Let's move on to his next club.
https://psgtalk.com/2016/06/what-unai-emery-will-bring-to-paris-saint-germain/
Article on Emery for Ecos del Balón in 2015 (in Spanish), to get his insight on Emery and what PSG supporters can expect next season.
Big Willie wrote:
Tl:dr
Emery in "Winning Mentality".
"When I wasn't summoned, I breathed a sigh of relief because I felt a lot of pressure and I was pretty shitty. I wanted to play, but doubts knocked on my door,"
EVERYTHING THAT WAS NEVER UNAI EMERY
http://www.ecosdelbalon.com/2015/05/unai-emery-carrera-como-entrenador-pasado-futbolista-metodo-filosofia-almeria-valencia-sevilla/
[spoiler]The crudity and honesty with which Unai Emery Etxegoien (1971, Hondarribia) talks about his time as a footballer is impressive. Many coaches have often commented, with laughter and a lighthearted attitude, that they would not have aligned themselves if they had had their "I-player" in the team, but the Basque coach goes further. Unai reneges on the Emery footballer with a certain contempt. Then she twists her gesture, changes her expression, swallows saliva and explains: "I saw football well and had a good left foot, but I lacked strength, power... I was not very competitive because I didn't see myself capable of responding at a high level". Grandson, son and nephew of a footballer, Emery was destined to be. It was a matter of tradition. But his physical limitations, his mental weakness and a serious injury he suffered at the Real Sociedad youth academy, where he aspired to one day succeed his admired Roberto López Ufarte, led him to develop a career for the Second Division that was marked by suffering. Being a normal player, mediocre, made him have to live the day to fight for the next contract. A demand that surpassed him, bound him and made him be in "a wheel from which he never managed to get out", because this pressure evidently made it even more difficult for him to secure his position.
HIS LIMITATIONS AS A FUTBOLIST WAS MARKING HIM AS A TECHNICIAN "The only compassion I had after a match was to see if in the Mark or AS I had put a 0, a 1, a 2 or a 3″, recognizes with a depressive tone that never manages to escape when he remembers his years as a player by Donosti, Toledo, Burgos, Ferrol, Leganés and Lorca. They were not easy moments, of course. But the footballing context, the inherent exigency of the competition and his personal inability to face it, led Unai to ask questions. Perhaps, due to his circumstances, at first those questions damaged him and deepened even more in his confidence problems, but little by little they were forming and shaping the person he had always wanted to be. "As a player, I learned a lot about how my coaches couldn't make up for my shortcomings," he explains. This growing and unstoppable need for answers caused him to want to combine training and matches with the coach's course and the title of "Management and Administration of Sports Enterprises". Thus, when she arrived in Lorca, Unai Emery already knew perfectly what "she wanted to be when she grew up": "I had that interest in the reason for the actions, in the reason for my development as a footballer on the field of play, led to the understanding of the game. That passion I acquired was developed as a footballer.
"I became not entirely self-taught, but a personal composition of the coaches I had, with what I thought. And then my experience as a footballer in a dressing room and what I felt as I played, because it has helped me a lot to understand the player. To get to the player the first thing you have to weigh is the human part, with the personal part you get to a professional footballer before...".
Although Unai says that, by merit or demerit, positive or negative, he managed to learn something from all the coaches he had, he always tends to emphasise John Benjamin Toshack over the rest because of his attitude. A choice that fits coherently with the premise on which he was structuring his career as a coach: to be on the bench everything he could not be on the pitch. "Something that I wanted to establish as a basis is that competitive capacity, that attitude from the passion to do things and, from there, unite logically what is talent, because without talent ... That is, with talent and without mood we did not arrive, but with mood and without talent either," he said referring to his manual of principles. Unlike many of his colleagues, Unai Emery would not follow a continuum of what he had been as a player, but would turn him around. To the extreme.
