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Just as in the world of sports, in politics there are two types of candidate signings: those in summer, and those during the winter transfer window. In summer, a team plans its season and if it is able to and can afford it, it assembles the squad it will need for the entire campaign it is facing. Ciudadanos signed Manuel Valls as candidate for the Barcelona mayoralty in the summer market with a chequebook coup - now that it's so fashionable for candidates to set demands, let's make it clear that the price of the Valls signing was that he would choose his own squad. Certainly at that time the season looked different, and Cs had dreams of grandeur, as its main rival had a very old squad, lacked leadership and had corruption cases open all over the territory. But now, at the moment of truth, the team is not performing, it is far from the top of the table and in just a few weeks, could find itself eliminated from all competitions. Even the Cs number one might end up throwing in the towel and making way for Ines Arrimadas, the new Ciudadanos hope, currently crouching in Albert Rivera's shadow.

Valls, in the end, has turned to the typical response of those who are getting nervous: make a signing in the winter transfer market. But everyone knows that in this market you generally end up signing the discards, players who are without a team or are not in their current team's starting lineups. Celestino Corbacho, seeing as he had no place in his lifetime team, resigned and sat down to wait. He was in no hurry, like all those who know that politics is the job of sweeping things under the rug and that past leaders are always recyclable. There is always a second or a third life. And so Celestino has come back and Ciudadanos have moved rapidly to erase all they said about him when he was Spanish employment minister under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. "The minister of unemployment," "the incompetent minister," were the mildest epithets used by those who have now gone to sign him up.

A memorable tweet from Albert Rivera said the following: "In any company, Corbacho would be sacked for the results he's obtained, but the PSC reinforces him". It was September 2010, when there were more than five million people unemployed in Spain, and month after month, the figures just kept going up. Now, Corbacho is Valls's new signing and Rivera has been quickly onto the job to give him a fervent welcome: "It is an honour to have him join our great project for the future", he has said, emphasizing that Corbacho has "refused to form pacts with separatists and has defended the Constitution in Catalonia". Incompetent and irresponsible, says Rivera, but a defender of the Constitution. Number three on the Ciudadanos' list for the city of Barcelona at the age of 69. The winter market has less on offer than ever, and in the sales dossier that is being passed around among the parties there is very little apart from ex-politicians of the Catalan Socialist Party of old, municipalist and hegemonic.