It hasn’t been a year since Octavi Anoro (Barcelona, 42) left La Liga headquarters without looking back. After just over eight seasons in what had been his home, one in which he had thrived from delegate in Japan to international commercial director of the competition, the Catalan felt the cycle was over. “It was a brutal school, but I don’t regret leaving and I don’t miss it,” he tells EL PAÍS from Tanzania’s most populous city, Dar-es-Salaam, almost 7,000 kilometers from Madrid, where traffic and chaos leave his apartment more than an hour and a half from the sporting city of Azam FC, a club where he has just made his debut as executive director.
“I never thought I would end up here, in Africa, but they called me at the beginning of the year and offered me a five-month project,” explains Anoro, who signed on as an external consultant for the entity in the spring. “They were looking for someone with experience and experience in European football who, let’s say, would help them get their house in order. Ultimately, it’s a club with incredible potential, but it has a lot of structural problems, starting with the management itself. I wanted a challenge in which I could apply everything I learned these years from the inside, not just in an office in Madrid. I wanted to get my hands dirty. Stop advising and start advising build.”
The raw material dazzled him from day one, but when he took over the command post, difficulties soon arose. “It’s a diamond to be polished, a superb car that only needs the right driver,” he warns. “The possibilities are enormous, but when I arrived, I discovered a club that worked without a road map, living day by day and always reacting to problems instead of anticipating them. Here, both in the country and in the club, the short term dominates everything. And everything is everything. What does that mean? In the sense that there is no unified vision, a plan that connects the club’s training center, the first team and the company. This wastes a lot of money every year.”
To stop the bleeding, Anoro was clear on his strategy. “From the start, I focused all my efforts on professionalizing the club, implementing European standards and making it economically sustainable,” he explains. What he didn’t expect was that those who should be helping him would be the first to try to hinder him. “There are certain dynamics that are difficult to understand,” he sighs, knowing the suspicion that his arrival still arouses today among the club’s old guard. “Here they have internal beach bars that turn everything into a mess. And of course, dismantling all that from the inside is not easy.”
Even less so in a country which, since its independence in 1961, has not seen any political force other than the current head of government, the Revolution Party led by President Samia Suluhu Hassan, re-elected in the last legislative elections with 98% of the votes. The authoritarian nature of his mandate, Anoro says, is evident in the most everyday examples. “Access to social networks is prohibited throughout the country,” says the Catalan, victim, like the rest of the population, of Internet shutdowns promoted by the government itself to, it is said, preserve national security and avoid disinformation.
A socio-political mechanism which, as one can imagine, is also reflected in football. “One of the first things I understood about Africa is that it has an endemic problem with corruption and money,” says the man from Barcelona. “Here, for example, it is not uncommon to see referees bribed in every match. In addition, CAF (Confederation of African Football) assigns one or the other depending on what they receive from behind. And of course, there are clubs who have integrated this as another point of their strategy. It is infuriating, but I promised myself to never use it as an excuse.”
“Despite everything, I would sign a thousand times again for Azam FC,” he says, convinced of the footballing singularity of the project. “Here we have one of the most powerful careers in the country and even in the entire continent. To give an idea, we could compare it to what Villarreal would be like in Spain. From this base, my goal is for the training center to stop losing free talent and start generating real value. I want to facilitate the paths for the boys to reach the first team and, if they stand out, to be transferred to Europe.”
Last December, without going any further, Anoro managed to conclude the first sale of a young player to the Swedish league, a transfer that will not be official until next February. “Here, we have players, still children, who have the talent to rub shoulders with the young people of the honorary division in Spain,” he explains. “The objective is to solidify these foundations of the club so that, within a few years, we can monetize the talents and compete head to head with Simba and Yanga, the two most important clubs in Tanzania,” he concludes.
Gone are the days in the shadow of Javier Tebas, president of La Liga since 2013. “We are very different, both in character and in the way of doing things, but I learned a lot from him and from another very important person in the company, Óscar Mayo, with whom I also worked side by side,” Anoro recalls. “Javier has always been an executor, a visionary who earned what he has through a lot of work. From him I learned many things that, let’s say, were not typical of my profile in La Liga. In the end, I was one of his soldiers and, in truth, I do not regret it. On the contrary. Despite our disagreements, I owe him a lot.”
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