Julen Lopetegui: ‘Going to the World Cup just for the sake of going is stupid’

When the Qatari national team’s flight from Dublin touched down in Los Angeles at 2.12pm on 30 May there was applause on board the Boeing 777‑300ER. For the 26 players arriving in America, this represents the first time they have qualified for a World Cup. For the coach who has led them there it is the third, but this time is different; this time he will get a game.

“Football didn’t owe me anything,” says Julen Lopetegui in the dining room at the team hotel in Montecito, Santa Barbara, yet maybe he owed himself a moment like this. And, he says, if there were many reasons to answer the call from Doha 12 months ago, the simplest stood out most of all: this is the World Cup.

The first time Lopetegui went to a World Cup was 32 years ago, also in America. The last time was Russia in 2018. In 1994, he did not play a minute: Spain’s third-choice goalkeeper, he never expected to and, the way he tells it, he might not even have been able to if they had asked.

Eight years ago, he arrived as Spain’s head coach, unbeaten in more than two years in charge, but was sacked one day before the tournament started after agreeing to coach Real Madrid once it was over.

Now, here he is again, third time lucky. If lucky is the word. Getting a game is one thing, winning a game another. Qatar may be the weakest team at the tournament, their preparation hit by bombings and a lack of competition. Lopetegui, though, is determined to compete.

The game that secured Spain’s qualification in 1994 was against Denmark the previous November. “I was back-up goalkeeper to Zubi [Andoni Zubizarreta], but I suffered a back injury a couple of weeks before,” Lopetegui says, slipping into an impression of the coach, Javier Clemente, as he tells the story.

“I had two herniated discs. I rang Javi and said: ‘Javi, sorry, I’m not in a fit state to be called up because if I have to play I don’t think I can’. And he says, very Clemente: ‘Bah, don’t be daft. Like an old man’s going to get flu on a Monday.’ I shouldn’t worry; I wasn’t going to be needed. I said: ‘Yes, but if he does get flu I can’t come on.’ ‘Right, I’ll call that Santi kid from Celta’.”

“And then,” Lopetegui says, laughing, “what had to happen, happened. Clemente called up Santi Cañizares and, although the old man didn’t get flu, Zubi did get sent off, 10 minutes in, the only red in his [international] career. Santi comes on, plays very well, wins the right to be No 2, later No 1.

“Although I wasn’t playing well at Logroñés, struggling with the injury, Javi called me up as third-choice as a reward for that gesture. I couldn’t enjoy it much because I was living with a lot of pain, but I did what I could, knowing I wasn’t going to play and supporting everyone, contributing my bit.”

Lopetegui is one of three coaches at the World Cup, along with Hong Myung-bo and Ronald Koeman, who went to USA 94 as players and the only coach who used to be a goalkeeper. He finds it difficult to list any goalkeeping coaches: “Nuno [Espírito Santo], [Dino] Zoff, [Walter] Zenga, [Ricardo] La Volpe …”

Which is when he cracks up and says: “But if you’re a sub goalkeeper you watch most games from next to the manager.”

Not just any manager either: after USA 94 Lopetegui joined Barcelona, where he was also a backup, occupying a place on the bench near Johan Cruyff and Cruyff, he says, was unique, even if “there was no point asking Johan how to defend”.

Cruyff awakened a curiosity in his players, Lopetegui says. “There’s a photo from the Super Cup final, one of the few games I played, and nine of that starting XI became coaches.”

There were other elements too: a Spanish footballing culture and coaching structure that emphasises the collective and the Basque milieu that led him, Mikel Arteta, Xabi Alonso and Andoni Iraola to emerge from the same, tiny province. The son of a champion stone-lifter, there was his own family’s sporting heritage, too.

All of which took Lopetegui into coaching and the biggest honour of all: leading Spain into a World Cup. But then, at dawn and with less than a day to go, that was taken from him in one of the most shocking stories the competition has produced. Sacked by the since disgraced Spanish federation president, Luis Rubiales, Lopetegui flew back to Madrid alone, leaving behind the team he had built, his dream shattered. In his absence, Spain collapsed. “It was the saddest day of my life,” Lopetegui said.

Now, via Real Madrid, Sevilla, Wolves and West Ham, here he is. Back at a World Cup.

The mind is inevitably drawn to Russia, to what might have been, towards some kind of nostalgia. “Nostalgia?” Lopetegui says. “No. There’s no time for that. But you think about it. I’ve lived many wonderful experiences, but, yes, that one too.

“I haven’t stopped working since, you don’t look back, and that experience gives you a thicker skin. You learn from them, too. But if you asked me: ‘Would you do the same again?’ One hundred per cent. Why? Because we always took what we thought were the right decisions from a position of deep respect for our responsibilities.”

An opportunity is returned at last. It is not the same, but it is something. “We came for two main reasons: to take on a huge challenge no one had done [qualifying for the World Cup, Qatar were in automatically as hosts in 2022] and to test ourselves in a very different context,” Lopetegui says. “And, of course, there was that feeling, the hope of being at a World Cup, which we could have had with another national team.

“We could have gone out straight away against Iran, the Brazil of [the region], but we won 1-0, which gave us time for Emirates [UAE] and Oman. We had to see what we could do, not what we wanted to do.

“You’re used to different players, intensity, qualities. That was an important shock for us when we started. Qatar is a country of 300,000 people; maybe 10,000 play. Against us, the Emirates had maybe one starter who was from the Emirates: the rest were Brazilians, Portuguese, Poles … we beat them. You have to improve quality, but maintain that essence.

“The biggest difference we found was in the level of competitiveness, the pace, the games they’re playing. We’re maybe the only national team [here] with lots of players who have only played four, five times this year. Our league has a lot of foreigners so there are 19, 20, 21-year-old players not getting the opportunity. The goalkeepers are all Qatari so often it’s as little as two outfield players.”

In March, two planned friendlies were cancelled when Iran bombed Qatar. “Those games would have been useful, especially to define our gameplans,” Lopetegui says. “We had to make do with sessions among ourselves and there were three weeks when players couldn’t train at all because they weren’t allowed to leave home. The physical preparation wasn’t ideal.

“It was unpleasant, unlike anything I have ever experienced. You’re waiting on the alerts, hanging on your phone. You get a message saying don’t leave home, another when the risk has dropped. Stay in safe areas, indoors, away from glass.

“Most of the bombs fell where the US bases are so you felt more or less safe away from there, but your family is saying: ‘Come back.’ First, you can’t: for 10, 15 days the airspace was shut. Then I didn’t think it was right.