Three months after landing at Málaga CF, Kike Pérez, the new general manager, will have to deal with one of the most difficult moments for the blue and white entity in the last 25 years. Together with José María Muñoz, judicial administrator, who already faced an extreme financial situation three years ago, they will be in charge of restructuring the club from top to bottom in the coming weeks, if a relegation to the First RFEF ends up being consummated, which It seems almost inevitable with the team 8 points from salvation with three games to go before the end of LaLiga SmartBank.
Kike Pérez arrived at the Martiricos club in February, convinced that the team could take the sporting situation forward to stay in the Second Division, but also being aware that the possibility of relegation was more than real. «I had my life made in Cádiz. I am a natural person, I felt that it was my place. Is it a dare? Not for me. I face it responsibly,” he said during his presentation in the press room. «Of course we had thought about that scenario (the descent), that we did not talk about it is something else. The message we send is that we are going to come back stronger than ever, we are going to give it our all.”he commented after the bump in Ponferrada.
Well, nothing could be further from the truth, his figure is going to have a great “responsibility” for the smooth running of the club in the near future. Kike Pérez, always with the financial supervision of the judicial administrator, You have many important tasks ahead of you. in what will be one of the great challenges that he has had to face in his extensive experience in Spanish football.
In the coming days, Kike Pérez will be the one to present the new sports director, in charge of setting up the Málaga CF 2023-2024 squad. The decision on who will occupy the position has already been made by the blue and white leaders, but it has not yet come to light and the official announcement is expected to arrive next week, or when the team has already certified its relegation.
Choosing the sports director to make the team for the new blue and white project is one of the most important tasks in the short term for Kike Pérez, but not the only one. The ‘smack’ at the financial level will be tremendous with the relegation and the judicial administrator and the general director will be forced to adapt the sports area to the needs and possibilities of a club with its first team in the third category of Spanish football. In addition to the enormous change that the squad will undergo -most of them are out of contract or have release clauses due to relegation-, the sports structure will have to undergo major cuts, from everything that surrounds the first team to the youth academy. There will be a cut in personnel forced by the economy in all areas, even taking into account that in that first year out of professional football the club would have financial aid that will serve to alleviate, to a small extent, the consequences of relegation.
If it was a challenge for Kike Pérez to reach a historic club like Málaga CF, now it will be even more so, because your decisions will have a lot of weight in the success or failure at the sporting level of the blue and white club in the short and medium term.