Quique Setien’s Barcelona dream became a nightmare: ‘Nobody called to say I was fired, I heard on TV’
“I never thought that I’d coach Barcelona,” Quique Setien tells The Athletic. “For me it was the opportunity of my life, fulfilling a dream.”
Setien’s appointment as Barcelona coach in January 2020 seemed, at the time, the logical result of over six decades connected to football. As he ascended the divisions from Lugo through Las Palmas and Real Betis, building a reputation as a purist whose coaching methods produced attractive football, the Catalan club was a huge influence, especially former Barca player and coach Johan Cruyff.
“At Barc, you did not have to implant the idea; it is where the idea was made,” Setien said. “Maybe that ideal had slipped a little, but I was going to Barcelona to coach the best players in the world, who had won so much before.”
Just six months later, Setien was leaving Barcelona, after the nightmare of a crushing historic 8-2 Champions League quarter-final defeat against Bayern Munich.
Four years on, at a restaurant close to where he lives in the Cantabrian town of Liencres in northern Spain, the 66-year-old says he has accepted that a dream ending at Barcelona was never really possible.
“My experience at Barcelona has had no lasting effects,” Setien says. “I see it as another episode in my life, in my sporting career. I’m still very happy, very relaxed, and I never wake up in the night thinking ‘I was fired by Barcelona’.”
As a player, Setien was an elegant attacker who scored over 100 goals for Racing Santander, Atletico Madrid, Logrones and Levante between the late 1970s and early 1990s. An early coach at Racing was Laureano Ruiz, later key to Barcelona’s La Masia academy focusing on producing the best technically adept players. Setien recalls getting frustrated at some of Ruiz’s tactical instructions, but also learning technical concepts from his fellow Cantabrian.
Another big influence was Luis Aragones, his coach at Atletico Madrid when they reached the 1986 Cup Winners’ Cup final, who provoked him to be more aggressive and intense to maximise his natural talent. That led to a call-up for the Spain squad for the 1986 World Cup but national coach Miguel Munoz left him in the stands for each game as Spain reached the quarter-finals.
“I suffered a lot with many coaches,” Setien says. “Often I did not agree with their orders. As a player, I needed to have the ball at my feet, to show my quality. When I did not have the ball, there was a problem.”
Playing against the ‘Dream Team’ Barcelona side coached by Cruyff, towards the end of his career, and having to chase the ball for 90 minutes, was a life-changing experience for Setien.
“That was when you understand what you have been feeling, can put it into words,” he says. “Cruyff had learned the ‘idea’ from (former Ajax and Netherlands coach) Rinus Michels, who had copied it from someone else. (Pep) Guardiola innovated and improved it with pressing after losing the ball. Then the rest of us followed that example. You try and improve some things yourself, bring what you can bring.”
Setien being unveiled as Barcelona coach in January 2020 (Alex Caparros/Getty Images)
Setien’s own coaching career began with guiding Racing to promotion to the Primera Division in 2002. After less successful spells in charge of Andalusian team El Ejido and Logrones came eight seasons at Lugo in the third and second tiers of Spanish football, when he could hone his ideas while building teams of limited players who produced spectacular passing football.
“You can play good football with any team, or try to,” Setien says. “You have to believe in it, be convinced of it yourself. I’ve had goalkeepers or defenders who told me it’s impossible. But you create the situations in front of them to make the passes less risky. And you tell them, ‘If you make a mistake, I’ll take the responsibility’.”
From 2015 to 2017, Setien’s Las Palmas team, which included future Swansea City midfielder Roque Mesa and one-time Liverpool youngster Nabil El Zhar, won many admirers for a style of football based on ‘automatisms’, movements learned on the training ground.
At Real Betis from 2017 to 2019, a squad including talented ball players Sergio Canales, Joaquin and Giovani Lo Celso pulled off back-to-back wins at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu and a 4-3 victory at Barcelona’s Camp Nou in November 2018.
A key part of getting players to buy into his ideas was showing them clips from games, and explaining how a different decision in the moment could have a more positive outcome.
“Some players, unfortunately, think they already know everything, but the vast majority want to learn and improve,” Setien says. “They listen to you when you are saying something which makes sense, which will help them be better players. When you analyse these situations, you make them think, and then they think better on the pitch. And if you are a good player, they help you much more.”
In January 2020, Setien arrived at the Camp Nou midway through a campaign which was to be the longest and arguably the most difficult in the club’s entire history.
Predecessor Ernesto Valverde’s sacking had been bungled by president Josep Maria Bartomeu, leading to a public row between star player Lionel Messi and sporting director Eric Abidal. Seven club directors had just resigned due to the ‘Barca-gate’ social media scandal.
“I did not expect what I found there,” Setien says. “The institutional situation was very bad. The environment was very tense. It was very difficult day to day, the downbeat mood, bitterness.”
Initially, at least, Setien was more concerned about the team’s problems, such as a lack of defensive organisation his Betis teams had exploited. But it was difficult to start by telling huge names including Messi, Luis Suarez, Gerard Pique, Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba and Ivan Rakitic that they had to start doing things differently.
