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Rafa Benitez was a technical observer for UEFA at the Europa League final a few weeks ago and as he left Dublin’s Aviva Stadium after Atalanta’s 3-0 victory against Bayer Leverkusen, there was a shout of, “Hoy, Rafa! Rafa, man! Rafa!”, and he wheeled around to see a grown man “running 50 metres, maybe more, to catch me”.
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Benitez pauses as he relates the story over the phone. You can tell he is smiling.
“There are a lot of Geordies around,” he says with a chuckle.
The interceptor introduced himself, you’ll be shocked to learn, as a fan of Newcastle United, the club Benitez managed for just over three years of hope and pain, and made reference to that extraordinary match against Tottenham Hotspur in May 2016 when Newcastle, already relegated and despite being down to 10 men, won 5-1 against a side who two weeks earlier had still been in the title race, and St James’ Park shook to hymns of plea and prayer. It was the moment that persuaded Benitez, a serial winner who had arrived in the March with 10 games to go, to drop down into the Championship with them.
“He was talking about Tottenham, about us deciding to stay,” says the former Newcastle boss — it is always plural with Benitez, inclusive of his coaching staff — “and he said he remembered everything, how difficult it was and how we fought for the club and things like that. It was good, very good; a nice message. Everyone knows the situation we had when we were at Newcastle, that we didn’t have too much money, that we had to be very careful with the signings.”
Benitez and Newcastle was a great, doomed love affair, an adrenaline shot of ambition just as apathy had become endemic under Mike Ashley’s ownership. He pushed Newcastle back up the following season and kept them up for the next two, forging a bond with supporters in much the same way he had previously at Liverpool, where he won the Champions League and the FA Cup and finished top-four for four seasons running, although it quickly became apparent there was no fertile ground for his ambition to grow.
He wanted Newcastle “to compete” when his bosses were content for them to exist.
Benitez was Amanda Staveley’s preferred choice to manage Newcastle when the financier first attempted to buy the club in 2017 and remained so when the Saudi-backed takeover finally went ahead four years later (by then, Benitez was with Everton, which proved a miscalculation in the wake of his reign across town at Anfield), but the timings never quite worked and so his era at the club carries that “look at what you could have won” kind of feeling. He understood Newcastle and wore himself out for them but was always constricted by tight limitations.
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One of the quirkiest, most unlikely and uplifting footballing stories of recent vintage is defined by those limitations. Joselu’s rise to Champions League winner with Real Madrid earlier this month was never linear, never predictable. Not if you ever saw him labour playing in England for Stoke City (2015-17) or Newcastle (2017-19).
Part striker, part hod-carrier, Joselu was the antithesis of glamour. There was no speed and only six league goals for Newcastle in 46 appearances, but he was trusted by Benitez because of his unselfish team-play and tactical discipline.
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That quirkiness is now tripled because Joselu, Ayoze Perez and Mikel Merino, team-mates at Benitez’s Newcastle, are in the Spain squad for this summer’s European Championship.
Just like Madrid, Spain are defined by how good they have been; winners of the World Cup in 2010, they were also European champions in 2008 and 2012, and came third in the most recent Euros three years ago. They are among the bookmakers’ favourites for the 2024 edition.
From Toon Army to Toon Armada.
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There is some poignancy there: a strange kind of romance and a reminder of how things were and what could have been, perhaps enough for Newcastle fans to consider Spain their second team at this tournament, even if their former trio are unlikely to be starters for Luis de la Fuente. “I don’t know if the word is ‘proud’, but I have great satisfaction when any of the players I was coaching are doing well,” Benitez says. “These players are showing their level and are showing first-hand why we saw something in them.”
Perez, who was only drafted into the squad for the first time last month at age 30 and then scored on his debut against Andorra, pre-dated Benitez’s arrival at Newcastle — the exception to the rule. Signed from Tenerife for around £1.5million in summer 2014 when Alan Pardew was the manager, he was exceptional in Benitez’s final season of 2018-19, earning a £30m move to Leicester City, which was less productive. He scored 42 goals in 179 league appearances for Newcastle over five years and is now back in Spain with Seville’s Real Betis.
“Ayoze is a talented player,” says Benitez, who led Tenerife, Perez’s boyhood club, to promotion into La Liga in 2000-01. “He’s a worker and he has game intelligence. He can play in four positions in attack and if you are telling him, ‘You can do this’, or, ‘You must do that’, then he will do it.
“He can play on the left, on the right; he could go wide behind the striker and then go in support and get into the box. Or, as a striker, to try to score and run in behind. As I said, he’s a clever lad. When you can play in different positions, sometimes it’s because you have the physical condition or the ability, but he was smart enough to understand his role in each of them. Technically, he’s a good player, but it’s that game intelligence which makes the difference.”
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Merino, a midfielder, was gifted, too. He had just turned 21 when he joined Newcastle from Germany’s Borussia Dortmund in the post-promotion summer of 2017, initially on loan and then on a permanent £8million deal. His quality was evident, but he came with a caveat. “It was a special situation because it wasn’t easy to get players from Dortmund to Newcastle then,” Benitez says. “But we told him our ideas, we convinced him to come and made sure he was comfortable.
