Pere Guardiola, Pep’s brother who wanted to play football, became a business genius and is the brains of Girona

The Santa Fe Rescues Paolo Gazzanigathe experience of the Dutch Daley Blind, the quality of Aleix García, the imbalance of the Brazilian Sávio and the goals of the Ukrainian Artem Dovbyk stood out in the first round Gironasurprising leader, together with Real Madrid, of Spanish League. Behind the team led by Míchel Sánchez Muñoz there is an institutional structure whose main support is the superpowers Citizen Football Groupbut it also has a local leg whose main face is Pears Guardiolaco-owner of the Catalan club and younger brother of Josephtrainer Manchester City.

The youngest of the sons of Valentí Guardiola and Dolors Sala Carrió (as well as enthusiasmhe has two older sisters: Francesca AND Olga) is the president of Girona Board of Directors, owner of a share and one of the strongmen of the institution. His connection with the club began to consolidate in 2015, although his participation in various spaces of the professional football universe dates back almost three decades.

After a failed attempt to be one footballer (went through the lower categories of Gimnastic de Manresa), Pere started working Nike in 1997, when he was 21 years old, and at the urging of his brother, who was already shining as a Barça player. In the American club he worked for more than a decade in sponsorship management and made agreements with players such as Andrés Iniesta, Sergio Ramos, Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets and Carles Puyol. In those years he also obtained a master’s degree in Marketing and Administration and Business Management in Barcelona.

In 2009 he left Nike and, together with the audiovisual company Mediapro, founded Media Base Sports, a sports representation and consultancy agency. With it he managed the interests of players such as Iniesta, Thiago Alcántara and the Uruguayan Luis Suárez. And he also opened other doors for him in the world of baseball. So, in 2013, he acted as an intermediary for the Chinese tycoon Jiang Lizhang to purchase the stake in Granada. Two years later, Pere participated in a similar operation with Girona.

In July 2015, when the Catalan club was in bankruptcy proceedings, the younger Guardiola brought the institution closer to the TVSE Football group, directed by Jean Louis-Dutaret and Samir Boudjemaa (former directors of Canal+ France), who acquired 80% of the shares which belonged to businessman Josep Delgado, who had a European arrest warrant and who would later be arrested and extradited to Poland.

When TVSE Fútbol took charge of Girona, Pere began operating as a player external consultant. “We will look for agreements with the big clubs to have loans (of players),” he then assured. Shortly after, players from Manchester City begin to arrive: the first are Pablo Maffeo (called up to the Argentine national team in November 2023 by Lionel Scaloni), Rubén Sobrino, the Frenchman Florian Lejeune and the Nigerian Chidiebere Nwakali. Pablo Marí and Angeliño followed in his footsteps.

Two years after that first approach, Guardiola formally set foot in Girona. On 23 August 2017, just 50 days after the club achieved promotion to the first division of Spanish football for the first time in its 87-year history, 88.6% of the shares were acquired in equal shares by Sheikh’s Emirates City Football Group Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan (which owned, in addition to Manchester City, New York City FC, the Australian Melbourne City, the Uruguayan Torque and the Japanese Yokohama Marinos) and Pere Guardiola’s Girona Football Group (the remaining 11.6% was in the hands of minority shareholders).

“The criterion for betting on Girona is the opportunity we see in a club like this, which has a very particular history and a degree of growth that we can exploit now. The first objective is to be able to do it stabilize it in the first division. “We know the idea of ​​Girona and its tradition and we will respect them,” Pere said when the new administration took over the institution.

Since then, the most successful period in the history of the Girona club began. Although relegated in mid-2019 and forced to return to the second division, they fought for promotion in the following two seasons (in both they played the playoffs) until reaching their goal on 19 June 2022 after defeating Tenerife in the final of the playoffs. Last season, returning to the league, they finished 10th.

“The balance of the season is very positive and we must be very proud of it. The goal was permanence and we more than achieved it. Now the goal is to save ourselves once again, despite coming from a season in which we did things very well. We must keep our feet on the ground more than ever because this is the danger. Our short experience says that the second years are the most complicated and we must avoid the same thing happening to us that did not happen in the previous phase in the First Division”, said the less famous Guardiola in June last year. So far the team is responding well above expectations.

In this present he played a fundamental role, although his economic participation was reduced. In August 2020, the Bolivian businessman Marcelo Claure, owner of his country’s Bolívar and former co-owner of Inter Miami, has purchased part of the share package that belonged to Pere Guardiola’s company. Thus, City Football Group has become the main shareholder, with 47% of the shares, Claure has 35% and Girona Football Group 16%. After that movement, however, Guardiola was appointed president of the Board of Directors, replacing Ignasi Mas-Bagà.

From this new role, Pere focused improve the club’s infrastructure and in strengthening the training categories. In the first aspect, it undertook the construction of the City Football Academy Girona, a 23-hectare training center with seven professional pitches in the municipality of Vilablareix. The completion of this project will require an investment of 25 million euros.

As for the lower leagues, Guardiola assessed that this was the way to not depend on players arriving on loan, many of them coming from the various structures of the City Football Group (such as Mendoza Valentino Castellanos last season). “For us, grassroots football is fundamental. They are home-grown people, who understand us, who feel the club is theirs, who have enthusiasm and that at some point we will be able to obtain financial returns from them. Hopefully one day we can have 70% of the first team squad made up of players from here,” he was emotional in mid-2021.

In the meantime, the Catalan club has managed to have teams capable of reacting. To this end, the President of the Board of Directors has decided to support the hiring of Míchel Sánchez Muñoz as coach in July 2021 and, above all, to support the work of Quique Cárcel, sporting director since 2014 and architect of the squads of recent seasons. that he managed to create very competitive teams with limited resources.

Because although the presence of the City Football Group has changed the history of Girona, the club is still very far from the financial possibilities of the greats of Spanish football. In the 2022/23 season it had the lowest budget limit in the league, together with that of Elche. In the current situation he is 13th, even if his 52 million euros are light years from the 727.4 that Real Madrid can invest, the 296.3 million of Atlético de Madrid or the 270 million of Barcelona.

“We have difficulties because our budget is the same and we are the most humble team in the First Division”, complained Pere Guardiola a few months ago, when Barça was preparing to apply the release clause and retain Oriol Romeu, who Girona aspired to. sign, keep. The end of the story was the usual in these cases and today the midfielder wears Barça.

Despite these limitations, Guardiola and Quique Cárcel have created a low-cost 25-man squad for this season, of which only two were loaned from clubs in the City Football Group ecosystem: Brazilians Yan Couto (belonging to Manchester City ) and Sávio (he was on loan from French club Troyes). With these resources the Gironese remain at the top of the Spanish championship.