UD Almería will play CD Tenerife at home later this season with no financial upside of their own. Every euro from the gate will go to the family of Jesús de Miguel, the 30-year-old Tenerife forward who died on Tuesday after an on-pitch cardiac arrest.
The decision came from the club’s president, Mohammed Al Khereiji, and covers the whole matchday 34 revenue in LaLiga Hypermotion, Spain’s second tier. Almería have also invited De Miguel’s wife and daughter to attend the match if they feel able to.
In its statement, the club said its sense of social and humanitarian responsibility, and its conviction about standing with the football community at such difficult times, had driven Al Khereiji’s initiative to allocate the full gate to De Miguel’s family.
Almería tempered the gesture with a single line of caveat: no amount of money and no expression of sympathy, the club acknowledged, could ever ease the loss of a loved one.
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Ronaldo’s 25% stake and a fixture reshaped
Cristiano Ronaldo holds a 25% ownership stake in UD Almería, which gives the Andalusian club’s gesture international reach it would not otherwise carry. The Portuguese forward does not run the club day to day, and the ticket decision is attributed to Al Khereiji, who leads the ownership group.
The matchday 34 fixture now sits in the calendar as one of the season’s most emotionally loaded dates for both squads. Tenerife’s team bus will arrive at a stadium where the home side has decided in advance to give away its receipts, and the visiting bench will include team-mates of the player the money is intended to help.
How De Miguel died
Jesús de Miguel suffered cardiac arrest after a chest collision with FC Andorra goalkeeper Jesús Owono in stoppage time of Monday’s Segunda División match. The score stood at 2-2 when the game was abandoned, played at Tenerife’s Estadio Heliodoro Rodríguez López. De Miguel was taken to hospital and died on Tuesday morning, 3 November.
Spanish police have opened an investigation into the circumstances of his death, standard procedure in a case of this kind. De Miguel is survived by his wife and their young daughter.
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A league in mourning, and a second gesture
Almería are not the only club reshaping a fixture in De Miguel’s name. UD Las Palmas will wear a third kit resembling Tenerife’s first shirt in their weekend fixture against CD Eldense at the Estadio de Gran Canaria, framed as a tribute to the Tenerife forward.
Tenerife’s next league assignment will be the first the club plays without De Miguel on the team sheet. The matchday 34 visit to Almería is later in the calendar, and the gate from that night will go, in full, to the family he left behind.
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