Luis de la Fuente, the Spanish absolute coach, appeared this Friday for the first time since the RFEF Assembly last Friday, in which his applause for Luis Rubiales' speech raised a lot of controversy. And the technician from La Rioja was face to face. "I do not have to resign, I have to apologize. I am on the side of equality and respect. These gestures do not represent my values or my way of acting in life. It was a situation of great pressure, new for me, and it I felt overwhelmed," he repeated.
Before facilitating the call for the next two qualifying matches for Spain for Euro 2024, De la Fuente wanted to take a aside to discuss the Rubiales case and offer his explanations. The coach, before submitting to a battery of criticism from journalists, offered an initial speech in which he apologized without nuance for what happened.
"All the criticism that I have received is fully deserved, I want to say that I am sorry for what happened and I apologize. I am going to try to explain some unjustifiable facts," he admitted. De la Fuente repeated on several occasions that he was overcome by the situation experienced during the Assembly: "I went, like many others, convinced that I was attending a formal farewell ceremony for a president (Rubiales) but it turned into something very different than he surpassed me, I wasn't prepared", he highlighted ruefully.
Given the insistence on the questions, De la Fuente gave more thought to his speech, changing some term but never the substance. "I made an inexcusable human error, if I could go back I would not do it again. I was shocked when I saw that Rubiales was not going to resign, it was something that was not easy to digest and it left me blank. That situation overwhelmed me, people You may or may not believe me but it really was like that," he insisted.
"I'm not justifying anything, it was unjustifiable, I'm just trying to explain the context of a situation that I experienced overwhelmed and I didn't live up to it. I couldn't control my emotions and later, when I reflected, I didn't recognize myself."
Finally, the coach from La Rioja was calm about his future on the Spanish bench: "I have the support of all the territorial presidents and the president of the Federation, if it wasn't like that I wouldn't be here."
