ON LJUBLJANSKA CESTA, the cold rain bounces off the concrete and the tin roofs of low-rise buildings with such intensity and such a din it suggests winter will not be leaving the Slovenian coast quietly this year.
From a food kiosk beneath the Bonifika Stadium, a balding man called Daki sells different variations of börek and the aroma of melting garlicky cheese blows out from across the counter, enveloping customers in a lardy plume.
The doughy snack is a reminder that Koper is a staging post between Italy’s north and Europe’s east. Inland, the H-6 motorway roars south and old wagons carry produce like hams and milk to mysterious kingdoms such as Macedonia and Albania. Out in the Adriatic Sea, cargo ships from places like Venice, Bari and Split come and go from Koper’s port, blasting their horns.
Daki speaks English and is keen to test it out. ‘Not many people from your nation pass here,’ he tells me. ‘Yes, in Slovenia we have tourism but the people, they go to places like Bled or maybe Ljubljana. Koper? They get on the ferries or the cruise ships and leave almost straight away.’
Daki does not know I am here to meet Albert Riera, the former Liverpool winger who recently signed for the town’s football team. Between unfamiliar men, however, the topic of football usually acts as an icebreaker, and so he proceeds to tell me about the current situation in Slovenia, where there are ten clubs in the league. ‘Koper are tenth,’ he frowns, pinning blame on the ‘unhealthy’ regime of the previous president who was ousted two months before.
I look at the börek as he slices it up with a large knife before handing it over to me on greaseproof paper. Surely nothing can be as unhealthy as this, I think inwardly, because Daki is speaking again and nothing is stopping him.
‘We have new owners,’ he continues. ‘There is a guy from Belgrade and a guy from Zagreb: businessmen. They are doing better things. In January, Koper signed seventeen new players. This is what needed to happen. In December, the team was terrible. We were going down.’
Koper is not Riera’s first Slovenian club. Towards the end of 2015, he signed for NK Zavrč, based way out towards Hungary in Slovenia’s eastern borderlands. Zavrč is a village outfit and in 2009 they were operating in the sixth division, around the time Riera was playing in victorious Liverpool sides against Real Madrid and Manchester United. Improbably, Zavrč rose another four levels before reaching the top flight in 2013.
I had chosen to meet Riera because it intrigued me how and why he has landed in this unusual place, out on the fringes of European football. Rafael Benítez had spent £8 million to bring him to Anfield in 2008 and although he contributed towards Liverpool’s best domestic campaign of the decade, playing in forty games that season, he is not remembered for any single moment or even particularly fondly. He finished his second season – the worst of the decade for Liverpool – suspended by the club after allegedly telling a Spanish radio station that Liverpool was a ‘sinking ship’ under Benítez. It was reported that the comment followed a fight at Melwood with a teammate. In more recent times, a photograph circulated in the British media of him supposedly enjoying himself in a casino while one of his more recent clubs, Udinese, were playing.
While I wait for Riera to finish a training session, I sit with the press attaché of FC Koper, and he is just as comfortable as Daki in telling me all the gory details about the club’s previous ownership and that things are changing with the ‘guys from Belgrade and Zagreb’.
Matej Babić has only recently celebrated his twenty-second birthday. He is tall, slim and is wearing a smart unbranded shirt, jeans and heavy boots. He explains that he has taken a year-long sabbatical from a law degree at the University of Ljubljana and that he might abandon education altogether because football is his greatest passion and what is happening at Koper is exciting him.
Matej originally got involved at Koper because his mother had contacts at the club and was able to arrange work experience for him. The two businessmen from Belgrade and Zagreb recognized his almost perfect command of English and Croat as an asset, especially when there are only ten people from top to bottom running the club on a day-to-day basis, and that includes the manager and his coaches.
