Athletic article about Benitez funnily enough. For those not interested in Rafa, or prefer their articles to fit in a Tweet, don't bother. 
Interviewed by Shearer...
It will come as a surprise to precisely nobody that Rafa Benitez is looking for a way back in.
“Am I missing management? Yes,” he says. “I’m watching and analysing matches, but it’s totally different from being involved. I wasn’t happy with the way it finished at Everton, because in the second part of the season, at all my teams, we’ve always done well as a staff, managing squads, controlling the load of training. So missing this part of the season is even worse.”
When Rafa talks about analysing, that isn’t code for sitting at home feeling aggrieved. He has brought a memory stick to our interview, the first he’s given since his dismissal three months ago. It contains the software he has been honing and refreshing for 35 years, an enormous database of players and scouting reports which now includes his training sessions stretching back decades, complete with a search function that allows him to pinpoint individual drills and exercises.
He retreats to his earliest days in management, “when my daughters were babies and I’d be holding one of them and a bottle of milk at 1am, doing my video clips, and then at 4am it would be the same, feeding them and doing the videos. I have people who can help me now, an analyst, fitness coach and sports scientist. They are specialists and I keep them busy all the time, but in terms of my dedication, it’s the same”.
And perhaps that image — cradling a child on his knee, a laptop screen in front of him — paints a slightly different portrait of the man we see on the touchline, the relentless hoarder of details, a fella who can look at data and minutiae and translate it into patterns of play, goals and victories and trophies, this stirrer of great emotion who keeps his own shrouded. There is a very human side to Rafael Benitez, as you will come to see. There is humour and there is pathos, too.
Benitez tells Shearer of his new obsession over goal kicks and his controversial time in charge of Everton
His latest obsession? “The thing I am doing now is analysing goal kicks,” Rafa says, and I can’t help but smile in response.
“I’m really surprised. People have started playing from the back. I watched a game in the (fifth tier) National League the other day and they were doing it. You see a lot of teams conceding goals, who put themselves at risk. So me and my staff are watching every game, watching teams at the top, middle and bottom of the table to see how they play.
“If they play short, is it short and then short again, short and medium, or short and long passes? What does it mean for Paris Saint-Germain to play short? For Chelsea? We are analysing all these things. I’m not saying teams shouldn’t do it because being allowed players in the box changes the approach, but I can tell you, there are not too many situations when they play short and score a goal. Not too many.”
And this is classic Benitez, this diver to the depths of football’s technicalities, this man with a ferocious belief in his capacity to make footballers better. His six months at Everton might have been bruising, but it impossible to think of him with his feet up, pausing, stopping, doing anything else. He turned 62 a week ago, but “I’d love to still be managing at 70,” he says. “I hope so. If I am healthy enough, I would like to do it. My wife might not agree, but I would love to.
“I am someone who loves football and loves his job. The things I did well when I was a young coach at Real Madrid’s academy was to improve players, to work really hard with them, to see how they progress, to see how the team grows. I’ve had the same feelings all my life — at Newcastle United, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Liverpool, Napoli. I love to coach, and if your team is winning and you see players growing, well, I’m really pleased with that.”
And if they are not winning? Like at Goodison Park, when there is anger and dismay and disappointment? “It’s part of the job sometimes,” he says. “It doesn’t mean that it’s not affecting me, but I’m a strong character and I’m very competitive. I was convinced that we could do well at Everton. We knew the players, we had knowledge of the division and the opposition. I’m still convinced.
“I know we could have made it better.”
In another version of this season, Rafa would have been back on the touchline at Anfield this weekend. But as a Blue, not a Red. He is no stranger to that away dugout — he has fretted and tinkered in there with Chelsea and Newcastle — but the thought of him managing Everton still jars. He was a dream-maker for Liverpool, the miracle-worker of Istanbul 2005 with a gilded legacy and it is hard to understand how he could ever have found reconciliation with their rivals.
I’m sitting with Rafa at a hotel in the north west of England — the very place, funnily enough, where Kenny Dalglish and I met when he was persuading me to join Blackburn Rovers from Southampton half a lifetime ago. During my four years at Blackburn, I lived in Liverpool and still have pals there, and I spoke to them last summer when Rafa’s name was being linked to Everton. Every one of them said, “There’s no way he’ll take that job. No way.”
In his own mind, Rafa’s call was simple, logical. Merseyside is still his home, he is embedded there, “and I signed because of my connection to the city, to give something back, to make sure we had two strong teams,” he says. “I have a lot of friends who are Evertonians and I knew their ideas well, what the team needed, what was going on, what they were missing and what they wanted to see each week. It was a challenge, and I like a challenge.”
This is what I mean by pathos. Rafa is far from naive — a favourite saying of his is “football is a lie” — but a theme of his career veers towards self-harm; a compulsion to work twinned with a soaring belief that his methods will win over erratic owners and soothe hostile fans. It took him to Chelsea, to Newcastle, Mike Ashley and the Championship, and it led him to Everton, becoming only the second manager — and the first since the 1890s — to cross the Merseyside divide.
