The Submarine have loaned Enric Martínez to Zemplín, a club from the twinned town with Vila-real
Imagine you live in a town in Slovakia with less than 40,000 inhabitants. Your club plays in the top flight and your goal is survival. Now imagine that a player from the Villarreal CF youth academy arrives there and that this incorporation, in the form of a loan, was initially agreed between the mayors of the municipalities. Michalovce and Vila-real have been officially twinned since 1998, and so José Benlloch, mayor of the town in the Plana Baixa, and Miroslav Dufinec, his counterpart in the small Slovakian town, are in regular contact.
This is how the loan of Enric Martínez, Villarreal C midfielder, was forged in order to try to achieve survival with Zemplín Michalovce. “Now we are second to last. We beat the bottom team last week and now we are starting the relegation league, when the league is split in two and some are fighting for the title and others are fighting to stay up. Only the last one goes down directly and the second last one plays a play-out against the second placed team in the second division”, says Enric Martínez, who is still adapting to the country, about the Slovakian competition system. “At the moment, I’m living in a hotel,” he adds.
The town, with a team in the national top flight, could easily be compared to Vila-real. This is how the Valencian footballer describes it: “When I have to go to training or shopping, I take the opportunity to see a bit of the city. It’s a very familiar little town”. Michalovce reminds him of Vila-real and Zemplín of Villarreal: “In the room where we do the videos, there is like a small trophy room and I saw that there were two Villarreal submarines and I said ‘look, here Villarreal is present’.”
In fact, the two cities are so close that the first Villarreal fan club in Slovakia was born there, while in Vila-real there is a Calle Michalovce (Michalovce Street). Although the official twinning has been in place for 26 years, the relationship between the two towns originated much earlier. In 1983, through cultural exchanges between dance groups. These exchanges generated friendships between the families of the participants, which were consolidated by correspondence trips. The creation of the International Dance Festival in Vila-real and the participation of the Laborec group facilitated rounds of contacts. In 1998, an official twinning protocol was formalised.
“Michalovce and Vila-real have been friends since even before our twinning was formalised in 1998. This relationship, rooted in cultural and institutional exchanges, has made the link between the two towns particularly dear to all of us and has even led to one of our neighbours, Professor Jacinto Heredia, being recognised as an Honorary Citizen of Michalovce. I know, moreover, that this mutual affection has also been reflected in a great fondness for our club, with a Villarreal fan club, and that the residents of Michalovce, including its mayor, follow the successes of our Villarreal CF with special interest”, explains Mayor Benlloch about these relations. On 20 May 1998, with Manuel Vilanova as mayor of Vila-real and Ladislav Ebský as mayor of Michalovce, the twinning agreement between the two towns was formalised at an institutional ceremony held in the Rafael Beltrán Moner Municipal Music Auditorium.
Who would have thought that more than four decades later, Enric Martínez would become a Zemplín Michalovce player thanks to this friendship between two small towns with great aspirations.
