by Simon Hughes
Alonso talks like a manager and it is imaginable that one day he will follow that path. Having worked under Benítez, José Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti and Pep Guardiola, he must have so much to pass on.
‘People ask me all the time: what links these four guys? It sounds simplistic but, fundamentally, they are all leaders,’ he says. ‘They are the ones who, at their best, know how to take the pressure and worries away from the players.’
For the time being, only playing motivates him.
‘I know these are my last years and because of that I want the success even more. I want to be productive. I don’t look back at what I’ve done in the past or how I’ve got here. I only look forward and at ways of maintaining my levels.
‘I am committed at Bayern until 2017. I want to win the Bundesliga again. I want to win the cup. I want to win the Champions League for a third different club. I want to win everything there is to win.
‘And maybe then I will stop.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
ALBERT RIERA,
Winger
ON LJUBLJANSKA CESTA, the cold rain bounces off the concrete and the tin roofs of low-rise buildings with such intensity and such a din it suggests winter will not be leaving the Slovenian coast quietly this year.
From a food kiosk beneath the Bonifika Stadium, a balding man called Daki sells different variations of börek and the aroma of melting garlicky cheese blows out from across the counter, enveloping customers in a lardy plume.
The doughy snack is a reminder that Koper is a staging post between Italy’s north and Europe’s east. Inland, the H-6 motorway roars south and old wagons carry produce like hams and milk to mysterious kingdoms such as Macedonia and Albania. Out in the Adriatic Sea, cargo ships from places like Venice, Bari and Split come and go from Koper’s port, blasting their horns.
Daki speaks English and is keen to test it out. ‘Not many people from your nation pass here,’ he tells me. ‘Yes, in Slovenia we have tourism but the people, they go to places like Bled or maybe Ljubljana. Koper? They get on the ferries or the cruise ships and leave almost straight away.’
Daki does not know I am here to meet Albert Riera, the former Liverpool winger who recently signed for the town’s football team. Between unfamiliar men, however, the topic of football usually acts as an icebreaker, and so he proceeds to tell me about the current situation in Slovenia, where there are ten clubs in the league. ‘Koper are tenth,’ he frowns, pinning blame on the ‘unhealthy’ regime of the previous president who was ousted two months before.
I look at the börek as he slices it up with a large knife before handing it over to me on greaseproof paper. Surely nothing can be as unhealthy as this, I think inwardly, because Daki is speaking again and nothing is stopping him.
‘We have new owners,’ he continues. ‘There is a guy from Belgrade and a guy from Zagreb: businessmen. They are doing better things. In January, Koper signed seventeen new players. This is what needed to happen. In December, the team was terrible. We were going down.’
Koper is not Riera’s first Slovenian club. Towards the end of 2015, he signed for NK Zavrč, based way out towards Hungary in Slovenia’s eastern borderlands. Zavrč is a village outfit and in 2009 they were operating in the sixth division, around the time Riera was playing in victorious Liverpool sides against Real Madrid and Manchester United. Improbably, Zavrč rose another four levels before reaching the top flight in 2013.
I had chosen to meet Riera because it intrigued me how and why he has landed in this unusual place, out on the fringes of European football. Rafael Benítez had spent £8 million to bring him to Anfield in 2008 and although he contributed towards Liverpool’s best domestic campaign of the decade, playing in forty games that season, he is not remembered for any single moment or even particularly fondly. He finished his second season – the worst of the decade for Liverpool – suspended by the club after allegedly telling a Spanish radio station that Liverpool was a ‘sinking ship’ under Benítez. It was reported that the comment followed a fight at Melwood with a teammate. In more recent times, a photograph circulated in the British media of him supposedly enjoying himself in a casino while one of his more recent clubs, Udinese, were playing.
While I wait for Riera to finish a training session, I sit with the press attaché of FC Koper, and he is just as comfortable as Daki in telling me all the gory details about the club’s previous ownership and that things are changing with the ‘guys from Belgrade and Zagreb’.
Matej Babić has only recently celebrated his twenty-second birthday. He is tall, slim and is wearing a smart unbranded shirt, jeans and heavy boots. He explains that he has taken a year-long sabbatical from a law degree at the University of Ljubljana and that he might abandon education altogether because football is his greatest passion and what is happening at Koper is exciting him.
Matej originally got involved at Koper because his mother had contacts at the club and was able to arrange work experience for him. The two businessmen from Belgrade and Zagreb recognized his almost perfect command of English and Croat as an asset, especially when there are only ten people from top to bottom running the club on a day-to-day basis, and that includes the manager and his coaches.
‘Attendances have gone up because of Riera, two hundred at home to two hundred away,’ Matej tells me proudly. ‘He came from Zavrč but so did several other players. In Slovenia, Koper is the third biggest club behind Maribor and Olimpija. We should be doing better than Zavrč but Zavrč were fifth and we were bottom. That’s why we had to look at their squad and act.’
