Mirandés continue to defy the odds with a transfer policy and model that relies on loan signings and picking the best young managers in Spain to lead the project.
Club Deportivo Mirandés have only been a professional football club for the last 13 years, but in that time they’ve built some of the most improbably efficient squads in modern football.
Maybe the headline is wrong. They’re not beating the transfer market, they’re playing by an entirely different set of rules.
Their model and its success could be studied as a counter-case for multi-million euro deals and runaway transfer fees. It’s unique within Spain and world football, and is built on their location, wedged between some of the best talent factories in Spain. They’ve also turned a lack of financial resources into a competitive advantage.
Their neighbours – Athletic Club, Real Sociedad, Osasuna, Alavés – have some of the most productive academies in Europe. Every year, these academies develop players good enough to flirt with first team football without getting the call. And every year, these players need somewhere to play that is right at the outer limit of their current ability.
That is where Mirandés step in.
They know they can’t compete financially with other teams so act almost like an external academy for bigger clubs in Spain. They offer minutes in one of the most competitive leagues in Europe where young players can grow.
“We’re not a school,” the club’s president, Alfredo de Miguel Crespo, tells Opta Analyst. “We’re a working club that does the best it can within the financial circumstances it’s given. We know what we can and can’t do and what we definitely don’t do is go crazy and spend more money than we have.”
He admits there are inherent risks with the model, which might be an understatement because it’s an annual controlled demolition. Every summer, the squad is gutted and rebuilt from scratch, a process that should destabilise them but somehow makes them stronger.
Last season, against all the odds, Mirandés came face to face with the impossible and within minutes of being promoted to La Liga. They would eventually lose to Real Oviedo in extra-time of the promotion play-offs.
And then, just like that, the summer reset switch was hit, just like it is every year. By 3 August of last year, for example, they had so few players in their first-team squad that they had to cancel a pre-season friendly against Mallorca.
A professional club in Spain’s second division, weeks from the opening game of the season, pulling the plug on a match because they couldn’t field a team. It sounds absurd. It is absurd.
Panic might be an appropriate response for some teams, but at Mirandés, this is all part of the plan.
The Rise of Mirandés
Mirandés became a professional club in 2012 when they finally clawed their way into the second division and became, at the time, the smallest town in Spain with a professional football team.
Before that, they existed in the strange liminal space that is the semi-professional Primera RFEF, where you’re still juggling part-time realities but with the costs and expectations creeping into the realms of the professional.
The third tier is Spanish football’s purgatory where it’s too expensive to be fully amateur but with not enough money going around to be considered fully professional.
Since then, Mirandés have evolved into a club that polishes players just about ready for the upper atmosphere of the sport.
The list of alumni is impressive. Dani Vivian, now an Athletic Club starter and Spain international, Chelsea striker Nicolas Jackson, Rayo Vallecano’s Sergio Camello, and Rodrigo Riquelme, who is now pulling the strings for Real Betis. And that’s just the class that graduated from Mirandés a few seasons ago.
From last year alone, at least seven players will play in the top flight next season.
Joaquín Panichelli (Strasbourg), Alberto Reina (Real Oviedo), Jon Gorrotxategi (Real Sociedad), Hugo Rincón (Girona), Urko Izeta (Athletic Club), Joel Roca (Girona), and Iker Benito (Osasuna).
Joaquin Panichelli celebrates a goal for Mirandés vs Real Oviedo in the play-off final second leg.Loan, Lose, Repeat
When Mirandés cancelled their pre-season game against Mallorca last summer, the reaction outside the Anduva was what you’d expect: speculation and an assumption that the whole operation was wobbling.
Inside the club, there was no such alarm. They knew exactly what was happening, because this is what always happens.
“I think staying calm and patient is vital in football. Things happen when they’re meant to, not before and not after. In the end, we always manage to build competitive squads, as we’ve seen.”
They don’t shop early in the transfer market, shrewdly waiting for better value.
“We can’t enter the market early,” the president says. “We have to work in a kind of strange way.
“Our financial capabilities don’t let us. We have to wait for teams to release players, and then gradually we bring in a lot of players on loan. We can’t compete with other teams in terms of financial resources, so we have to take a different approach – one that limits us in some ways, but also lets us bring in and develop talent for our team.”
Last season, just three players at the club longer than a year played more than 40% of the available minutes in the league. Only five played at all.
Two seasons ago, it was even more dramatic with just two non-summer signings playing more than 40% of minutes. Only five players with more than a year at the club made it onto the field, with Asier Ortiz de Guinea, a youth team player, only clocking six minutes.
Sporting director Alfredo Merino has worked his way up, much like the players and managers he recruits for Mirandés, from Spain’s lower leagues on a journey that has taken him from Palencia to Atlético Madrid and from Real Valladolid to Tenerife. He was Real Madrid’s head of youth scouting before moving into the same role at Celta Vigo. Mirandés is his first job as a sporting director, though.