‘Attendances have gone up because of Riera, two hundred at home to two hundred away,’ Matej tells me proudly. ‘He came from Zavrč but so did several other players. In Slovenia, Koper is the third biggest club behind Maribor and Olimpija. We should be doing better than Zavrč but Zavrč were fifth and we were bottom. That’s why we had to look at their squad and act.’
Matej says that at Koper, everyone has to muck in, doing things that would not be asked of them at English Premier League clubs where the organizations are huge. ‘Multi-skills is the term they use in England, no?’ he asks. Riera is not immune and it later becomes clear that this made Koper more attractive to him. Having played in six different countries, Riera had encountered many different people and therefore had many different contacts in the game. At Koper, the offer was not just to be a player but to learn how to be a sporting director as well.
When Riera arrives at the door, he is accompanied by Zlatan Muslimović, the thirty-five-year-old Bosnian international centre-forward who has also recently made his way to Koper from Zavrč, having spent most of his career swapping between Italian clubs before a couple of seasons in Greece and then China. An intense discussion begins. Riera and Muslimović are Koper’s senior players and, like Riera, Muslimović is entrusted with off-field responsibilities, helping out with recruitment.
Riera is still in his training gear and applying an ice pack to his hamstring. His meeting at the door carries on for more than fifteen minutes and there is a sense it comes to an unsatisfactory end for Muslimović, whose voice lifts several times during the discussion. Riera greets me apologetically. ‘Football,’ he says, raising one of his eyebrows. ‘Always issues to deal with, especially when you are not just the player. Everyone has an opinion on the way things should be . . .’
After Bonifika’s redevelopment in 2010, Koper’s headquarters were installed in a stand behind one of the goals. The stadium can hold just north of four thousand spectators but the day before my visit only seven hundred or so turned up to witness the defeat to Rudar Velenje, another club with relegation concerns.
Riera’s flip-flops slap against the tiled porcelain floor and he jangles a set of keys in the left pocket of his shorts as he leads me to another office where he conducts operations every day after training.
‘I am at work here until six or seven p.m. before I go back to the hotel where I am staying,’ he tells me. ‘There is so much to do. My wife and children will move here soon and we’ll buy a house. I haven’t found the right place yet. I’d like to live very close to the sea, like I did in Mallorca and like I did in Liverpool!’
His office is spartanly decorated, painted all in white. A crack extends across the ceiling and down one of the walls. There is a new computer, a new television, a new chest of drawers, a new printer and a 2016 calendar with some telephone numbers written on different dates.
Riera begins by telling me how he came to Koper. The two businessmen from Belgrade and Zagreb, it transpires, are former footballers who became agents. Riera knew Dušan Petković from his playing days at Mallorca and his business partner is Andy Bara, a retired Croatian defender who spent most of his career in Poland. The president at Zavrč had asked the pair to work with him and the relationship explains how Riera ended up in Slovenia in the first place.
‘Clubs from Dubai and Qatar came to me. That was the type of move I was looking for: easier life, slower pace of game, sun. But Dušan called and spoke to me about Zavrč, about the opportunity to be a part of something very different. When he explained that he wanted me to be involved in everything, to have the possibility to call a player and try to convince him to come and play for us, I realized this was what I wanted to do. It was my idea to become a sporting director after football but Dušan made me realize this opportunity was unique. I could play, but I could be a sporting director at the same time. So I said, “OK, let’s start now.”’
Riera says the relationship with the president at Zavrč was good until the issue of contract renewals arose. With Koper’s situation becoming increasingly perilous both on and off the pitch, Riera and Petković saw another opportunity to start something afresh, where they would have all of the control.
‘A new president arrived in Koper. He called Dušan and said, “I want to make a new club – everything to be different, a new project.” He wanted to give me, Dušan and Andy all of the responsibility to create what we thought was necessary. The money? OK, it is not so good. Other offers were better financially but that is not my priority at this stage. Making my family comfortable is the key, because I’ve moved around so many places and now is the time to find somewhere where I know I will be for a long time. My wife is Russian. I am Mallorcan. We need to find a middle ground somewhere.’
