Family club out to strike blow against Super League rebels

IT has not escaped Villarreal chief executive Fernando Roig’s attention that his club will be the odd one out this week when the two European finals are played. Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City are all owned by overseas billionaires and all backed the failed European Super League (ESL). Villarreal, in contrast, have been owned for the last 24 years by Roig’s father, also called Fernando, a local businessman who goes to all the games and hates the idea of an ESL. ‘We’re in a final between three Super League teams,’ says Roig junior just days from the biggest game in the club’s history. Villarreal know if they beat Manchester United they will be in next season’s Champions League. What most offended the club from the town on Spain’s east coast was the idea of having any route to European football’s top table almost entirely blocked by the ESL closed shop.

‘There will always be big clubs and small clubs but access must be kept open,’ he says. ‘It can’t be good for the game to close that off. You lose the essence of football.’ This club have been the surprise package before.

In their first season in the Champions League in 2006 they were beaten in the semi-final by Arsenal after Juan Riquelme missed a late penalty. Surely that made beating Arsenal this time to reach their first ever final, against Manchester United, all the sweeter?

‘It would have been the same had we beaten, say, Slavia Prague,’ he says. ‘But then a bit of healthy revenge isn’t a bad thing and they are a big club so there is added prestige.’

They did it with a former Arsenal manager, too. Last season it was Roig junior who took the bold decision to sack coach Javi Calleja after he had got them into Europe, just because there was a chance of hiring Unai Emery.

He has delivered a final and just getting this far is a huge achievement for a club the Roig family built up from almost nothing back in 1997 when Roig senior, a local ceramics magnate, bought it.

‘We had a 3,000 capacity stadium with poor grass and no training ground.

‘Now we are a club with more than 500 members of staff,’ says Roig junior proudly.

‘The town has responded incredibly. The people who go to the games as a percentage of the people who live in Villarreal, if you applied that to Madrid they would need 10 Bernabeus.’

There is still an old breeze-block cabin at the club’s training ground where the lawnmowers are kept — it used to be the dressing room but modern facilities were built around it. It stays there as ‘reminder’ of how things were says Roig.

So what does he make of the Glazer-family style of ownership; largely detached? Would they ever sell to foreign investors?

‘In the very, very, very distant future, I don’t know, but right now we have no intention of selling. We enjoy it too much. We suffer too, but we’re involved, in the good times and the bad.’