Ferran Martínez: "Many athletes surround themselves with toxic people who only want them for their money" Former basketball player and businessman BarcelonaFerran Martínez (Barcelona, 1968) shone with Barça, Penya, the Spanish national team, or Panathinaikòs during the 80s and 90s. But even then, he was preparing for a new life as an entrepreneur and financial advisor. Martínez meets with ARA on a terrace in Barcelona, where for over an hour he talks about companies, quantum computing, or AI. And about basketball, of course. He now publishes El Algoritmo del éxito (EmpreBooks), a book where he uses his sporting experience to understand the business world. He has lived two successful lives. One sporting and one, we could say, business-related. — Yes, that's why I always explain that we are very fortunate, right? In the life of a professional athlete you have social recognition, you travel all over the world, you make friends, you compete..., but you are in a kind of bubble. A very beautiful but a bit unreal life. And then it ends. And real life arrives. If during this first life you haven't prepared yourself in some way for the second, you can have problems. Many suffer from depression. Others lose money. And you ask yourself who you really are, once you are no longer competing. Didn't it happen to him/her/them? — I saw it clearly that a sporting career is not very long. Perhaps because I have always been very curious. I joined Barça at 12 years old, at 16 I was already in the first team dynamics... I was lucky. But I wanted to study. I had always really liked technology. It was the time when the first computers were starting to arrive in Spain, like the first one I had, a Sinclair Spectrum of 16Ks. The