It was sarcastic to start with, Manuel Pellegrini says, but that didn’t last long. When he arrived in Argentina, a cup winner in Chile and league champion in Ecuador but largely unknown there, San Lorenzo de Almagro were in a state. Coco Basile had pushed out the priest who would become Pope Francis and as he recalls it, an unloved ground lacked stands in all four corners, their real home long since sold to Carrefour. The joke ran that they had a supermarket, not a stadium.
One did, anyway. The other had Pellegrini arriving for that very reason. He was The Engineer they didn’t have, someone to finally finish the place. The name stuck. “It ended up being admiring, recognition,” he says. That season San Lorenzo became clausura champions and the Copa Mercosur followed, their first international trophy. He won another clausura with River Plate two years later then crossed the Atlantic. He never went back. That was 19 years ago. On Saturday night, he takes Real Betis into the fifth cup final in their history, against Valencia.
Pellegrini graduated in civil engineering in 1979 while playing at Universidad de Chile, where he made more than 450 appearances in 13 years, earning an international cap against Brazil in 1986. It was hard then, and he had to put final exams back 18 months; it would be impossible now. “These days you’d have to choose: the demands are too great in football and academically.” Combining coaching and engineering already was. Which is why none of this should have happened.
“It was absolutely clear management wasn’t going to be my path,” Pellegrini says. “I always intended to be a footballer but when I finished playing my plan was engineering. I graduated at 24, played to 34. I had started a small company, bought some land, constructed houses. But I had the fortune to meet Fernando Riera, who coached Chile at the 62 World Cup, Eusébio’s Benfica, in Mexico, France, many places. He awoke in me a possibility I didn’t know I had.”
Not that all the study was wasted. Nor, indeed, did it stop. “Engineering has helped me a lot,” Pellegrini says. “It’s a very precise discipline, demanding, teaching you to think with a certain logic, sequence, an order of priority.” Even if players aren’t pieces. “Managing the group is the most important part. I’ve always tried to show them they have someone there qualified to help them. That’s why I’ve continued to study, to improve my understanding, including of areas away from football.”
Pellegrini outlines a method built on talent – precisely what he says he lacked as a player – building a structure that affords certain freedoms, concerned that football is “headed towards denying invention; you shouldn’t constrain talented players”. He talks of a desire “to respect a profession that’s well paid so that people are entertained and don’t think ‘This is boring I’m going’ after 10 minutes”, where 1-0s sustain you only so long. “I can’t limit David Silva by saying boot the ball from our area to theirs.” He talks too of a conscious search for calm, the metamorphosis that made him the manager he is not the player he was.
There’s a smile at memories of Joaquín and Santi Cazorla in the Málaga dressing room, the revelation that he tried to take Cazorla to Real Madrid and West Ham, and a warmth for the footballers he worked with. James Milner was “a pleasure to coach”, and there’s satisfaction seeing men such as Enzo Maresca, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Júlio Baptista, Martín Demichelis, Diego Forlán and Javier Calleja coaching and citing him as a mentor “like Riera was for me”.
All of which makes up a 34-year managerial career, 50 years in the game, justifying the decision to construct teams instead of buildings. “I’m totally convinced it was the right decision,” he says, and then laughs. “And maybe the engineering world is happy I chose football too. I tried to do both but it was impossible. If you’d said that I’d work abroad continuously for 22 years in six countries, have the career I’ve had …
“I’ve coached the biggest club in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina and Spain, perhaps England too. There’s another style of coach that only takes big clubs because they can [win], but I won’t deny myself the challenge, the personal satisfaction, of managing different clubs. The best league is England, without doubt, and the best football is played in Spain.”
Perhaps no satisfaction matches the first European destination, Pellegrini’s most lasting project. “Villarreal had just been promoted and the target was not to go down again. We finished second in the league, third, fifth twice, we played a Champions League semi-final, a quarter-final, quarter-finals of the Europa League. If I’d turned up saying that, they would have locked me in an asylum.” But it happened, a missed penalty denying them a shot at a European Cup final.