Former technical secretary of Real Madrid, Ramón Martínez, says of Merino: “He’s a specialist at building squads. He is the kind of professional who would think nothing of driving 2,200 kilometres a weekend to watch players.”
That diligence is evident in the squads he has built and continues to build at Mirandés. Merino tells Opta Analyst, “The most important thing for me is to have watched the players and then we focus on their data.”
The players they select are obviously a massive part of the recipe but there’s another ingredient that Mirandés just keep getting right.
Managing Expectations
For a club as small as Mirandés, they have a remarkable strike rate when selecting managers. If players jump at the chance of a loan spell at Anduva as a potential career-shaping rung on the ladder, managers see it the same way.
There is no big sales pitch and no technical PowerPoint presentations selling the project because there is no need for one. They identify the manager they want, do the necessary research and then call them.
“We choose the coaches we want. Always,” the president says. “No coach has ever turned us down, first, because we go after coaches we know are within reach, and second, because they know this is a good place to take the next step.
“The coaching profile we look for is someone who has worked with youth teams and young players in general. That experience helps in dealing with young squads, and we also look at the person’s character and human qualities. From there, it’s about helping them however we can and working together.
“We’ve brought in quite a few coaches over the years, and just like the players, we’ve seen them grow in their professional careers. I’d say almost all of them who’ve come through here have progressed afterward.”
And it works. Alessio Lisci is now at Osasuna. Borja Jiménez took Leganés to the Segunda title and into La Liga after his time at Mirandés. José Alberto López has Racing Santander playing some of the most exuberant football in Spain and are serious promotion candidates this season. And, of course, there is Andoni Iraola, maybe the club’s most famous graduate. He is managing Bournemouth in the Premier League, getting results and making players measurably better in the process.
Some of those jumps might sound modest, and they are in the greater scheme, but for a club like Mirandés to continually pick these coaches and give them the working conditions to improve is a staggering testament to the philosophy of the club and all the things they are doing right.
Why haven’t they gone for big names? Or grown more ambitious as their circumstances have improved? The model doesn’t allow it.
“We’ve never gone for “market” coaches and never chased big-name or established coaches, and again, for that same reason, because this approach works for us, and we don’t have other options,” the president says. “I don’t think it’s luck or coincidence that most coaches who come here end up doing great things.
“Mirandés offer the right conditions for coaches to work, without the extreme pressure you might find in other clubs that are desperate for promotion. Here, we’re patient – we know we build the team little by little, slowly, and we hand over a squad in August that isn’t fully formed, and we know it’ll need time. But that’s our process.”
For managers, their potential big break is rarely the loudest job offer in the room. But it’s the right move, in the right place with just enough stability and hungry young players in the squad to make the whole project sustainable.
The latest coach to be hand-picked by the club to lead the project is Fran Justo, the 35-year-old coach comes from Algeciras in the Primera RFEF. His CV isn’t the sort of thing that would excite a top-flight hiring committee.
They finished ninth last season in their group (the league consists of two divisions with 20 teams in each). An inconspicuous finish, but Justo plays a similar style to Lisci as the club looks for continuity amidst the squad turnover.
Former head coach Alessio Lisci, who left to join La Liga club Osasuna this summer.The Mirandés Model Miracle
In the searing August heat at Anduva, in Miranda del Ebro, watching the team take to the field for training, you could easily mistake this for an underage training session. It’s a tight panel of young players, with more arriving by the week.
On the morning Opta Analyst arrived, a new signing from Real Betis’ academy had just stepped in (Ismael Barea), alongside a graduate from Atlético Madrid’s B team (Pablo Pérez).
By the end of the week, the roster was added to further with Gonzalo Petit from Betis signing for his first experience in European football after a summer move from Nacional. Aarón Martín, an 18-year-old has also arrived on loan from Al-Qadsiah, with Mirandés fighting off competition from some big clubs to sign him, another feather in the cap of the sporting director and the project at Mirandés.
The cycle is constant: loan, lose, repeat.
But how long can they keep repeating this miracle? Will they keep flirting with promotion, or will gravity eventually pull them back into the depths of the Spanish football pyramid?
The environment that the president talks about is hard to bet against. It feels like they’ve attained some sort of cheat code that only a smaller club that understands its own limitations can use.
“Mirandés is a very welcoming city, and the fans too. And as a club, we’re always right there for any problem or need that arises, doing what we can to help, and I think that’s the key,” the president says.
Miranda de Ebro isn’t a place you’ll likely stumble across on your summer holidays. It’s not coastal, not a resort town, not a tourist draw. But it has a football team and a philosophy to go with it that is perfectly aligned with the size, resources, and rhythm of the place.
And in a football economy that devours projects like this, the fact that it’s still working, is in itself, a small miracle.
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The Mirandés Model: How a Tiny Spanish Team are Beating the Transfer Market Opta Analyst.
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