IN LORCA COMPLETED ONE YEAR AND A HALF OF MAGNIFICATIONThe Hondarribian aspired to have everything measured, tied and planned so that doubts would never knock on his door again, but curiously his passage to the benches caught him by surprise. In fact, when he received the proposal on 28 December, at first he thought it was all a joke. But it wasn't. "I went home for three days of holidays, being a player, saying goodbye to my team-mates as one more, and I came back as a coach. It was difficult. But I got so into the paper from the beginning that I didn't think so. And with the players, who I knew very well in that step, I got everything to flow easily," he recalls, wielding a very different pose. Unai, when she talks about her "I-coach", wastes security, confidence and firmness. Surely, if he sat down with himself to talk at some point, he would lose the thread of the conversation, but not precisely for lack of determination. That credibility, that mood, were keys to complete a year and a half unbeatable to the commands of CF Lorca Deportiva. From being in the middle of the table at Christmas, the team went on to playoff and finally, after a comeback and an extra time, ascend to Second. A first success that contains a curious and symbolic ephemeris, as Emery achieved it in the field of Real Union of Irun, the team for which his grandfather had played (the "Little Bird" Antonio Emery, who conceded the first goal in the history of the League in 1929), his great-uncle (Roman Emery) and his father (Juan Emery). Of the latter, recently deceased, Unai comments how that day could not stand the nerves and walked from the Stadium Gal to his Hondarribia.
This initial success, with only 33 years, would have its continuation in the following season (2005-2006). It didn't matter then that Lorca's squad was as modest as their economy required, as Unai Emery squeezed every drop of will and talent to bring the Murcian club close to promotion to the Primera Division until the last round of the league. With a team that was built from behind, where there was a bit more quality (Iñaki Bea, Fernando Vega, Berruet and Marc Beltran), the Guipuzcoa signed a superb fifth position that would attract the attention of the rest of the teams in the category.
"There are two types of coaches. One is those who in the world of football have been important players and have a credibility as a coach, which then of course have to prove. And the others, who have been of lower profile, we have to have a performance and a credibility that must be based on something: the results. But in my case, those results are based on the dedication I've conveyed. Everyone works, okay, but if I've grown and I've been successful it's because I've had a working group close to me who live and feel football like me, and who feel the need that, when we fail, that failure surprises us working. That's the motto I've always had.
UNAI ALWAYS HIGHLIGHTS ITS WORK CAPACITY AS THE KEY TO ITS SUCCESSAi Emery signs with UD Almeria in the season (06/07) with the challenge of short-medium term promotion. An objective that fulfills of loose form in its first attempt, returning this way the soccer of elite to the Andalusian city 27 years later with a team that begins to define the tactical ideario of its young trainer: intense in both halves of the field, in which they begin to shine players with much route like Bruno Saltor, and very vertical with the ball in the feet, thanks to the boot of Corona and the legs of Albert Crusat or Kalu Uche. However, when Emery is asked about his successes, whether in 2008 or now in 2015, the one from Hondarribia always turns to a succession of terms that are chained together (work -> performance -> results -> credibility) and that turn his slate into a consequence and not a cause. Interested in the background of this explanation, which may seem simple and not very concrete, in the "Reserved Space" dedicated to his figure the journalist Ricardo Reyes asks Unai every time he mentions "the work" as his totem. In the end, despite his skill, he doesn't get the technician to pronounce the magic words, but if one witnesses the conversation it doesn't cost anything to interpret what Unai Emery actually thinks: most technicians have worked and work hard, but he has worked and works even harder. And for example, a button: "At the cost of sacrificing my wife and my son, my day of rest in football has been to watch more football, it has been to work even more football. And as I have done from the passion I feel, which for me is not a job, because it has not cost me.
