A great way to understand how Villarreal – a football team from a city of just 50,000 souls, playing in a stadium that can hold just under half of them – makes it to the Champions League semi-finals is to watch the cleaning products aisle of the largest supermarket in Spain.
The supermarket, Mercadona and the football club are business cousins. Fernando Roig, the president and benefactor of Villarreal, has a minority stake in Mercadona, Spain’s largest retail chain, but it is his brother, Juan, the majority shareholder, who has made the latter an important case study for business schools around the world.
Central to this approach is the idea that the customer is ultimately in control. After all, they are the ones who determine what their stores should have in stock. To ensure that the company meets their needs, Mercadona occasionally invites a selection of its most trusted customers to participate in a testing lab.
These are held in 10 stores across Spain and each is dedicated to a particular area of the business: pet care, snacks or personal hygiene, for example. Customers are not only asked to provide feedback on different products – the packaging, the price, the taste, the smell – but also to advise Mercadona’s staff on how to use them.
For example, Mercadona found that while many people bought white wine vinegar as a seasoning, they also used it as a stain remover. “So they created a cleaning product made with vinegar,” Miguel Blanco, a professor of business economics at King Juan Carlos University, once told a business magazine from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Mercadona, like Villarreal, understands that the appeal of a product depends on how it is used.
Villarreal, on the face of it, does not follow the blueprint drawn up by the handful of teams from outside the exclusive cabal of fabulously wealthy clubs that have beaten the Champions League semi-finals in recent years.
Monaco in 2017 and Ajax in 2019 felt a bit like a glimpse of the near future of football. It was in Monaco’s run past Manchester City and Borussia Dortmund that Kylian Mbappe, Bernardo Silva and Fabinho first penetrated the wider consciousness of the sport. Ajax’s defeats to Real Madrid and Juventus en route to the semi-finals two years later helped Frenkie de Jong and Matthijs de Ligt turn into stars.
RB Leipzig, who finished in the last four in 2020 in that strange, haunted pandemic tournament, also seemed to be a team of the top. It featured the likes of Dayot Upamecano and Christopher Nkunku, and was led by Julian Nagelsmann, the standard-bearer of the first post-Pep Guardiola generation of coaching.
Villarreal, on the other hand, doesn’t feel like a vision of things to come. The core of Unai Emery’s squad is homegrown, with the emergence of Gerard Moreno, Yeremi Pino, Alfonso Pedraza and most notably Pau Torres proving the outstanding work of the club’s widely admired academy.
Other than Pino, 19, no one is particularly young, not in football terms. Even Torres, the club’s locally sourced jewel, is 25, meaning he’s unlikely to inspire the kind of feeding frenzy among the apex predators of the transfer market that De Ligt generated in 2019.
Instead, around that cadre of graduates, Villarreal gives the impression of being some sort of Premier League vintage shop, with faces vaguely familiar to casual followers of English football. There’s Vicente Iborra, a 34-year-old midfielder who has struggled to impress at Leicester City, and Pervis Estupiñán, the young Ecuadorian left-back who has been scurrying around Watford’s great loan factory for a while.
Étienne Capoue, 33, spent six years at Vicarage Road, establishing himself as a rare constant in a Watford team marked by permanent change. Alberto Moreno was released on a free transfer by Liverpool. Francis Coquelin made his first appearance at Arsenal. Dani Parejo had a short stint with Queens Park Rangers. Horace Danjuma had flickered and sputtered at Bournemouth.
And then there’s the Tottenham contingent: Juan Foyth, a defender who had lost his way; Serge Aurier, ditto; and Giovani Lo Celso, an extravagantly gifted midfielder who was left out in the cold late last year when Antonio Conte arrived as Spurs manager.
Even Emery, of course, returned to Spain after being given the somewhat daunting task of replacing Arsene Wenger at Arsenal. His team at Villarreal, the team that knocked out Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals, the team that is blocking Liverpool’s path to a third Champions League final in five years, is built on the delusions and straits of the Premier League.
Those familiar with Villarreal’s strategy say this is not a deliberate policy. Miguel Ángel Tena, the club’s sporting director, and Fernando Roig Negueroles, the chief executive – and the president’s son – have not set out to defraud those who have been bullied by the Premier League’s rowdy, wasteful consumerism. pushed aside, by digging.
Instead, there has been a degree of expediency. When Emery needed a physically imposing, technically agile central midfielder midway through last season, he recalled being impressed by Capoue when he was in England. Capoue, who has admitted he doesn’t watch football, didn’t even know where Villarreal was when the offer came; he had just been touched by Emery’s confidence in him.
Danjuma was another asset recommended by the manager: Villarreal’s analysts had never noticed him when, in the wake of Villarreal’s Europa League win last season, Emery suggested the team should pay around $20 million for a player who had just been relegated with Bournemouth. However, the club paid the fee. Villarreal now believes that the breakthrough star Danjuma could make $100 million one day.
Others have taken advantage of the club’s eidetic memory. Villarreal has long maintained ties in South America in general and Argentina in particular: when it last reached a Champions League semi-final, in 2006, it was with a team full of Boca Juniors alumni. The scouting network picked Foyth and Lo Celso a long time ago.
Villarreal could not match the money offered by England – or Paris St Germain, in Lo Celso’s case – when they first came to Europe, but the club is well aware that football can always offer a second chance, especially considering how quickly English clubs especially repel players.
That insight has allowed Emery not only to take the first major honor in Villarreal’s history – last year’s Europa League – but also to win the team within 180 minutes of the biggest game of all: knowing that one product purpose, a larger role, than that stated on the packaging.
And it’s that approach that may not make Villarreal as immersive or as exciting as Monaco or Ajax, but maybe it makes his story a little more imitative, a little more inspiring in an era dominated by both the super clubs and increasingly by the financial power of the Premier League.
Monaco’s success was largely due to the unparalleled eye for talent of its chief scout, Luis Campos. Ajax’s was a tribute to the club’s unparalleled gift for nurturing and nurturing promise. But both also contain trace elements of lightning strikes: difficult—if not impossible—to replicate or replicate.
However, Villarreal offers a template to follow, a vision for how clubs could thrive without the finances of the Premier League or the weight of continental Europe’s giants. It shows that it’s possible to get strong on party scraps, to thrive in football’s increasingly Anglocentric ecosystem, by remembering that a product’s appeal depends on its use.