“We had to give him a promise that he could go in the future to a Basque club (a region of northern Spain close to where Merino was from). You know that Athletic Bilbao only sign Basque players and at Real Sociedad, the majority are also Basque. It’s a good market for anyone who can access these players because you know you will sell them for a good price. He would not have come without that €12million (£10m/$12.8m at the current exchange rates) escape clause. He was the youngest of the three players. You could see he had class, but he also needed more time.”
The following summer, Real Sociedad came knocking and Merino was gone. Six years later, he is still there and now has 21 senior caps. “My Celta Vigo team played against them this year and he is a very, very important player for them,” says Benitez. “He’s good in the air, he wins a lot of aerial duels — in England, that was more difficult for him — but he’s a good size (189cm/6ft 2in) and has good timing.
“He can control the ball. He has a very good left foot, he can take free kicks, he can shoot outside the box, he’s capable of playing the final pass, he gets there at the right time. He’s another player with intelligence.”
And what of Joselu? He, too, arrived in that summer of 2017 when tension was spiking at St James’.
After coming up from the Championship as title winners, Ashley had promised Benitez “every last penny” to spend on new signings but was rebuffed when he tried to bring striker Tammy Abraham in on loan from Chelsea. There was a glass ceiling on aspiration and it was very low.
Benitez has previously put it like this: “It’s like when you buy a car. If you have big money, you can buy a very good brand. If you don’t have too much money, you buy a car that maybe can do the job, but it’s not so spectacular and not so fast.”
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Joselu was neither spectacular nor fast, but he was less erratic and more mature than Aleksandar Mitrovic (another Newcastle old boy at this tournament, with Serbia) and more physical than Dwight Gayle. He was also available and cheap.
“He was £4million plus one,” says Benitez and you can almost hear him shrug. “He had experience in England (after two seasons with Stoke, though he spent most of the second one back in Spain on loan), he was good in the air, he could hold the ball up and he could finish, so I think it was a good option. Obviously, the pace and movement, they were different.”
In the blur of the Premier League, Joselu was not a natural fit, but it was make-do-and-mend, needs-must stuff. “He can finish. He’s really good with his volleys, with control, with heading the ball,” Benitez says. “He can use both feet. He’s not the quickest in the box, but he goes to the right places and if you’re playing for Real Madrid and they make crosses for him, then he will score because in Spain everybody is trying to play on the floor and he will be stronger than a lot of the centre-backs.
“At Newcastle, we had a lot of players that were really good in the Championship but were not as good for the Premier League. Not to be at the top of the table. So you’re not on the front foot all the time, you’re not having possession all the time and you have to play counter-attack and you have to use the tools you have. For Joselu, it was more difficult because he’s not a quick player. He needs to be close to the box and then he will be more clinical because he has the quality to do it.
“I would make one note, one remark. We saw last season that the three teams who got promoted to the Premier League also got relegated (Burnley, Sheffield United and Luton Town). We were promoted and then finished 10th, without money, so that shows how well we did at the time. Not too many teams do that. It was a great achievement and Joselu and the other players played a big part in that.
“We had to promote players internally, like with Sean Longstaff, and then we had to bring others in with some quality. We made mistakes — for sure, we made mistakes — but always when you have less money, it’s more difficult to get top-class players. The fact these three players are in the Spanish squad for the Euros means at least they had the quality. It was a question of time for them, of maturing, of being comfortable with where and who they are.
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“You asked me about being proud earlier and I talked about satisfaction, but always, when you have people who are part of your time, part of your life, you are really pleased to see them succeed. The big thing about these players, about our whole team, is that they were great lads and good professionals. I’m sure Newcastle fans still appreciate that and will have sympathetic feelings for them this summer.”
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That spirit still endures.
At 64, Benitez is “waiting for the next challenge”. After Newcastle, there was a lucrative spell working in China, then brief, difficult stops at Everton and at Celta back in Spain, but he is not interested in slowing down. “I’ve had offers from different countries and continents, but my priority is to stay around here if it’s possible (his family have been based in Merseyside since the Anfield days),” he says.
He continues to update his player and training databases and will attend matches at Euro 2024 in his role with UEFA. “I try to analyse everything and to learn every day,” he says.
What does he expect of Spain and their adopted Geordies in the coming weeks? “It depends if they feel comfortable and have confidence, but they have players who can make a difference — we can say the same about France, Germany or England,” Benitez says. “Sometimes, it’s a little bit of luck. Sometimes it’s one player with a moment of inspiration that changes everything. Spain have two or three who can do that.
“With our three Newcastle players, I don’t say they will start games, but they have experience and are good for the group and good for the coach, so if you have a problem or need something different, they can do it because you can trust them. It’s not a case of, ‘Oh, we’re losing, so we need an offensive player’. When you make substitutions, you need players who understand the game plan or where the opposition has weaknesses. These players have the experience, quality and intelligence to do that.”
Benitez showed his love for Newcastle with diligence and detail, with an intensity that exhausted players, but that they quickly missed when he was gone. He made them better and he reminded supporters it was perfectly acceptable to want more from their club. On social media or on his website, he would sign off messages about the team with “Come on Toons!”, which was not quite right but also perfect.
So, in that cheesy spirit, to Ayoze, Joselu, Mikel, the class of 2017 and to Spain: Vamos the Lads.
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(Top photos: Getty Images)
