In 1997, Villarreal was a humble club, which had managed to stabilize itself with certain difficulties in the Second Division but had never passed the tenth place in the silver division. Primera and elite football were little less than a dream for an institution that had spent most of its almost 75 years of history between the third and fourth categories of Spanish football.
Two seasons in the Second Division at the beginning of the seventies and the five campaigns in the lower-middle zone of the table in the same category since 1992 were the golden years of the entity when Fernando Roig He arrived at the club in this small town, located in the southeast of the province of Castellón, in the Plana Baja, which then had 40,000 inhabitants – today about 50,000 – and was and is economically based on the ceramic and tile industry.
Precisely from that sector, since he was president of Pamesa, the then new president of Villarreal took the reins of the club to change its history forever. In 1998, a totally unexpected promotion to First, in the promotion against Compostela, after a draw to one in San Lázaro. Then a rapid descent to the following season, with illustrious in their ranks such as Albelda, Palop or Craioveanu, and returned to the top flight in 2000. So far, everything relatively normal, although it was a notable step forward for a club from such a small town, it was still the case of the so-called ‘elevator team’ case, without many options to consolidate among the best.
However, a much more ambitious project was already passing through Roig’s head, with his sights set even far from the Spanish borders. Villarreal settled in the First Division, with notable footballers such as Palermo, Riquelme, Marcos Senna or Arruabarrena, and although he did not manage to directly access European competitions through the first league positions, the extinct Intertoto and its classic summer duels was the access route to the Old Continent in the campaign 2003-04. Until UEFA semi-finals The team trained first by Benito Floro and then by Paquito was able to arrive and only Rafa Benítez’s Valencia truncated his first continental dream.
Then Pellegrini would arrive and the definitive leap of the hand of stars as Forlán, Pires, Cazorla or Sorín. Europe every season and some of them even the Champions League, with that 2006 semi-final against Arsenal, in which an entire final of the highest continental competition escaped with a wrong penalty in the last minutes by Riquelme. Years passed and Villarreal, which was even League runner-up in the 2007-08 season, became a classic of European competitions. Third semifinal and third defeat, this time in the Europa League, against Falcao’s Porto and James in 2011. Also on the verge of the grand final in 2016, with Klopp’s Liverpool as executioner.
The descent, the litmus test
In the middle, a unexpected decline in 2011-12, a season that began in the Champions League and ended in Second. It was a litmus test for Roig’s project, perhaps the most important in these almost 25 years, but the club solved it with an immediate promotion as a result of the great reaction in the second round, after the arrival of Marcelino García Toral to the bench.
Without being a team too cupbearer, since it only reached the semifinals in the 2014-15 campaign, the ‘yellow submarine’ and its two decades in the elite were only missing the icing on an official trophy. He came before a colossus of Europe, the Manchester United, and with a story worthy of a tale. Resisting for 90 minutes, becoming the owner of the game in extra time, and transforming each of the eleven penalties to which he was forced in the decisive round. Never seen. All the players in yellow who finished the game threw from eleven meters and all scored. The last, Rollers, who kicked the squad against De Gea and then, in the change of roles, stopped the Spanish from the final blow.
Fernando Roig could not see it live, from the Gdansk Arena. After his positive for covid, and although he had already obtained a negative result in a PCR test, UEFA prevented him from being in the stadium. The brain of EuroVillarreal, the man who insisted on the madness of creating a champion club in the Old Continent from a town of barely 50,000 inhabitants, followed how his wish came true from his home. «We love you, Fernando. Look at all this that you have created, presi », it said thousands of kilometers away Pau Torres, a boy from Villarreal who had just converted his penalty in the shoot-out and who, as if he were the personification of his own club, from that boy who dreamed of playing for his hometown team, has become a soccer giant European.
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