José Luis Mendilíbar says he likes the “sound of football”, boot on ball, and mostly football likes the sound of him. Old school and potty mouthed, no pretence or pretentiousness, he’s not messing about. Anti-VAR, pro-fans, attacking authorities and challenging charlatans, cutting through the crap, he has a way with words and his way is direct, blunt, warm and often funny. The coach whose response to a former player apologising for scoring against him was “don’t do it, then” and who admitted “we’re a bunch of cheats in La Liga; touch us and it’s like someone killed us”. He is the man one footballer says could never manage a big club because the media would murder him if he said in Madrid and Barcelona what he says in Eibar.
What he says in Eibar is the truth even when the truth hurts. And this hurt. At the end of their 4-1 defeat at Granada on Thursday, Mendilíbar was asked: “On a scale of one to 10, what chance do you think Eibar have of surviving now?” At which he looked at the screen and the man sitting 813km away, at the hope slipping further even than that, and said: “Not much.”
Mendilíbar has been in primera longer than anyone but there’s probably not long left. After a playing career in which he never made the top flight and 27 years as a coach, a job he never planned to do but which started aged 33 at Arratia in the Basque regional league; after 14 straight seasons in the first division; after six successive seasons with Eibar, the club he first coached 20 years earlier in Segunda B, every away game a grand day out, ham and wine at the side of the road, his first relegation is becoming a reality.
Eleven days ago, Eibar slipped to the bottom for the first time; not just this season, but ever. Four days later, they got battered 5-0 by Atlético and four days after that let in four at Granada. On the touchline, captain Kike García sat by Mendilíbar’s feet, watching the errors condemn them again, another animated conversation accompanying another defeat. Five points from safety, four points from anyone, with just six games to go. They will almost certainly need three wins against Real Sociedad, Betis, Valencia, Barcelona and especially fellow strugglers Alavés and Getafe to survive, when they haven’t won in 15 matches – not since the last time they faced Granada, at the start of the year.
“Eibar, without hope,” ran the headline in El Diario Vasco. Eibar had been left in “an induced coma”, they said; “one foot in the coffin”, “the sound of the scythe above their head”. And if you weren’t sure that a scythe makes a sound, at least until it starts a swishing and a slicing, you knew what they meant and Mendilíbar knew too; he couldn’t help but share their view. Couldn’t help sharing it with others, either. No filters and no sugar-coating.
“It looks more difficult every time,” he admitted. “Every four days for the last two or three months, it’s always the same story. There are moments when we compete but for one reason or another we make a mistake that costs us. It’s not chance any more. We’re five points off but it’s not just that; it’s the team. Mathematically it’s possible, but we have to take a leap forward. If we don’t stop making mistakes it’s impossible to survive. We have to see that. We have to think more of the team, not our own play. We have to be much more competitive, we have to be much bigger bastards.”
All of which makes them sound like a disaster and makes him sound like one too, a manager who can’t get the best of his players, something fundamental lost. But there is something deeper too and at the risk of over-simplifying it, this, like him, is normal in a world that’s not. This day was always going to come eventually, everyone knew.
Eibar are not a team that should be in the first division and had it not been for Elche’s financial crisis and he administrative relegation that followed it, they would have been relegated at the end of their first ever season there in 2015. From a tiny town of 27,000 people sunk into the Ego valley, Athletic Club and Real Sociedad within an hour and a stadium with a capacity for less than 5,000, they were almost denied the chance to go up – on the grounds that they were too small. The stadium is bigger now, but at 8,164 it didn’t fill pre-pandemic, and their budget less than a 10 the size of Madrid’s.
Beautiful finish by Roberto Soldado! 😍
A delicate curler that was confirmed as the opener for Granada after a VAR check 🔴⚪ pic.twitter.com/kUIgoDJdB6
— Premier Sports 📺 (@PremierSportsTV) April 22, 2021
The 16 players that faced Granada cost a total of less than €14m. The surprise is not that they might go down now; it is that they might go down now. That it has taken six years, each a minor miracle, together a miracle so big so normalised that it stopped looking like a miracle at all; that they looked like they belonged. They had even been on the verge of Europe, and never slipped below 14th. Now they look like slipping under. The good news is that with the stadium upgraded, a new training ground built, books balanced, they don’t go down the way they were and are better equipped to surface again.
On many levels, Eibar remain a model club, overcoming odds stacked against them, and much of that is Mendilíbar’s success too, a reflection of what he built and who they became. What makes the last few weeks so surprising is that it is out of character. As a player, Mendilíbar says he was a mingafría, a bit wet. He was, he says, “fast-ish, technical-ish, everything -ish”. As a coach he could hardly be more different; there is no stopping short, no holding back, no half measures.
“I suffer,” he told Vicente Del Bosque recently. “When the team is warming up I stay in the dressing room walking round and round in circles asking myself how can I still be suffering so much rather than enjoying this. And there are players who vomit with the tension. Lots of people think that footballers enjoy playing, but that’s not always easy to do, and others are suffering.” Yet there is an enthusiasm too and, while he is on top of his players, he is close to them too: honest and fair, there is a connection, a sense of fun.
“Training grounds look like airports these days, there are so many cones around,” Mendilíbar says, seeing in that an attempt to overcomplicate the simple. He has forged a team in his image, an identity that is inescapably his, stripped down and pure. But if that sounds like the classic cliché, it is not: this is not just a small team that resisted, a tough, terrifying team on a tiny pitch, still less a dirty one; it is a team that rebelled: they took the game to teams, that attacked, that played high.
“He is the incarnation of the club,” sporting director Fran Garagarza said, and even as results deserted them there was no suggestion that club and coach would desert each other. “It’s a marriage. There is what he gives Eibar and what Eibar gives him: a club that’s transparent, that involves him, that doesn’t have a face on when results are bad, that works, is patient. He’s a leader, whose message sticks with a style that fits the club: intensity, solidarity, offensive. Lots of things align with him. Every year we survive is a blessing and he was a principal actor in that, for sure.”
Quick Guide
La Liga results
Cádiz 0-3 Real Madrid, Elche 1-1 Real Valladolid, Alavés 2-1 Villarreal, Real Betis 0-0 Athletic Bilbao, Osasuna 3-1 Valencia, Levante 0-1 Sevilla, Barcelona 5-2 Getafe, Real Sociedad 2-1 Celta Vigo, Granada 4-1 Eibar, Atlético Madrid 2-0 Huesca
Survival slips away and that hurts and surprises, which is perhaps a success in itself. Together they did something special: they belonged. Eibar and Mendilíbar made it so a team no one truly expected to turn up in the first place will be missed if they go again, a little different to the rest, like something from another time and place. For now, though, they cling on for one last fight. “The four or five teams above us have more of a chance”, Mendilíbar said. “We don’t have many chances, but we’ll use them all up. People are worried, gutted. Maybe I speak too clearly, but I can’t hide what I see.”
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