We are now witnessing a process you suffered first hand, the FIFA ban imposed on Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid for irregularities regarding the signings of children for their academies. What is going on which has put all the focus on Spanish football?
The priority is to defend the children and all their rights. From this point of view, it’s a bit difficult to understand that some kids who live in full normality, studying at school, can’t play football after the end of the school day because of some rule which rules out this possibility. The ban is something which affects the first team, but it actually is terrible for the youth teams, especially for the affected children and their families.
When Barça had to go through this conflict, it coincided with a time of recognition of the Barça model by FIFA, with [Lionel] Messi, [Andrés] Iniesta and Xavi being the Ballon D’Or candidates. It was funny, because with the current rules, Messi wouldn’t have been able to play at Barça. Were the rules even stricter, as some people have proposed, even Iniesta would have been prevented from playing for the club. The sad thing about the whole situation was the loneliness the institution had felt at the time. It appeared as if Barcelona had a problem, and that was interpreted as an advantage for some of its principal rivals.
That situation called for some exceptional planning. How did those plans come about?
There was no precedent at Barça, and neither at the main European clubs, of a similar situation. We had to face a new challenge while we were in the midst of a process of change. Víctor Valdés and Carles Puyol were heading for the exit. Xavi remaining with the team was not entirely clear. Fortunately, he stayed for one more year. The timing of the ban pressed us. We made the largest outlay in the history of the club, with continuous comings and goings. We had to have things very clear both at the sporting and economic level. It was important to make the big changes early: Luis Enrique, [Marc-André] Ter Stegen, [Ivan] Rakitić, and afterwards, Luis Suárez.
Why was Luis Enrique chosen?
It appeared to us that we needed a coach who would add energy to a dressing room immersed in some grave problems, like the death of Tito Vilanova. Luis Enrique had the advantage of knowing the club and the academy very well.
What is your evaluation of Tata Martino?
He described his arrival like that of a paratrooper at an aircraft carrier. Tata is a man of football. And he continues to be. He helped us a lot at a very complicated time. We tend to forget that he arrived when Tito Vilanova’s cancer relapsed, just after Sandro Rosell’s resignation.
His reference was always the team, the football, the players. If you judge him in terms of titles, it wasn’t Barça’s best year, but in terms of loyalty, discretion and cooperation it was extraordinary. I have lots of respect for him. It’s difficult to find a person in football that’s more honest, coherent, consistent, able of accepting a very delicate role at a very difficult time for everyone else. He was always loyal to the club and the dressing room, despite of all the ‘shooting’ for the press.
The decision to sign Luis Suárez was crucial. You are considered as the biggest defender of the Uruguayan’s signing.
We had a few options. The first one was not Suárez. He knows it. In the winter we were thinking about signing [Sergio] Agüero. That didn’t work. At that point, there was no doubt: Suárez was our only target. During the negotiations, the Chiellini incident occurred. The whole buzz around the incident meant that many of the suitors began having serious doubts. His character was under scrutiny and there was no way of knowing the severity of the sanction. I thought that was the time for us to speed up the process of signing him.
I liked everything about him: he was never static, he could move outside the box and he would generally give us things that we didn’t have. Another key aspect was key though: from the very first moment, his willingness to sign for Barça was at the maximum. The severity of the sanction baffled both us and him, due to the implications it could have on his preparation.
Your job was made more complicated due to the bad news the club received: Guardiola’s departure, Rosell’s resignation, Neymargate, Tito Vilanova’s death, the FIFA ban. Also the doubts created by the intention of lining up Messi and Neymar together.
We signed Neymar, Brazil’s superstar, with few previous similar cases at the club. Romario, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho arrived having already gained experience of European football. Neymar though had something we badly needed: he was a player with an extraordinary ability of beating defenders, opening up defences. We have seen that he had done that and much more. He was set more targets, and he’s achieved, as we saw during the time Messi was injured.