The contract at Koper is the lengthiest Riera has signed in a fifteen-year career. It will keep him in Slovenia – if everything goes well – for the next five seasons. And yet the highest paid player at Koper (not Riera) is on less than €800 a month. ‘My salary is nothing,’ Riera says. ‘I am certainly not here for the money.’
Rather, he relishes his newfound responsibilities. It means that, usually, he is the first person in to work and the last to leave.
Having grown up in Mallorca before living in urban cultural centres like Bordeaux, Manchester, Barcelona, Liverpool, Athens and Istanbul, I suggest to him that Koper seems a bit primitive.
‘Maybe, but where else would I get an opportunity like this one?’ he asks. ‘To run a club, you need big money. I saw an interview with the Indonesian owner of Inter Milan last week. He wanted €100 million for 20 per cent of the club. Here in Slovenia, I have an opportunity to start a project from the very beginning and to learn about something new where the pressure is not quite the same.
‘If I had the opportunity to go back in time and change what I have done, I would not take that opportunity,’ he continues. ‘All of the decisions I have made – to move here, to move there – the decisions were made with my heart. The decisions were true to my thoughts in those moments.
‘I had the same feeling about Koper as I did about Liverpool. OK, Liverpool is huge, one of the big European clubs. Koper is small. Outside Slovenia, few people have heard of Koper. The attraction of Liverpool was the history, the ambition and the expectation. When I was twenty-six, that was what I wanted. Now I am nearly thirty-four. I am thinking about the rest of my life.
‘I have a lot of friends who have stopped football and they don’t know what to do. You have a period after retirement where it is difficult for a footballer: bop, the end. How do you replace a routine that has been there for twenty years?
‘I realize I cannot go on for ever. After every game, it takes longer to recover than it did before. My muscles ache. You realize time is catching up with you. I do not want to experience this period where I retire and I have nothing to do. I don’t like the idea of relaxing, because after a while it becomes boring. A footballer’s life is very short and I am satisfied by my career but there is so much more to do, more life to live. OK, thirty-four is old for a footballer but it is not old in life.
‘The day I cannot play for Koper, straight away I know I am working for the club. It is nice, because I don’t have to think about the future too much and it means I can enjoy playing without the fear of what happens next. I will be honest with myself. The day I cannot dribble past a defender is the day I will stop. Maybe I will be unsuccessful as a sporting director and I will have to change my idea, who knows? But I feel like I have to try.’
I question Riera about whether it is difficult getting Koper’s squad to trust him. He trains and plays alongside the players but ultimately his say will dictate whether they remain.
‘From the outside, I know people will say, “How can you be a player as well as a sporting director?” But it’s so easy. My message to the guys in the dressing room was very clear from the beginning of our relationship: “Listen, here I am just a player. If I do something wrong and you are unhappy about it, you shout at me like you would any other player. I am at the same level. I am not more than you. I am not less than you.” I want the same thing as them: to win games. When I walk out of the dressing room and up to the second floor into my office, only then do I think about the issues that can influence the team to improve.
‘We are a completely new group. Seventeen new players is a huge number and usually it would be considered unworkable. But Koper needed a new chapter, for everything to be clean and everything to be transparent. We are careful financially and will not spend what we don’t have. Of course we would like to bring in fantastic players but at the moment that isn’t a possibility. We have to do it little by little.
‘What we really want is to play in Europe. If you play in Europe, there are more possibilities: to earn more money, to bring in better players and improve the infrastructure of the club so that fifteen or twenty years from now Koper is leading in Slovenia and respected abroad as a small but well-run club.
‘Immediately, the aim is to escape relegation. The people in Koper, they have never experienced an expectation like this. In the past, they have had the opportunity to sign some Croatian or Bulgarian players, because those countries are so close. But never Spanish, never French or Italians. If everything goes to plan, I am convinced that next season we can finish in the top three for sure – I am convinced.’
