”I have two daughters, one of them is Valencian and both of them are falleras, for this reason the city of Valencia and Valencia FC will always be in my thoughts and in my heart.”
These were the final words of Rafa Benitez as manager of Valencia. On Tuesday the 2nd of June 2004 he spoke of “personal and emotional damage” that had forced him to reconsider his position. That summer he was to sever an emotional connection, just as he had at Real Madrid nine years earlier, to further his career and achieve his goals.
Leaving Valencia was the biggest decision in the career of a manager who had never spent more than two seasons at a club before his move to the Mestalla in the summer of 2001. His family had settled, his youngest daughter was Valencian and he had a club that could match his ambition. In his three seasons at the club he became their most successful manager, winning the league twice and adding the UEFA cup in his final season.
In typical Benitez fashion he had mapped out a plan for long-term success. Thankfully as far as Liverpool were concerned, the board at Valencia were determined to undermine it. Throughout his time at the club Benitez had fancied Eto’o. He would eventually get Ricardo Oliveira as an alternative. The now infamous “I’ve asked for a table and they’ve brought me a lamp” would become the sound bite for his disillusion at the way the board at Valencia acted. At the turn of the year in that final season he was to drive home his desire to improve. There was no clever sound bite, just indignation at being out of sync with a board at the club he desperately wanted to improve and at pace.
”We need reinforcements, now is the time to improve. The team has done well, but if we want to last out until the end we must have signings in some positions that are shaky.”
No signings would arrive and Rafa would respond with what has since become the characteristic angry press conference:
”I’ve heard a member of the board who says that we don’t need any signings, that the players aren’t tired, aren’t stale, well get as far as we can with what we’ve got.”
It was the type of news he would be greeted with again few years later, one that would set off yet another famous press conference moment;
”As always I am focused on training and coaching my team”. For a man like Rafa it must have been almost inconceivable that those running the club at an administrative level were not as committed to continual progress as those running the club on the footballing level. Denying quick and steady progress to a man determined to build a legacy would have seemed like a personal affront.
Like so many things in life, Rafa’s obsessive nature and desire for constant improvement could be summed up best in a quote from Bill Shankly, the man whose footsteps he would one day follow in;
“Of course I didn’t take my wife to see Rochdale as an anniversary present, it was her birthday. Would I have got married in the football season? Anyway, it was Rochdale reserves.” Hidden behind the typical Shankly wit there was the anorakish attention to detail and a level of obsession that few would be able to understand. Whether the story is true or not doesn’t matter; it would have been something Benitez could have immediately related to in 2004 when he took over at Shankly’s club.
Benitez had spent his own honeymoon in Italy, watching Milan train. It is unlikely to have come as a surprise to his wife Montse however. When speaking on local radio in the summer of 2008 she confessed that when she and Rafa had began dating, he spent most of his time discussing formations and explaining how they worked with salt and pepper shakers. It must have been painfully obvious to her from early on that Rafa was a driven man who knew exactly what he wanted, and was committed to improving and doing his part to get it.
That is why he could no longer work at Valencia. Despite insisting that
”I’ll never be better anywhere than in Valencia” by the summer of 2004 he felt as if he had to move on. Valencia had been the making of Rafa Benitez as a top class manager. Within 3 years he had gone from promotion specialist in the Segunda division to one of the most highly sought after coaches on the planet. He was to leave a club he had taken back to the top, a city where his youngest daughter had been born, and a where his family was happy. He was to uproot to one of football’s great institutions.
Anyone who has been on a package holiday has probably felt similar pain to Benitez when he arrived at Liverpool. Before his feet were even under the table it would have become aware that the job was not as it appeared in the brochure. Benitez would admit as much a year later when his debut season achievements were chronicled in
A Season On The Brink. There have been rumours about just what Rafa was promised when he took over at the club. One rumour was that he was made aware of Owen’s desire to leave, but would be allowed three big (£10m+) signings to compensate for his loss. They were not forthcoming. The club was already committed to buying Djibril Cisse from Auxerre, and Benitez’s only big signing – Xabi Alonso – was purchased through the sales of players already at the club.
Whatever the truth of what Rafa was promised he was already at the club by the time he found out that it wasn’t the idyllic fixer-upper he’d hoped for. Giving the kiss of life to a giant that had crawled on its hands and knees just to make Europe’s premier competition the season previous and winning it – particularly in the manner which it was won – should go down as the most miraculous feat of management. Long-term however it wouldn’t disguise the failings of the club he inherited.
Liverpool Football Club should be at the very pinnacle of world football. To play for the club you have to be exceptional. The wheat is separated from the chaff and only the best make it to a club of that stature. Playing for Liverpool isn’t for everyone it is for an elite few. Yet when Rafa took over it seemed as though just about any middling Premier League footballer could turn up and pull on the red shirt. Turning around results is one thing, but re-imposing the identity of a club that was once feared and respected all over the continent was a different matter altogether. Beating Deportivo away with a patchwork team will gain respect, but the players on the pitch that night were never going to regain the aura of invincibility that once surrounded the club.
What would have appeared to be in Rafa’s favour however was that he would get time, patience and support – where possible – from his board at Liverpool. The fact that he didn’t have the money to compete with Chelsea and United – never mind the clubs from the continent – was offset by the ability to mould a club from top to bottom. That was something he was denied by the board at Valencia. The fact that his efforts were curtailed by various people within his own club is what forced Benitez to leave his own country. The culture of interference and undermining is – fancifully –considered alien to the boardrooms at English clubs, Liverpool in particular historically. It must have come as an unpleasant surprise then, when a couple of months into Rafa’s third season he was being criticised by an unnamed director of the football club.