Under this way of living football and after only 30 months working as a coach, Unai was presented with 35 years in the category that had cost him so much to arrive as a footballer and in which he had only been able to play 124 minutes. And his Almeria broke it. Without nuances. From the collective to the individual. Diego Alves begins to work miracles, Bruno Saltor demonstrates his engine, Felipe Melo wins his signing with Fiorentina, Juanma Ortiz competes with Albert Crusat to see who is faster and Alvaro Negredo, in the spearhead, attracts everyone's attention. The man from Valladolid had been the bet of Unai, a coach who focuses on directing his team and not on signing but who had the luck on his side: "In Segunda we faced every 15 days the rival that Castilla left. Then, in that coincidence, I analyzed and watched the 42 games played by Negredo. So when we were promoted to Primera, I told the president that it was a safe bet. But more than all these, the footballer who best describes Almeria de Unai Emery is Fernando Soriano. The master, from the midfield, was the first attacker and first defender of a team in which everyone seemed to have the dual mission of defending and attacking. With his curious physique, his brutal ability to wear out and his understanding of the game, Soriano acted as a forward midfielder coordinating the pressure, launching attacks quickly and stopping the game when he touched.
"I'm passionate about collective play, defensive seriousness and collective harmony to attack," Unai commented in one of the many interviews she would give between late 2007 and early 2008. At the time, he was constantly receiving praise, flattery and good reviews. He had the focus on his figure and, in this way, we began to know him in all his extension. The reports of "The Day After", for example, reveal his numerous manias and eccentricities. Because Unai is special. Very special. Before the matches he likes to go out calmly to walk, checking the grass and measuring the length of the lines step by step. "I like the smell of grass, it makes me feel good," he confesses. But her zen pose, calm, ends just as the referee blows his whistle. Then, as if it were Pavlov's Dog, Emery changes. He accelerates, gets up from the bench, puts his arms in a jar and begins his game, which is what a person with Tourette's syndrome would play with only tactical concepts instead of obscenities. He, aware of the image he conveys, laughs when asked. "That's how I live football. I live my training like this. I'm all over the players. But even if we go to the office, when I prepare the training, I prepare it like this. And I identify it as something positive in my past and my present. In fact, my second coach also participates in the same way from behind. Calling us heavy is a positive thing," he says again, pausing.
But in addition to his peculiar character, Emery is beginning to be known and respected by the eminently footballing. His method wins and convinces. It looks like the future. Technical studious, very prepared and obsessed with detail, like a set-piece in which that Almeria was shown dominant. That team, which defended well but found it difficult to score if it was not on the counter-attack, produced more than 50% of the goals and scored more than 60% of the points in strategy plays. He invented new goals, won games and brought Europe closer to the Mediterranean Games. But what brought Unai Emery to Valencia was another aspect: her brutal performance against the big boys. Their Almeria beat Real Madrid 2-0, scored four points against Villarreal (1-1 and 1-0), drew with Barcelona (2-2) and Atlético (0-0), defeated Sevilla twice (1-0 and 1-4) and, on 27 January 2008, took Mestalla (0-1).
"We're sponges. On Sunday I went to see Levante. I like to see how it works. When I got home, I watched Athletic-Sevilla and Racing-Madrid out of the corner of my eye as I prepared for the match with Schalke. And at 1.30am I ended up watching Hospitalet-Orihuela. You can learn more from a Second B coach than from many First B coaches. Another thing is the handling of the group, because the control of the egos is the most difficult thing. In the strategy, the best is Miguel Alvarez, from Hospitalet. I read an interview with Spalletti in "El País" in which he said that he was following my Almería. The other day, his current team, Zenit, scored a goal with a strategy that we did and that I got from Javi Lopez when I was preparing Novelda in the stadium of La Magdalena. The coach has to be mobile: looking and digging. The day that I go to play golf, that they separate me because I will no longer serve. I want intelligent people nearby, who can know more than I do and who demand a lot of themselves".
Once again Emery meets goals, exceeds expectations, takes a step forward and breaks early records. However, when he reaches his stage in Valencia (2008-2012) he has to stop and change the pace. The differences between the assessment made by his former fans, Unai's and what we can conclude from the outside is too great to present only a linear portrait.