Matej says that at Koper, everyone has to muck in, doing things that would not be asked of them at English Premier League clubs where the organizations are huge. ‘Multi-skills is the term they use in England, no?’ he asks. Riera is not immune and it later becomes clear that this made Koper more attractive to him. Having played in six different countries, Riera had encountered many different people and therefore had many different contacts in the game. At Koper, the offer was not just to be a player but to learn how to be a sporting director as well.
When Riera arrives at the door, he is accompanied by Zlatan Muslimović, the thirty-five-year-old Bosnian international centre-forward who has also recently made his way to Koper from Zavrč, having spent most of his career swapping between Italian clubs before a couple of seasons in Greece and then China. An intense discussion begins. Riera and Muslimović are Koper’s senior players and, like Riera, Muslimović is entrusted with off-field responsibilities, helping out with recruitment.
Riera is still in his training gear and applying an ice pack to his hamstring. His meeting at the door carries on for more than fifteen minutes and there is a sense it comes to an unsatisfactory end for Muslimović, whose voice lifts several times during the discussion. Riera greets me apologetically. ‘Football,’ he says, raising one of his eyebrows. ‘Always issues to deal with, especially when you are not just the player. Everyone has an opinion on the way things should be . . .’
After Bonifika’s redevelopment in 2010, Koper’s headquarters were installed in a stand behind one of the goals. The stadium can hold just north of four thousand spectators but the day before my visit only seven hundred or so turned up to witness the defeat to Rudar Velenje, another club with relegation concerns.
Riera’s flip-flops slap against the tiled porcelain floor and he jangles a set of keys in the left pocket of his shorts as he leads me to another office where he conducts operations every day after training.
‘I am at work here until six or seven p.m. before I go back to the hotel where I am staying,’ he tells me. ‘There is so much to do. My wife and children will move here soon and we’ll buy a house. I haven’t found the right place yet. I’d like to live very close to the sea, like I did in Mallorca and like I did in Liverpool!’
His office is spartanly decorated, painted all in white. A crack extends across the ceiling and down one of the walls. There is a new computer, a new television, a new chest of drawers, a new p
rinter and a 2016 calendar with some telephone numbers written on different dates.
Riera begins by telling me how he came to Koper. The two businessmen from Belgrade and Zagreb, it transpires, are former footballers who became agents. Riera knew Dušan Petković from his playing days at Mallorca and his business partner is Andy Bara, a retired Croatian defender who spent most of his career in Poland. The president at Zavrč had asked the pair to work with him and the relationship explains how Riera ended up in Slovenia in the first place.
‘Clubs from Dubai and Qatar came to me. That was the type of move I was looking for: easier life, slower pace of game, sun. But Dušan called and spoke to me about Zavrč, about the opportunity to be a part of something very different. When he explained that he wanted me to be involved in everything, to have the possibility to call a player and try to convince him to come and play for us, I realized this was what I wanted to do. It was my idea to become a sporting director after football but Dušan made me realize this opportunity was unique. I could play, but I could be a sporting director at the same time. So I said, “OK, let’s start now.”’
Riera says the relationship with the president at Zavrč was good until the issue of contract renewals arose. With Koper’s situation becoming increasingly perilous both on and off the pitch, Riera and Petković saw another opportunity to start something afresh, where they would have all of the control.
‘A new president arrived in Koper. He called Dušan and said, “I want to make a new club – everything to be different, a new project.” He wanted to give me, Dušan and Andy all of the responsibility to create what we thought was necessary. The money? OK, it is not so good. Other offers were better financially but that is not my priority at this stage. Making my family comfortable is the key, because I’ve moved around so many places and now is the time to find somewhere where I know I will be for a long time. My wife is Russian. I am Mallorcan. We need to find a middle ground somewhere.’
The contract at Koper is the lengthiest Riera has signed in a fifteen-year career. It will keep him in Slovenia – if everything goes well – for the next five seasons. And yet the highest paid player at Koper (not Riera) is on less than €800 a month. ‘My salary is nothing,’ Riera says. ‘I am certainly not here for the money.’
Rather, he relishes his newfound responsibilities. It means that, usually, he is the first person in to work and the last to leave.
Having grown up in Mallorca before living in urban cultural centres like Bordeaux, Manchester, Barcelona, Liverpool, Athens and Istanbul, I suggest to him that Koper seems a bit primitive.
‘Maybe, but where else would I get an opportunity like this one?’ he asks. ‘To run a club, you need big money. I saw an interview with the Indonesian owner of Inter Milan last week. He wanted €100 million for 20 per cent of the club. Here in Slovenia, I have an opportunity to start a project from the very beginning and to learn about something new where the pressure is not quite the same.
‘If I had the opportunity to go back in time and change what I have done, I would not take that opportunity,’ he continues. ‘All of the decisions I have made – to move here, to move there – the decisions were made with my heart. The decisions were true to my thoughts in those moments.
‘I had the same feeling about Koper as I did about Liverpool. OK, Liverpool is huge, one of the big European clubs. Koper is small. Outside Slovenia, few people have heard of Koper. The attraction of Liverpool was the history, the ambition and the expectation. When I was twenty-six, that was what I wanted. Now I am nearly thirty-four. I am thinking about the rest of my life.
