The problems at CD Tenerife continue after the end of the playing season, this time off the field.
As reported here, having narrowly missed out on the chance to rub shoulders with Real Madrid and Barcelona in La Liga after losing the playoff final to Girona in June 2022, the club faces the embarrassment of playing in Spain’s third tier next season after relegation from the 2nd Division.
A complete restructuring is on the cards as several key players depart, although manager Alvaro Cervera (the third to take charge of the team in the past year) is staying on to try and secure promotion at the first attempt.
The club has been in the headlines for a very different reason this time due to the controversial ousting of chairman Daniel Díaz Armas using what some see as a coup which is likely to end up in the courts.
According to sources, a board meeting attended by Díaz Armas on 2 June had already ended and the chairman had left the room when several members decided to stay on and vote him out, replacing him with former club idol Felipe Miñambres, who had just been brought in as general manager.
The ousted chairman reacted furiously to the manoeuvre, which he says is illegal and a breach of regulations, and his cause may be helped by Spain’s highest sporting body, the Sports Council, which has now indicated that it intends to request the official record of the meeting at which Díaz Armas was deposed.
At his first press conference, Miñambres was inevitably quizzed on the procedures used to install him as chairman but declined to give an opinion, insisting that they were “a matter for the club’s legal services” and that he did not intend to let himself be drawn into boardroom battles. However, he expressed his unhappiness that news of his election had been reported in the media before an official communiqué from the club.
In a separate development, Tenerife’s top women’s team, the Granadilla-based Costa Adeje Egatesa, has indicated that it wants to use the Heliodoro Rodríguez stadium for its home games next season and the demand could pose problems for CD Tenerife, which says it has not been consulted.
The fact that the women’s team play in Spain’s premiership and is therefore the island’s top-ranked football club may well prompt a rethink of the use of the publicly-owned stadium in the light of CD Tenerife’s new status in the third (and largely semi-professional) tier.
Photo of new club chairman Felipe Miñambres