Be that as it may, where you have to start is from the beginning. Because on this occasion, more than ever, the context was everything. Unai Emery arrives in the summer of 2008 at a club that is experiencing a very delicate moment despite the recent Cup title. In the squad there are very good footballers (Albiol, Marchena, Joaquín, Silva, Mata or Villa), but the Hondarribian knows that the future of many of these hangs and depends on a complicated economic situation that is beginning to mark the sporting and institutional agenda of Valencia CF. From there, although they all stay the first year and even rejoin David Albelda, the feeling is that the team lives in a tense impasse of restructuring that had already spoiled last year, when they hovered relegation with Ronald Koeman. Emery was always aware of this complicated disposition: "The entity underwent several changes and had to adapt to reality. When I arrived in the dressing room this summer I could see some skepticism among the players but the attitude was always positive and collaborative. My goal was to help re-establish a normal, day-to-day atmosphere.
EMERY WAS ACCUSED OF HAVING A CERTAIN SPIRIT OF TECHNICIAN SECONDED this, the technician had a somewhat incoherent double mission: to put the team in Champions to clean up the accounts while the club, for its part, did the same at the cost of worsening the squad out of pure necessity. And Emery fulfilled the objective once the team was made (6th, 3rd, 3rd and 3rd), becoming the one commonly referred to as "the champion of the other league". A title that, personally, seemed to fill him, but failed to convince, if ever he did, the Valencian fans at the end of his third season. It is at that moment, despite its subsequent renewal, when the great schism between coach and environment begins to emerge. Unai Emery is beginning to be accused of being too conformist, of having a second spirit and of having infected the team with her lack of ambition. "You have to know the teams, the players, the cities, the mentalities... All that process takes a time of adaptation that you have to do as soon as possible," he said in an interview. Perhaps that was one of his weaknesses: his message. Mestalla can be demanding, yes, but the best way to face that challenge doesn't seem to be to constantly lower the team's expectations and possibilities, which is what Unai seemed to do. Even if it made sense, even if it had reasons to do so, there came a time when third place sounded routine and the environment seemed to need something more. "When we talk about high level performance is the handling of fears," he said in the same conversation. Was it that handling of fears that failed you in Valencia? It's impossible to sentence anything. But the truth is that the message of the technician did not get through and that his impeccable results in League (better in the first laps, worse in the second) ceased to be so valued as it was seen that there was not too much competition either, that almost every game was lost to the greats (7/48 points in League) and that, in the rest of competitions, never touched the metal of the titles (6/13 qualifying between Cup and Europe).
The defeat against Schalke 04 in the Champions League 2010/2011 was also paradigmatic of competitive problems that seemed chronic in Valencia de Unai. The defensive fragility, the null control of the matches and the direction of the field were aspects that the fans pointed out and Unai could not stop in adverse scenarios. It could be said in a general way that if Emery lasted in Valencia was because "always" won to those who had to win, which at that time already had much merit for the context, but that his memory in Mestalla is not positive because "never" surpassed a superior rival. Thus, each defeat weighed more and added to the tiredness that began to produce his figure. In addition to Schalke's, there was the elimination against Villarreal, the 3-6 against Real Madrid and, finally, the following year, the 1-2 against a Zaragoza colista. All this, together with some group management problems, staged in the figure of Miguel, Isco's march and Joaquín's phrase ("I spent three years with Emery, four I couldn't stand them. I had so many videos that I ran out of popcorn"), they also gradually downplayed their tactical merits: The good performance of Pablo Hernández, his double-back Mathieu-Alba, Roberto Soldado's scoring explosion, Jonas's union with him, Feghouli's evolution... In short, the Emery-Valencia marriage no longer made much sense and, surely, the year they were given to try again (11/12) worsened the memory that left a relationship that, despite everything, was important for the club today to be in a position to live happier days.
