Chapter 1: What prompted Gary Neville to reflect on his time at Valencia?
Gary, how are you? Are you missing me at this difficult time?
Yeah, to be honest with you, I sometimes complain and whinge on the way to matches. You know, when you've got to drive three or four hours, like Norwich or Southampton.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Did you say sometimes?
No, I mean, you do, don't you? You've got those long five hours or you've got the trains at sort of, you know, 10 o'clock at night that get back in at half one in the morning and you think, oh, you're hard done to sometimes. You feel like the world's against you.
And then you're in moments like this and you just realise that you'd do anything to be back on the road watching football and doing normal things. It is unbelievable, this.
One of the very few upsides of this, though, because everybody is the same boat as that, We can't go into the studios now. We can't broadcast in a normal way. You get a great snoop around people's houses when you aren't Skyping. I'm loving the decor. You've got a bit of David Bowie gone in the background. What else have you got there? What are those pictures of? The ones on the shelf.
It's actually Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and I'm not sure who the one is in the middle.
I can't see that far. People might not know this, probably don't know this. I was, well, they believe I was single, I think. I was single in Manchester from the age of about 26 to 29. I actually went on a massive photography binge in terms of just art and photography. I used to just walk out in the afternoon and just loved artwork and got into it and collected a lot.
And I've got, I don't know if you can see, I should take you around in a bit if I can take you around and show you some of the artwork. I actually am really proud. It's the one thing I've kept with me for 17, 18 years. I never have any artwork of football in my house or souvenirs or memorabilia or anything like that. But I do have obviously artwork of
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Chapter 2: How did Gary Neville's experience at Valencia impact his coaching philosophy?
Simple pleasure, son. Now, I'm not entirely sure I follow the next bit because the producer said, look, we can't get together. So we need a bit of off script. We need something to talk about because understandably, there is the focus is on the important things, which is people's health. And we're all in lockdown at the moment. And by the way, once again, let me join everybody else.
Fantastic what you and Ryan and your partners have done with the hotels. Brilliant, brilliant gesture. they need a bit of distraction, a bit of levity, a bit of entertainment. I said, yeah, okay, I get that. What should we do? Because you and I have done countless interviews. He said, ring him and ask him about his time at Valencia.
Now, I can see why that could amuse a lot of other people, but I'm not entirely sure that's going to lift Gary's spirit. I mean, as soon as I even say the word Valencia, what do you think?
Massive lesson in terms of allowing probably a number of things, really. One, sometimes no is a great word. And I think saying no to the original offer, probably from Peter when he asked me to do it, with such obviously short timeframes to react from it, and probably thinking that... But that's Peter Lim, your business partner.
He's your partner of a number of different things. And it was a very... different scenario it's not like a chairman of a club now ringing you up and saying Gary would like to speak to you this is a close personal friend and also a business associate so you probably viewed the request in a completely different fashion to being offered a job in football as it were
Yeah, I mean, I turned down two Premier League inquiries and two Championship inquiries in probably the 18 months before. I had no intention to go into management. And obviously I was working as a coach under Roy, but I was doing more of the video work with Roy and Roy and Ray were doing the coaching and I was doing the more analysis type stuff that I was doing on Sky.
And when Peter rang me, I just felt that he'd supported me and the lads in obviously Salford and other business ventures. And, you know, he didn't want to bring a manager in partway through a season because he knew that he wouldn't get the manager that he wanted. He didn't want to rip the squad up and him costing him a load.
He wanted just somebody to navigate him to the end of the season that he trusted. And I said no initially, I didn't think it was the right thing, but then eventually he obviously wanted to do it for him. So I think saying no and sticking to where you are, but I think also a little bit of arrogance, a little bit of ego.
I think at that point, if you remember, I'd lived through Manchester United for 20 years, I'd gone to Sky and it had gone well and you feel a little bit unbreakable, you feel a little bit sort of... in a position where nothing's gonna go wrong. And when you're unprepared, you're not working as hard at something as other people are.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Gary Neville face during his time as Valencia's manager?
The only way I can describe Valencia in terms of a sort of hotbed of football, it's a little bit like Liverpool. It's a little bit like Newcastle. It's like a ferocious city in the sense that it's... It's fans. If they take you in, they'll love you forever. But if they don't take you in, they're going to be quite difficult with you quite quickly.