Amongst Riera’s first big decisions was one to reduce the squad from twenty-five to twenty-two players, and then he had to inform Ariel Ibagaza, a former teammate at Mallorca and Olympiacos, that he would not be able to sign him, despite the Argentine’s determination to move to Slovenia. ‘Believe me, Ariel can still play,’ Riera says. ‘He called me on the last day of the transfer window because a deal to re-sign with Mallorca did not happen. But I could not justify changing everything for him, just because he’s a friend. Our team is mixed between experience and youth. The next six months will reveal whether the young Slovenian players are good enough. I believe they are.’
There must be wanderlust in the Riera family. Albert’s younger brother Sito plays in Kazakhstan, after spells in Greece and Ukraine. He thinks it is strange that both of them have followed less-trodden paths, especially when he thinks back to a happy childhood in Manacor on the Balearic Island of Mallorca, a town best known as the birthplace of tennis great Rafael Nadal and his uncle, Miguel Ángel Nadal, an international footballer whose fierce defending earned him the nickname ‘the Beast’ during eight seasons at Barcelona.
‘I guess you could say we are only the second family in Manacor,’ Riera concedes, smiling. Riera’s parents led modest lives: his father as a wood craftsman and his mother in a shoe shop. He thinks it is strange that he and Sito became footballers, because football was not in the family before.
‘I never had any pressure to play,’ he says. ‘I remember my first game with Mallorca’s first team. Not even one member of my family was there. You see some young players and every day they have a father or an agent pushing them. This was not the case for me. Maybe if my parents had pushed me, I wouldn’t have become a footballer. I have always liked to make my own decisions. I was good at maths at school and one day my mother told me she wanted me to become a doctor. From that day, I wanted to be everything except a doctor. Had my father pushed me as a footballer, maybe I would have ended up hating it.’
Riera does not offer platitudes about the game like other footballers. He admits his motivation to become a player stemmed from liking the idea of being paid to get fit. ‘I am not typical,’ he says, revealing that the bug of football only really seized him when he was sixteen or seventeen years old, with part of the reason for his interest being the resurgence of his nearest professional club. Mallorca had bounced between the top and second levels of Spanish football until Argentine Héctor Cúper became manager in 1997, leading them to the final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup two seasons later. Miquel Soler, Vicente Engonga and Carlos Roa were the team’s main players but it was Jovan Stanković, the Serbian winger, whom Riera admired the most.
‘I had the chance to be close to him and learn. He was my example. I had the opportunity to play with him. He left for Marseille and I was selected as his replacement. A big responsibility.’
Riera was exposed to the ruthlessness of football from an early age. Mallorca’s progress was stunted when the club moved to a new modern ground on the edge of Palma. The results of before did not follow, attendances dropped and financial problems plagued his first two seasons as a professional. Riera was twenty years old.
‘I was very, very happy, living at home, around people I love. The club came to me and said, “Albert, we have sold you to Bordeaux – the offer was good for the club.” They told me to fly to Barcelona and sign the contract. I could not believe it. I wanted to stay in Mallorca. There was an offer from Atlético Madrid but my heart and mind was in Mallorca and I was too young to go. It showed me that in football, your life can change very quickly. If you become too attached, your heart can be broken.’
The move to Bordeaux was successful without being spectacular. He went back to Spain with Espanyol and when that did not work out initially, he signed for Manchester City on loan.
English football supporters probably do not realize the esteem in which the English game is held abroad.
‘For me, England is the home of football,’ Riera says. ‘I liked playing in England the most. People ask me whether I miss the weather in Spain. I always say, “Sunshine is for when we go to the beach. A wet pitch is for football.”
