Marcos Llorente was never one of the faces of Spain’s World Cup campaign. He didn’t become one of the tournament’s defining figures. He still came home as a world champion. For the Atlético Madrid player, the victory carries a particular significance. He was left out of the squad that won Euro 2024, and this feels like a way of answering that decision. Not loudly. Just on the pitch, in the only way available to him. Over the last few years, Llorente has become one of the most distinctive figures in Spanish football. His ideas away from the game have attracted almost as much attention as his performances: scepticism towards established science, including vaccines, a Paleolithic diet, coloured glasses worn throughout the day and into the night. They are part of a broader vision of how he believes modern life should be lived. Not everyone would choose Llorente as a model to follow. That has never stopped him from building a world around those beliefs. The other side of his story is financial. He has turned his interests into businesses, and so far he has done it successfully.
According to El Confidencial, most of Llorente’s investments are held through Kiedote SL, the limited company used by the player and his entourage to manage his wealth. The curious part is where those businesses come from. Llorente has built some of his most successful ventures directly from the ideas that define him away from football. Naked & Sated is perhaps the clearest example. The restaurant chain presents itself on Instagram with the phrase: “Aquí se come brutal, saludable y glutenfree.” The person leading the culinary project is Roberto Bosquet, described by the company as “a self-taught chef, triathlete and firefighter whose work focuses on adapting traditional dishes to a more balanced diet without sacrificing flavour.” Then there is Aureo Lightstyle, a company dedicated to wellbeing and phototherapy. Its range includes lamps, bulbs, panels and glasses with different coloured filters — products that became familiar to a wider audience largely because Llorente himself has worn them in public.
The yellow lenses are designed for daytime use. The red ones are intended for the night. The company also produces lighting systems built around combinations of red and infrared light, designed for different stages of the day. Aureo Lightstyle associates its products with sleep, physical recovery, circadian rhythm and skin health. And then there is the book. During one of his recent television appearances, Llorente presented Free Human, a project he describes as “a manual for feeling human again”. The themes are familiar territory for him: fatigue, anxiety, disconnection, and the strange contradiction of living in one of the most comfortable periods in history while feeling increasingly detached from it. The book moves from biology to nutrition and, eventually, sporting performance. That final subject is where Llorente has always been most comfortable. Performance has been his obsession for years. The approach, as ever, is entirely his own.