Harburg plotting Cadiz’s path back to the big time

“It’s been a good start to the season,” stated Cadiz minority shareholder Ben Harburg in a recent LaLiga Expert interview, which took place prior to their weekend win against Huesca.

“We got relegated a year and a half ago, so this is now our second season down in the second division. The first season when you get relegated is tough, because you’re carrying a lot of contracts from the first division, which is really tough. 

“What basically happens is, anyone who’s a good player jumps ship, because they don’t want to go down to the second division, and so we lost many of our best players overnight who found other clubs in the first division. 

“And then everyone who’s not really a first division player, but was getting paid a first division salary, sticks around. So you’ve got all these guys who aren’t significantly disheartened because of what happened in the relegation, getting first division prices, but playing in the second division. It’s a recipe for disaster.”

Born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Harburg spent his childhood bouncing around from places like Michigan, Egypt, and Switzerland, but it was during his stay in El Puerto de Santa Maria, Spain, where he came across football. After attending a Cadiz match in 1997, he fell in love with the beautiful game forever.

Over the next quarter century, Harburg made a name for himself in the finance world, going from China to Southeast Asia to Africa to the Middle East to Germany while trading commodities and other stocks.

He is a managing partner at MSA Capital, a global investment firm with over $2 billion in assets under management, having overseen investments in companies like Palantir, Uber, and Airbnb.

After watching the Netflix series Sunderland ‘Til I Die, Harburg decided that he needed to start a football ownership adventure. After plotting all 80 clubs in Spain’s top three divisions into an Excel spreadsheet and reviewing factors such as GDP per capita, city size, and stadium capacity, he found that Cadiz offered the best value-for-dollar investment.

Harburg purchased a 6.5 percent stake in Cadiz in October 2021, becoming an observer on the Board of Directors.

“One of the funny things that happened in that Sunderland story was that the team got relegated out of the first division to the second, and then the next season, they got relegated out of the Championship into League One. You had this team that had the fifth-biggest stadium in England, it’s just a wild position. 

“Last year was a hard year for us because we had that kind of a dynamic, and so what we worked really hard on over the off-season was getting rid of a lot of those older legacy players that maybe weren’t so motivated, that were probably a little bit too far along in their career, and who were being overpaid. 

“In the final days of the transfer window, we were able to finally shed many of them, not all unfortunately, and bring in a lot of fresh blood. And fresh blood is really critical in the second division of Spain, because you need young, hungry players who run like crazy to get promoted back up, as opposed to older players who expect to be playing at a first division level and are kind of like prima donnas.”

Since joining Cadiz four years ago, Harburg has proved instrumental in the club’s globalisation initiatives — from setting up their esports team to helping Cadiz grow from less than half a million to over 18 million followers on social media, to recruiting key players, to establishing an international academy.

And while Cadiz have gone from playing in the top flight to the second tier, they have remained financially sustainable thanks to Harburg’s oversight.

“We’ve refreshed everything, we’ve got a fresh kind of goalie and a relatively fresh front line. We still have some great veteran players, like Javier Ontiveros and Suso, others, but otherwise, it’s a pretty young squad, and the results have been great. 

“I think we’re probably overachieving right now. I’m not entirely convinced this will be our year to go up. But the squad has a very different feel than it did the last few years, where it felt like we were just running on fumes and trying to survive the end of the season and looking for miracle wins to keep us alive. 

“This season, it feels like everything that’s happened is very systematic and predictable. It doesn’t feel like we’ve stolen any wins. It feels like we’re playing at the level we should be at. I think we’re in good shape. I don’t know if I’d predict we’re gonna get promoted this season, but that kind of catharsis and cleansing process has begun.”

Zach Lowy is a freelance football journalist who has written for leading outlets like FotMob, BetUS, Apuestas Deportivas, and who has appeared as a radio and television guest for BBC, SiriusXMFC, and various other platforms. After pursuing a global sports journalism degree at George Washington University, Zach has been able to tap into his multilingual background and interview major footballing figures in Spanish and Portuguese as well as operate the weekly podcast ‘Zach Lowy’s European Football Show’ on BET Central.