And I think that the ego in me said that I could handle anything. I could do anything. I could... take anything on. That was a confidence, that was a belief I had, which is good. But then you've got to have that perspective and that awareness of, hang on a second, am I really up to this? Have I done this before? Is this really the first job you're going to take in football?
Valencia, you don't speak the language, you don't know the league, you don't know the away ground, you don't know the referees, you don't know the local media, you don't know the national media. You're a stranger in a city that, to be fair, doesn't expect you to come.
All those things I underestimated and it was my ego that felt I could get through anything and just take it in my stride that made me probably, when I was over there, not realise how difficult it was going to be. I don't think I saw the warning signs or the flashing lights quickly enough.
I think I probably should have seen the warning lights a lot quicker and gone in there in crisis mode rather than going in there thinking I could put it right straight away.
When you look back now, can you see what those warning signs were, what those flashing lights were? Were there obvious moments where you think, should have said that to him, should have done that, should have done that. So once you've passed the point, of course, taking the job in the first place, that was an emotional decision, which in fairness, knowing you, is not normally you.
You don't normally make emotional decisions. Okay, so if we move past that, it almost doesn't sound like you, because you say you're not, people don't know you personally. You are direct. You are very, you can be brutal in the way you normally are. So when you say you were fluffing around and trying to sort of cajole it along, that's diametrically opposed to your natural character.
Geoff, I plan everything in sort of three and five year batches. I know exactly what's going to happen in the next three years, next five years, what I want to get out of it. I've always done that, even in football with my career in terms of where I want to be.
the two instinctive decisions that I've made in my life, which are Valencia and opening a nightclub in Manchester, which is obviously a very different thing. No, it didn't, Geoff.
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Chapter 4: What lessons did Gary Neville learn about decision-making in management?
Essentially, it's going to be a bit of a fire sale type thing if you're getting players out at that time. Let's try and keep the ship steady to the end of the season. And I should have made a couple of really big decisions on players that weren't committed to the club at that point, even though they were for the non-footballing reasons, both of them.
And I remember speaking to Sir Alex on the way home from training quite early on one day and him saying to me, Just get rid of them, son. He said, don't even think about it. He said, protect yourself. Only have people in the dressing room who are facing the same direction as you. And that means you need to get results.
So why didn't you listen to him?
Because I went home and I went into training the next day and I thought, I'm only here for four months. These were two... Do you remember when Unai Emery said that he had five captains? when he was Arsenal manager and he got criticised for it. Well, I think every club in Spain or most clubs in Spain have five or six captains. So we had five captains at Valencia. These were two of the captains.
They were two of the senior players. They were good lads. No problem with them as people. They had obviously individual issues. And I tried to talk them round over a period of a week into accepting that, look, let's just stay here to the end of the season. At the end of the season, there'll be a new manager comes in. It'll be a lot more stable.
You can make a decision in the cold light of day because it's a great club. So you can sort of get through these next four or five months. You're a big part of the squad. And started to talk to them in that nature. but they weren't happy.
If you remember, there were a couple of other players who'd been left out by the previous manager who I'd brought back in and I did what, to be fair, do you hear managers come into a club and they do an interview, you've done thousands of these types of interviews, Jeff, and you hear the new manager say, look, everyone's got a clean slate, you start from scratch, everyone that's had a previous history gets pushed away.
Well, I adopted that approach. But if you look at what Jurgen Klopp did at Liverpool with Benteke, or what happened to Joe Hart with Pep Guardiola, The minute that a manager goes into a club nowadays, he's just got to get the right people on the bus that are right for him, that are right for the club, that will get him results.
He believes, well, I don't think the approach of everyone's got a clean slate anymore is actually... Managers haven't got time to be able to give a year to a player to work out whether they're a good lad or not, or a bad lad or not. You've just got to be definite.
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Chapter 5: How did language barriers affect Gary Neville's coaching effectiveness?
I can't do this. Or were you actually stood there thinking, I can't do this. I'm not a football coach. I found out in the worst possible circumstances, I cannot do this. What were you thinking?
