José Luis Mendilibar, the fixer setting Sevilla on straight path towards safety

J osé Luis Mendilibar can’t be bothered with the bullshit. Enjoyably potty-mouthed, as direct in the press room as on the pitch, he is, he says, the anti-modern football manager. He tells it the way it is, challenges fools and takes on authority, doesn’t like VAR – a circus, he calls it – and definitely doesn’t like the theatre, insisting: “we’re a bunch of cheats in La Liga; touch us and it’s like someone killed us.” He doesn’t have an iPad, doesn’t think much of the stats and doesn’t mind saying so. He reckons too many training grounds look like airports – cones and arrows and God-knows-what all over the place – and too many coaches hang around there all day to make a point, not a difference.

As for him, he never wanted to be a manager at all but once he started with tiny CD Arratia in 1994, he couldn’t stop, not one season going by without him working. This was all set to be the first in almost 30 years, the last 14 of those in the top division, until a call came from the dressing room at the Coliseum, around the time the clásico was kicking off a fortnight ago. Sevilla had just been beaten in Getafe, their third defeat in four games in which 12 goals were conceded. Only two points above relegation, their coach had lost control and, desperate now, the sporting director Monchi needed someone to save them.

Someone like him.

It was a little later than 8.30pm and there was no hesitation. A meeting was set for lunchtime the next day, just enough time for Mendilibar to drive down to Madrid from the Basque Country. We’ll fix this, he told them when he got there. Terrified, the risk of relegation a reality, that was exactly what they wanted to hear. No doubts, no demands, no conditions or clauses attached to the contract,