The story and outcome of Sansinena It is crossed by all the condiments that season Argentine football. The General Cerri club, a town 10 kilometers from Bahía Blanca that is home to 10,000 people, poked its head out of the Southern League, the oldest in the country that in just over a week will celebrate 114 years of existence, and In the last decade he set foot in the Federal A.
In the league to which it belongs, 35 teams compete. White Bay y Colonel Rosalesamong which stands out Olympus, for his experience in the highest category of Argentine football. He aurinegro, Villa Miter y SansinenaFurthermore, they are the representatives in Federal A, category two steps below the Professional League.
Why can Sansinena summarize a certain functioning of Argentine football in general? Because it is a non-profit civil society like all the clubs that directly or indirectly make up the Argentine Football Association (AFA) and like many institutions in that universe is managed.
Management and corporations are two different things.but they have one particularity in common: when they disappear from the clubs they leave an institutional disaster that unequivocally provides elements for the same analysis.
Private capital is an injection of money that allows clubs a reality outside of their austerity. The way Sansinena works is the same as, for example, Deportivo Riestra: The club has a president who takes care of almost everything except football.
In Cerri’s club, this year he was president again Marcelo Di Marco as he did between 2011 to 2014. He returned at the request of the vice president Dámaso Larraburu, the strong man of the team that competed in Federal A until last weekend and who this week, after a mass exodus, had to withdraw from the competition. The thing is that the team that plays in the league takes care of the rest of the commission, just as happens for the other disciplines of the club: volleyball, basketball, gymnastics, cloth, judo, dance, boxing.
In the same way as Riestra, where a sponsor -Speed- covers the team’s fixed expenses and one man -Víctor Stinfale-, makes the decisions, in Sansinena the strong man was Larraburu, and the management in charge of different experiences.
Larraburu is a lawyer, he was a deputy for Justicialism three times and also an official at the Banco Provincia de Buenos Aires. He was also president of the South Pampas Confederation which encompasses many regional leagues. He is not a parachutist in footballalthough its greatest exposure occurs in the political sphere.
The only time his name was in the news in the Police was when in January 2021 his rottweiler dog escaped from the house and attacked a woman and her 5-year-old son in a nearby square, causing serious injuries. Larraburu avoided the trial with financial compensation for the victims and community tasks.
Sansinena management
Three years ago, the professional soccer businesses went to the Menseguez brothers with their consulting firm MyM Management. The company set foot in 2021 and in 2022 it made a landing that ended badly.
“They are one of the many who manage clubs: they were full with Deportivo Maipú and close to a not so full development in Defensores de Villa Ramallo. They introduced me to (coach) Sergio Maza and they filled me with players who, at least 30 or 40 percent, were not in line with the Federal”, Larraburu contextualized naturally in an interview with “The Voice of the Fan.” .
In that report, he acknowledged that after the departure of the managers and the coach, the club had to make a decision. “That led us to release many players one July and (coach Darío) Bonjour started to have a tremendously short squad, sometimes in the games there were almost no changes,” he explained a year ago, without euphemisms, in the same interview.
With MyM out, a manager or facilitator had to be found for a good part of the between 20 and 30 thousand dollars that a month of competition demands, between travel, hotels, salaries and other fixed costs.
With a fee of two thousand pesos and 8 thousand members, in the best of cases, the collection reaches 16 million pesos and in addition to soccer, there are more sports activities. The accounts, clearly, do not add up.
Marcelo Di Marco, the president of Sansinena who decided to remove the team from Federal A.“We lost a sponsor who never contributed anything. He was from Córdoba and was going to take care of the players, salaries, hotels, meals and trips and the only thing he did was bring the footballers, then he didn’t contribute anything and our pockets are not adequate at the moment to face such a competition,” the manager assumed. Friday Di Marco, the president of the institution, to explain the resignation of Federal A.
Without that capital and with the deficit produced by the reconstruction of the stadium and other club facilities destroyed by the storm that hit the Bahía Blanca area at the end of last year, money began to become scarce and payments to suppliers and salaries were delayed.
In the middle, Larraburu, the strong man of football and Justicialism in that Buenos Aires region, followed the same line as the current Secretary of Tourism, Daniel Scioli, and joined the libertarian ranks to assume the mayorship of the Nahuel Huapi National Park in Bariloche. . Football is no longer his priority.
“Playing Federal A with a very low budget like ours and the loss of the sponsor that was going to cover half of it was decisive. The little money that was coming out, almost one hundred percent, was from Dámaso (Larraburu) or another member of the Commission and the Federal cannot handle it with that. We made this decision to not seize the club because six months from now this was going to end up completely destroyed,” analyzed the president who is waiting for a sanction from the Federal Council of the AFA.
“We did not have any response (from the AFA). I imagine that we are going to have some sanction that, from what the regulations say, the sports one is two to three years of suspension in federal categories. If there were any financial fine, as far as personally, I am going to appeal but this is joint and not my decision,” he said.
The success stories of covert management that hope for the entry of private capital to privatize clubs are told when they are underway. With Deportivo Riestra in the elite of Argentine football or the modest Defensa y Justicia lifting the Copa Sudamericana.
We will have to see what happens with El Malevo or El Halcón -among others- when the Stinfale or the Bragarnik are not behind them. At the end of the story, it seems, swallow capitals are no business for clubs that end up like Sansinena.