Did he not have second thoughts when banners were posted near his home saying, “We know where you live.”
“I also had friends telling me the majority of Everton fans will say, ‘OK — maybe it’s not ideal, but he’s a manager with experience and wants to do well’,” he responds. “Because I lived there, a lot of people understood that I wanted to succeed more than anyone, so I would give everything. It would never change my mind if a few people were saying negative things.”
Benitez managed Everton against Liverpool but will not be on the touchline for this weekend’s Merseyside derby (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
In retrospect, though, surely it was the wrong decision?
“At the beginning, I don’t think so,” he says. “You have to make decisions in context. Afterwards, with hindsight, it’s easy to have an opinion, but with the conversations I had with Everton and the ambition they told me they had, it was right. Afterwards, well, we didn’t have the money, we had injuries and other problems, and you can see what was going on. But I still think they have the potential to be good, to be great.”
Everton are a brilliant, historic club, Goodison is one of the game’s great, old arenas and their takeover a few years ago gave them injections of cash and ambition, but that potential feels very distant today. From the outside looking in, they’re a ****-show, a monument to waste and dysfunction and a model of how not to do it, spending something between £500 million and £600 million on new players since Farhad Moshiri came on board in 2016.
And look at them. One place and one point above the bottom three with seven games left, burning through managers like they’ve burned through all that money, recently announcing losses of £372 million over the past three years, threatened with their first relegation since 1951 but with a new £500 million stadium being built, while being obliged to suspend their sponsorship deals with companies backed by Alisher Usmanov, the sanctioned Russian oligarch who is a long-time business associate of Moshiri’s. ‘Mess’ does not begin to cover it.
The thing is that if Rafa had not been called Rafa, he might have been seen as the perfect candidate to steer Everton through.
He is a club-builder, skilled at eking out the most from his players, bringing balance to his squad, turning potential into clout. I wish their supporters could have seen the manager who brought hope to Newcastle, my club, five or so years ago or could listen to the smart, funny man sitting opposite me now, but I don’t quite get how success was ever really possible at Everton. As soon as things turned…
There is something I should say at this point.
For contractual reasons, there is plenty that Rafa cannot discuss and although I ask about Moshiri, Usmanov and other things, they are conversational dead-ends. Our chat is more reflective but that’s fine with me, because he is fascinating company. When he first arrives at the hotel, before we turn the tape on, he just talks — for an hour. The words spilling out of him. He has this vivid intensity. You yearn to soak it up.
The cliche would have it that Rafa can’t do love, that he wants to turn his players into robots. The truth is far more subtle, that he expresses his love through work, that arm draped around the shoulder at the final whistle, whispering in the ear, always believing you can do more, give more and striving to unlock it, giving everything of himself in the process. And something most people don’t know; his early moments at Everton concealed crushing personal pain.
Last summer, Rafa’s mum, Rosario Maudes, died of COVID-19. She was 87. “So many people have had problems like this, so maybe nobody will be interested,” he says when I bring it up, gingerly. He is matter-of-fact and does not deploy emotional language, never has, which doesn’t mean he cannot feel it or show it. His voice thickens. And in a cool room, beads of perspiration suddenly break out on his forehead.
“In personal terms, Everton was quite difficult for me,” he says, “but as a professional, I was fully concentrated and focused and always trying to do my best. That’s the main thing. I knew it was impossible to change the situation, so you have to deal with it.”
Did he manage to get back to Spain? “Yes, I stayed with my family and was able to see my mother,” he said. “The doctor had told my brother that they couldn’t do anything because of her age and we said they had to try, that you cannot do nothing. They tried different techniques but after a couple of days she died, and that’s it. I was there at the end — watching through the window, because we couldn’t go in.
“She recognised me, but after that… I could see very clearly it was a question of time. It was quite difficult, because my sister had COVID at the same time and was in hospital with both lungs affected, and we were trying to keep her fine and upbeat and my mum was dying. At least with the funeral, it was quick. It’s not like here, where you wait 15 days. We sorted it out, had the funeral and came back. In this aspect, it’s much better.”
His mother was a big football fan, a big Real Madrid fan. When Rafa signed for them as a kid, winning school competitions, captain of his team, “she took me to training, staying until late in the evening and then going back. She was always following me. She was quite passionate.”
The words are slower now, more deliberate. But back when it happened? Football rumbles on regardless and Rafa rolled with it, no public excuses, no plea for time or empathy, no letting up, no pause, no time to wait. His mantra, then and always: Don’t stop.
Rafa’s history with Liverpool was one thing, Everton’s difficulties another and if it is not quite right to say he never had a chance or that the rug was pulled from under him, then circumstances were unkind. They had finished 10th under Carlo Ancelotti a year ago, albeit after a run of three wins in their last 12 league matches and a final-day 5-0 hammering by Manchester City, but Rafa believed that “with a certain investment they could aspire to something more”.