‘I have a lot of friends who have stopped football and they don’t know what to do. You have a period after retirement where it is difficult for a footballer: bop, the end. How do you replace a routine that has been there for twenty years?
‘I realize I cannot go on for ever. After every game, it takes longer to recover than it did before. My muscles ache. You realize time is catching up with you. I do not want to experience this period where I retire and I have nothing to do. I don’t like the idea of relaxing, because after a while it becomes boring. A footballer’s life is very short and I am satisfied by my career but there is so much more to do, more life to live. OK, thirty-four is old for a footballer but it is not old in life.
‘The day I cannot play for Koper, straight away I know I am working for the club. It is nice, because I don’t have to think about the future too much and it means I can enjoy playing without the fear of what happens next. I will be honest with myself. The day I cannot dribble past a defender is the day I will stop. Maybe I will be unsuccessful as a sporting director and I will have to change my idea, who knows? But I feel like I have to try.’
I question Riera about whether it is difficult getting Koper’s squad to trust him. He trains and plays alongside the players but ultimately his say will dictate whether they remain.
‘From the outside, I know people will say, “How can you be a player as well as a sporting director?” But it’s so easy. My message to the guys in the dressing room was very clear from the beginning of our relationship: “Listen, here I am just a player. If I do something wrong and you are unhappy about it, you shout at me like you would any other player. I am at the same level. I am not more than you. I am not less than you.” I want the same thing as them: to win games. When I walk out of the dressing room and up to the second floor into my office, only then do I think about the issues that can influence the team to improve.
‘We are a completely new group. Seventeen new players is a huge number and usually it would be considered unworkable. But Koper needed a new chapter, for everything to be clean and everything to be transparent. We are careful financially and will not spend what we don’t have. Of course we would like to bring in fantastic players but at the moment that isn’t a possibility. We have to do it little by little.
‘What we really want is to play in Europe. If you play in Europe, there are more possibilities: to earn more money, to bring in better players and improve the infrastructure of the club so that fifteen or twenty years from now Koper is leading in Slovenia and respected abroad as a small but well-run club.
‘Immediately, the aim is to escape relegation. The people in Koper, they have never experienced an expectation like this. In the past, they have had the opportunity to sign some Croatian or Bulgarian players, because those countries are so close. But never Spanish, never French or Italians. If everything goes to plan, I am convinced that next season we can finish in the top three for sure – I am convinced.’
Amongst Riera’s first big decisions was one to reduce the squad from twenty-five to twenty-two players, and then he had to inform Ariel Ibagaza, a former teammate at Mallorca and Olympiacos, that he would not be able to sign him, despite the Argentine’s determination to move to Slovenia. ‘Believe me, Ariel can still play,’ Riera says. ‘He called me on the last day of the transfer window because a deal to re-sign with Mallorca did not happen. But I could not justify changing everything for him, just because he’s a friend. Our team is mixed between experience and youth. The next six months will reveal whether the young Slovenian players are good enough. I believe they are.’
There must be wanderlust in the Riera family. Albert’s younger brother Sito plays in Kazakhstan, after spells in Greece and Ukraine. He thinks it is strange that both of them have followed less-trodden paths, especially when he thinks back to a happy childhood in Manacor on the Balearic Island of Mallorca, a town best known as the birthplace of tennis great Rafael Nadal and his uncle, Miguel Ángel Nadal, an international footballer whose fierce defending earned him the nickname ‘the Beast’ during eight seasons at Barcelona.
‘I guess you could say we are only the second family in Manacor,’ Riera concedes, smiling. Riera’s parents led modest lives: his father as a wood craftsman and his mother in a shoe shop. He thinks it is strange that he and Sito became footballers, because football was not in the family before.
‘I never had any p
ressure to play,’ he says. ‘I remember my first game with Mallorca’s first team. Not even one member of my family was there. You see some young players and every day they have a father or an agent pushing them. This was not the case for me. Maybe if my parents had pushed me, I wouldn’t have become a footballer. I have always liked to make my own decisions. I was good at maths at school and one day my mother told me she wanted me to become a doctor. From that day, I wanted to be everything except a doctor. Had my father pushed me as a footballer, maybe I would have ended up hating it.’
Riera does not offer platitudes about the game like other footballers. He admits his motivation to become a player stemmed from liking the idea of being paid to get fit. ‘I am not typical,’ he says, revealing that the bug of football only really seized him when he was sixteen or seventeen years old, with part of the reason for his interest being the resurgence of his nearest professional club. Mallorca had bounced between the top and second levels of Spanish football until Argentine Héctor Cúper became manager in 1997, leading them to the final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup two seasons later. Miquel Soler, Vicente Engonga and Carlos Roa were the team’s main players but it was Jovan Stanković, the Serbian winger, whom Riera admired the most.
‘I had the chance to be close to him and learn. He was my example. I had the opportunity to play with him. He left for Marseille and I was selected as his replacement. A big responsibility.’
Riera was exposed to the ruthlessness of football from an early age. Mallorca’s progress was stunted when the club moved to a new modern ground on the edge of Palma. The results of before did not follow, attendances dropped and financial problems plagued his first two seasons as a professional. Riera was twenty years old.