He lasted a season at Madrid, a feeling that it wasn’t really his kind of place although he set a points record. Quiet, no desire to occupy the spotlight, that charming man as City fans had it, a judgment quickly confirmed in conversation, he is the most successful coach in Málaga’s history. And he has the highest win percentage in Betis’s, taking a team that had got dangerously close to relegation, finishing 15th, to sixth in his first season and now fifth, plus a cup final 17 years on. He won the league with City, personal pride undimmed by a sense that it has gone unrecognised, perhaps because of an idea that he was a placeholder – a role of which he remains remarkably accepting. Only at West Ham did he feel he had failed.
“I was approached by City to tell me Pep Guardiola would be coach [but] if for whatever reason he didn’t want to it was me,” he recalls. “They’d worked with Pep before. Under no circumstances would I feel disrespected. I had an offer from Paris Saint-Germain but decided on City. I knew my contract would be three years or until Pep decided. That was absolutely logical and in three years I never feared not completing my contract.”
It seems striking to accept a job with an expiry date. “Every coach has an expiry date,” Pellegrini says. He laughs. “And an expiry date that gets closer according to results. I never doubted I’d be there three years. You appreciate far more people who have conviction, a clear route, than those changing coach every 10 games, paying a fortune to get rid of them.
“I knew I was leaving four or five months ahead. We reached the semi-final and I have no doubt that if we’d won the Champions League the plan wouldn’t change, just as [Roberto] Mancini won the Premier League after I-don’t-know-how-many years but still [left]. That’s conviction. Guardiola can arrive, not win in the first season and never think anything would happen … We achieved important things – the Premier League, the cup – and implemented a change of style.”
West Ham was a different story, “the first time in 22 years coaching abroad I didn’t see out a season”. Pellegrini says: “They didn’t have the patience because we had a bad run – you can understand it. They had invested and for various sporting reasons it didn’t work out. Personal issues too. I’ve had bad runs before but this time I couldn’t turn it around. It’s the first time I haven’t qualified for Europe since arriving at Villarreal in 2004. I’d always finished satisfied, with the exception of West Ham. The responsibility’s mine.”
“There’s no rancour,” he says. But, two decades away from home, by now in his 60s, City and Madrid a past not coming back, it would have been easy to stop. To back away, fall out of love with a game in which, contemplating a photo of himself at Universidad Chile in 1973, he says “almost everything has changed”.
“You reach 60, lose three games and they call you old. But I feel very much alive, still valid. Football stimulates me, keeps me busy. If I’d stayed in Chile, maybe it would be different, but I’ve always demanded more of myself, wanted to learn something every day. I’m envious, in a positive way, of people who do things better than me.”
And, Pellegrini adds: “I ensure I dedicate a couple of hours a day not to the mind exactly but to other things: books, music, other sports, to studying history, literature, languages.” You need it, he admits, and so does his family. He describes himself as “absolutely unbearable” after defeat; there has to be an escape. He has Ken Follett and Arturo Pérez-Reverte on the go and says: “If I had another life, I wouldn’t dedicate it to football or engineering; I’d dedicate it to music. I love music, especially from the 60s to the 80s, bands still heard 40 years on by new generations. I’d love to play the piano, I’d love to sing.”
But that’s another life; what challenges are left in this? Could PSG call again? The national team? “The challenge is to win the Copa del Rey,” Pellegrini replies.
It is no little thing. As for happiness, Seville is a good place to be: if there is anywhere that’s life-giving, a place to revive you, it is this city and this club. Pellegrini dropped his salary to sign; now Betis have their biggest moment for a generation, a cup final in their own city.
“Betis is special: it can’t compete economically with big clubs but it has a fanbase as good as any, a very big club equal to Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid, Barcelona. It’s very similar to West Ham: a tremendous fanbase, always behind the team, hoping to reach Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham financially and a match for them in supporters. Better, even. With Betis it’s the same. You have to manage that ambition, ensure it doesn’t generate frustration.
“It’s been 17 years since they reached a final. In their entire history, Betis have won three trophies since 1930. At the start of last season there was a gloomy atmosphere but competing for Europe changed attitudes 100%. We reached the final and you couldn’t walk down the street without everyone talking about ‘la Plaza Nueva, la Plaza Nueva’ where they celebrate titles. There’s no one who isn’t looking forward to it.”
And then? “I’ve signed here until 2025,” The Engineer says. There’s a prolonged pause. “It’s a lot of time considering I’m 68. I am happy so hopefully we can continue with Betis competing at the highest level, with this project. If not, another project. But retire? I won’t stop until I can’t do the job any more. I won’t retire, the game will retire me.”
