Friday, November 29, 2024 marks the 125th anniversary of the founding of FC Barcelona.
To commemorate this, The Athletic runs a series of works that celebrate the people and moments that have helped make the club what it is today.
We have told the story of Joan Gamper, the man who founded the club, and introduced some of the most important figures in Barça's history. Here we take a look at the almost unbelievable story of when their star striker Quini was kidnapped in 1981…
“I got a call at 4 o'clock in the morning from Quinn's wife. She told me that he didn't come home that night and that she hadn't heard anything from him.”
Former Barcelona president Joan Gaspart speaks The Athletic About one of the most unusual events in the history of the club.
It was Sunday, March 1, 1981, and Gaspert was vice president. Barça defeated Hercules 6-0 at Camp Nou, with La Liga's top scorer Quini scoring twice. Barça were on track to win the Spanish title for the first time since 1973-74, when Johan Cruyff was still active and Cuini was scoring for Sporting Gijón instead.
The whole town and the players were filled with excitement and decided to have dinner at a restaurant near the ground.
It was a restaurant called “Can Juste'' located 15 minutes walk from Camp Nou. Everyone was waiting for the then 31-year-old star striker Quini, real name Enrique Castro Gonzalez, but he never arrived.
“We had seven or eight people,'' says Carles Rexac – says one of the team's players. The Athletic. “(Barça centre-back and Cuini's best friend Jose Ramon) Alexanco met us and said he didn't know where he was or where he had gone.”
Quini was one of the most famous players in Spanish football in the 1980s (FC Barcelona)
The last we heard from Quini was in a TV interview in which he talked about the upcoming game against Atletico Madrid. The match was crucial as Atlético were in the lead with a two-point lead over Barça.
Quini's wife, Mari Nieves, flew home from Gijón that afternoon with their two children, as she does on many weekends. After the match, her husband stopped by her house to collect her luggage and then drove to the Barcelona airport to pick her up in his Ford Granada.
“His wife (when he didn't show up at the airport) called several hospitals, police stations, and wherever she might know,” Gaspert said. “He didn't show up. Nobody knew anything. We went to his house at 5 or 6 in the morning and thought, 'Where the hell is he?' ”
Gaspart, then-Barça president Josep Luis Núñez and Alexanco spent the night at Nieves' house and immediately called the police.
The next day, the report of Quinni's disappearance became official. The three men stayed with Nieves until she began answering the phone.
This incident caused ripples throughout the country. The incident was reported in all major media outlets, and rumors began to spread that the Basque separatist group ETA, which terrorized Spain many times, was behind the attack.
Nieves received the first of 21 calls from her husband's kidnapper. It wasn't ETA, but a trio with no criminal record or jobs who tried to solve their financial problems by kidnapping one of the country's biggest soccer stars and demanding a hefty ransom.
“The news spread like wildfire throughout Barcelona,” said Josep Maria Minghella, a former agent and long-time close associate of the club. The Athletic.
“There were a lot of surprises. There were a lot of kidnappings back then because ETA was active, but we had never had a kidnapping happen to a player. That was a few years ago. It reminded me of what happened to (Real Madrid legend Alfredo) Di Stefano (when he was kidnapped by Venezuelan guerrillas in 1963).
As Reczak said 43 years later, “At first I thought it was a joke because it was so unimaginable.”
On his way home from the airport, Kuini stopped to fill up his car with gas when three men suddenly attacked him and forced him into his car at gunpoint. They then abandoned the car, placed Mr. Cuini in the bonnet and wooden box in a van, and drove to Zaragoza, about a four-hour drive west of Barcelona.
There they transported him to a safe house, where he spent 23 days in captivity.
Quini was La Liga's top scorer five times, scoring 73 goals in four seasons with Barcelona.
“He was one of Spain's best players and was always in the media's attention,” says Rexac. “They knew kidnapping him would have major repercussions.”
“He was a very charismatic man and was kind to people,” said Juan Carlos Pérez Rojo, a player who played for the B team but trained with Barça's first team. The Athletic. “They knew that everyone would stand up and give him the money he needed.'' Rojo and Quini became friends some time after the kidnapping, and he is in his 46th year working as a scout at Barça. There is.
“As a person, he was a very simple, good and kind person,” said Minghella, who was instrumental in signing Cuini from Sporting Gijon. “Everything that happened to him and his family, he didn't deserve. It's one of those moments where you realize life can be unfair.”
Quini and Nieves on the day of their release (Xavier Bonilla/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
It was later revealed that the kidnapper's main target was then-Barcelona manager Helenio Herrera. Learning that he had a cold, they feared he might die during the kidnapping and changed their plans.
For the next several days, police operated in secret.
“There was a lot going on,” Minghella said. “Police had the situation under control and didn't want too many people involved.”
“The police didn't want people to be disturbed if they wanted to help,” Rexak added. “So they just had Alexanko help them.”
Barcelona requested the postponement of that weekend's La Liga match against Atlético. Spain's top flight rejected the request, and Barça played at Atlético's old club, the Vicente Calderon, losing 1-0. German midfielder Bernd Schuster, who had threatened not to play, said the responsibility for future games rests with Nunez and Herrera.