“With these players, you cannot arrive and start changing everything,” he says. “They will just say, ‘It went well for us before, why would we change?’ I could never improve on the original idea at Barcelona. The problem is that many things had already been lost from that idea, players had become comfortable.”
Setien with Lionel Messi during a Barca training session in January 2020 (Lulus Gene/AFP/Getty Images)
Setien and assistant Eder Sarabia worked on improving aspects of the team’s play. Natural talent meant they could beat most opponents, but they were eliminated by Athletic Bilbao in the Copa del Rey. Then, just before all football stopped for four months due to the Covid-19 pandemic, they lost a crucial La Liga Clasico at Real Madrid.
“There were things we were happy with,” Setien says. “We’d improved our winning the ball back in the rival half, and playing out from the back. But the Copa game in Bilbao damaged us a lot. We played spectacularly well, creating three or four chances. And in extra time, a corner and it’s headed in. In the Clasico, we were the better team, but we did not win. Messi missed three one-on-ones with the goalkeeper, then they scored a deflected goal. It was the negative energy that was all around the club, the sensation we all had.”
On the return from lockdown, Barca kept dropping points, while Madrid won 10 straight games to seal the title. Messi felt he was being held responsible, and called out his own team for being “very inconsistent, very weak, beaten for intensity, beaten for motivation”.
During a wide-ranging conversation with The Athletic that lasts almost two hours, the only time Setien is guarded and careful for his words not to be misinterpreted is when he is asked about the Argentine star.
“Many players are not easy to manage — I was not easy to manage either, when I was a player,” he says. “(With Messi), what are you going to change? A player of that stratospheric level, it’s very difficult. There will be some things you tell him, but over many years he was used to doing what he understood he should do, and it went so well for him, so many goals and assists.”
In the Covid-delayed Champions League last-16 second leg, Messi scored one and assisted another as they beat Napoli 3-1, setting up a quarter-final against Bayern Munich in Lisbon. The frantic opening stages saw chances at both ends, but Bayern soon took control and were 4-1 ahead at half-time. The 8-2 final score was Barca’s heaviest competitive loss since 1951.
“When the fourth goal went in, the team just collapsed,” Setien says. “It was over. (The problem) was much deeper than just football. The coach always pays; we know that, that’s the profession we’ve chosen. The sad thing was the way it was done. Nobody called me to say I was fired, I heard it on the TV.”
Barcelona and Bartomeu declined to comment when contacted by The Athletic.
Looking back, Setien says that the situation at Barcelona meant he could never do his dream job as he would have liked to.
“You realise (now) that it was impossible,” he says. “You’re always thinking, selfishly, that you can win a trophy. Even when not playing that well, you win most of your games. But all great teams have a cycle which ends. Ajax in the 1970s. Real Madrid’s Quinta del Buitre (in the 1980s). Liverpool in their moment. Or Manchester United. And that happened to Barcelona. We did many things well but, in the end, everyone remembers the final game.”
GO DEEPER
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Since then, Setien’s only coaching job has been less than a year at Villarreal, yet he remains a keen student of the game, which he compares to chess, another of his passions. However, developments in tactical systems, as well as modern physical preparation methods, have made top-level football less exciting to watch, he believes. Even the best players can become mere pawns following their coaches’ pre-planned strategies.
“Guardiola’s teams find it more difficult to win games these days,” Setien says. “Rivals are very strong, fast, aggressive and well coached. There are games when absolutely nothing happens for a long time. If you put many players ahead of the ball, you are exposed to counter-attacks. So instead of playing with joy, teams play with fear, as the result is all important.”
Setien with Real Madrid coach Zinedine Zidane in March 2020 (Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno/Getty Images)
Setien’s successors at Barca, Ronald Koeman and Xavi, tried to implement their own versions of Cruyff and Guardiola’s ideas. Both ultimately struggled with the pressure and demands of the job.
“There were things in (Xavi’s) team which could be improved, but he also did good things,” Setien says. “All Barca coaches, in this period, have had problems, you can’t blame them.”
Current Blaugrana coach Hansi Flick, who was in charge of the Bayern side which so cruelly exposed Barca’s problems in 2020, has brought a new vigour and life to the team during his first three months in Catalonia.
“Flick has improved many things that he inherited,” Setien says. “The team is playing well, scoring lots of goals. Young kids are renewing the energy and the spirit of the team. But Europe is where these teams are really measured (the interview took place before Barca’s 4-1 win against Bayern). If Flick has bad results, for sure he’ll get the same punishment that we other coaches received.”
In recent weeks, Setien finally received the last of the money he was owed from his Barcelona contract, over four years since he was sacked by Bartomeu.
“It’s a consequence of how that club has been organised in the last years,” he says. “When some time passes, you realise that a truck has run you over. But it has not left a big mark on me. There was no chance to fix anything, or do anything. Anybody else would have had the same thing happen to them.”
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Flick’s fast start at Barcelona: Avoiding the ‘entorno’, discipline, a secret meeting with Xavi
(Top photo: Quique Setien by George Wood via Getty Images)
