Long and wide like a piece of industrial pipe, Ballesteros stands six foot two. His body resembles a turret from which a leathery head sticks out, turning, featureless, on his not inconsiderable neck. The nickname of ‘Papá’ sums up everything he means to the dressing room. Ballesteros is their natural leader: his presidential voice, his watchful green eyes commanding respect. Everyone see him as the great provider. He misses nothing – and that includes the provocations from the Madrid coach, to whom he quickly conveyed a simple warning. At the final whistle he approached him in the tunnel and repeated it several times.
‘Respect your fellow professionals,’ he said. ‘Respect your fellow professionals …!’
In the 2010–11 season Levante’s players were the lowest paid in the first division. According to a report by Professor José María Liébana Gay for the University of Barcelona, spending on Levante’s staff for that year amounted to €7 million in total. This was followed by €11.7 million at Almería, and €14.4 million in salaries and bonuses at Real Sociedad. All a world away from Barcelona, who set aside €240.6 million of their budget for the payment of salaries, and from Madrid, with €216.1 million as the second highest spenders on personnel in the league behind Barça. Mourinho’s salary alone – about €14 million – was double the wage bill of the Levante team. In this time of fiscal crisis Levante were the club with the smallest total debt to the government. The bankruptcy action had forced them to settle their accounts with the tax authorities.
‘The professionals’ to whom Ballesteros was referring live according to the law of the marketplace; a law that is crueller to the smaller clubs. Eight of the eleven Levante players who played against Madrid in 2010 were in the final days of their careers in the top flight. Del Horno has been without a club since 2012; David Cerrajería, right-back, signed for Cordoba in 2011; Sergio González Soriano, midfielder, retired in 2011; Xisco Nadal signed for Alqueires in the third tier in 2011; Nano, who played in the centre of defence alongside Ballesteros, went to Guizhou in the Chinese league in 2012; the goalkeeper Manolo Reina ended up at Atromitos, a team on the outskirts of Athens in 2011; Nacho González, midfielder, played for Standard Liège and in 2012 signed for Hércules in the second division; after a brief period in the Chinese League, Rubén Suárez, the striker, returned to play for Almería in the second division.
Levante’s training ground is located in the Comarca region of Hoya de Buñol on a plateau surrounded by mountains, dotted with almond trees and lined with ditches. The horizon is marked by the giant metal cylinders of the Cemex cement plant, closed due to a lack of demand. In early 2013 the future of the 150 workers at the plant hung in the balance of rather grim negotiations. Dust particles of crushed materials floated in the air. It was a cold February day with a chill wind, normal in the microclimate of the plain of Buñol, and Vicente Iborra sat in a small room next to the dressing room to explain what kind of club he served.
‘We’re aware of our limitations,’ says Levante’s second vice-captain. ‘The club cannot pay transfers and we’re forced to wait for loan players or free transfers. Because the club that pays the most is the first to choose, we have to wait until the end of the summer. It’s an uncomfortable situation because you start the season with only half the squad guaranteed, and after the league starts two or three more players come in.’
Born in Moncada, Valencia, in 1988 and brought up through Levante’s youth team, Iborra spent his formative years at the club during that crucial time of administration and promotion. Since he was 24 years old he has been a loyal lieutenant to Ballesteros and Juanfran, sharing a sense of administrative duty and talking about the club with the solemnity of an entrepreneur speaking about his investments. Listening to Quico Catalan, the president, was not much different to listening to the players. In his conversation he referred to the crisis, the austerity and the structural problems that constitute the daily struggle in the vast majority of Spanish clubs.
‘We often resort to players who don’t have an important role at the clubs they’re at and who are keen to continue enjoying their football,’ Iborra says. ‘They come here and I think the club’s friendliness is a great calming influence – and now we also have economic stability. People who come feel very comfortable, and they perform to a much higher level. It’s very easy to become committed to the cause.’
The match on 25 September plotted the course for the years ahead when Madrid would come up against many teams who surrendered most of the pitch, together with the ball. It was also an indication of how Mourinho would go about explaining such bad results. The coach’s explanations of the draw in the press room at the Ciutat de Valencía drew subtly on his players’ lack of accuracy in front of goal, obscuring the fact that Madrid had had fewer chances to score than he acknowledged: a meagre balance of just two shots on target meant Mourinho had to avoid recognising that his team had played poorly.
‘I’m concerned about not turning so much attacking football and chances into goals,’ he said. ‘It’s not normal to need so many opportunities. If from six chances we score two or three goals, then OK … But this has been happening from the first game. It was like this against Mallorca, Osasuna … And now against Levante we had some big opportunities but didn’t take them.’
In the draw for the knockout stages of the Copa del Rey, Madrid again found themselves up against Levante. The first leg was played at the Bernabéu on 22 December. If Mourinho had shown signs of nervousness in September, three months later he was bordering on neurotic. After the 5–0 rout suffered against Barcelona at the Camp Nou on 29 November he had embarked on a flurry of team-talks and training sessions that kept the team on constant alert. The preparation for matches had become a continual source of surprise for the squad; the resources drawn on by the coach to motivate the players amazed them and the close proximity of Christmas provided new ammunition to fire up the team. In the dressing room the players interpreted Mourinho’s preparations as his revenge for the two points they had dropped in the league.
Taking advantage of the fact that it was the last game of 2010, Mourinho promised to prolong the Christmas holidays in proportion to the number of goals put past their opponents. To complete the message, he named most of his first team: Casillas, Lass, Pepe, Albiol, Marcelo, Alonso, Granero, Di María, Özil, Ronaldo and Benzema all started. The pre-match team-talk was a masterpiece of motivation. Even the most sceptical of players took to the pitch like men possessed.
Benzema, Özil, Benzema, Ronaldo, Benzema, Ronaldo, Ronaldo and Pedro León scored in that order from the fifth minute to the ninetieth to deliver a historic win: 8–0. The process was painful for the Levante players. Some said that Di María, Marcelo, Özil and Pepe had openly mocked them, repeating the phrase ‘Don’t touch the shirt. You’ll make it dirty,’ which to the ears of the visiting players sounded like a rehearsed insult. Nobody at Madrid would acknowledged this to be true, but the accusations were never officially denied.
‘We were a little annoyed that when they had already scored six goals, the seventh and eighth were celebrated with such enthusiasm,’ recalls Iborra, although those involved in the game itself were not so aware of this. But the watching Levante directors were amazed by the public reaction in the stadium. The Bernabéu, as electrified as the players, celebrated the thrashing and called for Levante to be relegated with the familiar chant: ‘To the Second! To the Second …’
‘I’m very happy with the attitude of my team,’ Mourinho said in the press room with uncharacteristic serenity.