Did he know there would be nothing to spend when he signed his three-year contract? “No. No, no, no, no, no. At the beginning, it was a massive project with the potential to spend some money,” he says. “It changed when we couldn’t sell players. It’s difficult when people are on big contracts and nobody wants to buy them, so we didn’t have that option. We signed five players for less than £2 million and we worked with what we had.” That £2 million is worth emphasising.
Their start was good. There were four wins in the opening five matches in all competitions, joint top of the league with 10 points out of 12. Andros Townsend and Demarai Gray, “wingers with speed, quality and energy, what the fans wanted,” Rafa says, began in blistering form. “People won’t remember it now but in the first months, the team were doing so well. There were comments in the newspapers like ‘amazing, fantastic, he’s doing the right things’.”
And then injuries struck, a chronic frailty which pre-dated Rafa’s arrival. Richarlison missed a chunk of matches, Dominic Calvert-Lewin even more and, with James Rodriguez gone and Gylfi Sigurdsson unavailable, Everton were blunted. “It was key players through the whole spine of the team,” he says. “That made things more difficult and started the problems with results on the field.” There were heavy defeats to Watford, Manchester City and, yes, Liverpool.
Off the pitch, Rafa attempted to impose structure. He filled technical positions with people he knew. In early December, Marcel Brands left his role as the director of football. The following month, Lucas Digne, the left-back, who was viewed as a difficult character, joined Aston Villa for £25 million on January 13, freeing up resources for new signings. What makes no sense — none at all — is Everton allowing Rafa to win those battles and then sacking him on January 16.
For balance, there was a damaging sequence of one win (two if you include squeezing past Hull City in the FA Cup after extra time) in his last 14 fixtures and I guess the point is that Rafa had no hinterland at Everton. “The hope was to recover the injured players and balance the team in January, but there was no patience,” he says. “They fired us when we were six points from relegation and six from 10th, with two games in hand (on some of the sides between them and the top half). All the important players were back.”
Was he surprised by the hostility he encountered? “At the end, yes,” he says. “I was really pleased with the support at the beginning, but yes, I was surprised because we were giving everything. We were working so hard, a lot of hours — I’ve done that at all my clubs — we were honest and my staff were incredibly dedicated. I was surprised also that, when I left, the club got rid of some of them.
“But I cannot control the emotions of other people. The only thing I can do is give the message that we were doing our best, we were unlucky with injuries, we didn’t have much support in the transfer window in terms of money — you can see the numbers — and that all the teams around us were all spending more money. It was very difficult to improve without that help.”
Benitez believes he and his staff helped make Anthony Gordon mentally stronger (Photo: Tony McArdle/Everton FC via Getty Images)
If he could live it again, would he do things differently? “Yes, but I won’t say what,” he straight-bats, although I get the impression he would have begun his clear-out much quicker. Nor is he casting off responsibility. “Obviously, the results were not good enough,” he says. “And, for sure, you make mistakes. What I can say is that in terms of working, my staff, the effort we put in and the quality of what they were doing, I was really pleased.”
He grasps satisfaction from the same thing as always. “I like seeing a player do something that you have been practising,” Rafa says. “Maybe it’s something like Anthony Gordon making a pass. Anthony was a surprise for us when we saw him in Florida in pre-season. We could see he had the potential. We worked with him on different things, spending time giving him what he needed. Mentally now, I think he’s stronger. That’s a good point for us.”
Has Rafa spoken to Frank Lampard, his replacement and his former player at Chelsea? “No, he didn’t call me,” he says, but he thinks the club will avoid relegation. “I genuinely hope they will stay up and I believe they will do it because they have enough quality in the squad,” he says. “They signed five new players in January and all the key injured players were back and although people like to compare, in reality, it was like a new Everton team. Everyone has to take their own responsibility.”
Rafa, Newcastle and those sliding doors. He was an astonishing appointment by Ashley just over six years ago, an ambitious, trophy-laden manager last seen at Real Madrid coming to a flatlining club wrestling with existential doubt. He dropped down to the Championship with them that summer, brought them back up and then with relationships fraying — inevitable under Ashley; trust me, I know — kept them in the Premier League for another two seasons.
It was such an opportunity for Ashley, to rehabilitate his reputation and to rebuild Newcastle and, of course, he rejected it. But, man, Rafa was adored by our supporters. He had arrived on Tyneside when we were at one of our lowest ebbs, he’d spoken about the club in the forgotten language of prestige and power, and he fought for everything. That thought was always there; if only Ashley realised what he had.
When Rafa left at the end of his contract in the summer of 2019, it felt like an unfinished story. He had been an integral part of Amanda Staveley’s first attempts to buy Newcastle and remained her No 1 choice to be the manager. He took a job in China — another risk to his own standing, to my mind — and then came back and for a little while, before the takeover (which was now backed by the wealth of Saudi Arabia), became snarled in legalese, it looked like the stars might align.
