Antonio Hurtado, the Spanish emigrant who led the resurrection of Unión Berlin: "The club was chaos"
Antonio Hurtado's movie life began in Puertollano in 1959. There, in the depths of La Mancha, he fell in love with football and frequently attended the old Calvo Sotelo field with his uncle, where the town team came to play in the promotion phase to the First Division.. 60 years later, that boy from La Mancha became one of the most important people in the history of Unión Berlin, a club that today debuts its life in the European Cup by visiting the Santiago Bernabéu. «After this, what is there? “It's a dream,” admits Hurtado in conversation with EL MUNDO from his seat as a professor at the University of Dresden.. He is no longer part of the board because he wanted to spend his years in teaching, but this afternoon he will sit in the Chamartín box. In the German team they adore him, they have him as an advisor and they wait for him when he retires the books.
The current success of Unión Berlin cannot be understood without Hurtado, although he, modestly, prefers to direct the conversation towards the resurrection of the club in 2004.. Antonio arrived in Germany in 1972 forced by his parents.. “I didn't want to,” he says.. They landed in Ludwigsburg, next to Stuttgart, where he began to study. «I finished school, studied to be a draftsman and then entered university. I loved the German order. I did an Engineering degree and went to work in Mönchengladbach until the University of Ludwigsburg called to start a PhD.. Two years later I moved to Aachen, on the border with Belgium, to do a postdoc, and later to a company in Dresden, Saxony, where I worked in the development of technical plants. From there I got the opportunity to go to Berlin to a state waste management company.. It was December 1999,” he summarizes.
At that time, 27 years after arriving in Germany and after traveling almost the entire country, Hurtado settled in Berlin and began a series of contacts and collaborations with the club that ended up bringing him closer to its Board of Directors.. Unión was the second team in the city after Hertha. He competed in the Third Division and tried to find a place for himself while his great rival closed off any options.. In 2001 they met in the final of the German Cup, with victory for Hertha.. It was a sidereal distance. In 2023, Unión is in the Champions League and its enemy is in the Second Division.
The 2004 Assembly
«Our company put advertising in the club and supported the education of young people from the quarry. And a key moment came in 2003. There was a tremendous controversy between the president, the coach and the press and I told them 'if the club is like that, our company doesn't want to know anything'. So they offered us a position on the board,” he explains.
The first time he sat on the Board, everything changed. «I saw that there was no professionalism or order, not even information about the financial situation, it was chaos. And in April 2004, when the team was doing very badly in sports and economically, it was in Third Division with the possibility of going down to Fourth Division, we held a members' meeting, I gave a 20-minute speech on how to save the club in 10 months and they named me president. of the Board. Together with the current president, Dirk Zingler, we brought together 5 or 6 people and developed the 'Iron Strategy', a couple of points to integrate the partners and save the Union. We talked to the city, to Bayern who came to play in our stadium, which looked like a stable of cows…. “There began, being modest, the success that today makes Unión shine.”
Unión ended up going down to Fourth, “a necessary storm,” says Hurtado, and from there they began their ascension to the Champions League where they set foot for the first time today.. In 2010 he began the renovation of his stadium with the help of his partners and when the last stand was finished, Antonio said “see you later”. «I obtained my professorship in Dresden in 2007, he was director of the Energy Institute and at the same time president of the Board of the Union. “I couldn't do both forever.”
Eleven years after his departure, Hurtado maintains two seats in the box and the club's gold medal for “the Bible of the Union.” «What has brought us here. Control, not spending more than what we have,” he says. He left, but that Iron Strategy remains in the great revelation of the Bundesliga. “When I see managers we say to ourselves: 'Pinch me to see if this is real.'”