As for the chemistry between the three, Suárez, Messi and Neymar, I couldn’t have predicted it. Had the president asked me whether the three would end up working miracles, I wouldn’t have been able to guarantee anything.
All that occurred after Messi came under some criticism. How did you see the process of Messi getting criticized?
This is about two things. On one hand, it is impossible to sustain the notion of Messi being Maradona in all matches, although at times he really does look like him. Being Maradona is difficult to start with. If from that point, there is have a drop, no matter how small it is, in his performance, that affects him, the team, everyone.
Secondly, football has the perverse necessity to track the decline of big players. It happened to us with Ronaldinho and it appears to me that something similar is happening now with Cristiano. Meanwhile of course, he scores two goals every match. Messi was affected by a sequence of injuries which was longer than usual. On top of all that though, his performance was great. Not sublime, but still great.
It can happen to anyone. When you compare Atlético’s Courtois with Chelsea’s Courtois, he seems human. Yes, but his quality is there and he is great. With Messi, the same thing happened, with an extra pinch of salt: his ability of being able to reinvent himself as a player. That is his own merit, strictly his own.
What do you think whenever you get blamed for a failure of certain signings, like Vermaelen, Mathieu or Douglas?
Barcelona cannot win only with Messi, Suárez and Neymar. It needs Iniesta, [Sergio] Busquets, [Gerard] Piqué and Rakitić. It also needs [Dani] Alves, [Javier] Mascherano, Jordi Alba and the goalkeepers. Not everything can be glamorous.
My impression is that the club, or rather the leading figures of the club, appeared like those responsible for the successful signings and Zubi appeared as the guilty party for the more questionable ones.
Perhaps this was my problem, an issue with how I would explain things. These things aren’t strange to me. They are inherently linked to football. Don’t forget that I was a goalkeeper and that leads you to think that the person responsible for the defeats is the person conceding the goals.
Of all these stories, the only one which has hurt me is the one with all the comments, the parodies, the notion of Zubizarreta not working. We may have failed to do other things, but we did give body and soul to our work.
How can you explain that the only decision by the club after the Anoeta crisis was to sack you?
It is important to remember that the grades are given out in June, and back then it was January. It’s all about different perspectives. After that small flare-up between Messi and Luis Enrique, we lost at Anoeta. They asked me about the FIFA ban at Anoeta and I responded with something obvious: the one who knows my work best is Bartomeu, who had been the director responsible for sporting matters during Rosell’s presidency. The one who knew most about the team plan was he. Two days after, came the club’s decision.
Did it surprise you?
I felt alone, picked on.
Who benefited from the decision?
I can’t respond to that. I can’t speculate with these things.
Luis Enrique didn’t forget to defend you at the worst times.
And I am grateful to him. It is something which comes straight from Luis Enrique’s personality.
After everything that happened though, the year ended with five titles and a veil of silence with respect to Zubizarreta’s share in the success. Privately, there were praises. Not publicly though.
I also gratefully remember Xavi’s words. And it is true that the club did invite us to the Copa final against Athletic and the Berlin final against Juventus. I preferred not to go. I had an internal conflict. On one hand, there was the pride of the work done, but that could not be separated from the inner pain I had, the lament about how it all ended, for how people who put the whole process in doubt at a very difficult time could be part of the success.
There have been such adverse circumstances at the club on very few occasions. I suppose that your distancing with Pep Guardiola was extraordinarily painful.
This is certainly what I can give the least explanations about. It is a case in which personal matters gets mixed with professional matters more than in any other case. It is very difficult to distinguish between affections and relations. I came in 2010 because of a decision by Pep and Sandro Rosell. One of my goals was to make sure that Pep would continue at Barça. I acknowledge that one of my defeats, perhaps the biggest one, was that Pep left Barça.
It was his own decision, but there are matches in which you concede a goal in the top corner and other in which you think you could have done more. That was the case with Pep. All the rest, all the professional matters related with ensuring a seamless transition and a continuation of the Barça model was impeccable. All the wounds were made on a personal level… I often say that it is a friendship pushed to the margin. If he’s open to it, it would be nice to seal it off at some time during our lives.