I’m told that when Ashley finally, thankfully, departed in October, a speculative call went out to Rafa or people close to him; Would he come back? But he was at Everton by then; he had committed himself and he does not break contracts. “The directors of Everton were worried about what the press were saying, but I told them, ‘Listen, if I give my word, I will try to do my best until the end’,” he says now.
Which is all very well, except that Everton’s commitment the other way turned out to be pretty flimsy; six and a bit months after arriving, he was out. Should he not have been more selfish? “I did what I had to do,” he says. “I did the same when I was at Newcastle and another club approached me but I said, ‘No, I will stay’.
“At the end of my time at Newcastle, I was waiting and waiting, but they didn’t sell the club. OK, fine. I had to leave. Later on, I was waiting again and they didn’t get permission (for the takeover to happen) and then Everton came in and I went there.”
Does part of him not wish he had stayed, that he had gritted his teeth and carried on under Ashley until the breakthrough happened? “I couldn’t,” he says. “I couldn’t stay. It wasn’t even a negotiation at the end — I don’t think they had any interest in keeping me there.”
Benitez led Newcastle back to the Premier League as Championship winners but left before last year’s takeover (Photo: Tony McArdleEverton FC via Getty Images)
The irony, the sliding door, is that Newcastle now would be ideal for him: the grand design, the building and improving and infrastructure. “Yes, I know what it means to create and develop a project properly,” he says. There is a shrug. “One of my main problems is that I think too much about the club. I don’t think about myself. I like to improve players and bring players who will stay and be an asset for the future.” He shrugs again. “You do what you have to do.”
But he is “really pleased for Newcastle, to see everybody enjoying it, because we were there for three years without any money and fighting for everything and now you can see them trying to do something different. They are doing well and it’s clear that Eddie (Howe) is doing a great job.
“When I talk about Newcastle, it will always be good. My relationship with the fans, the city, with our players, will always be part of me. That is forever. All I’m doing is enjoying their success from outside.”
It is strange to think of Rafa as an underdog, but his best work has often been against the odds, internal or external.
When I ask him when and where he was happiest, he does not stick to one answer but starts with Tenerife, where he won promotion to La Liga in 2001. “That was amazing,” he says. “Why? Because we were one of four teams fighting for three positions with Real Betis, Sevilla and Atletico Madrid, and we didn’t have any money. That was massive.
“Obviously, the Champions League with Liverpool was massive. To win the league with Valencia after 31 years and to do it twice (in three years), that was massive. To win any trophy at Napoli was massive. To stay in the Championship with Newcastle was a massive risk and then to get promoted and see what it meant to the fans…
“I cannot pick just one. These kinds of things, they all stay in your head.”
As well as his “13 trophies and three promotions — people forget about them,” he is just as proud of the “30 trophies I won at youth level.”
So where can he go to recapture that? Where does he end up next? He has had approaches from at least one national team, from clubs in Turkey and the Middle East, but none have been quite right.
“I love working in football,” he says. “The Premier League would mean staying close to my family, otherwise Europe if possible and after that, other options. But I’m not in a hurry now.” The last statement brings a snort of disbelief from a friend sitting close by and Rafa smiles, too. He gets it.
“To talk about a project means nothing now — they say three years and it could be three weeks!” he says. “The problem I have is that I want to compete and have a chance to win, not just coach for the sake of it. Success isn’t just about winning a trophy, it can be to get the maximum from your team. After being promoted at Newcastle we finished 10th (the next season), and that was a great success. You have to go to the next step later on.
“I like to compete. If you look at international football, you can’t compare the stats with the past. It used to be that getting 20 caps meant you were an amazing player. Now you can win 100 caps quite easily, because you play Andorra, Luxembourg, San Marino, and score three goals in every game. For me, it’s always about analysing things in context. I’m not interested in the idea of losing a game 3-0 and being happy because it wasn’t 4-0.”
From a personal perceptive, I do hope that Rafa takes his time and properly recharges his batteries. He is way too good to jump at the first half-decent offer and he has so much to give, but I also understand that the compulsion within him is strong. He is an all-in kind of manager, an all-kind of man and my use of gambling terminology is deliberate because there have been little gambles everywhere. Nobody can win every bet.
“Even Inter Milan was a risk, because we had zero money,” he says. “You go there having confidence in your coaching ability, your staff, your experience, but it’s true sometimes that you are thinking, ‘This is a good option’, and after you can see something is wrong and so you have to try and manage it. But football in general is more complicated now. Players are different, for the owners it’s more like a business, and agents have more power.”
Everton was a risk that did not pay off and so, instead of being in the heart of it, Rafa will be watching the Merseyside derby tomorrow (Sunday) on TV, itching to be back out there, analysing every aspect, updating his software and, no doubt, paying particular attention to the short goal kicks.
In the red corner, his old flame. In the blue, the difficult break-up.
Who does he want to win?
“As a professional, it is always better not to say; ‘Oh, I go with this one or that one’,” he says. You can understand his logic, his drive to work and do his best, to give himself like he always does, but on this occasion, in this city, with his history, maybe he should have stuck with one and ignored the other.
