🎥 Gil v Caneda, 30 years on from Spanish football’s most epic fight 🥊 | OneFootball

There are images that remain etched in the memory of a generation not because they are brilliant, but because they are tacky. Today marks three decades since that March 8, 1996, the day Jesús Gil decided that the best way to resolve an institutional conflict in the League was to throw a right hook in the middle of the street. If you watch the video today, it looks like a B-movie, but it was the reality of our football.

"Son of a b***!": The word that broke everything

That Atlético de Madrid of the "Double" was flying on the field, but its president preferred the mud. The war with José María Caneda, president of Compostela, had been brewing for days on the radio. Gil arrived at the LFP headquarters with the energy of someone looking for a fight from the moment he put on his tie.

What follows in the recording is pure chaos: microphones piled up, shoving, and a word that Gil repeated like a mantra: "Chorizo" (crook). When Fidalgo, the manager of the Galician club, tried to get in the middle to defend his boss, he encountered the most volcanic version of the red-and-white executive. Of course, he had just called him a "son of a b***" a few seconds earlier.

A right hook for the ages

The incredible thing about the video is not just the punch—a sharp blow that caught Fidalgo completely off guard—but what happened next. In a normal world, someone would apologize.

In Gil's world, the guy kept hurling insults—just like the Compostela president, José María Caneda, who called him a "disaster"—while his bodyguards protected him as if he were a rock star on a bad day.

"Am I different? Yes. Do I have balls? Also," he declared afterwards to his fans, completely unfazed (in the same press conference he also recalled his praise for Franco). There were no filters, no communications departments controlling the damage, just a man with too much power and very few brakes.

The football of "robberies" and cigars

That incident was the peak of the surrealism of an era when the presidents were bigger protagonists than the players. It was a football of smoke-filled offices, incendiary statements on the sidelines, and a lack of professionalism that today would seem unthinkable.

Thirty years later, Atleti is a global brand and Compostela fights in other divisions, but that punch is still there, reminding us that there was a time when the League was run more like a Berlanga film than an elite competition.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here.