Former Barcelona coach: I coached players who do not understand football, and I was close to the Egyptian league
I was not myself at Barcelona
Coach Quique Setién makes no secret of the fact that his spell with Barcelona was among the toughest periods of his professional career.
In a lengthy interview on the podcast "El que marca gana", Setién opened up on his time at the Camp Nou, as reported by Sport.
He never managed to show his true character at Barcelona, Setién admitted, nor to carry into the Catalan dressing room the kind of personal and professional relationships he had built elsewhere.
"I wasn't myself at Barcelona, either I couldn't do it or I didn't know how to do it," he said. "That's the answer. I wasn't myself because I'm not like that. I had a certain personality, and when I look at my photos from that period I don't recognise myself."
"I came from Real Betis, and it is true that I left the club amid many calls for my departure, but daily life inside the dressing room was exceptional," he continued.
The pandemic only made things harder. He couldn't enjoy the Barcelona experience as much as he had hoped, with coronavirus complicating everything. Yet Setién insisted he never regretted accepting the offer.
During his time at the club, he even told Lionel Messi how much pleasure he had taken from watching him play across so much of his career.
"I once said to Messi: I spent 14 years of my life waiting for Barcelona's match dates so I could watch you play," said the coach from Cantabria.
I was on the verge of joining one of the Egyptian clubs
Setién has lifted the lid on one of the most surprising details behind his move to Barcelona: just days before agreeing to join the Catalan club, he was on the brink of signing for an Egyptian side.
The coach was out of work at the time, having recovered from a health problem that forced him to turn down several offers in the preceding months. Then came an approach from a businessman keen to buy one of Egypt's clubs.
Setién recalled: "He offered me an enormous amount of money."
So convinced was he that he had already started arranging the trip to Egypt with his coaching staff.
He explained: "I was really going to go, because it happened right after I came out of the health problem I had been through, and it seemed to me a great opportunity to return to coaching again."
He added: "I called the members of my coaching staff, and I called home to tell them we were going to Egypt for a few months, until the end of the season. The team was in eighth or seventh place, and we had to qualify for the CAF Champions League. And I said to myself: well, five months in Egypt with one of these teams would be a special experience."
He went on: "We already had a plane ready, a private plane rented to travel there. We had already signed, not the final contract, but the contract had been prepared and fully drafted."
Then it all collapsed. The businessman pulled out of the deal after problems surfaced during the due diligence and review process. All the while, the people advising Setién kept insisting he must not fly to Egypt, because the chance to coach Barcelona might just come his way.
He explained: "They would call me and say: don't go to Egypt, because you might sign a contract with Barcelona. And I would answer them: but how would I sign for Barcelona? And what have I even done to take charge of coaching Barcelona?"
Setién never took the possibility seriously. He was set on the Egyptian adventure, convinced it was his way back into the dugout. But once that deal stalled, events moved fast.
He said: "After three days, they called me and said: get ready, and get on the plane, because you are going to sign a contract with Barcelona this evening. At that point I went to Barcelona and signed for the club."
He added: "When you sign for Barcelona, you arrive there, and you find that it is the only place where you don't have to do anything."
The reason, he explained, was simple: Barcelona's players had spent years working to specific principles of play.
Sarabia's crisis at the Bernabéu: some matters remain unresolved
Quique Setién also addressed the incident involving Eder Sarabia during one of the Clásico matches at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium.
Television cameras caught Barcelona's assistant coach at the time firing off sharp criticism at some of the players. The footage sparked a widespread uproar.
Setién admitted the episode caused problems inside the dressing room, pointing out that his assistant was not always aware of the consequences his reactions might carry.
"It is true that a lack of experience and the nature of one's character can sometimes push you into situations you cannot control, and in which you do not realise where you are," he said.
He added: "That situation was complicated, and it was contained, but some things remain lingering, and that is natural."
Rows with Sarabia were frequent, Setién recalled, but he saw them as part of a professional relationship in which the pair constantly traded footballing opinions. He was also trying to pass on an important lesson to his assistant, one tied to his potential future in coaching.
"I used to tell him: you will become a coach one day, and you will have to accept things you do not like, no matter how convinced you are of your opinion, and this is something we have all been through," he said.
Those differences aside, the coach defended Sarabia's importance within his technical staff, stressing that both of them learned a great deal during their years working together.
I coached players worth 80 million euros who don't understand football
Setién made one of his sharpest remarks when he spoke about the ability of some players to read and understand the flow of the game, regardless of their talent or their financial value.
He said: "I have previously coached players worth 80 million euros who do not understand football."
From his time at Barcelona, he recalled working one-on-one with a player to sharpen his reading of the tactical side of matches.
He explained: "I remember working with one of the Barcelona players, sitting with him and showing him clips of his performance during the match."
The work would start with a simple question: did the player remember the clip, and why had he made a particular decision during it?
He said: "I would ask him: do you remember this play? He would point to something, then I would ask him: what did you do here? He would reply: here I tried to take a risk, and here I did such and such. So I would say to him: all right, let's watch the clip now."
Once the clip had played, Setién would press the player on the alternatives open to him.
He added: "I would ask him: how do you see it now compared to the idea you had on the pitch? What do you see here now? And what other things could you have done?"
His aim was to show how small technical and tactical details can completely change the course of an attack.
Setién explained this by saying: "You might find a team with a numerical advantage of three players against two in attack, then a poor touch of the ball gives the opponent's players enough time to recover, and suddenly the situation turns into a numerical advantage for the opponent of four players against three."
Body position or the direction of the first touch, he stressed, could decide whether a chance is created or a promising attack is wasted.
He said: "When you show such clips to one of these players and he watches them himself, you begin to make him think. Then you return to the pitch, and these things start to appear in the players who have the ability to see the details, and that is when things run smoothly."
Setién never named the Barcelona player involved. His dig at players carrying huge price tags, though, stood out as one of the most striking lines in the interview.
