Manu Brunet, the Lion King who returned home
“He was always close”Rodolfo professed Fito Páez when writing that melody that today seems to musicalize the walk of Manuel Brunet through the streets of Rosario. Land of Lucha and Lionel, but also the home of a man who, after almost two decades of operating in the most competitive leagues in the worlddecided it was time for the return trip to stop being a summer stopover. manu He returned to his University Club and not only to be there, but to dump a little of all that baggage accumulated in the Old Continent.
The spark of return: between Madrid and family desire
The original plan did not have the Flag Monument on the immediate horizon. After closing his professional chapters, manu and Annhis wife, imagined a balanced retirement in Madrid, that midpoint between European “coldness” and Argentine vertigo; But the psychology of the athlete does not always rule when the family’s heart beats stronger.
“We returned to the country in the summer of 2024 to 2025 and there was a push from the boys. The youngest insisted, the oldest was more cautious, but you could see the desire to be here,” he confessed. manu.
“We had left when we didn’t see that Argentina was a place for kids to grow up like us, but we dare. Today we have been there for eight months, we are very happy with the election and with how we are today,” the renowned number 24 began by confessing.
The diagnosis: against the tyranny of immediacy
Brunet does not observe local hockey from a pedestal, but with the acuity of someone who wants to tidy up their own house. His biggest concern lies in the lack of long-term projects, a lack he attributes to a culture that privileges instant results over solid construction. “We need to make room for comprehensive schemes. Here we live too fast and everything is for ‘now’. It seems to me that this is the pending part: finding the time for the processto work for institutions and not for personal brilliance,” he analyzes with the pause that Europe gave him. For him, real growth is that which transcends people. “Being able to work more for institutionsthat if tomorrow I have to be in a club I can be aligned with their project and not in my view for my team because if not when I leave that goes with me and That is where the clubs remain in a wheel in which they do not move forward.”
This lack of structure hits especially where it hurts most: the formation and crisis of men’s hockey. Manuel puts his finger on a replacement that is given out of necessity and not capacity. “Today, without disparaging anyone, Any 20-year-old boy coaches an Under-19 out of pure necessity.. Historically, men’s hockey nurtured women’s coaches, and Now it is clear that the gentlemen are not doing well, they do not have enough. I encounter people with very little training in charge of schools, and managing groups of people at any age is difficult. There is a lack of awareness in training”.
The gap and constructive “egoism”
With only three water courts in the city, Brunet understands that the difference with Buenos Aires is not only talent, but tools. “That makes it another sport“, he says. Added to this is the constant exodus to the capital, a dynamic that he himself resisted in his years of selection, sleeping on buses and driving entire mornings so as not to leave his club. “They have told me a thousand times to go to Buenos Aires and I always said no. Seeing that a player appears today and leaves after a year, it hurts me, because it lengthens the gap inside“For him, the solution is to understand collective success: “The European, who is more selfish in culture, understands that when knowledge is shared and I know how the person opposite works, a competition is generated that makes both of us improve.”
Closure: the flag of the non-negotiable
He barely set foot on Rosario soil last year, manu he put on the “Uni” and returned to the ring. However, this return is not an extension of his professional career, but rather an experiment in freedom. For the first time in decades, hockey sheds its rigidity to rediscover its purest essence. Brunet will continue to add where he can, integrating into projects that seek the growth of the club, but with a maturity that allows him to draw an insurmountable line. “I will try to resume this seasonbut in a way that I never did before, because in fact in 2025 I was training once a week and also going to help on the weekendsthis year I would do it the same way, perhaps recreationally. Until today, almost since I was a teenager, I had never experienced hockey in a playful way; there was always rigor and high discipline. Now I am in another stage: Continuing that way would mean not being able to be at home, and there are a lot of things that I am not willing to negotiate.. I prefer to focus on collaborating so that hockey grows from a comprehensive place, but with my priorities clear,” Manuel concluded.