That’s Rafa, though. Never stop.
Interviewed by Shearer...
It will come as a surprise to precisely nobody that Rafa Benitez is looking for a way back in.
“Am I missing management? Yes,” he says. “I’m watching and analysing matches, but it’s totally different from being involved. I wasn’t happy with the way it finished at Everton, because in the second part of the season, at all my teams, we’ve always done well as a staff, managing squads, controlling the load of training. So missing this part of the season is even worse.”
When Rafa talks about analysing, that isn’t code for sitting at home feeling aggrieved. He has brought a memory stick to our interview, the first he’s given since his dismissal three months ago. It contains the software he has been honing and refreshing for 35 years, an enormous database of players and scouting reports which now includes his training sessions stretching back decades, complete with a search function that allows him to pinpoint individual drills and exercises.
He retreats to his earliest days in management, “when my daughters were babies and I’d be holding one of them and a bottle of milk at 1am, doing my video clips, and then at 4am it would be the same, feeding them and doing the videos. I have people who can help me now, an analyst, fitness coach and sports scientist. They are specialists and I keep them busy all the time, but in terms of my dedication, it’s the same”.
And perhaps that image — cradling a child on his knee, a laptop screen in front of him — paints a slightly different portrait of the man we see on the touchline, the relentless hoarder of details, a fella who can look at data and minutiae and translate it into patterns of play, goals and victories and trophies, this stirrer of great emotion who keeps his own shrouded. There is a very human side to Rafael Benitez, as you will come to see. There is humour and there is pathos, too.
Benitez tells Shearer of his new obsession over goal kicks and his controversial time in charge of Everton
His latest obsession? “The thing I am doing now is analysing goal kicks,” Rafa says, and I can’t help but smile in response.
“I’m really surprised. People have started playing from the back. I watched a game in the (fifth tier) National League the other day and they were doing it. You see a lot of teams conceding goals, who put themselves at risk. So me and my staff are watching every game, watching teams at the top, middle and bottom of the table to see how they play.
“If they play short, is it short and then short again, short and medium, or short and long passes? What does it mean for Paris Saint-Germain to play short? For Chelsea? We are analysing all these things. I’m not saying teams shouldn’t do it because being allowed players in the box changes the approach, but I can tell you, there are not too many situations when they play short and score a goal. Not too many.”
And this is classic Benitez, this diver to the depths of football’s technicalities, this man with a ferocious belief in his capacity to make footballers better. His six months at Everton might have been bruising, but it impossible to think of him with his feet up, pausing, stopping, doing anything else. He turned 62 a week ago, but “I’d love to still be managing at 70,” he says. “I hope so. If I am healthy enough, I would like to do it. My wife might not agree, but I would love to.
“I am someone who loves football and loves his job. The things I did well when I was a young coach at Real Madrid’s academy was to improve players, to work really hard with them, to see how they progress, to see how the team grows. I’ve had the same feelings all my life — at Newcastle United, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Liverpool, Napoli. I love to coach, and if your team is winning and you see players growing, well, I’m really pleased with that.”
And if they are not winning? Like at Goodison Park, when there is anger and dismay and disappointment? “It’s part of the job sometimes,” he says. “It doesn’t mean that it’s not affecting me, but I’m a strong character and I’m very competitive. I was convinced that we could do well at Everton. We knew the players, we had knowledge of the division and the opposition. I’m still convinced.
“I know we could have made it better.”
In another version of this season, Rafa would have been back on the touchline at Anfield this weekend. But as a Blue, not a Red. He is no stranger to that away dugout — he has fretted and tinkered in there with Chelsea and Newcastle — but the thought of him managing Everton still jars. He was a dream-maker for Liverpool, the miracle-worker of Istanbul 2005 with a gilded legacy and it is hard to understand how he could ever have found reconciliation with their rivals.
I’m sitting with Rafa at a hotel in the north west of England — the very place, funnily enough, where Kenny Dalglish and I met when he was persuading me to join Blackburn Rovers from Southampton half a lifetime ago. During my four years at Blackburn, I lived in Liverpool and still have pals there, and I spoke to them last summer when Rafa’s name was being linked to Everton. Every one of them said, “There’s no way he’ll take that job. No way.”
In his own mind, Rafa’s call was simple, logical. Merseyside is still his home, he is embedded there, “and I signed because of my connection to the city, to give something back, to make sure we had two strong teams,” he says. “I have a lot of friends who are Evertonians and I knew their ideas well, what the team needed, what was going on, what they were missing and what they wanted to see each week. It was a challenge, and I like a challenge.”
This is what I mean by pathos. Rafa is far from naive — a favourite saying of his is “football is a lie” — but a theme of his career veers towards self-harm; a compulsion to work twinned with a soaring belief that his methods will win over erratic owners and soothe hostile fans. It took him to Chelsea, to Newcastle, Mike Ashley and the Championship, and it led him to Everton, becoming only the second manager — and the first since the 1890s — to cross the Merseyside divide.
