New Villarreal coach Quique Setien said he should have left the Barcelona job after just one month in charge due to difficulties in fulfilling the role how he wanted to.
Setien, 64, said certain habits had set in that he was unable to change and made him compromise on his coaching style.
The former Barca boss also spoke about the difficulties he experienced coaching Lionel Messi, although he said he wanted to remember the positive elements of the Paris Saint-Germain forward.
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“Barca was the team I had always dreamed of coaching, but if you see there are things you can’t change, you should leave,” he told El Larguero on Thursday after his first game in charge of Villarreal, a 2-2 draw against Hapoel Be’er Sheva in the Europa Conference League.
“But it is an opportunity you have dreamed of forever. And arriving through one door and leaving through another the next month like [Jose Antonio] Camacho did [at Real Madrid in 1998]… There was a moment I thought about it, but you overcome those moments. If there are things that don’t fit, you should not be a hypocrite and you should go.”
Setien took over Barca in January 2020 after the dismissal of Ernesto Valverde. He was sacked in August of the same year after missing out on the LaLiga title to Madrid and losing 8-2 to Bayern Munich in the Champions League.
“When you arrive at a club that has been winning everything for 14 years… there are some habits that I had never seen,” he added.