"It was an experience in that sense to add and increase ... I think we were in Champions, we lacked the cherry on a title, but made a positive generational process. And in all that process there have been bad moments and good moments, moments in which the fans are manifested towards the team and players, but that is a coexistence of the coach in which he has to be above.
His time in Valencia also leaves the feeling that, perhaps, that challenge caught him too young and inexperienced. That he was still not as good at handling high competition situations as he would show in the future. "You learn more from defeat because defeat will cure you in a different way. It makes you focus more on the problem. Many times victories also have those same problems, but we don't get to see them because we don't get to go deeper," he reasoned recently. As Marcelino García Toral knows, nothing is more disappointing than disappointment. And in his case, moreover, his grey final in Valencia was added to the setback of his first experience abroad at the controls of Spartak Moscow. A decision that surprised, because his Real Sociedad seemed interested, but that already was mumbling: "I wanted to broaden experience, it was a challenge in which we had to measure ourselves to see how we handled ourselves. [...] As a coach, it has made me better, and I have a much better understanding of what football is... It was a very good initial process, we managed to make a nice wrapping, but the base was not strong. So when bad results come, adversity always comes out.
WINNING MENTALITY AND TRAINING PLAYING SITUATIONS; YOUR KEY RECIPE as a coach, overcoming adversity has never cost you. "Those who know me best say that I am like Captain Thunder, a kind of chosen, a survivor who comes out triumphant in difficult times," he says in his book 'Winning Mentality: The Emery Method. Unai has always been very clear about her ideas. It's all about attitude, work and commitment. That's her method. In order to deepen in him in tactical key, getting closer to his pragmatic and creative slate, an unusual union, the best thing is to revise the conference that he gave in the committee of coaches of Gipuzkoa. There he described his path: for him the objective is to win and, for that, he thinks of a philosophy. Not the other way around. From there, his idea of a good team starts from very physical concepts: it must be aggressive and intense defensive and offensively, intelligent to think, strong to win the individual disputes, resistant to prolong this rhythm to the maximum and with speed to surprise the rival. Emery wants a team with players different from what he himself was, always proclaiming values such as competitiveness, character and leadership. For it, besides the positive thought and the winning attitude that it comments, the work in the trainings is fundamental. Emery understands the game as a whole, as a succession of related moments, which through repetition can be mastered. His teams have their own discourse, but most of the time they win by their adaptation to the match, not to the opponent. As he explains in this conference: if your team grows through positional defense, during the week he is rehearsing it at the height that the rival may need as his study reveals. "We must try to create sessions where these characteristics are taken into account so that our style of play can be reproduced in the games on weekends," he explained back in 2008.
"In the Unai Emery coach there has been an evolution, but with an essence that has never been lost. The essence is to always take a step forward. I wasn't born a coach, I became one. I wasn't born with a surname that gave me a place in the elite, but I had to earn it. The essence is my ambition. But in the game, I've learned to be more pragmatic. That means finding the best competitive profile. In Valencia I always fulfilled the objectives, but I lacked what I learned later in Seville, to know how to combine when to go for the rival because you are superior, and when to balance when you are not.
For all that has already been said, the union between Sevilla, Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán, Monchi and Unai Emery initially had great potential. Then it could come out better or worse, because surely there is nothing in football, but it fit. It was the time and the place. For everyone. Carlos Pérez, a journalist with Estadio Deportivo, explains the reasons for his arrival: "Monchi signs Emery as a coach who values the players. In a club whose 'leitmotiv' is to 'buy well and sell better', that is peremptory. Sevilla, on the other hand, had followed the Basque's work for many years and knew that he is a methodical coach, who dominates both tactics and psychology.