‘Real Madrid and Barcelona are the two biggest clubs in the world and maybe they always will be. But the best football is in the Premier League because you are competing every weekend. There is intensity in England – sometimes animosity – but also a respect. I played on the wing. The terraces were close to me. I liked playing close to the line. You can feel the crowd, hear the noises. In England, you can smell the soup! You experience every sensation: the sound, the scent, the taste of the football. At corners, the fans get very excited. The anticipation that something was about to happen was enormous. You don’t get that in other countries. In Spain, I sometimes think the fans would ban corners if they could. In France, we would not even practise attacking or defending corners. In England, it is like a goal.’
Riera returned to Espanyol, where he resurrected his career under Ernesto Valverde, a manager who ‘appreciated the value of traditional wingers’. Riera helped the team to the UEFA Cup final, only to lose on penalties to Sevilla at Hampden Park in Glasgow.
‘Everywhere else I went, the managers wanted the wingers to defend or cut inside to help the number 10. When that happens, you are no longer a winger. My strength was getting chalk on my boots and stretching the opponent’s defence – focusing on the attack. Valverde let me do this.’
Upon signing for Liverpool, Riera can remember recognizing the step up in standard within five minutes of starting his first training session at Melwood, largely due to the presence of one player in particular.
‘Steven Gerrard was sliding into tackles as if it was a game and he was playing Manchester United in the FA Cup final. He was the first at running and his passes always hit the mark. The level of commitment was clear: he was the example of the standard you had to meet every day. Otherwise you wouldn’t be good enough to play for Liverpool.’
His first season, as he describes it, was like a ‘dream’. The team spirit amongst Liverpool’s players was fostered by results on the pitch and then reinforced on the golf courses of Merseyside. Each week, between eight and ten of the players would enjoy a round together, with Gerrard and Pepe Reina acting as the organizers and others like Daniel Agger and Dirk Kuyt usually following. Kuyt, an unconventional Dutch forward, was fashioned as a winger by Benítez and, according to Riera, he played golf as he played football: ‘a strange swing but the ball usually appeared on the green’. Riera moved on to the same luxury housing estate as Reina and Fernando Torres and he formed a close bond with Reina and his wife Yolanda. When the couple’s second son Thiago was born, Riera became the godfather. Riera’s relationship with the goalkeeper grew on the drives to Melwood, sharing lifts. Reina was superstitious and would pay a visit to the same petrol station before games even if his car did not need filling up. ‘If it needed four pounds, that would be his excuse. He did not want to change anything: same dinner, same socks, same underpants. Pepe’s mad.’
Riera says Liverpool’s players were individually of the highest level. What defined the strength, though, as they scored four goals against Manchester United, another four against Real Madrid, before five against an emerging Aston Villa side, all in the space of twelve days, was the organization of the team.
‘Everyone knew what to do. Everyone knew their job. We played the same way in every game. I remember watching the video of our victory in the Bernabéu. We looked like machines – robots! The movements, they were the same time after time for ninety minutes plus injury time. I was against Sergio Ramos and Arjen Robben: world-class players. Robben touched the ball only a couple of times in the game. This was because of Rafa’s plan. Everything was done before the game. He came to us: “Robben, if he does not get the ball, we have no problems.” I had to stop Ramos. So I chased him all night.
‘From the outside, the journalist might say: “Riera – he did not play well. He touched five balls; he did not give the assist for the goal.” My job was to stop the pass from Sergio Ramos to Robben; it had to be delayed for as long as possible. I was running, running, running all of the time. I know this game was not my best creatively. I could not say I enjoyed it. But it was so satisfying, leaving the pitch as a winner in the Bernabéu. Not many teams do that. We did. We had some great players. But the team mattered most. Benítez takes the credit.’
Off the pitch, conflict was never far away. By this point the club had been sold to Americans Tom Hicks and George Gillett, but the relationship between the two men had broken down, while trust issues lingered between Benítez and Rick Parry, the chief executive. It could not have been easy for Benítez, managing Liverpool and reaching quick conclusions with important decisions. Yet it was his choice to try to sell Xabi Alonso in the months before Riera arrived. Though the midfielder stayed, by the summer of 2009 – after Liverpool finished second in the league behind Manchester United – Alonso was ready to go.