Did he not have second thoughts when banners were posted near his home saying, “We know where you live.”
“I also had friends telling me the majority of Everton fans will say, ‘OK — maybe it’s not ideal, but he’s a manager with experience and wants to do well’,” he responds. “Because I lived there, a lot of people understood that I wanted to succeed more than anyone, so I would give everything. It would never change my mind if a few people were saying negative things.”
Benitez managed Everton against Liverpool but will not be on the touchline for this weekend’s Merseyside derby (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
In retrospect, though, surely it was the wrong decision?
“At the beginning, I don’t think so,” he says. “You have to make decisions in context. Afterwards, with hindsight, it’s easy to have an opinion, but with the conversations I had with Everton and the ambition they told me they had, it was right. Afterwards, well, we didn’t have the money, we had injuries and other problems, and you can see what was going on. But I still think they have the potential to be good, to be great.”
Everton are a brilliant, historic club, Goodison is one of the game’s great, old arenas and their takeover a few years ago gave them injections of cash and ambition, but that potential feels very distant today. From the outside looking in, they’re a ****-show, a monument to waste and dysfunction and a model of how not to do it, spending something between £500 million and £600 million on new players since Farhad Moshiri came on board in 2016.
And look at them. One place and one point above the bottom three with seven games left, burning through managers like they’ve burned through all that money, recently announcing losses of £372 million over the past three years, threatened with their first relegation since 1951 but with a new £500 million stadium being built, while being obliged to suspend their sponsorship deals with companies backed by Alisher Usmanov, the sanctioned Russian oligarch who is a long-time business associate of Moshiri’s. ‘Mess’ does not begin to cover it.
The thing is that if Rafa had not been called Rafa, he might have been seen as the perfect candidate to steer Everton through.
He is a club-builder, skilled at eking out the most from his players, bringing balance to his squad, turning potential into clout. I wish their supporters could have seen the manager who brought hope to Newcastle, my club, five or so years ago or could listen to the smart, funny man sitting opposite me now, but I don’t quite get how success was ever really possible at Everton. As soon as things turned…
There is something I should say at this point.
For contractual reasons, there is plenty that Rafa cannot discuss and although I ask about Moshiri, Usmanov and other things, they are conversational dead-ends. Our chat is more reflective but that’s fine with me, because he is fascinating company. When he first arrives at the hotel, before we turn the tape on, he just talks — for an hour. The words spilling out of him. He has this vivid intensity. You yearn to soak it up.
The cliche would have it that Rafa can’t do love, that he wants to turn his players into robots. The truth is far more subtle, that he expresses his love through work, that arm draped around the shoulder at the final whistle, whispering in the ear, always believing you can do more, give more and striving to unlock it, giving everything of himself in the process. And something most people don’t know; his early moments at Everton concealed crushing personal pain.
Last summer, Rafa’s mum, Rosario Maudes, died of COVID-19. She was 87. “So many people have had problems like this, so maybe nobody will be interested,” he says when I bring it up, gingerly. He is matter-of-fact and does not deploy emotional language, never has, which doesn’t mean he cannot feel it or show it. His voice thickens. And in a cool room, beads of perspiration suddenly break out on his forehead.
“In personal terms, Everton was quite difficult for me,” he says, “but as a professional, I was fully concentrated and focused and always trying to do my best. That’s the main thing. I knew it was impossible to change the situation, so you have to deal with it.”
Did he manage to get back to Spain? “Yes, I stayed with my family and was able to see my mother,” he said. “The doctor had told my brother that they couldn’t do anything because of her age and we said they had to try, that you cannot do nothing. They tried different techniques but after a couple of days she died, and that’s it. I was there at the end — watching through the window, because we couldn’t go in.
“She recognised me, but after that… I could see very clearly it was a question of time. It was quite difficult, because my sister had COVID at the same time and was in hospital with both lungs affected, and we were trying to keep her fine and upbeat and my mum was dying. At least with the funeral, it was quick. It’s not like here, where you wait 15 days. We sorted it out, had the funeral and came back. In this aspect, it’s much better.”
His mother was a big football fan, a big Real Madrid fan. When Rafa signed for them as a kid, winning school competitions, captain of his team, “she took me to training, staying until late in the evening and then going back. She was always following me. She was quite passionate.”
The words are slower now, more deliberate. But back when it happened? Football rumbles on regardless and Rafa rolled with it, no public excuses, no plea for time or empathy, no letting up, no pause, no time to wait. His mantra, then and always: Don’t stop.
Rafa’s history with Liverpool was one thing, Everton’s difficulties another and if it is not quite right to say he never had a chance or that the rug was pulled from under him, then circumstances were unkind. They had finished 10th under Carlo Ancelotti a year ago, albeit after a run of three wins in their last 12 league matches and a final-day 5-0 hammering by Manchester City, but Rafa believed that “with a certain investment they could aspire to something more”.
