BarcelonaTwo and a half years later, Barça reunites with Quique Setién (Sunday, 9 p.m., Movistar). The technician put himself at the helm of a ship that was headed for the wreck, sporting, social and economic, although not even the greatest of pessimists could imagine then everything that would happen in the little more than 200 days that the Cantabrian managed Barça. And what came after, clear. Now Setién is trying to rebuild his career at Villarreal and finds himself with a Barça that has been reborn, like a phoenix.
Quique Setién, a successful ex-footballer at Racing, Atlético de Madrid or Logronyès who had gone on to play for the Spanish beach soccer team, was a renowned coach in 2020. His good work at Lugo, Las Palmas and Betis had turned him into one of the defenders of the cruyffisme outside of Barcelona. He always spoke well of the Blaugrana school, which he had admired from afar. But the offer made to him in January 2020 by Josep Maria Bartomeu can be said to have been poisoned. Setién was watching the Copa del Rey match between Escobedo and Sevilla, as his town, Liencres, is just 14 minutes’ drive from Escobedo. It was then that he received the news: Barça wanted him. It seemed like a dream and it would be a nightmare.
His stay at Barça did not start well, and not through his fault. Josep Maria Bartomeu, after Barça’s defeat in the semi-finals of the Spanish Super Cup that January 2020, decided to send off Ernesto Valverde. The team was leading in the League, but the symptoms of a cycle that was ending, added to the obsession to try to win the Champions League, caused the farewell of the Basque. This was the mantra: it was necessary to change the coach to raise the level in the Champions League and avoid defeats like that of the previous season in Liverpool. But Valverde’s farewell was done hastily and poorly, as his replacement on the bench was not well on track. A Barça expedition tried to convince Xavi Hernández, then in Qatar, without luck. And on January 13 at half past eleven in the evening, in a hotel in the upper part of the city, Josep Maria Bartomeu was unable to sign the liquidation of Valverde’s contract, when a few meters away, in another room, negotiated the contract of the new coach, Quique Setién. Both agreements were reached at 11:15 p.m. Setién was already officially coach of a project where he would last just half a year, until the wreck in Lisbon against Bayern.
the cows
It was an announced wreck, although it was hard to see at the time. And Quique Setién was not responsible for all of it. “A good guy, a good professional. But he couldn’t do anything, the club was already going bad and he ate the toad”, they explain at the Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper, where they remember how the players greeted him with a frown. Many did not want the dismissal of Valverde. Setién was not to blame, but he found the long faces of those who would have preferred to continue with the Txingurri. Others did not trust a manager who they doubted was ready, despite the good work he had done in the past with Betis, with a triumph at the Camp Nou including playing good football in November 2018. “I was perfectly fine aware when I went to Barça that I was going there because they didn’t have anyone else, but what you can’t do is give up going to Barcelona to train the best players in the world, among them, the best. But what I found I didn’t I’ve found it in the forty years I’ve been playing football,” he would remember in an interview with Jotdown. It didn’t help that on the day of his presentation he let loose a nice phrase that would accompany him forever: “Yesterday I was walking among cows in the village and today I manage the best players in the world.” The players were the first to joke about it. The cows still chase him.
To try to gain the complicity of the footballers, Quique Setién talked a lot about football and tried to change the dynamics in training with new exercises. His assistant was Eder Sarabia. A young man with personality and passion, who is now proving in Andorra that he has a future on the benches. But he too would be a victim of that Barça that was headed for the abyss. Sarabia didn’t have hair on his tongue and had run-ins with some players. And, unfortunately for him, one would be Lionel Messi, with whom he would have a dialectic fight one day in a training session. Messi did not hide that he did not pay attention to Sarabia in a talk on the sideline during a game against Celta in Balaídos. Setién wanted to discuss it with Messi later in the dressing room, but the Argentine didn’t want to listen to him either. “The chemistry with Messi was never the best,” Sarabia later admitted. “There’s a non-football side that’s harder to manage, something that’s typical of a lot of athletes that you can see in the Michael Jordan documentary. You see things you don’t expect. He doesn’t talk much, but he makes you see what he wants … I’ve had enough experiences to make an accurate assessment of what this guy and the rest of the players are really like. I’m lucky to have seen him play these years,” Setién would explain. Neither of them wanted to openly criticize Messi, without hiding, however, that they feel hurt. “We didn’t know how to motivate him, we didn’t hit the key,” admits Sarabia. Messi, in fact, would send the famous burofax in which he asked to leave Barça a few days after the dismissal of Setién. He was not happy with the way Bartomeu’s organization was managed.
