First came the scaffolding platform. Then there was the giant screen. Now there’s the walkie talkie too. When Spain‘s players turned up at their Las Rozas HQ this week for the final two games before the World Cup this winter, Luis Enrique gathered them together in the gym and explained that they would find that there was something different about their training kit. In the back of the vest, near where the GPS goes, he had added a little speaker, through which he could tell them exactly what to do.
“You’re going to hear the mister’s voice,” he warned them. He said he would try not to shout too much but from the platform alongside the training pitch Spain’s manager talked to them: delivering orders, correcting mistakes, directing their next move. Controlling everything, getting it just right.
“When you first find out, you imagine there will be lots of information, that he will be radio-controlling the game,” Borja Iglesias admitted. “But he does it very well and it’s a good way to get close to the player. It’s fantastic, useful, and he knows how to use it well: it’s clear, concise and it helps.”
At 29, Iglesias is in the Spain squad for the first time but he was in the Celta B team when Luis Enrique was their first team coach back in 2013. It has been a long route to the seleccion — he only played one league game in the Celta first team, in January 2015 after Luis Enrique had gone, he went to Zaragoza in the second division, joined Espanyol for two years and is in his fourth season at Betis, where he scored just three times in his first season — but Luis Enrique says he has been keeping an eye on him for a long time now. And Borja has seen his coach up close too.
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The first time Luis Enrique decided to build a scaffolding platform at the training ground so that he could watch over the session from a better vantage point was in Vigo, and he continued that at Barcelona. With Spain, where he became coach in 2018, other innovations have followed. If that platform enabled him to see their mistakes, he had a giant screen erected at the side of the pitch so that he could show their mistakes, live. Now, gripping his walkie talkie, he is in their ears, preventing their mistakes. That at least is the hope.
It’s all Big Brother — “Papa will come out from behind you,” he told his players — and a lot Luis Enrique.
