The images of Toni Kroos’ moving farewell just over a month ago added some sentimental nuance this Thursday, more than 1,200 kilometers from the Bernabéu, when Nacho Fernández sat in the press room at the SV Aasen facilities in Donaueschingen, where he works the Spanish team during the Euro Cup. In some of the photographs from that night of May 25, you can see the Real Madrid captain throwing Kroos into the air, in the last throw. “When Toni was saying goodbye, I already knew that he was going to end my career at the club,” he said. “They were difficult times for me, because I was sad not to be able to say goodbye like that, but at that moment I didn’t have the time to sign the contract I wanted. Until a few days ago. “I would have loved to say goodbye to the Bernabéu like Kroos did.”
Last week Nacho closed an agreement with the Saudi Al-Qadisiyah coached by Míchel, after having held very advanced negotiations with Al-Ittihad in which Karim Benzema plays. The process has taken longer than he wanted, to the point of causing him some discomfort. “I would have liked to come to the national team without talking about my future.” Bogged down in negotiations, he found support from Madrid, which kept the door open for him, and from the coach in the Spain camp: “he has supported me at all times. “It wasn’t easy for me these days to be in the national team with so many things on my mind.”
The thing about Madrid, to which he had informed “a few months ago” that he would leave, was a safety net: “He told me that if at any time I wanted to change my mind, if I backed out on any operation that did not convince me , that I was going to have my home there,” he said. “I am very grateful to the president of Real Madrid, who for me is a father.” Apart from the annoying meanderings of the negotiations, the development of the course itself, which ended with him at the top of La Cibeles with the Champions trophy, his sixth European Cup, threatened to modify his intentions: “When things happen as well as this season, when everything is so beautiful… When you win, when you play, when you lose only two games in a season, you have doubts. Of course you have doubts. Why not hold on for one more season,” he said.
But he kept his intentions. After more than half a life in a club where he arrived at the age of 11 and left at 34, that was almost a leap into the void: “It is the most difficult thing that has happened to me in my life without a doubt.” But it was something he had been ruminating on for a long time. “Even last season I had slight doubts,” he confessed. “Those doubts that have been growing inside me day by day have not been for any reason. At the club I have always felt loved. Logically, there have been difficult moments in the season, such as not playing a game that you think you have to play, or not performing at the level in another…”.
Their explanations pointed to a certain exhaustion. “I decide it because I need to live a new experience, with my family. It’s going to turn my life upside down, but it’s what I need. I have been in the club all my life, you know how demanding it is. Even if we win, you have to be 100% on a day-to-day basis, nothing else is worth it other than being at the highest level every day and at every moment,” he said. “It is a decision made from the deepest part of my heart. I’m quiet. There’s no reason, but it’s what I feel. When I feel things, I believe that in my life I have always made good decisions. “I am prepared for everything that comes and very excited about where I am going.”
Also because his new Saudi destination makes it very difficult for him to have to face what is already his former team: “I didn’t see it, nor do I want to, that these Madrid players are very good… I don’t feel like suffering from them,” he joked. “I was always clear that if I didn’t finish my career at Real Madrid, I never wanted to face them.”
There were touches of nostalgia in Nacho’s story, but also a touch of serenity: “I have no doubt now. I do it with complete confidence, with complete peace of mind,” he explained. “I have been the happiest person, the happiest youth player at Real Madrid.” The ending could not have been as complete as Toni Kroos’s, that night in which he propelled him to heaven knowing he was already leaving, but it seemed that way to him: “When I was a child I always wanted it to be a happy ending, and I think that “I didn’t even dream it would have turned out so beautiful.”
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