Did he know there would be nothing to spend when he signed his three-year contract? “No. No, no, no, no, no. At the beginning, it was a massive project with the potential to spend some money,” he says. “It changed when we couldn’t sell players. It’s difficult when people are on big contracts and nobody wants to buy them, so we didn’t have that option. We signed five players for less than £2 million and we worked with what we had.” That £2 million is worth emphasising.
Their start was good. There were four wins in the opening five matches in all competitions, joint top of the league with 10 points out of 12. Andros Townsend and Demarai Gray, “wingers with speed, quality and energy, what the fans wanted,” Rafa says, began in blistering form. “People won’t remember it now but in the first months, the team were doing so well. There were comments in the newspapers like ‘amazing, fantastic, he’s doing the right things’.”
And then injuries struck, a chronic frailty which pre-dated Rafa’s arrival. Richarlison missed a chunk of matches, Dominic Calvert-Lewin even more and, with James Rodriguez gone and Gylfi Sigurdsson unavailable, Everton were blunted. “It was key players through the whole spine of the team,” he says. “That made things more difficult and started the problems with results on the field.” There were heavy defeats to Watford, Manchester City and, yes, Liverpool.
Off the pitch, Rafa attempted to impose structure. He filled technical positions with people he knew. In early December, Marcel Brands left his role as the director of football. The following month, Lucas Digne, the left-back, who was viewed as a difficult character, joined Aston Villa for £25 million on January 13, freeing up resources for new signings. What makes no sense — none at all — is Everton allowing Rafa to win those battles and then sacking him on January 16.
For balance, there was a damaging sequence of one win (two if you include squeezing past Hull City in the FA Cup after extra time) in his last 14 fixtures and I guess the point is that Rafa had no hinterland at Everton. “The hope was to recover the injured players and balance the team in January, but there was no patience,” he says. “They fired us when we were six points from relegation and six from 10th, with two games in hand (on some of the sides between them and the top half). All the important players were back.”
Was he surprised by the hostility he encountered? “At the end, yes,” he says. “I was really pleased with the support at the beginning, but yes, I was surprised because we were giving everything. We were working so hard, a lot of hours — I’ve done that at all my clubs — we were honest and my staff were incredibly dedicated. I was surprised also that, when I left, the club got rid of some of them.
“But I cannot control the emotions of other people. The only thing I can do is give the message that we were doing our best, we were unlucky with injuries, we didn’t have much support in the transfer window in terms of money — you can see the numbers — and that all the teams around us were all spending more money. It was very difficult to improve without that help.”
Benitez believes he and his staff helped make Anthony Gordon mentally stronger (Photo: Tony McArdle/Everton FC via Getty Images)
If he could live it again, would he do things differently? “Yes, but I won’t say what,” he straight-bats, although I get the impression he would have begun his clear-out much quicker. Nor is he casting off responsibility. “Obviously, the results were not good enough,” he says. “And, for sure, you make mistakes. What I can say is that in terms of working, my staff, the effort we put in and the quality of what they were doing, I was really pleased.”
He grasps satisfaction from the same thing as always. “I like seeing a player do something that you have been practising,” Rafa says. “Maybe it’s something like Anthony Gordon making a pass. Anthony was a surprise for us when we saw him in Florida in pre-season. We could see he had the potential. We worked with him on different things, spending time giving him what he needed. Mentally now, I think he’s stronger. That’s a good point for us.”
Has Rafa spoken to Frank Lampard, his replacement and his former player at Chelsea? “No, he didn’t call me,” he says, but he thinks the club will avoid relegation. “I genuinely hope they will stay up and I believe they will do it because they have enough quality in the squad,” he says. “They signed five new players in January and all the key injured players were back and although people like to compare, in reality, it was like a new Everton team. Everyone has to take their own responsibility.”
Rafa, Newcastle and those sliding doors. He was an astonishing appointment by Ashley just over six years ago, an ambitious, trophy-laden manager last seen at Real Madrid coming to a flatlining club wrestling with existential doubt. He dropped down to the Championship with them that summer, brought them back up and then with relationships fraying — inevitable under Ashley; trust me, I know — kept them in the Premier League for another two seasons.
It was such an opportunity for Ashley, to rehabilitate his reputation and to rebuild Newcastle and, of course, he rejected it. But, man, Rafa was adored by our supporters. He had arrived on Tyneside when we were at one of our lowest ebbs, he’d spoken about the club in the forgotten language of prestige and power, and he fought for everything. That thought was always there; if only Ashley realised what he had.
When Rafa left at the end of his contract in the summer of 2019, it felt like an unfinished story. He had been an integral part of Amanda Staveley’s first attempts to buy Newcastle and remained her No 1 choice to be the manager. He took a job in China — another risk to his own standing, to my mind — and then came back and for a little while, before the takeover (which was now backed by the wealth of Saudi Arabia), became snarled in legalese, it looked like the stars might align.
I’m told that when Ashley finally, thankfully, departed in October, a speculative call went out to Rafa or people close to him; Would he come back? But he was at Everton by then; he had committed himself and he does not break contracts. “The directors of Everton were worried about what the press were saying, but I told them, ‘Listen, if I give my word, I will try to do my best until the end’,” he says now.
