutionized sports journalism at least three times . He did so with De la Morena at SER, dethroning José María García from his radio throne; then with Canal+, showing that football was much more than what we saw on TVE; and finally with the newspaper As, with which he tripled circulation and nearly surpassed Marca on newsstands.

He welcomes El Confidencial to his home in Aravaca, where he shared a wall with Pepe Domingo Castaño and now with his widow. He's relaxed: he says he's been receiving nonstop displays of affection since Friday. "My phone keeps ringing. Most of them are colleagues stroking my ego , and there are also some job offers, so I'm not sad either."

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QUESTION. Tomorrow you'll wake up and no one will ask you for your column for the first time in decades. How do you feel?

ANSWER: On the first day of the rest of my life. I'm fine, although it's true I wasn't expecting the news. The other day Vicente (Jiménez, editor of As) called me, and that's when I got suspicious: either they'll fire me or he'll tell me they'll fire him. It's strange that Vicente would call me because I've been somewhat disconnected from the newspaper for six years, submitting my columns and contributing to the radio station from home. It wasn't very expensive either, since I was self-employed. I don't know what happened, but I feel like I'm moving.

Q. You know that rumor has it that Florentino Pérez, your closest enemy, could be behind it.

A. A few years ago I would have said yes, definitely, because Florentino has tried many times to get me fired, but now I don't know what to say, because Prisa is going through a strange time. There have been changes at El País, Huffington Post, SER... why would As be any different? If they also change their editor, it's likely they'll want to rid him of such a heavy figure as mine. The only thing I'm sure of is that Florentino won't be sad (laughs). People from the club have written to me, but not him. And look, years ago, he ate in that chair you're sitting in.

Q. We'll return to Florentino Pérez later. Aren't you thinking about retiring?

A. No, no. What I've been doing is quite comfortable, and it seems there are people who want to keep paying me to do it. It's not about the money: I'm not rich, but I don't need anything else either. The thing is, I love this side of journalism; it has all the benefits without the problems that come with running a media outlet.

Q. What didn't you like about managing As?

A. Very detailed, the meetings. In companies, there are people who do little or nothing, so they try to waste others' time meeting with them. It made me very nervous. Then, well, the burden of having to gather information for the entire newspaper through meals, calls, coffees... the editors' problems... many small issues that become difficult to bear over the years.

"The police came to believe that El País had kidnapped a soldier to sell more."

P. There must be something good about it.

A. Of course. The schedule was kind! Since the games ended at 11 p.m., we'd close the broadcast very late, and I'd get home and sleep as fast as I could, without an alarm clock.

Q. You know that for a couple of generations of Spaniards, the director of As will always be Relaño.

A. It's been 25 years, so I understand and appreciate it. But As has existed long before me: it was founded in '67 as a vibrant newspaper, with much better print quality than Marca and young people, with a fresh tone. Believe me: I was at Marca at that time and I was one of the few young people; I only lasted two years. As it turns out, over time As began to decline, and when Prisa bought it in 1996, it was far behind Marca in sales. The month I became editor, I remember well, Marca sold almost 600,000 copies, a huge amount, and I think we were at 80,000. Fighting against them was an arduous task.

Q. There was a comeback, but you never caught up with them.

A. At my peak, we were printing 233,000 newspapers, and they were printing 300,000. We were close. It was the time when we'd finish the paper in the early hours and go down to see what the competition was saying at VIPS or a newsstand in the Plaza Mayor that didn't close for a single minute a year. With the expansion of digital sales, everyone's sales fell, and perhaps As overtook Marca for a few months, but it was already on the decline.

Q. How did you get to Prisa?

A. After finishing my military service, I joined the El País foundation as a sports editor. García Candau was setting up the section and needed a young reporter to handle the classic Spanish trilogy: soccer, cycling, and boxing. Because El País, in its early years, covered boxing, it was Cebrián who later vetoed it out of pure moral superiority; he said it set us apart. I was there from the first issue, in which I wrote a preview of Rayo Vallecano. The newspaper grew in a very short time and, it's ugly to say, partly because of the Oriol y Villaescusa case , a soldier who kidnapped the GRAPO.