‘You lose a player like Xabi and it is like losing almost 50 per cent of the creativity,’ Riera says. ‘You lose a player who is strong in the dressing room, who is well respected by everyone, but also someone who makes it easier for everyone else to play to their levels. He gave balance, tempo, aggression and rhythm to the team – everything. [He was] a perfect player for Liverpool, the way we were playing.’
Wingers are often criticized in England for not influencing the game consistently. Benítez demanded that Riera stayed wide and assisted the left-back behind him. His contribution in an attacking sense would be determined by the service he received.
‘For wingers to be effective, a lot depends on the middle of the pitch: the balance and identity of the players. These guys need to understand your movements and when to play faster, to be able to give you the ball in a situation where you can create for the next person. Xabi was intelligent and had a quick mind. He gave possession very fast, so I was one against one rather than two against one.
‘In that first season, we had Xabi who could do this. We had Mascherano, who was aggressive. We had Stevie, who could release Fernando [Torres]. The spine was so powerful, so quick and so creative. When Xabi left, everyone missed him. The base was gone, the first pass.’
Riera cites the departure of Sami Hyypiä as being significant as well. The Finnish defender was Liverpool’s captain before the responsibility passed to Steven Gerrard. After a decade of service, Hyypiä was disappointed in Benítez for not telling him face-to-face that Philipp Degen, a new Swiss right-back, was being selected ahead of him in his Champions League squad. Although Hyypiä was registered again after qualifying for the knockout stages and performed strongly in key games, the rejection made him consider his options and eventually he decided to join Bayer Leverkusen.
‘Sami was very strong in the dressing room, another leader, trusted by everyone,’ Riera adds. ‘Another one: gone.’
Benítez was promised more money by the owners to improve other areas of the squad, and had that money materialized he might have made better buying decisions to enhance the squad. It was his decision, however, to replace Alonso with Alberto Aquilani, an Italian with a dubious fitness record, someone who arrived on Merseyside with an injury.
‘People like to analyse football using statistics and theories. Often, success and failure is determined simply by the standard of the player: how you buy and how you sell, and the consistency within the squad,’ Riera says. ‘From a position of strength, change as little as possible, only buy. In the first year, everything was perfect: players, atmosphere and the organization. The feeling amongst the group was more important than talent or quality. But three players [including Álvaro Arbeloa] were allowed to leave. It took time for the replacements to settle. Maybe they never settled. The mood changed.’
Liverpool’s decline was swift. An expected title challenge did not materialize and as 2009 became 2010, they were struggling to qualify for the following season’s Champions League, having been knocked out of the present one at the group stages. Riera was out of the team.
‘It was a special moment because it was before the World Cup in South Africa. I was not playing. Rafa was trying other players in my position. The trust wasn’t the same as it had been the previous season. I wasn’t sure whether I was being left out of the team because of my efforts in training and in the few games I played in, or for other reasons. I went to Rafa and said, “Rafa, I don’t want any favours from you but if I deserve to play, please put me on the pitch.”’
Riera’s frustrations spilled over on the training pitches of Melwood. Left behind while Liverpool played an away game, he was involved in a fight with Daniel Pacheco, the twenty-year-old forward. Riera describes it as the ‘standard’ thing that happens when frustrations and emotions are running high. Pacheco was a friend of his but he’d said something that upset him in the aftermath of a pass being short.
It was the start of what he says was a ‘strange’ period. Marginalized from the team, he gave an interview on Spanish radio. What Riera insists was a constructive evaluation of the season came across as a stinging attack on Benítez, with only a few words from a longer discussion being released, thus allowing the comments to be taken out of context.
