Liverpool was reigning English champions, having won the FA Cup a year before, and already had a social phenomenon in the seething, dancing, shouting Kop when the Beatles released the Ringo Starr-sung "Yellow Submarine" in August 1966. Ian Callaghan and Roger Hunt, the Reds' best players, had recently won the World Cup with England a week before.
Villarreal was in the fifth flight of Spanish football on the day the Beatles' PR machine for their Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby release went into overdrive. The club's uncovered Madrigal "stadium," with a capacity of a few thousand, was nothing more than a pitch with walls surrounding it, located in a small agricultural and fishing town adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea.
Fernando Roig, the Yellow Submarine's visionary President, who will celebrate 25 years in command in a few days, was just 19 years old at the time, and Unai Emery, the man who will lead them to Anfield this week, hadn't even been born yet. (In 1971, he came.)
They wouldn't have been a Goliath to Liverpool's Goliath, but rather the person who lived three doors down from David who gathered sharp stones for him to make a few dollars a month.
However, that irritatingly catchy song from the "Revolver" album, which climbed to No. 1 worldwide (except in Spain, where it reached No. 3), was quickly embraced by fans and local media.
Because the club has just recently become well-known across the world, it is assumed that the moniker is a recent invention. That is not the case. Villarreal was on a promotion campaign, and there's a great fading black-and-white photo of a supporter banner hoisted aloft by first-team players on the day that reads: "The Yellow Submarine is Advancing At Full Steam."
And now they're here. Los Groguets ("the Yellows") is ready to return "to the place where (their moniker) was born," as Ringo would describe it.
Whatever the outcome, it's been a magnificent ride, one that backs up Fernando Roig's response to my previous question about a single sentence, to sum up, his quarter-century rule, which has seen a small, humble, almost village team become one of Europe's best and most honorable clubs.
Roig replied, "Hard labor and huge dreams."
When Villarreal knocked Juventus out of the Champions League last month, Roig went to Juve President Andrea Agnelli and told him that their idea of a "closed-shop" European League, in which clubs like Villarreal wouldn't have an automatic right to play, was "garbage."
His message was reinforced by his team's 3-0 victory in Turin, with Davids all around the world ecstatic to see another Goliath not just defeated, but battered, and hopefully given a lesson in humility.
Villarreal the club, not Roig, is the "everyman" up against a Goliath here.
He is a billionaire, much like his brother and sister-in-law. Roig's success in ceramics and as part of the family's Mercadona supermarket chain allowed him to buy Villarreal for just over €400,000 in 1997, fund some of the club's expansion, deal with relegation, create countless local jobs, and integrate his then 24-year-old son, Fernando Jr., into the boardroom, where he is now effectively the lead figure.
The most painful experience for him during this magnificent quarter-century was relegation, from which the team rebounded back with rubber-ball speed. The image of the Yellow Submarine reaching the Champions League semifinals in 2006, however, is more brutally memorable. Arsenal defeated them 1-0 in London, and with seconds remaining at the Madrigal, Juan Román Riquelme missed a penalty that would have sent the game to extra time and a possible trip to the final in Paris.
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Villarreal beat Bayern Munich to clinch a spot in the semifinals against Liverpool. |
Of course, that's where this year's spectacular will now take place. Do not inquire whether fate is calling a man who just believes in a hard effort and huge goals.
But if you ask him about that 16-year-old night of shattered hearts, he'll tell you: "It's something I recall well. I sprang out of my seat and landed on my knees. I was on the verge of collapsing. At the time, reaching the semifinals was a huge accomplishment."
"I was disappointed because we fell short of our goal, but I often remind Juan Román that only those who are willing to take penalties miss them. I couldn't have missed it if I hadn't taken it. Villarreal is considerably larger now than it was back then."
Roig's most famous triumph occurred a year ago when he beat Premier League and European behemoths once more. Many people forget that this extraordinary 74-year-old just recently recovered from the coronavirus in time to fly his private aircraft from Spain's eastern coast to Poland's most renowned Baltic port in Gdansk for the Europa League final. On arriving, he was informed that his negative test had not been received in time to give him admission to the stadium, where his team was poised to make history. So, only hours before kick-off, he turned around and returned to Villarreal, where he sat alone in his living room, watching Geronimo Rulli win the Yellow Submarine is one of the most incredible penalty shoot-outs in history and witness his guys, his team, hold a European title.
'My wife put Villarreal flags on my sofa so that I might be surrounded by our colors,' he recalls. Because my children were in Poland, my brother was in Poland, and everyone was in Poland, I had to watch the final alone. Because my wife found it stressful, I watched it mostly alone. She is more anxious than I am because of her son! She does, however, suffer. I didn't shed a tear. I was quite tense. I did give a cheer.
"When the game was done, I was shrieking, so I went out onto my house's balcony and screamed and shouted for two or three minutes, releasing all my anxieties."
Imagine, as another Beatles member may have put it, all that hard work and all those goals, but not being present for the coronation.
Unai Emery is the essential figure to whom Roig Sr. owes the realization of his desire.
Emery, a workmanlike Basque footballer, is a worthy testimony to what his employer has accomplished. He appeared in a few games for Toledo against the old Villarreal, both before and after Roig's purchase, always in the second division, at a small stadium, when the club was still training in a public park or on school grounds.
Win, lose, or draw, Emery thought the Yellow Submarine initiative had a feeling of urgency, ambition, and grit. Now, after a remarkable career in which he still appears to believe he will return to Premier League management shortly, he has led Villarreal to their first major prize.
These have been two absolutely exceptional seasons with Roig Jr. at the lead, rather than the club's president. Most people would consider it enough to beat Arsenal in the semifinal last season, beat United as heavy underdogs, go undefeated in the Europa League, and go toe-to-toe with European Champions Chelsea in Belfast at the start of this season in the UEFA Super Cup, before flirting with a Newcastle link and nearly departing. Despite this, he's the one assuring that 'every one of us has all we need' for a Champions League semifinal against the six-time champions, as the Yellow Submarine put it.
Whatever the tactics, whoever is healthy (hopefully Francis Coquelin this week and Gerard Moreno next), however important it is for Emery to avoid his past two outcomes at Anfield (losing 5-1 and then 3-1 in command of Arsenal), you can be sure that his players will be well-informed.
Emery recently told UEFA: "There is always a lot of study of our opponents so that my players have as much information as possible about their opponents. So that we may all learn how to be better. In general, if we compete against an opponent with a larger budget, better players, more awards, and more success, we can beat them if we compete in our best version, with our best performance."
"As a result, I constantly attempt to offer the players more effort rather than less, more information rather than less, and more information rather than less information. Then there are our hopeful aspirations, which are founded on a lot of hard effort."
"You can't be an optimist without a solid basis, which includes hard work, devotion, understanding ourselves, and understanding our adversaries. That's where an optimistic yet realistic sense of assurance comes from."
These are undoubtedly the same characteristics Emery utilized the previous time he faced Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool in Europe, in the 2016 Europa League final triumph in Switzerland, which was one-way Liverpool traffic for 45 minutes before becoming a Seville steamroller for the rest of the game. Winning entails watching, preparing, persuading, and believing.
Working hard and thinking big, much like Roig Sr. and Villarreal during the previous 25 years. And now they're back in the place that gave them their moniker.
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