Text by Aitor Lagunas / @aitorlagunas
Photos by Óscar Fernández Orengo / @oscar_fdez_orengo
You get the impression you’re a coach who, when asked about football, really enjoys talking about the game, which isn’t always the case within your profession.
Well, the best way to build a close relationship with both the fans and the press is to explain yourself. If you don’t explain yourself, you can’t then complain when they criticise you. I question myself all the time, and one of the questions I ask is why the gap between coaches and the media has widened. I believe it’s come out of this attempt to conceal things. You shouldn’t be afraid of people copying you. We all copy people, but those who base everything on direct imitation are unlikely to achieve the same results as the original.
But ultimately, it’s all about results.
Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t about talent or dedication. You gain credibility by winning games. Explaining yourself helps, but what you absolutely have to do is win matches. Sometimes people tell me I talk too much but that’s the way I am and I’m not about to change.
Winning gives you credibility but this is a game with such a high degree of fortune to it. To what extent do such explanations resonate? Or is public opinion formed purely by the numbers on football score applications?
You just have to accept it might not be fair, that’s the way it is. Life isn’t fair. It’s a coach’s job to minimise the uncertainty that exists in football, while being aware that a moment of fortune could change the result in an instant. You have to choose how you want to lose and then defend that unreservedly. The result is what matters, but an element of the result rests on what you transmit, on your style. Success and failure are fleeting, the important thing is to keep going.
You are performance optimisers.
Exactly, but at times optimisation may be achieved through intervention, while other times it comes through precisely the opposite. When we came to Barça we saw just a couple of things we needed to address, while at Roma we had to alter far more.
And what about with the national side?
You don’t get much time and so more than changing things in training, it’s about fostering the synergies that can be established between players from different teams.
Interesting. In football nowadays, where the big financial power is shared between ten or 12 clubs, will it be increasingly unusual to find national teams with a core group of players from the same club side? How can a national team coach make up for that?
Those synergies, like what we saw with Barça in Vicente Del Bosque’s Spain team, will never happen again within a national side. That’s why you don’t pick a player based solely on their individual performance, but rather on what they can contribute to the group. We could all pick a different squad to the one the national coach selects, but we’re not in his head to understand how he wants them to work together.
You said success was fleeting. I wonder, what comes afterwards?
Winning is deadly. Any team that has success is immediately condemned to failure… if there aren’t changes made to the coach or players. It’s very difficult to keep on wining with the same group because you subconsciously take it easy. That isn’t the case so much with the greatest players I’ve had (Messi, Neymar, Ramos) because they have that innate hunger. But in my opinion, a coach’s cycle lasts two or three years. That’s why what [Diego] Simeone is doing is so exceptional. Because you have to make changes, you have to spring surprises.
”You don’t pick a player based solely on their individual performance, but on what they can contribute to the group”
Talking of surprises, we’ve seen plenty this year in a pandemic-hit European football season. What are you expecting from the EURO?
We know football is unpredictable, but this year it has been even more so, and the EURO won’t be any different. The increased number of substitutions means you have a greater chance to intervene in a match. On the other hand, you have the increased squad size of 26 players, which I don’t really think is necessary because ultimately, only about 18 to 20 players take part in a tournament. Then there’s the fans, their influence has been clear: home wins are down 50%. At this EURO, there will be teams playing at home, with their fans behind them as well, and I think that’s incredibly unfair, just like we saw in the last few LaLiga games.
We saw Atlético crowned champions playing a more passing-based brand of football than in recent years, perhaps due to the presence of Luis Suárez. Then Manchester City made their first Champions League final having had less possession and shots than PSG in the semis. Are we looking at a mix of styles or an attempt to master them all?
First and foremost, Pep [Guardiola] wants to win. If he’s developing this style, it will be to do just that.
That’s pragmatism.
We all want the same thing. When I got to Barça, the first thing I did was analyse all of the team’s games under Pep. I can tell you they had some exceptional performances and others that were very poor. Styles are cyclical and not everything has been done in football. But yes, I don’t think you can go the full 90 minutes using a single style – let alone a whole season.
”We know football is unpredictable, but this year it has been even more so, and the EURO won’t be any different”
Especially not this season.
Absolutely. What I look to do is coach my players so that they are able to control any situation a game throws at them. To do that, you have to reduce a player’s uncertainty. Repetition forms habits and habit is the foundation of performance. When I coach, I look to defend deep in a mid-block and apply a high press; short passing and long balls; transitions or positional attacking moves.
Versatility.
Over the course of a season there will be matches we dominate and others in which, however much we try to avoid it happening, we’ll be dominated. If I only coach for the former, then when the latter occurs we’ll be in unknown territory. Translating all of those variants into specific messages for the player is the element of coaching I love most. Some players will take in more information and others will need more specific references: if there is a free player, should I go or not? When we bring the ball out, should I move closer to my teammate or away? And how: in straight lines or diagonally?
Klopp, Flick, Tuchel, Nagelsmann… What has the German school of coaches brought to the game?