‘They asked me a question about Rafa’s commitment to training. I told them he was not there every moment of every day because his office overlooked Melwood and he could see from there if he really needed to when we were doing physical sessions and the fitness coach was at work. They made a headline out of that: Rafa is not there every day.
‘Of course Rafa was angry with that and I could understand why. I went to him and apologized, explaining that my words had been twisted. Rafa is a very strong character and he did not accept my version of events. He was under pressure and a situation like this only increased his problems.’
Riera describes his relationship with Benítez before the confrontation.
‘Not really close, not really far away – it was somewhere in the middle. You are OK if you accept the situation and see it like Rafa. He wants to control everything. You cannot ask him not to have an opinion on your diet or what you are doing in the gym, because that’s his way: he has an opinion. You have to respect what Rafa likes. If you accept this, then everything is going to be good.’
Now he is older, Riera believes he is able to see the bigger picture. Back then he admits he did not find it so easy to make concessions – ‘to listen to the reason of others’.
‘If you want to work with Rafa, it requires you to be objective,’ he says. ‘You have to realize he is managing not just one person but a group, a team and a club. The expectations on him are massive. He lives and dies by his decisions. That means he can only do things his own way. He cannot afford to make many concessions. Being the football manager of Liverpool, it is like being the prime minister of England or the president of the United States. The pressure never goes away: every second of the day, the pressure is there.
‘The problem is, players are selfish. I was selfish. You are desperate to do well. You want to play. You don’t always think that Rafa’s job is more than just about you. I think I have learned a lot of details from Rafa. You realize you cannot make decisions that everyone will like.
‘I have to look at myself. I realize now he did not put me on the pitch because I did not deserve to be there. As players, we are selfish. We try to think we have reasons to be angry. But I had no reason at that moment. For sure, he was not doing anything to hurt me or Liverpool. It was one point in my life where I look back and think, Maybe it was me. I did not accept Rafa’s opinion but I did not analyse why Rafa was thinking this way. I did not look at myself. If I had been playing perfectly, would he have put me on the pitch? For sure he would. I did not finish the season playing and I missed the World Cup. Spain won the World Cup. I regret it.
‘I do not have anything really bad to say about Rafa. Everyone is different and it would be boring if we were all the same. He is one way; I am another. I have a strong character and sometimes it is not the best way to be. I react so fast without considering the consequences. Sometimes you have to think. Rafa will stop and think – maybe too much.
‘OK, maybe I would not go with him for dinner and maybe he does not want to go with me! We have no friendship. But that doesn’t really matter. People always look for the bad things and the criticisms and they make you forget the good moments. Rafa was the perfect manager for Liverpool. We always ask questions about managers: who is the best one? The question should be: which manager is better for your club? Rafa was perfect for Liverpool and I would say Luis Aragonés was perfect for Spain too. I say this because of their intensity and their attention to detail. It is what the people of Liverpool demand and it is what the people of Spain demand. As a player, I never stepped on the pitch not understanding what was expected of me.
‘Rafa, he also brought me to Liverpool and for that I am grateful. The first season was probably the best in my career, the most enjoyable. The second? Maybe the worst. It doesn’t mean I only have to look at the bad parts. As a society, that’s what we tend to do a lot.’
Liverpool’s seventh-placed finish contributed towards Benítez getting the sack in June 2010. By then Riera insists his relationship with the manager had improved and he was confident of getting another chance to prove himself. With Benítez gone, however, his prospects became bleaker with the appointment of Roy Hodgson. Christian Purslow, Liverpool’s managing director, had a list of players he wanted to sell and Riera was amongst them alongside Lucas Leiva, the Brazilian midfielder, and Emiliano Insúa, the Argentine left-back – both Benítez favourites.
