When the National Training Center for Coaches (Cenafe) opened its doors, it almost immediately came into conflict with the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF). Miguel Ángel Galán, an electricity professor who requested a leave of absence to travel through the benches of several modest teams for more than two decades, dared to start an academy to train coaches outside the federative umbrella. “And at that moment I became an outlaw,” he has said for years.
“I had two options: fold, like the rest, or fight.” And that is what this entrepreneur has been doing ever since. The fact that the RFEF did not grant its students the UEFA license to train aroused his vindictive vein, which has led him to file endless complaints in the face of any federative slip, either in the time of Ángel María Villar or now, with Luis Rubiales in front.
“In the Federation they call me ‘Querellator'”, he confessed in an interview in 2019.
His greatest impact was reached when in 2014 he denounced Zidane for serving as Castilla’s head coach without the required qualifications, which led to a three-month ban for the Frenchman. A complaint that he curiously repeated last year with Fernando Torres. However, although his denunciations sometimes obtained favorable results, Galán was seen as a character in search of his minute of glory. A perception that changed with the criminal complaint that he filed in 2017 against Villar for embezzlement of public funds, misappropriation and prevarication in the Haiti case and the Recreativo case. The accusation ended up costing his position, after almost 30 years, to the boss of Spanish football.
His victory did not stop his righteous momentum, which led him to challenge the 2020 RFEF elections, to denounce Irene Lozano, president of the Higher Sports Council, for alleged administrative prevarication in the electoral process, or Luis Rubiales when he was president of the AFE for the alleged use of funds from this body to renovate his house. And along the way he still had time to claim and fight the industrial property of the VAR and to flirt with a candidacy for the presidency of the Federation.
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