The Bundesliga is a fairly self-contained ecosystem for linguistic reasons. The majority of the coaches are from the country. Klopp was the first to deliver success with a style based on swift transitions and explosiveness. That lead to a certain copycat effect.
When you coincide with that front three (Messi, Suárez and Neymar) in the Barça team, there will also be an evolution towards transitions.
Transitions which weren’t at all typical of the club’s style, of course. I like to take advantage of the space. That can mean attacking very swiftly, with three passes, or slowly, with 20 or 30. When teams press you high up, there is space in behind the defenders. That’s what the German coaches look for, with players who get up and down well. What does that kind of football result in? It’s a certain lack of control. As coaches, that unsettles us.
But I’d argue it unsettles Spanish coaches more than your German counterparts.
Perhaps, because you lose control and we don’t like that in our style of football. There’s an element of cultural difference, not just in relation to the Bundesliga, but the Premier League as well.
Over the last four years, LaLiga has gone from totalling 1,100 goals per season, to 953. Besides the departure of Cristiano [Ronaldo] or Messi’s evolution, how can we explain the fact we’re the lowest-scoring competition in Europe’s top five leagues? Are we perhaps getting carried away with too much control…
That’s a very complex question. To start with, attacking is harder than defending. When you have the ball, you have to make more decisions than when you don’t have it. And when that works, it sparks a trend. The fact Cádiz survived will most likely see Álvaro Cervera become a model for other teams. I think the exuberant offensive play of times past has been met by a defensive response, but I think the fact the Premier League is in perhaps the best position to attract talent also has an effect. In truth, the most honest answer is that I have no idea why LaLiga’s annual tally has fallen by 150 goals. Not a damn clue [laughs].
That’s a great answer! At times, it seems as though we have to have an answer for everything.
Perhaps we have come to see possession as the end, rather than the means. The greatest challenge for a coach isn’t creating a playing system, it’s injecting it with dynamism. It’s great to have the ball but when you get into the final third, where there is less space and more opposition players, you have to do something different. What’s that? Either attack the space, cross into the box, shoot from distance, or look for one-on-one situations. But if you take the latter option away from players, what do they do? “I’m not going to take risks with a pass because if I give it away, the coach won’t play me.” That’s how we end up with the control-based passing, not designed to attack better but rather not to lose the ball. We coaches are to blame for that. Both at an elite level and at grassroots too.
How does the control a coach seeks coexist alongside a player’s creativity?
Well, control should serve to allow that creativity to flourish, not to constrain it. I help the players to be well positioned but I encourage them to take risks. Otherwise we could take the goalposts away and not a whole lot would happen. I don’t want to lose the ball systematically but when spaces open up, we have to attack them unrelentingly.
Another school of thought claims that today’s Spanish football lacks the ‘legs’ to compete with European teams.
The challenge isn’t to try and play those other teams at their own game, but rather to impose our strengths. Take Villarreal as an example, winners of the Europa League after beating a Manchester United side that had plenty of ‘legs’.
Has LaLiga become a more evenly matched competition due to a drop in standards because Real Madrid and Barça are no longer achieving the 90 or even 100 points they used to?
I don’t think so. That’s credit to Atlético. No matter how much we might think of them as underdogs, they have an incredible squad. Then there’s Julen Lopetegui’s Sevilla, Imanol’s Real Sociedad or Unai’s Villarreal. Take Sevilla, for instance, they were knocked out of the Champions League by Dortmund, or should I say Haaland. There are players who make the difference. For the competition to have become more evenly matched in Spain with the likes of Messi or Benzema still here, is a reflection of how well the other sides are doing.
Let’s talk about individuals. Messi, Cristiano, Benzema, Mbappé, Neymar, Haaland: the absolute elite. None of them won LaLiga. None of them made the Champions League final.
Of course, because they need a team around them, with a coach who provides a plan.
That’s just where I was headed – has this season underlined the importance of the collective over the individual?
The group is always the most important thing. Those players have the ability to change a game, but to do so, they need a team behind them which gives them the platform to shine. You don’t tell Messi where he needs to be, but you have to tell the rest of the team where they need to be depending on where Messi is. Players make the decisions but we coaches have an influence. We can maximise or minimise a team’s performance. You soon see that players are hugely respectful of what is asked of them, even if they might not like it.
Even elite-level players?
Look, there are certain players who demand a lot from you and others who don’t need you at all. That’s the beautiful thing about coaching, being able to give each team and each player what they need. At Monaco, my approach wasn’t the same with Badiashile, a young centre-back who needed an arm round and even psychological support, as it was with Ben Yedder, who was fine on his own. Messi… you don’t coach Messi! You coach the others to make sure they’re capable of playing with Messi. And if anyone doesn’t like it… Are you going to show Messi or Neymar which positions to take up? Of course not! But you might need to help others who look at you, like, “Where should I go?” You can’t treat everyone the same, especially when it comes to players who are different in every sense, in sporting, contractual, commercial terms. If the rest of the world and society doesn’t treat them like other players, why should coaches be the only ones to do so? I believe privileges can be admissible, provided they don’t have an adverse effect on the group. That’s the red line.