I think both. I think that
I couldn't do this because of the speaking language in the sense that I was doing four or five lessons a week but you know when you've got four months in a job you haven't got time to learn Spanish I actually should not have even I should have put the Spanish lessons to the back burner and what I should have done was bring in two or three really experienced English stroke dual language speaking English language
That basically could... Essentially could do the job for me in a three, four month period. Because I didn't have... There was no chance that I was going to learn Spanish in four months. Even though I was trying my best and I was doing everything that I could. And it was important that I committed. So I took my family over. I learned the language. But...
The things that I knew before I went over there, like I didn't speak the language, I didn't know the league, I didn't know the away grounds, I didn't know the referees, I didn't know the media, I never looked at those as excuses because I knew those before I took the job.
What I would say is in terms of did I think I wasn't a good coach, what I would say is that if I went into a coaching role in the future, which will never happen, But if I was to, I would go in there with the best in class coaches. What I do feel I can do is communicate to people and see a football match and understand the football match.
But the ability to coach a football team or football squad of 22 players requires hundreds of hours of practice on the grass. And I didn't have the hundreds of hours of practice on the grass behind me. To be a football player at Manchester United for 20 years, I practiced for thousands of hours playing full back and being defender, being able to pass the ball.
To think then I could go and be a coach having not done any hours on the grass, because I wasn't doing that with Roy Hodgson. I was only doing the video analysis work mainly. That was just complete and utter naivety and arrogance. I needed to bring in three or four. I had one or two already that were there, but I needed to bring in probably a couple of others, real specialists,
in coaching football teams to a philosophy that I wanted. And that's what I think Steven Gerrard's done up at Rangers. I think he's brought in really good quality coaches in around him. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's done it at Manchester United. Ryan Giggs, I've seen, obviously I know, has done it with Wales.
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Chapter 6: What were the critical moments that signaled trouble for Neville at Valencia?
But that was an amazing night. We drew 2-2. The atmosphere was incredible. It was out of this world in terms of seeing Cristiak.
Gary, if they're not part of you, and I understand, and you're very honest about it, But is there a part of you that is proud that you have managed against Real Madrid?
No. I never think of it. I've never thought of anything that I've done and felt proud about it. Actually, what I remember about that game is that obviously we were struggling in the league and Real Madrid were absolutely outstanding. They had Bale, Cristiano Ronaldo and all the other sort of great players. And we left the grass really long...
on the pitch so that the ball wouldn't travel very quick and we didn't water it either. And I remember Cristiano coming over to me, honestly, it's a true story, he came over to me before the game. He said, Gaz, Gaz, a disgrace, it's a disgrace, cut the pitch, cut the pitch. I said, you've no chance of me cutting the pitch. Honestly, it was like a farmer's field. Honestly, it was.
We left it that long. There was no way he was dribbling that night. But do you know something? At that point, I actually thought, well, if that's in the players' heads and it's in Cristiano's heads before the game this was...
I always knew when we were distracted before a game, maybe at United, the odd time where we thought maybe... I remember once at Bradford, the dressing rooms weren't big enough and we all went outside. It was boiling hot and we all went outside into the corridor before the game about an hour before and just sat in the corridor.
And what we were telling Bradford were that the changing room wasn't good enough. So it probably lifted them a little bit. And I suppose that message from Cristiano that night gave me a little bit of a hope. But then there was another period partway through I think we won three games and drew two. I think we won a little unbeaten run, including cup games.
We got the first league win and I thought, here we go, we've got it now, we'll go on a good run. That was a period where I felt as though we were starting to get there. Paco had come in, the training sessions had become a lot more smooth. The communication had become a lot more smooth. The players seemed to be responding a little bit.
They knew that we'd done quite a lot of fitness work with them in the early days and we were trying to get them fit. There were quite a lot of injuries at the time when I first joined. And the players were coming back from injury and we were starting to get quite good. And I could see the bones of a real league football team. And there were some really talented players.
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Chapter 7: How did the press conferences differ in Spain compared to England?
Who's going to come out? They've just been done. Who will come out?