From the Champions League to the pandemic
The coach had to deal with small acts of indiscipline, such as a lack of attention in the talks or the habit of some players to leave the training ground a little late. Hoping that Barça would win titles that season, a film crew recorded much of the day-to-day to make the second part of the documentary Matchday, which would never be done. Now some of these images were offered to the makers of the documentary that was released recently about Xavi Hernández’s first year in charge of Barça. In one of these images you can see how Alba, Piqué and Messi come out late to train and Setién reprimands them. They reply that it won’t happen anymore, but with a defiant tone. “I came to a new place where things had been working the same way for years. I knew that other coaches, before me, had already adapted to what they had found instead of imposing their ideas. It was absurd to try to change many things” , the current Villarreal coach said recently.
Luck never helped him, as the club was socially broken, with Josep Maria Bartomeu’s management besieged by the Barçagate case, with the Mossos entering the club’s offices. On November 25, 2020, however, Setién made a dream come true: being able to train in the Champions League. Barça had qualified for the round of 16 with Valverde on the bench and it was his turn to face the Italians in a game where everyone was then talking about the luck of seeing Messi playing in the stadium where Maradona reigned. “Being in the Champions League was one of my dreams,” said the coach. At the time, few people were talking about the fact that a virus from China, covid-19, had already arrived in northern Italy. The second leg would not be played until six months later, behind closed doors. The pandemic didn’t help make things easy for Setién either, who admitted in an interview with ARA that Barça was improvising too much. “Now everyone talks about wanting to win, but if I take out four midgets and we don’t win, I’ll be kicked out. Everyone is improvising on the fly. A lot of people don’t go to the field to enjoy the game anymore, they just want to see their team win. And win or losing can depend on inches. Now I read chronicles and I don’t understand them. I can understand them saying you don’t play well, but they say what you don’t really do well. That all that matters is winning? Really? There is a tense atmosphere and everyone is with the rope around the neck, no one enjoys it here.”
Defeating Napoli in a stadium without fans, Setién managed to qualify Barça for the final phase of the Champions League that UEFA improvised behind closed doors in Lisbon. In the quarter-finals, the opponent was Bayern. Little did he imagine the coach who would surely lead the worst humiliation in the club’s history, the 2-8 defeat by the Germans. “You are very damaged, you go down in the history of Barça with this defeat, and I assume my percentage of blame. But after my dismissal I found out that the decision had already been made before the 2-8”, said the coach. As the Bavarian goals rolled in, he knew his cycle was over.
From the bench to the courts
That defeat was the nail that finally closed the coffin of Bartomeu’s project, who dismissed Setién two days after the match. Now, he did it so badly, the case ended up in court. “I was never told that I was not following. I heard the president make a statement on television and the sporting director, Abidal, stayed for lunch with me the next day and wanted to convince me to forgive them the money,” said Setién in relation to the contract he had signed with the club. “After forty days I received a letter of dismissal because the deadlines were met and I already filed a complaint that is in court.” Setién’s lawyers requested through a burofax an official communication from the his dismissal, but it did not happen and the case would not be resolved until December 2021, when already with Joan Laporta in the Barça box, a compensation would be agreed between the two parties, the details of which were not made public.
In the seven months he was at Barça, Setién led the Blaugrana team in twenty-five games: nineteen in the League, three in the Champions League and three in the Cup. The total balance of results he recorded was sixteen wins, four draws and five losses. He was unable to win a title and stayed away from football until this season, when Villarreal called him up to fill the position left by Unai Emery, the new manager of Aston Villa in England. Now he is reunited with Barça, the club he dreamed of coaching but ended up devouring him.