“It was a little bit of a struggle because some of us didn't want to play until we found him and the coaches thought we had to play even without him,” Reczak says. “It was complicated.”
Barça played two more games without Cuini, losing 2-1 to Salamanca and drawing 0-0 with Real Zaragoza. They will finish in 5th place, 4 points behind champions Real Sociedad.
“We didn't win La Liga that year because I spent those three weeks thinking only about Quini,” Leczak said.
Meanwhile, police continued to do their jobs. Because the calls from the kidnappers were coming from a phone booth, they requested the cooperation of Telefonica, a major Spanish telecommunications company that owns the kidnappers.
“The kidnappers were completely unnoticed,” Juan Martínez Ruiz, one of the 20 police officers in charge of the case, later told Spanish magazine Libero. “That was the main reason it took so long to find them. They had never broken a dish, they had no criminal records, they had no criminal ties… They were completely normal. .”
Police issued a statement asking the public for help, but had to deal with an avalanche of false leads. Telefonica had trouble determining the origin of the calls.
During the phone call, the kidnappers told Nieves that they were worried about how much Cuini had eaten because they no longer had enough money to buy a sandwich. They had demanded 100 million pesetas (equivalent to about 600,000 euros today) as his ransom, an increase from the original 70 million pesetas.
As part of an attempt to pay the kidnappers, police asked Alexanco to go to La Jonquera, a town in Catalonia near the French border, with a briefcase full of banknotes. The kidnappers asked him to cross the border, but police refused, saying French authorities would arrest him on the spot.
On March 20, the three asked for the money to be transferred to a Credit Suisse bank account.
“The kidnappers were so dazed that Barça was looking for a solution,” Minghella said. “The people who kidnapped him did not have a clear idea of what ransom they wanted to demand and had changed their strategy.
“Nunez's secretary called me and asked if there was any way to get the money in Switzerland, but the kidnappers asked me to keep the money. I have business in Luxembourg and Switzerland, and there are I had the money. I said yes and agreed to help pay.”
The bank account was in the name of one of the kidnappers, Victor Miguel Díaz Esteban. Swiss police worked closely with Spanish police to track him down. Díaz Esteban went to Switzerland on March 24 to withdraw 1 million pesetas in US dollars. Within 18 hours, police found the hotel where he was staying and arrested him after tracking him as he made his way to the airport to catch a flight to Paris. He was interrogated and confessed to having imprisoned Quini in a basement in Zaragoza.
Within a day, police released him and arrested a second kidnapper.
Quinni later told friends that this was the scariest moment. Because I heard a lot of noise and thought that the kidnappers might kill me. However, on the night of March 25, radio throughout Spain announced that he had been released.
When he arrived in Barcelona, a large crowd was waiting for him at the police station. Quinny had to go outside to greet them.
The striker prepares for a press conference after his release (FC Barcelona)
“When he came out, he was in very bad shape, as you could see,” Leczak says. “All I know is that I held him. He was hidden away in the dark for 23 days. That's something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.”
“He wanted to play as soon as possible and get back to normal,” Rojo said. “They gave him moral support. I heard about it from my teammates after a while.”
Quini returned for the final four games of the La Liga season, playing again just a week after his release, and was received with the highest honors at every ground he played on. He played 90 minutes in each of his first three league games after his return, scoring twice in the 5–2 win over Almeria, and still finished as La Liga's top scorer with 20 goals. He also scored with both feet in the Copa del Rey semi-final and twice in the final against his boyhood club Sporting Gijon, helping Barça win the Spanish National Cup.
“On every pitch, when they said Quini's name, there was a five-minute applause,” Rojo says. “He received a wonderful reception.”
The three kidnappers were sentenced to 10 years in prison and a fine of 5 million pesetas.
“They were simple people without great potential,” Kuini said at a press conference after his release. “They fed me sandwiches because they didn't have any more money.”
“Some of my teammates joked with me afterwards,” Rojo said. “Sometimes I would go to his room after dinner at the hotel and there would be teammates who would go into the wardrobe and scare him when he arrived.”
Quini spent three more seasons at Barcelona, scoring 73 goals in 141 appearances for the Catalan. He then returned to Sporting Gijón in 1984, where he spent the last three years of his playing career. He worked as a coach, team principal, and director of institutional relations.
The kidnapping had a profound impact on Quinni, who died of a heart attack in 2018 at the age of 68. From the Camp Nou, a huge tifo with the inscription “Quini, Semper Records'' was unfurled in an emotional tribute: Kuini, always remembered.
Kuini was mourned at Camp Nou after his death (Xavier Bonilla/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“This had a huge impact on him throughout his life,” Reksak says. “He spent days locked in a very small cell in the basement. He didn't want to talk about it because every time he talked about it it reminded him of the trauma.
“He told me that when he was fed by his kidnappers, he sometimes kept (the food) to himself. If they hunted them down and killed them, it was unlikely that anyone would find him there. He thought it was possible and he would starve to death.
“Those 23 days were on his mind until the day he died. People think he forgot right away, but he didn't. quickly changes the subject.
“This is the most incredible event in Barça's history.”
(Top photo: Getty Images, Design: Eamonn Dalton)
