He wants to associate with his name a trip that, beyond marketing, translates into two contracts that the former cyclist negotiates in parallel. One is to assume and continue managing the Movistar team, the team of the last 12 years of the 2018 world champion’s career. The second is what will make him national coach for the next four years, until the end of the team’s mandate. president of the federation, José Vicioso, in the fall of 2028. Both, according to sources from the three parties, are in the so-called fringe phase, very close to closing.
The negotiation with Unzue, whom the four-time Liege winner has known all his life and whom he has always asked for more specificity about the tasks he should accomplish, is much more advanced. It will probably consist of setting a number of days a year in which Valverde will be the image man for the team’s different sponsors, bicycles, clothing, saddles, helmets…
The process to reach an agreement with the Spanish federation seems longer and more arduous, an entity that, it recognizes, is not used to negotiating the contracts of its selectors with managers. The previous ones in office—Pascual Momparler, Javier Mínguez, José Luis de Santos, Paco Antequera…—were more men of the house or friends of the presidents. With Vicioso, president of the federation since November, successor to José Luis López Cerrón, the desired profile changed. Vicioso was looking for a figure as a coach and was the protagonist of a media hubbub, speaking simultaneously with, and later stating that his only option was the 44-year-old from Murcia. Freire felt deceived and ignored and made public his little affection for Vicioso, who found himself with another problem: the solution to the conflict that Valverde’s simultaneous commitment to two employers, Abarca and the federation, meant. Finally, neither Unzue nor Vicioso raised any objections to compatibility.
To negotiate with Antonio Sánchez, Valverde’s longtime manager – “neither hammer nor anvil in negotiations,” is his motto –, persistent and realistic, Vicioso has appointed the federation’s new external legal advisor, the lawyer and former cyclist José Rodríguez, specialized in doping matters. In 2006, as president of the ACP, the cyclists’ union, Rodríguez opposed the federation’s initiatives and any possibility of negotiation and solution for the dozens of cyclists involved in Operation Puerto and actively participated in a historic event, the boycott and the suspension of the Spanish championship to protest the publication in EL PAÍS of information about the largest doping plot investigated by the Civil Guard. As a lawyer, he later defended some of the best Spanish athletes in doping cases, such as Marta Domínguez and Alejandro Valverde himself.