“Normally, by the time you get to October, you'd expect the manager to know his best team and stick with it but there are no signs of that happening now. I don't think he could tell you what his best team is”
The director was later revealed to be Noel White, a former chairman who would come in for fierce criticism in Brian Reade’s book a few years later. White rightly fell on his sword, but it did little to make the incident any more pleasant. Direct criticism of the manager through the press was not something that the club needed. It was exactly the sort of thing that had driven Benitez out of Spain. He could have taken it as a warning sign, but chose instead to do what he does best – use it to his advantage. He got the support of the fans that he knew he would. His Liverpool side would go on to inflict Martin O’Neill’s first defeat as Aston Villa manager the day after White resigned. It was their best display of the season to date and showed an intensity that would become apparent on another run to a European Cup final.
Athens was no Istanbul. It was an unpleasant experience from the off. Issues with ticketing beforehand, a performance that lacked cutting edge and then calls for strengthening, that Rafa felt fell on deaf ears, quickly followed. In a press conference the day after Rafa spoke of the need to “Spend big and spend now”. He hadn’t yet lived down the frustration of the toothless display the night before and much like at Valencia in the January of 2004, he had the bit between his teeth. He wanted to strengthen. The club had been sold; the new ‘custodians’ were there to sign the cheques with zero interference and let the manager get who he wanted. Instead of this being the case there was a chess match played out in the press, with Rick Parry, the man charged with getting Benitez what he wanted, insisting every thing was hunky dory, despite that clearly not being the case.
For a man who left Valencia because he felt the machinations of the club worked against him as he tried to improve from a position of strength, Liverpool was hardly plain sailing.
The boardroom problems that followed are well documented. It took Rafa nearly 2 years from Athens to consolidate a position of strength at the club. The political animal that learnt to fend for himself at Valencia had to work twice as hard to do the same at Liverpool. He could have walked away at any time. Before he arrived at the club he had offers from Internazionale, Beşiktaş and Tottenham Hotspurs. Throughout his first couple of years the spectre of Real Madrid hung in the background. Even days before the extent of his disillusion at the clubs American owners was made clear he revealed that he had no intention of leaving to join Bayern Munich, who were reportedly interested.
The prospect of leaving Liverpool shouldn’t have wretched the same way that leaving Valencia did. Rafa was not a Scouser but a Madrileño. Neither of his daughters were born in the city. He was a manager in demand before he even joined Liverpool so he shouldn’t have felt any loyalty for what the club had allowed him to achieve on a professional front. But, for whatever reason, he could not bring himself to sever the emotional connection with Liverpool in the same way that he had done with both Madrid and Valencia.
Liverpool, like perhaps no-one else in the world, is a club that celebrates its managers. Whereas Madrid is Zidane and Di Stefano, Liverpool is Shankly and Paisley. The star sits in the dugout (or waves his arms frantically, in a series of inexplicable gestures, occasionally signalling the end of the game at 2-0). Nowhere else in the world would there be a Rafatollah. Perhaps it’s the unique culture of the club that made Rafa realise that he had to fight to remain. Perhaps a sense of duty to those who supported him compelled him to fight out his battles in the boardroom. Perhaps it was the chance to join the pantheon of the greats. Or maybe it was just Montse who stopped him from upping sticks, telling him he could go but she and the children would stay.
Five years on from arriving Rafa has fought through more battles at Liverpool than he did at Valencia. He said he’d never be better than he was in Valencia, but he is, and he fought tooth and nail for the chance to show it when the easier (and at the time smarter) option would have been to walk away.
To become the architect of a club is an opportunity that not many coaches have. A strong character, vision, commitment and talent must all be part of the individual who gets the chance, not to mention an understanding for the history and the philosophy of that club and its supporters. Most managers, even the very best, move from club to club picking up trophies along the way. Their legacy is in the medals they’ve won, not the hearts and minds of the supporters of the clubs they guided to success. Very few managers leave behind a legacy in both, but that is the opportunity Rafa Benitez has. The opportunity he fought for.
In five years at the club he has been ridiculed constantly by the media, doubted by ex-pros, and mocked for his tactics, purchases and systems. The type of criticism every manager suffers but on a greater scale.
Rafa Benitez missed his fathers funeral to manage Liverpool football club in what was considered (right up until Manchester United won it) a joke tournament. He went through three operations on kidney stones mid-season and then immediately had to suffer taunts of ‘cracking up’ for finally having the balls to say what everyone with half a mind thinks. He’s dealt with endless boardroom squabbles, the breakdown in a relationship with one of his closest confidants and the Wrigley’s Tag-Team of Ferguson and Allardyce making ridiculous accusations of arrogance and contempt, just to get to the position he is in five years on from joining the club. To be able to go into a new season knowing that his club are competitive, that his Liverpool team possess the power to destroy any of Europe’s top clubs. The aura of invincibility hasn’t quite returned yet, but every club wants to avoid Liverpool in Europe once again. The squad he goes into the season with is no longer home to middling Premier League players but some of the finest footballers in the world, as it should be.
The air is rarefied this near to the top and the summit is in sight. The final push toward the perch will be difficult, but the fight to get there pales in comparison to the fight over the last five years to make the club Rafa’s own.
