When Luis Enrique Nearly Took the Nastic Job

Back in 2006 in a rare foray in LaLiga Nastic de Tarragona said no to a coaching duo that would change football: Luis Enrique and Pep Guardiola.

As Luis Enrique went up to lift his second consecutive Champions League and the third of his illustrious coaching career, spare a thought for Gimnastic de Tarragona fans, who could have seen the Asturian in their dugout if different decisions had been made.

Nastic, as they are more commonly called, come from the Catalan resort city of Tarragona and are currently celebrating their 140th anniversary. They have spent most of their history split between the second and fourth tiers of Spanish football.

In 2006, in what was one of the strangest seasons in the history of Segunda, Nastic gained promotion alongside Recreativo Huelva and Levante to LaLiga. Vying for promotion that season with Nastic were clubs like Ciudad de Murcia and Lorca Deportiva, who had Unai Emery in the dugout. Both clubs are now defunct.

Nastic in LaLiga were taking on giants. Transfermarkt has their squad value at €27 million, €13 million behind the next side and less than a tenth of the most expensive squad at the time, Real Madrid.

They started the season against fellow Catalans Espanyol, where they secured an unlikely 0-1 victory. That, though, was their only victory in the opening ten games, as they came crashing down to earth.

With the club struggling in the top flight, the decision was made to sack the coach Luis Cesar Sampedro, and a more fateful decision was made in the aftermath.

The sporting director Jose Sicart got to work finding a replacement. In the coastal town of Vilanova i la Geltru, Sicart met a recently retired player who enjoyed surfing and cycling.

That player was Luis Enrique. The Asturian impressed the sporting director with his eagerness to coach, offering to work for free, with only a small financial agreement if the club did not let him see out the season. Sicart told SER Radio:

“Luis Enrique was very interested in taking over the Nastic bench and even offered to work for free because he wanted to start coaching.”

“When I sat down with him, he explained that he believed in the project and expressed his willingness to accept the challenge on one condition: if he did not finish the season, he would receive compensation. He wanted to ensure he would coach in the first division until the end of the season.”

It was not just the financial incentive that was appealing to the sporting director. Luis Enrique also said he planned to bring in Pep Guardiola as his assistant, who had retired the season before. The two struck an agreement for Luis Enrique to become the coach, but Sicart had to put it to the board.

Sicart spoke to the board, but while both players had reached the top of the game in their playing careers, they were completely unproven as coaches and neither had any experience. The board had already made an agreement with Paco Flores, a coach who had been in LaLiga with Espanyol, where he also won a Copa del Rey.

He had also taken Real Zaragoza back to LaLiga and was seen as a safer pair of hands. Flores ultimately oversaw a small upturn in form, but Nastic finished the season bottom of LaLiga, 12 points from safety.

For Luis Enrique, despite his plans to take Pep as his assistant, he found himself in the curious position of replacing Pep as the B team coach in 2008. Pep had taken Barcelona B from the fourth tier back to the third. Luis Enrique, meanwhile, took Barcelona B into Segunda and then to the Segunda play offs, which they were ineligible for.

His first role outside of a B team came at Roma, a spell that is generally thought to have ended in failure. Luis Enrique truly established his coaching pedigree at Celta, where he led the team into the top 10.

Both coaches have gone on to win multiple Champions Leagues at multiple clubs, while Paco Flores never coached again. With hindsight, it is easy to say Nastic made a terrible decision and to think about what could have been.

In truth, the Nastic team were not prepared or good enough for LaLiga. They were an ageing group of players better suited to Segunda. When Nastic fell to Segunda, they spent four seasons in mid table before eventually dropping to the third tier. In 2015/16, they almost gained promotion back to LaLiga before being knocked out by Osasuna in the play offs.

Not many clubs in Nastic’s situation would hire a coach like Luis Enrique with no experience during a relegation battle. Even if they were willing to hire a novice, there would likely be a demand for an experienced assistant.

Both Pep and Luis Enrique are methodical coaches who think of every detail and refine their tactics. Both starting in the B team makes a lot of sense, allowing them to tweak and experiment with less pressure than in a relegation dogfight.

If they had taken the job and it had gone well, given the financial disparity Nastic faced and a squad not fit for LaLiga, who knows, it could have damaged the reputations of both Luis Enrique and Pep Guardiola.

We might not have had the revolution Pep brought to the game and Barcelona. We might have seen Jose Mourinho and his style of football become the dominant force in the game. Who knows the seismic changes that could have happened, all based on one decision.

Who knows though, maybe in a parallel universe, this week’s newsletter is a write up on the fifth consecutive Champions League for Nastic and how this Catalan club’s domination of the European game is bad for football.

Instead, for Nastic fans, that decision 20 years ago is just one example among many over the last two decades of what they see as the mismanagement of the club. Just five years after being in LaLiga, the club almost went out of business in the third tier.

The club has been in the third tier for the last seven seasons and twice fell at the play off final stage in heartbreaking fashion. This season, they almost dropped to the fourth tier, surviving on the final day.

A club in a bustling coastal town with a population large enough to sustain a Segunda side is instead underachieving in the third tier, much to the frustration of fans. I met some in September when I visited Europa, with Nastic the visitors that day.

Over 600 made the trip, and it showed, in a way, how the club had not really moved on from that LaLiga season. The coach against Europa was Luis Cesar, the same coach who had taken them to LaLiga 20 years earlier.

He had been out of football for almost five years when Nastic called him back, having fired popular young coach Dani Vidal. Vidal had secured consecutive play off appearances for the Catalan club, but after missing out again and with the team badly out of form, he was dismissed in November.

So every time we see Luis Enrique succeed, and one thinks this will not be the last of his success, writers like me will bring up the day Nastic said no to two of the biggest coaches of the modern era. But we will never truly know how much that decision has changed football.

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