Monchi, the man behind Sevilla’s rise to the top
It is a challenge that Leicester City, and many English clubs right up to Liverpool and Arsenal, would be all too familiar and frustrated with. How do you ensure a team keeps on at the same level, when they keep losing their best players?
No matter what you try and do, there is always the sense that a kind of attritional decline is inevitable. It is very difficult to find examples of the opposite - apart, of course, at Sevilla. There, at the Sanchez Pizjuan, there are copious examples.
What is really impressive, though, is not just that Sevilla have kept on going. It is that they have gradually improved. They have turned one of football’s most problematic and persistent economic disadvantages into a unique advantage, playing the system against itself.
That is all the more impressive given the system in Spain involves the two super-resourced super heavyweights of Real Madrid and Barcelona, but it appears Atletico might be in a brink of a breakthrough.
For so long, after all, they were the ultimate Europa League team after winning the competition five times in 11 years including in all of the last three seasons. For that, though, read: best of the rest in the second tier. It was occasionally a consolation, too, since they went out of the Champions League at the group stage.
That is something else that has changed. They finally qualified for the last 16 again this season, in the same campaign that they look capable of splitting Barcelona and Real and putting in a proper title challenge. In fact, they have arguably overtaken Atletico Madrid as the over-performing ‘outsiders’ and certainly filled a vacuum left by the chaos at Valencia. There is a stark contrast between those two more southern clubs. While Valencia are currently a basket case, Sevilla may well be the best run club in Europe.
Except that ‘club’ might be stretching it. Almost everything that Sevilla do so well is down to one man, and one who used to be such an innocuous figure a the club.
Ramon Rodriguez Verdejo was once little more than the substitute goalkeeper. He is now the sporting director, and probably the most important figure in the club’s history. His influence can be measured in trophies. In the time between the 1948 Copa del Rey and when Monchi took over, Sevilla didn’t win a single major trophy. In the time since, they have claimed seven: those five Europa Leagues and two