Which is all very well, except that Everton’s commitment the other way turned out to be pretty flimsy; six and a bit months after arriving, he was out. Should he not have been more selfish? “I did what I had to do,” he says. “I did the same when I was at Newcastle and another club approached me but I said, ‘No, I will stay’.
“At the end of my time at Newcastle, I was waiting and waiting, but they didn’t sell the club. OK, fine. I had to leave. Later on, I was waiting again and they didn’t get permission (for the takeover to happen) and then Everton came in and I went there.”
Does part of him not wish he had stayed, that he had gritted his teeth and carried on under Ashley until the breakthrough happened? “I couldn’t,” he says. “I couldn’t stay. It wasn’t even a negotiation at the end — I don’t think they had any interest in keeping me there.”
Benitez led Newcastle back to the Premier League as Championship winners but left before last year’s takeover (Photo: Tony McArdleEverton FC via Getty Images)
The irony, the sliding door, is that Newcastle now would be ideal for him: the grand design, the building and improving and infrastructure. “Yes, I know what it means to create and develop a project properly,” he says. There is a shrug. “One of my main problems is that I think too much about the club. I don’t think about myself. I like to improve players and bring players who will stay and be an asset for the future.” He shrugs again. “You do what you have to do.”
But he is “really pleased for Newcastle, to see everybody enjoying it, because we were there for three years without any money and fighting for everything and now you can see them trying to do something different. They are doing well and it’s clear that Eddie (Howe) is doing a great job.
“When I talk about Newcastle, it will always be good. My relationship with the fans, the city, with our players, will always be part of me. That is forever. All I’m doing is enjoying their success from outside.”
It is strange to think of Rafa as an underdog, but his best work has often been against the odds, internal or external.
When I ask him when and where he was happiest, he does not stick to one answer but starts with Tenerife, where he won promotion to La Liga in 2001. “That was amazing,” he says. “Why? Because we were one of four teams fighting for three positions with Real Betis, Sevilla and Atletico Madrid, and we didn’t have any money. That was massive.
“Obviously, the Champions League with Liverpool was massive. To win the league with Valencia after 31 years and to do it twice (in three years), that was massive. To win any trophy at Napoli was massive. To stay in the Championship with Newcastle was a massive risk and then to get promoted and see what it meant to the fans…
“I cannot pick just one. These kinds of things, they all stay in your head.”
As well as his “13 trophies and three promotions — people forget about them,” he is just as proud of the “30 trophies I won at youth level.”
So where can he go to recapture that? Where does he end up next? He has had approaches from at least one national team, from clubs in Turkey and the Middle East, but none have been quite right.
“I love working in football,” he says. “The Premier League would mean staying close to my family, otherwise Europe if possible and after that, other options. But I’m not in a hurry now.” The last statement brings a snort of disbelief from a friend sitting close by and Rafa smiles, too. He gets it.
“To talk about a project means nothing now — they say three years and it could be three weeks!” he says. “The problem I have is that I want to compete and have a chance to win, not just coach for the sake of it. Success isn’t just about winning a trophy, it can be to get the maximum from your team. After being promoted at Newcastle we finished 10th (the next season), and that was a great success. You have to go to the next step later on.
“I like to compete. If you look at international football, you can’t compare the stats with the past. It used to be that getting 20 caps meant you were an amazing player. Now you can win 100 caps quite easily, because you play Andorra, Luxembourg, San Marino, and score three goals in every game. For me, it’s always about analysing things in context. I’m not interested in the idea of losing a game 3-0 and being happy because it wasn’t 4-0.”
From a personal perceptive, I do hope that Rafa takes his time and properly recharges his batteries. He is way too good to jump at the first half-decent offer and he has so much to give, but I also understand that the compulsion within him is strong. He is an all-in kind of manager, an all-kind of man and my use of gambling terminology is deliberate because there have been little gambles everywhere. Nobody can win every bet.
“Even Inter Milan was a risk, because we had zero money,” he says. “You go there having confidence in your coaching ability, your staff, your experience, but it’s true sometimes that you are thinking, ‘This is a good option’, and after you can see something is wrong and so you have to try and manage it. But football in general is more complicated now. Players are different, for the owners it’s more like a business, and agents have more power.”
Everton was a risk that did not pay off and so, instead of being in the heart of it, Rafa will be watching the Merseyside derby tomorrow (Sunday) on TV, itching to be back out there, analysing every aspect, updating his software and, no doubt, paying particular attention to the short goal kicks.
In the red corner, his old flame. In the blue, the difficult break-up.
Who does he want to win?
“As a professional, it is always better not to say; ‘Oh, I go with this one or that one’,” he says. You can understand his logic, his drive to work and do his best, to give himself like he always does, but on this occasion, in this city, with his history, maybe he should have stuck with one and ignored the other.
That’s Rafa, though. Never stop.
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