‘Hodgson, he was clear with us in the pre-season. He said, “I want 80–85 per cent of my team to be English.” Rafa had been there for six years, something like that, so it seemed to me that Liverpool wanted to start again, to follow a different route. Hodgson wanted to start a new culture from the first day. I said, “OK, I respect your decision” but I didn’t agree with it. In football, a mix is good. Sometimes you need something different. I felt I still had qualities to offer the team and the decision was purely based on where I came from.’
Riera went to Olympiacos, spending a season there, before moving on to Galatasaray.
‘I made my Liverpool debut against Manchester United and we won [2–1]. Maybe the noise wasn’t as loud as the derbies in Athens or Istanbul but noise is not the only detail that matters.
‘In Athens, I can remember seeing Djibril Cissé shielding himself from stones being thrown by the Panathinaikos fans. You think, If the fans do that to their own players, what are they going to do to us?
‘The only time I was scared in my life was when we won the league in Fenerbahçe’s stadium with Galatasaray. We finished the game at nine o’clock and at five o’clock the next morning we were still in the dressing room, hiding. The police told us to stay. People were waiting for us. When we finally got out, it was like a film. For five kilometres until we reached the Bosphorus, the police vans were there: in front of us, behind us and by the sides of the coach. You could see the guns. You could see fire. The Fenerbahçe fans were burning everything: cars and buildings.
‘It was the first and the last time the Turkish federation decided to finish the league with a play-off. The game had to be stopped six or seven times. The atmosphere, it was something different. A few months ago, the Fenerbahçe supporters tried to shoot the driver of the Galatasaray bus as it crossed the bridge. They were trying to kill the whole team. This is not normal. OK, as players we are paid a lot of money. But we should not have to deal with this.’
Riera signed for Udinese on a free transfer in 2014 and these proved to be some of the darkest months in his career. When a photograph appeared in a national newspaper of him in a casino on a match day, it portrayed a player not taking his responsibilities seriously, yet Riera says nothing was really as it seemed.
‘It was not on a match day,’ he insists. ‘The club had not selected me or paid me for six months and I wanted to leave because of this. But I also thought the club should honour their commitment to me. When I signed, I did not put a gun to their heads. And they did not put a gun to mine. And suddenly, as if by magic, this photograph appears in the press . . .
‘It was a very bad experience. I gave up fighting and went back to Mallorca because it was making me unhappy. I wanted to enjoy my life again.’
At Mallorca, though, he returned to a club with ‘no clear objective’ under a German owner where ‘football is not the most important thing’.
Riera reasons that he has moved clubs so many times because of restlessness.
‘If you are in the right place and you have everything that you need, why would you want to move? I admire the player that stays his whole life at one club, because it is so difficult. You see so many players and after two or three years their motivation disappears. These players need something else to [help them] switch on again. I see players like Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard in the same way Real Madrid supporters view Raúl or Roma with [Francesco] Totti. I wonder whether the pressure of remaining is actually greater than that of leaving.
‘I would have liked this to happen in my career: to play for Mallorca for ever. Unfortunately, Mallorca wasn’t able to win trophies. They needed the money and sold me even though I didn’t want to be sold. Maybe I wouldn’t have earned enough money at Mallorca to sustain my life after my football career was over. By moving clubs, it has taken financial concerns away. Stevie at Liverpool, he had everything. Totti at Roma, he had everything as well. Maybe they could have won more league titles at other clubs but if that comes at the expense of happiness and reputation, I don’t think it is worth it.’
Riera has gone from playing in front of ninety thousand spectators at the Bernabéu to just a few hundred at the Bonifika.
‘You have to accept the situation,’ he concludes. ‘The motivation remains the same otherwise I wouldn’t be here. The pressure comes from within yourself: the desire to carry on and make a contribution towards a victory. There is no better feeling than the moment at the final whistle when you win. That still gives me immense satisfaction.
‘The atmosphere is different, of course. It is more beautiful to play in front of a lot of people. In the big English stadiums, you cannot hear your teammate fifteen metres away because the crowd is shouting.
‘In Slovenia, the stands echo.’