Yeah, I mean, if we lost, then I'd be the player that would go out and speak or if it was, you know, with England or if it was, you know, I'd be one of the players that should I say,
I was over there, I think I had 30 matches, and the rules in Spain are, as they are in England, that you have to do a press conference the day before every game and obviously straight after the game, full press conference, exactly the same. I was over there, I think 120 days or 130 days, something stupid like that, and I did 60 press conferences.
I don't know if people remember, they won't remember, Because we were in the Copa del Rey and the Europa League to the point whereby I left, We had a game every midweek whilst I was there. So we played Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday. We didn't have one single free week from the moment I arrived until the moment that I left.
And that was one of the other big mistakes that I made that Peter rang me up about January, mid January and said, other than the Christmas break, which everybody had. So basically every time we played a game, we had a game three days later, every single game.
So there was never any training time at all, which was one of the big frustrations because we just felt, I just felt like we needed to jump off the roundabout that was spinning and just rest and give the players a couple of days off. And what I should have done actually was probably give the players two or three days off and said turn up for the game on Wednesday just to give them a break.
But I didn't do, I always went through the same routine. But what Peter said to me in mid-January was, look, Gary, get out of the Copa del Rey, get out of Europa League. It's the league that's the priority. That's the competition that's killing us. And we kept on winning in the Europa League and the Copa del Rey, obviously, until the semifinals and the quarterfinals.
but we just had no energy at the weekend and the pressure was building every single weekend. And with Salford over the last five years, I've always said the FA Trophy, or whether it be the Manchester Senior Cup when we're in the lower leagues, they're not the priority, forget about them. We deal with the league, that's our priority.
And even Sir Alex, when we was younger and he put the kids into the sort of Carling Cup teams or the League Cup teams, and he played the main team in the Champions League and the Premier League. I'd been surrounded by this all my life. in terms of Salford or Manchester United. And again, just a really weak decision not to play the kids in a game in the Europa League and Copa del Rey.
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Chapter 8: What lasting effects did the Valencia experience have on Gary Neville?
It would be a lot more... clinical and maybe that was because they were going for me as well because obviously i was the stranger in town a little bit and i was young and i think they realized that they could potentially go for me a little bit more than some of the experienced managers but there's no doubt some of the press conferences became brutal i mean the one after i
The one after, say, for instance, games like against Bilbao where I lost or against Atletico Madrid or against Barcelona, the 7-0, obviously. They were brutal press conferences where, you know, I'd walk out after and I'd sort of smirk to myself thinking, I tell you, it's a pretty severe grilling that I've just taken. There was no forgiveness, and why would there be?
There was no fellow managers putting their arm around me saying, you'll get through this. You were on your own. In fact, I do remember Simeone. We got beat at home 2-0 off Atletico Madrid. And I remember them going 1-0 up. And we were in the game. In fact, it was 0-0, I think, up to 60 minutes when we were in the game. And then they scored after 60 minutes or something like that.
Then they scored later on. But when they scored the first goal, during that match, it was interesting because... There were a couple of games that I felt as though I was up against coaches where I thought, I'm out of my league here. I am totally out of my league here. And it was Valverde who went on to manage Barcelona for Bilbao.
He changed system three times inside the game and he was always one step in front of me. I always felt like he was toying with me like a little puppet. You were chasing smoke. Honestly, Jeff, I could feel it on the touchline. I thought, this is what inexperience feels like.
And I remember being on the touchline against Atletico Madrid and I felt like Simeone was strangling me gently through the game. I felt like it was nil-nil up to 60 minutes. And I felt as though he put his hands around my neck after about five minutes. And he thought, do you know something?
I'll just keep, you know, I will literally carry on with you and I'll just toy with you a little bit, but I'll... He was almost torturing me football-wise over 90 minutes. And at the end of the game, I went to shake his hand and he just stormed off past me down the tunnel. And I always thought, can I swear on this podcast at this time?
I think we know what you thought.
Yeah, I thought, Joseph, you absolute... Because to me, respect is always at the end of a game. Whatever happens, you go and shake your opponent's hand or you shake your fellow manager. And he stormed straight past me and I thought, you are one horrible so-and-so, you. Which, obviously, I admired in his teams when I'd watched them. I've admired in his team since. His team represent him.
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