By the entrance to the car park at Villarreal’s training ground, on the corner of the pitch where the first team prepare, is a concrete outhouse measuring maybe six metres by four. Hastily built then and faded yellow now, it is not much to look at and a bit out of place: alone, worn and in the way. But there are no plans to remove it. Once this was the dressing room. Piled high with kit, these days it is a storeroom and a reminder of who they are and how far they have come.
“When we arrived, there was just a typewriter and Llaneza,” the president, Fernando Roig, is fond of saying. Sitting in an office upstairs, the other side of the pitch where Unai Emery’s players work in the sunshine, the club’s CEO smiles. “Well,” says Fernando Roig Negueroles, who is also Roig’s son, “there was José Manuel [Llaneza] and two more people: Gumbau and a man who has passed away called Parra. Now there are 500 staff.”
There is work for them this morning. For a start they are a couple of hundred tickets short for Wednesday’s Europa League final against Manchester United, the biggest night in the Spanish club’s 98-year history. “When I walk into the stadium, I don’t know how I’ll feel,” Roig Negueroles says. “I’ve never been in a final before.” None of them has.
Vila-real is a small, welcoming but unremarkable place of little houses and low-rise flats with a population of 50,577 and only one hotel – which, standing at the southern entrance, turning off the N340 past the ceramic factories, is closed. But they do have a first division team and now a European finalist. Only Bastia and Monte Carlo have had clubs reach a final with a smaller population. When this began, Vila-real barely had a club at all.
Government legislation forced Villarreal to become a public company in 1994. Apart from a brief second division spell in 1970-72, their history had been spent in Tercera, only reaching the regionalised Segunda B in 1988. And, although they were in the second division then, they were struggling to survive. Pascual Font de Mora, the former player, administrator and president who had dedicated his life and money to the club was ill and his family were looking for a buyer – one from the region who would protect it.
The man tasked with finding one was José Manuel Llaneza, an employee at Pirelli and then Goodyear who had recently joined Font after a chance meeting in a restaurant in the provincial capital Castellón, 9km north. Initially he did two jobs, his wife telling him it would not last; quarter of a century later, although he has stepped down as managing director having been through heart surgery and cancer, he is still the club’s vice-president.
One day Llaneza went to see Fernando Roig at the offices of Pamesa, the ceramics business he owns. Roig, also the owner of the supermarket chain Mercadona with his brothers Juan and Paco, ran Pamesa Valencia basketball club while Paco was president of Valencia. Llaneza recalls Roig asking how much Villarreal needed, how big their debts were. When he was told €80 or €90m, he said to his finance director: “Put €180m.” The agreement to buy Villarreal was signed in a bar in Vila-real now called Birbar.
It was May 1997 and Roig paid 72m pesetas, €432,000. “We had a ground for 3,000 people with poor grass and no training ground,” recalls Roig Negueroles, who was finishing his degree and joined the club the following year. “The team had to train wherever it could, asking in other towns. The infrastructure was basic, seen at any third division team these days. But my dad’s project was: why not?”
For lots of reasons, really. There were a little over 2,500 members and 1,000 f those were retired, given season tickets by the town council. Roig took one look at the ground– tiny, whitewashed and with an imperfect pitch – and said it had to be totally rebuilt to play in the first division. They planned on promotion in three years but went up in one, with a budget of €3m – and then went straight down again. “We didn’t have a team good enough for promotion but made the play-offs,” Roig Negueroles says. “We then committed the sin of thinking it was easy when we won at Barcelona. The season put everyone in their place: at the end Barcelona were champions and we were relegated.”
“It was important we came straight back [in 2000]. An extra year in the second division would have been very hard for the club’s stability,” he says. But Villarreal learned and investment gathered pace, reconstruction at every level. They travelled to nearby towns – Benicàssim, Villafranca, Borriana – and gave tickets to schools in Vila-real to fill the new stadium, a connection made with their community still reflected in social projects throughout the province. There are 20,000 members now. “As a percentage of population, if this was Madrid you’d need 10 Bernabéus,” Roig Negueroles says.
Villarreal also constructed a training ground on an old orange grove, the outhouse the first stone. “It was one pitch, then one more, then two artificial pitches. We built offices, which became the residency. We added a floor, then another, then another. We always wanted a youth system but it didn’t happen immediately,” Roig Negueroles says. Now they have two training complexes, more than 100 kids developing there. Bruno Soriano and Santi Cazorla played in the academy, as did 10 of the current squad, including captains Mario Gaspar and Manu Trigueros.
There were signings too – particularly from Argentina to start with – and large investment, financial muscle making it possible. Roig put in around €120m, he calculates. Martin Palmero came, Robert Pires, Diego Godín, Marcos Senna, Juan Román Riquelme. There was a clear identity, a style recognisably theirs: touch and technique, led by coaches who fit the model, low profile but ambitious, Manuel Pellegrini the most significant.
Villarreal was a place players wanted to be, the perfect football ecosystem. “The club really, really look after us. It’s surprised me. If it’s up to me I’m never leaving,” Alberto Moreno says. “It’s the humility, how close they are, every need met,” Santi Cazorla says. “It’s different from other clubs, like a small family.” Roig Negueroles talks about “enjoying this”, admitting: “I don’t know what the motivation is for absentee owners. I wouldn’t buy a club thousands of miles away.”
Stable and fully established among the strongest sides in Spain, reaching the Europa League final is no longer a miracle or a surprise. In fact, it is overdue. Even when they unexpectedly went down in 2012, Roig selling Mercadona shares to clear debt, they came straight back up and went top, spending only what they have generated over the past nine years.
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“We’re 17th in the all-time table; sometimes it feels like we’re a new arrival but we’ve been here 25 years,” Roig Negueroles says. Twenty-one of those have been in primera, 14 in Europe. They have been runners-up, reached a Champions League semi-final in 2006 and four more European semis: in 2004, 2011, 2016 and now 2021 at last reaching a final.
When Villarreal signed Diego Forlán in 2004, Llaneza tried to get Manchester United to include a friendly in the deal but they refused. “Don’t worry,” Roig told him. “They’ll come – and for free.” The following season they did. Three years later they returned. In four games Villarreal, the team from the town whose entire population could fit inside Old Trafford and leave 23,563 empty seats, remained unbeaten. Now they meet again.
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