José Augusto Cadena is synonymous with controversy, scandal, but also football and the ability to move here and there and manage to stay current.
This Thursday he received a hard blow, the suspension of the sports recognition of Cúcuta, his current club, for delays in his payments between 2018 and 2019. The reality is that surely the 167 million pesos that he must pay to suspend the punishment will surely not be difficult to get, but many wonder: how is it that he manages to get into so much trouble and always appears clean, in another club, using the same maneuvers without there being a definitive punishment?
Cadena has everything in his favor: smell, guts and contacts in soccer, because he has always been a passion for him and because he understands the dynamics of soccer like few others.
This 43-year-old from Buenos Aires is a lawyer from the University of La Sabana and one of the youngest managers of local football. He wanted to be a footballer but soon understood that his role was on the management side, which is why he has taken successive courses in sports marketing abroad and has a global vision of the game. He also has the backing of a prosperous family business that helps him alleviate economic emergencies and is a forward, challenging and distrustful, essential characteristics to make his way in a complex business such as football.
Journalist Norvey Quevedo recalls that his first appearance was in 2005, when he was just 28 years old and bought Atlético Bucaramanga for 4,000 million pesos, which he paid half in cash and the other half with a loan. Upon arrival, he avoided relegation, in part thanks to his agreements with Colonel Hugo Aguilar, Governor of Santander, later condemned for ties to the self-defense groups. In 2008 he suffered the decline and was practically declared a non-person in his own city. Óscar Córdoba, the Colombian exporter, representing an investment group, would get him out of trouble by buying the club and leaving good dividends.
But in 2012 the big business man reappeared: for 1.6 billion pesos he bought the Patriotas club, made a beneficial partnership with Eduardo Pimentel to distribute official income for both teams, but soon became disenchanted and ended up selling again.
He was not going to be far from football: he appeared to buy a First B team, in Bankruptcy Law, with no higher expectations, except for the interest of former Mayor Ramiro Suárez, sentenced to 25 years for murder. Cadena arrived and restructured the company to the point of reducing its debts by several billion. But in sports, the bet did not go well because the team, despite the fact that she alleges that she invested a million dollar figure, went back to the decline in 2015.
Cadena played with juveniles, took the team to Zipaquirá, fought with everyone who showed him his teeth, was investigated by all the control entities without being found guilty, he played with the payment deadlines but in the end he found how to catch up and in 2018 he recovered the category with coach Lucas Pusineri, whom he brought from Argentina without anyone knowing much about him (later he went to Cali and today to Independiente) and so, against the current, he made the Cúcuta fans give him another opportunity.
How did you pay them? “It is bullshit square,” he said in a leaked audio that did not deny, threatened to take the team if there was no support from the city and the department and today is in a lawsuit against the Supersociedades, which on August 13 could Condemn him for arrears of tax payments and other unfulfilled official expenses.
Today Cadena has one more mess: the suspension of sports recognition for debts to players, coaching staff and other concepts that total 167 million. Surely he will pay them but before, as he announced, he will exhaust the 10 days of the replacement and so on, until he comes out of the mess again without considerable injuries because he knows how to move in the middle like no other. Error chain? Chain of controversies … that surely will not stop here.
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