Q. Why?

A. Because GRAPO chose El País, which had just started, as a medium for sending messages. They would call the editorial office and tell us "in the restroom of such-and-such a cafe in Carabanchel" or wherever, and a reporter would stop by to pick up the message. I picked one up myself: it was terribly scary, because you didn't know if you were going to find an envelope, a cartridge, or a bomb. That helped El País become popular and also raised suspicions.

Q. Suspicions?

A. Because no one knew who we were. Cebrián told me that Sáenz de Santamaría, who was the director of the National Police, had even sneaked into his house to see if he had kidnapped Oriol and Villaescusa. They were checking the floor for a secret trapdoor, a hidden prison or something. They thought El País was part of the GRAPO, because it had suddenly emerged, had that information... they even thought we had kidnapped the soldier to sell newspapers.

Q. Did you grow that much?

A. Yes, we doubled or tripled the circulation overnight, although that wasn't the original idea. El País wasn't conceived for mass consumption, but as an enlightened medium, for knowledgeable minorities. What we wanted was to explain democracy to the Spanish people, to talk about abortion, divorce, regional languages... issues that hadn't existed until then. There was a joke back then: "I'm going to read El País and see what I think about this" (laughs).

Q. At that time, sports were a minor issue in El País.

A. Absolutely. Cebrián didn't like them; he thought they trivialized publishing. Back then, there weren't even Monday newspapers; only Hojas del Lunes (Lunes Sheets ), which were trade newspapers whose profits went to the sector's social welfare programs, were published. So, if there wasn't a Monday newspaper, the weekend sports scores weren't published. It was Pedro J. Ramírez who put an end to that and started publishing Diario 16 on Mondays, and on top of that, with a sports booklet, so the rest of us followed suit. We produced a six-page booklet that worked well.

Q. How did you convince Cebrián?

A. It helped that in those years Ramón Mendoza, president of Real Madrid, became the third largest shareholder in Prisa. He came to lend a hand to Polanco, because Prisa had many small shareholders who agreed with the founding idea of ​​creating a democratic and European journalism, among them Manuel Fraga, but then got down to the nitty-gritty... communists no, abortion no, the autonomous regions are intolerable... each meeting was a war between Cebrián and Polanco's faction against the other shareholders. Mendoza came in, sided with Polanco, and the minority shareholders gave up.

P. It's curious, because Mendoza didn't seem very socialist.

A. (Laughs) No, no. Mendoza was a man of order, as they used to say, the typical ABC reader. A shrewd businessman. For example, he was a close friend of Fernández Cuesta, Deputy Secretary of Commerce, and did business with the USSR so the government wouldn't have to get involved. He was a bon vivant with a lot of personal charm.

Q. But you had a tough time since El País, where I was a councilor and you were already head of Sports.

A. He would always say angrily, "They're attacking me from my newspaper" (laughs). He would call Cebrián to scold me, but he respected me greatly and always let me do my thing. I already had a reputation at the newspaper, and everyone knew I was as much a Real Madrid fan as anyone else and had a deep understanding of the club's history.

Q. What did you publish?

A. Nothing special, just the coach's arguments with the players and things like that. Mendoza wanted them to stay quiet, but they had to be. I would nag him, he would complain to my bosses, and I would nag him even more. But he was always elegant, certainly much less damaging than some of his successors. Years later, he invited me to his estate during Holy Week and gave me the best room in his house. We ended up becoming friends.

Q. After the war with Mendoza, you moved to SER and faced another heavyweight, García.

A. The one facing him is De la Morena. When I signed him, I knew he was going to do well, because he was very brave, mentally tough, and a very good interviewer, but I wasn't thinking about beating Super García. Keep in mind that at that time there wasn't even a nightly sports program on SER; the plan was to renew the program and, like El País, do well, not thinking about being first. I don't think De la Morena was either. The one who did think so was Alfonso Azuara, who when signing said, "I'll win this, and when we overtake García, that's another." The second figure was an outrageous amount of money, but they signed him because at the time it seemed impossible.