HIS CAREER DIO A GREAT PASO ADELANTE WITH MBIA'S GOAL IN MESTALLAP
But despite how well that panorama looked, the Hondarribia coach experienced a critical moment at the start of his second season (13/14). His first months had been quite stable, without pain or glory, after having replaced Michel, but the new course already brought with it competitive demands that had to be met. His Sevilla had to make a football leap that would lead to Europe, but in the fifth day he left Valencia with a goal and as a new bottom line. Seven months later, a goal by Mbia in Mestalla in the semi-finals of the Europa League would cause a catharsis by Unai Emery, who, from then on, changed his legend of sinning in the decisive moments for his first title as coach. But rather than the final, which would have an impact on the next campaign, it is interesting how he arrived at that situation. Because in between, it's everything. "I'm not going to die with my ideas," he said, breaking the cliché before visiting Espanyol. Emery referred, above all, to the position of Ivan Rakitic. He believed in the Croatian as a member of the double pivot, not interior, and the environment asked him to advance to the mediapunta. Finally in Cornellà he did it, Sevilla won 1-3 and Rakitic became a star of the counter-attack. With Federico Fazio securing the own area, Ivan Rakitic throwing and Carlos Bacca running, Sevilla won a big one, touched Champions League spots and lifted its third UEFA/Europa League in Turin against Portuguese Benfica.
THIS COURSE COURSE COULD CORRECT EVERYTHING THAT FAILED IT IN VALENCIAD from that tactical decision and Mbia's goal, Sevilla has grown to become one of the best teams in the world. A fact that has a special merit for having lost during the summer 66% of its system. Unai, in order to replace them, in the beginning advanced the bolt in its own field to the midfielder position with Grzegorz Krychowiak and used Vitolo's fast legs as a pitcher. Both players and both elections seemed successful, but the team lost potential, became even more concrete and generally weakened. Sevilla continued to win almost by inertia, as Valencia did in its day, but this time the Gipuzkoa was not satisfied. He went to the center of the problem (the ball), was working collective solutions and found, in an unexpected element like Banega, the piece that was fitting the others to get their maximum potential (Reyes, Gameiro, Aleix, Denis, Iborra ...). The team thanked him, competed against the best as an equal, pressed Valencia de Nuno for the Champions League and, again, got brilliantly into the final of the Europa League after destroying the Fiorentina de Montella. Unai Emery went for everything, did not renounce anything and so, relying on the magnificent squad that Monchi had given her, corrected errors of the past in a big way. "With or without Emery, Monchi has a very peculiar way of working: the coach gives the profiles he needs and he gives the names. Then, of course, he studies the options with the coach, but it is he who chooses, because he is the market expert," explains Carlo Perez, while reminding us that Unai does not manage the market because he is absorbed in the day-to-day life of his team. In this way, the Sevillian sports director gave his coach a team with the positions doubled, with different profiles and, at the same time, similar because they all fit with him. Physical players, with specific skills, with room for improvement and a taste for verticality. Players who, well united, have raised the level of Sevilla, have increased their value and have put on the front page the name of their coach.
Both at the end of last season and at the end of it, there was a rumour that Unai confirmed without putting her own names: a big European club called her. "I just want to train. That's why I don't think about the future. What I do have very clear is that where I am I would like to be all my life. My thinking is basically to train, that they want me where I am and that I want to stay all my life. Even though I know it's not going to be like that," he said a few weeks ago. Since then rumors have only increased and even victory to victory have multiplied. But right now, on 27 May 2015, there is only one reality that matters: Unai Emery is Sevilla's coach. And today, precisely today, he can repeat what motivated his career as a coach, which is nothing more than being everything he wasn't as a player: "I haven't scored important goals as a footballer nor have I played almost in the First Division, so now winning a match is an adrenaline shot that I have inside. Sometimes they say to me: 'Unai you make too many gestures when you score a goal, when you win a match, and you have to take care of it'. That's true, but it's natural. And I don't want to lose it.[/spoiler]
Translated using DeepL.
Shortcut to the credentials of the writer for those looking to shoot the messenger.
http://www.ecosdelbalon.com/author/miguel-quintana/
