What does it cost to give eleven years of your life to a football club?
Michael Valenzia was president of Birkirkara FC until he resigned in May 2026. He arrived in 2015 for what was meant to be a few months as team manager.
He describes three bubbles in his life, his family, his business and the club, then admits without being asked that the club was always the first one. He calls that a sick thought.
In this conversation he explains what a Maltese football club actually is. Not a company. A voluntary organisation turning over one and a half million euros, run by ten unpaid people, carrying forty fully paid professionals with no HR and no accounts department. He tells you why one in five Maltese players says they have been approached to fix a match, why he thinks the real number is higher, and why refusing to be bought made him enemies rather than allies.
He tells the story of the phone call from his wife, screaming that their daughter was unresponsive, and what he said to his players from outside the hospital: go and win the game, I will deal with this. They lost. He missed one match in ten years, and people wrote that the president had abandoned his team.
He walks through the fake transfer that nearly took two hundred thousand euros from the club. Real tickets, a real hospital, an agent who had done deals worth millions. It collapsed over a request for seven thousand euros, caught by a volunteer who was paid nothing. On the call, the man on the other end refused to switch to video and started laughing.
Then he takes you through eight days in May. A league decider lost. 187 unread messages on Mother's Day. A stranger phoning at half six in the morning to say one of his players had been out until five. A cup final handed to the one referee his club had asked in writing never to officiate them again. A red card after five minutes. His daughter hit in the stands. Losing in the last five minutes, driving home, and collapsing on his wife and daughter at the front door.
But the moment that stays with you is smaller than any of it. Three weeks before this conversation he was in a swimming pool with his nine year old, throwing a ball. She said: Dada, you are always laughing now. He asked what she meant. She said: because you used to come home sad.
He brought a winner's medal to the studio and explained it has almost nothing to do with the cup. That year was the hardest of his life. In the end I won, he says, and I am not talking about football.
This is not a football episode. It is an episode about what a man gives away without noticing, and who finally tells him.
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