P. Alfonso Azuara was such a mess.

A. Tremendous. He spent his days filming García, finding his contradictions and laughing about them on El Larguero. At first, Butanito pretended, but over time, he started to get heated, and the war we all know so well began. That's when De la Morena surprised me, because he took a lot of hits and took them with fortitude; he's a man of well-tempered steel.

Q. At that time, the late 80s, García was untouchable.

A. You could feel his power in the Vuelta a España. He arrived with a truck, a helicopter, several mobile units... it was like the Normandy landings. He controlled the race completely. At the finish line, the organizers would create a corridor so the winner could go straight to García, and you'd see De la Morena shoving everyone in and overtaking many times. When José Ramón took off, no one could stop him.

Q. They say you had a fight in the 1989 Vuelta... in a helicopter?!

A. That time I was really angry, which has rarely happened to me. It just so happened that Perico Delgado was going to win the Vuelta, and the organizers, and therefore García, were angry with him because the previous year he prioritized the Tour over the Vuelta. Echávarri, his director, believed he could win the Tour, but to do so, he had to compete in the Giro and not the Vuelta, which was in May.

So García didn't want him to win and hatched a plan. In the time trial of the penultimate stage, he was going to give Parra the helicopter, who was just a few seconds behind Delgado. This consisted of having his helicopter fly right behind the rider, who was hit by a tremendous gust of wind and was almost alone. I had already seen this happen three years earlier in Jerez, when they gave it to Álvaro Pino to help him win a time trial. So I threw it in García's face and warned him: "If you give Parra the helicopter, I'll send ours to get him out of there." Ours was piloted by a kid named Lucas, who had a reputation for suicide; he had crashed several times and escaped unharmed. In the end, they didn't give Parra the helicopter.

"I told Garcia: if you put the helicopter in, I'll send Lucas to take it down with his."

Q. Speaking of the Vuelta, what do you think about the protests?

A. First of all, it makes me angry that sport is being asked to do what no one else is. That said, I'm horrified that there's a team called Israel there. What we're seeing in Gaza is terrible, images not seen since World War II.

On top of that, Netanyahu, who's an animal, keeps calling them heroes, pouring more fuel on the fire. Today they took their name off the jersey, which is a good thing. I can understand the road being covered in Palestinian flags and even the race being stopped at a certain point. What I didn't like was Bilbao, with those idiots pushing the barrier as the peloton passed at 60 km/h.

I'm looking forward to the Vuelta being over and having no accidents. It seems the worst is over, but there are two more stages left in Madrid where things could get messy. Anyway, I would have loved for the Israeli team to have pulled out of the race.

Q. Don't you see a double standard in Russia's expulsion from European sport?

A. Yes and no. Russia invaded Ukraine without provocation, but Hamas lit the spark in Gaza. A big spark. The thing is, the retaliation should have ended a long time ago, and it seems that what they want to do in Gaza is create a resort and starve them to death, which is cheaper than bombing. It's horrifying. Reverte, a while back, said on El Hormiguero that both of them are sons of bitches, but that Israel is our sons of bitches. He recently returned to the program and said no, that Israel is no longer their sons of bitches.

Q. Can sport be separated from politics?

A. No, it's inevitable that they go hand in hand. And it's not something new either: until recently, the Olympics were just another battle between the United States and the USSR. Or the rivalry between Barcelona and Real Madrid, which, in the end, are two ways of conceiving Spain. The love for certain colors is an affiliation with a tribe with a specific character, which has friendly tribes and rival tribes.

It's like wanting Nadal or Alonso to win. You shouldn't care, because you don't know him, he's not related, he's not even your neighbor. But you want him to win because he's Spanish, which is a political position. Humans are political animals.

The golden years of Plus

Q. You went from radio to sports director for a new television station. How did you dare?

A. That's what I say, I didn't know anything. Before launching the channel, one day I was going to Paris with Juan Cueto, who had been appointed director of Canal+, and I was overwhelmed and confessed to him that I had no idea about television. He looked at me as if I were looking at Baby Jesus and said: "And neither do I. I'm an impostor who knows nothing, it's just that they haven't discovered me yet, which is why I'm starting to think they're the impostors," (laughs). In retrospect, you never know who the impostor is.