Haven’t you talked since then, hasn’t there been a moment for conversation?
No, the truth is that there hasn’t been one. It hurts me to say this.
It is difficult to believe in this distancing.
Yes, at times life separates us from great friends, because when you have had great affections, rebuilding bridges doesn’t seem as simple.
How do you remember Guardiola the coach? You know that football races through time at breakneck speed.
That’s true, the speed at which football moves on is brutal. We are gone in no time. In 2008, when he was appointed first team coach, Pep brought in a breath of fresh air, a different, unconventional mentality. He could see things we couldn’t see. In addition, he also brought in a new form of advancing a coach’s work in a team, a form of an assistant coach who had a lot to do with a head coach, especially in the relations between them. I am not one of those who say that ‘Tito was the good one’. No, Pep was Pep, and first person who used to say it was Tito Vilanova.
With Guardiola, the game and training are not separate. Football is not about strength, speed, and endurance. It’s also not about tactics and technique… Football is a combined universe made up of all these things and many more. He brought in a new way of looking at football. And most importantly, he conveyed this to the players and to the surroundings, with the credibility he has and the extraordinary capacity of communication which characterizes him. Football, which is the most unpredictable thing in the world, became predictable with Guardiola.
Guardiola’s Barça coincided with Mourinho’s Madrid. Were those years as tiring as they seem?
Barça was very well prepared to compete about pure football. However, in reality things deviated far away from football, to things almost purely unrelated to football during that period, on top of the clash of personalities on the bench and on the pitch.
It was a pity that it all coincided with the era of splendour of Spanish football. It was the ideal world. It will be difficult for that situation to ever be repeated. I do think that Pep was emotionally spent, but also physically spent, certainly because the emotional part is very important to him. The certain thing is that the clash became global: it reached the players, the fans, the journalists. In any case, the clash hurt did more damage to Real Madrid, in my opinion.
You have praised Luis Enrique, a hermetic man, at least with the press. What is your opinion of him?
Speaking about Luis Enrique in the press is complicated, it may as well mean that he could be annoyed. He doesn’t like it. Luis Enrique is a passionate man, passionate about everything, football included. He is a man who admits that he doesn’t have all the answers, but he is very clear on his ideas. He is direct and has a big virtue: he assumes his responsibilities very well. He is someone who asks to be judged through the game, not according to other things. It’s not easy, because as we all know, the game as such is not the main argument in the crucial debates.
How do you see Busquets, Xavi and Iniesta in the Barça universe?
Sometimes we tend to forget that Barça has some extraordinary players who are great interpreters of a way of understanding football, fabulous competitors. It is funny to see Busquets being the player very coach wants to have, and yet he never comes up whenever the time comes for people to choose the best in the world. If I had to choose somebody for a street football match, I would choose him first. Busquets needs Messi, but Messi needs Busquets and Iniesta.
It is a delicate combination. Xavi, Iniesta and Busquets are players who know how to interpret the game perfectly and who have taken on the roles which have fallen to them. Iniesta is now the Barcelona captain. A short while ago, nobody would have ever thought about it. He does look like a natural though.
What do you think about Guardiola’s potential move to the Premier League?
For a man with Pep’s character, it’s understandable that the mystery of English football seems fascinating. I always regret not having played a couple of years in England.
Will it go well for him?
The other day [Jurgen] Klopp warned him about some of the things particular to English football. It has such a strong culture that you could easily get run over.
This challenge must be even more fascinating for Pep.
Somebody tells me that whenever Silva makes a great first touch, the spectators produce murmurs of admiration, but everybody goes ecstatic whenever Zabaleta drives in to shoot, and all that which they like so much.
Reference
for the role.you played in these victories. Still don't want you back as a sporting director but you have slightly redeemed yourself.
Rakitic just scored in CL Final and proved to be a great fit. Humble too, played basically as our 2nd dm entire season.
