Enjoy the way you play

I love football now just as much as I did when I was playing the game for fun as a five-year-old kid.

By the time I was playing in my late teens, it was already on my mind to be a coach, but it happened much faster than I expected. My coaching journey ever since has been a beautiful experience.

I started to coach when I was 20, with players who were only two or three years younger than me. Now, just over 20 years later, I still enjoy it every day. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to do something that I love. It is very special to have had the opportunity to coach in some fantastic countries outside my native Spain, and experience different cultures.

With every experience, at every club and at every stage of my career, I have developed as a person. I always try to look at the positive side of every experience, even if a result has not gone the way I would have wished. That said, I am proud I have never left a club because of results. Rather, on the rare occasion things didn’t work out at a club, it was because of not being aligned with new ownership on the way we wanted to work.

You see, I am a person who is very clear on my values. That is very important for me, and it has been the real driver of my career. For me, being honest is very important. When I was a player, it was something I really valued from a manager – someone who could be honest with me, who could say what they thought.

One of the reasons I became a manager was also to be able to prepare players for what they could face in a game. When I was a player, it was frustrating when a manager would come just before a game, or at half-time, and suddenly ask us for certain things, when they’d had a long week to prepare for this kind of situation. As a manager, I want my players to have a clear understanding of what I expect from them. It is also my job to help them be able to adapt to the situations they will face.

“I felt the joy of that Cruyff way of playing. It moved me”

There was one manager who left a huge impression on me. I grew up in the town of Sant Cugat del Vallès, just outside of Barcelona, at the time of Johan Cruyff’s FC Barcelona ‘Dream Team’. What a privilege it was to be able to watch them.

Cruyff had been a Barcelona player, and is one of the most influential players in the history of the game. But when he came back as manager in the late 1980s, his impact was immediate. Not only on the results, but also on the mentality and way of playing.

When Cruyff started to teach the positional game, it was a big moment in Barcelona’s history. He also taught what it meant to have a real winning mentality, to focus on your own team, and to have this brand of attacking football that entertains people.

My first experience in a football stadium was visiting the Camp Nou to see Barcelona against Atlético de Madrid. It was a game I will never forget. I felt the joy of that Cruyff way of playing – it moved me. It’s definitely a way of playing that, in my opinion, can give players the best tools to express themselves, to play with a lot of freedom, and to develop their game understanding.

It was a very influential grounding for me. Later, when I got the opportunity to go to the Netherlands as part of a coaching placement at Ajax, I learned more about this philosophy and way of playing.

As a manager, I have now coached in Spain, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and England. It is always a challenge to try to play in a way that perhaps the players haven’t been familiar with before. For instance, Scandinavian football – especially Swedish football – has a tradition based on English football. In Sweden, they had the influence of Roy Hodgson and Bob Houghton. That was very zonal, very 4-4-2, very direct football. In recent years, though, that has been changing.

“We had to be very clear on our identity, to not change just because of one, or two or three bad results”

When I arrived in these countries, I had to understand these influences. For me, it’s always about the balance between how many ideas the coach wants to give to the players, while at the same time understanding the culture and the background of these players – the impact that all of this has on the game. So from my side I learned a lot, but at the same time I felt happy that the players could develop, learning a new way of playing and of understanding the game.

When I spoke with Queens Park Rangers about becoming head coach, I was really excited by the project, as well as the history of the club. I was attracted by the faith they showed in me as a coach, too – in what I was doing, what my ideas are, and what my identity is as a coach. It was a good fit. I feel very connected to the club’s history of technical players and attacking football.

When I arrived, the team had only two wins from 14 Championship games, and were six points from safety. The priority was to recover the confidence of the players and to create an identity. Usually, when there is a change of a manager in the middle of the season, it’s because something is not working well and the club decided to make a big change. This can have a big impact not only on the way of playing, but also on the team dynamics.

In that sense, I have to say that the players were fantastic from day one. They really helped us to implement our ideas, to let us help them as much as we could. The main reason for the change in results was thanks to the players, because they were really, really good from the first training session. They helped us implement new ideas, to create not only the football principles, but also team spirit, in terms of the way we want to be as a team and a club. That was a very important part of achieving what we did in the 2023/24 season.

After three wins and three draws in my first seven games, there came a period around Christmas with a lot of games in a row where unfortunately we had some injuries. We were not playing at our highest level. We know that the Championship is a very intense league, and other teams – our rivals around us – started to perform well and pick up points.

At that time, it was very important to recover the confidence of the players, but also we know that this league is relentless. The key – the only answer – was to be as relentless as the league is. We had to be resilient, to accept that while some good moments would happen, there would also be some bad moments. With this in mind, we had to be very clear on our identity, to not change just because of one, or two or three bad results. We will always try to develop and have faith in what we are doing.

“I want the QPR fans to be proud of the way we play”

The Championship is a very fun, very intense league – not only because of the amount of games you play, but also how the games are played. This is because of the mix between traditional English football and the way many teams are now developing. It’s definitely a challenging league in the sense that every game can present a very different kind of opposition. So you need to prepare for each game in a very specific way.

At the same time, because the Championship is so intense, with its schedule of 46 fixtures, you need to be very good at developing the team while you recover from game to game. There is not so much time to train on the pitch.

I’m enjoying every moment. The atmosphere in the stadiums is incredible, and we can really feel the passion of the fans having an influence on the games.

The ambition is always to get better and, at QPR, we want to be the best version of ourselves. We want to make sure that we play every week, if possible, better than the last week. Accepting that there will be challenges on the road, that football is not just a straight line. We need to work hard to achieve the things that we want to achieve.

But definitely the club has a big potential. I want the QPR fans to be proud of the way we play. I want the fans to remember that we were always a team that tried to attack, that tried to be dominant, and to be brave in our approach to the games. And for the players to enjoy the process as well. That they enjoy playing for this club – one that has a clear identity and a big history.