Q. For someone who knew nothing, you created a television channel that was better than the others in every way. A. Yes, it turned out well. In fact, the early days at Canal+ were where I best embodied my vision of sports journalism. With a first-class editorial team, we managed to produce broadcasts that were very different from what was out there.

Q. You don't get much recognition for your talent scouting work, but the list is tremendous.

A. It's the professional aspect of which I'm most proud. When I arrived at Canal+, I had already given debuts to journalists like Santiago Segurola, Paco González, and De la Morena, but in television, I signed people like Michael Robinson, Jorge Valdano, Antoni Daimiel, Josep Pedrerol, and Carlos Martínez, who have had brilliant careers.

Q. How did you come up with the idea of ​​having Robinson commentate the matches, since at first you could barely understand him?

A. Initially, I put Valdano on the team, who was there the first year, but wanted to be a coach. I was looking for a former player to commentate, someone original and funny, without being eccentric. I had heard Robin at the 1982 World Cup, commenting on Italy's group, and I remember they barely let him speak because he joked during the broadcast; I thought he was very nice. I ate with him and saw he had it all: he knew about football, he was funny, he had no shame... He ordered a gin and tonic before eating and told me he drank before eating, the English way. Afterward, another. And at the end of the meal, another. The guy drank them the English way and the Spanish way at the same time! (laughs)

The first match he commentated was a Charity Shield in England, and before the match, a band came out to play. He told Carlos Martínez live on air: "Look, do you see the bandleader? He's the only one who's been to Wembley more times than me without winning a single match." He was very brazen, a talkative man, and he was incredibly popular in Spain. I remember at the Benito Villamarín in Seville, you had to cross an esplanade to get to the stadium, and the crowd went crazy for him.

Q. What was special about those broadcasts?

A. Aside from the cameras, the crane, the presentation, and such, which is what people remember, one advantage we had over the public networks was that the same people always went to do the matches, while the other networks would send one team one day and another the next. We did everything together and then reviewed the five hours of live broadcasts and discussed how to improve. With El Día Después , we did the same thing: review everything thoroughly.

P. The Day After , a historic format that has been broadcast since 1990.

A. Well, I'll tell you that it was originally designed as a soccer advertising space. We were a pay-TV channel, but by law we had to broadcast a certain percentage of our programming free-to-air, so I created El día después to show how we worked on the broadcasts. Then the show started to take off on its own.

Q. You're also benefiting from the momentum : we've gone from rocky football to Quinta del Buitre and the Dream Team, a beautiful show that fits in with Canal+.

A. Yes, that's true, and we took advantage of it by showing things that aren't visible, like installing a fixed camera behind a goal so you could see how Benito Floro's Albacete team pressed. It was strange stuff that sometimes not even the cameramen understood, but I think over time people have learned to appreciate what we did. I also think it has influenced sports journalism in subsequent decades.

Q. We've reached the Florentine moment. Tell me how you survive so many years facing the Higher Being.

A. I don't know, but I think, in retrospect, it's benefited my career. Over the years, many people have praised me for being the only one who criticized the Real Madrid president.

Fr. Florentino came to eat at your house with the families. How did the food get poisoned?

A. With Mourinho. I thought he was a good coach, but he introduced some ways of doing things at Madrid that I didn't like: leaving the grass long so there was less play, putting Pepe in central midfield to kick Barcelona around... that's where we clashed. And I've never liked Florentino's concept of the press, his constant attempts to influence the media, to remove journalists...

To give you an idea, one day I was at a conference in Malaga and received several messages from Florentino's secretary. I called him right after finishing in case it was urgent, because we had given Figo two points for the match, and he thought he deserved three. I would even call the newspaper for details like that.

P. And one day he stopped answering the phone.

A. Exactly. He even sued me, which he lost. I must also say that he maintained an institutional courtesy: he continued to invite the director of AS to the box at every match and to the Christmas drinks, even though he never went, and he even invited me personally to a tribute to Di Stéfano because I was his biographer.

Q. Do you rule out having lunch with Florentino one day?

A. No, not at all. If we ever get together, I'm willing to be cordial and put aside our differences. After all, we're the same age, on the same team, and have very similar experiences. What I won't do is stop criticizing him in my columns if I think it's appropriate.