He was twice voted European Midfielder of the Year, guided his team to two consecutive Champions League finals, was wanted by Real Madrid but never sold to them, scored one of the best goals ever in the 1999 Copa del Rey final, is considered one of the very best and remorseless, cold-eyed penalty takers in history, and till today, is regarded as one of the all-time greats at his club. If you haven’t guessed yet, we’re talking about Gaizka Mendieta of Valencia CF.  (Goodness knows, Gary Neville could do with a player of his class right now! But we digress…)

Here’s Mendieta’s goal from that Copa del Rey final – WOOF!!!!

 

The funny, probably incredible, part of all this is, that when Gaizka did turn up at Valencia for his first training session, the players around watched him and thought, “Who the hell is this guy?! He can’t even stop the ball!!” The truth is, he had never been a technical player when he began at CD Castellón.  He could run – he had held the record for the 1000-metre run in the region at the tender age of 13 after all – but he was a midfielder, a holding midfielder. And he was slotted in as one because of his excellent fitness levels and because he would recover the ball and give it to the teammate closest to him. When he arrived at Valencia, he didn’t think he possessed the technical skills to cut it with the best, and, worse still, he was told he wasn’t good enough.

But this is a guy who, until Torres was bought by Chelsea, became Spain’s most expensive footballer when he moved from Valencia to Lazio in 2001. At his peak, he would easily rank among the top 5 or 7 footballers in the world.  And here he was being told, at the start of his career, that he wasn’t good enough! So how did he manage to settle down? What did he do to make things right? He sheds some light here:

“My dad always saw a potential in me – the fitness, the physicality, the intelligence within the game, being in the right place to get the balls, and not trying to do anything I wasn’t capable of doing.”

But it was his coach at Valencia, one Guus Hiddink, who looked at his young squad and thought, ‘You know what, if we take these kids and drill them over and over again, they could improve in every aspect.’ And they did. They trained the Dutch way with a huge emphasis on technique – and it was all about passing, crosses, shooting and passing and passing and passing, as Gaizka says.

Looking back to his childhood, Mendieta talks about other more talented players he would observe:

“There used to be guys that played with me when I was 16. Barca wanting them, Madrid wanting them, because they were brilliant. I used to watch them and go like ‘These guys are very good! I’m not at their level!’ None of them have made it. Basically, because mentally that’s something that people never get to understand – the sacrifices you make when you are at that age. When all your friends go out and have a drink or go out for the weekend somewhere else and travel, you don’t. You’re either training or you’re either sleeping because you go again the next day. Once you start to train with the first team, you go to train in the mornings and school in the night. So your day is completely the other way around as compared to your friends… you have to mature when all your friends are still having fun.”

While maturity and the ability to make sacrifices are rare, there was a special gift that Gaizka Mendieta had that every elite sportsperson/performer possesses. Who better to say it than himself:

“It happened like for any other player or person or sportsman, I had a talent. My talent was, obviously the fitness, but I had the talent of learning and I was not afraid to learn, and I wanted to learn.”

And that’s what is at the heart of excelling in football, or any profession for that matter. It’s the desire, that hunger to continuously learn and improve that separates the best from the rest. And as Mendieta has said himself earlier in this piece, it isn’t all down to the talent you’ve been blessed with. Sure, it helps. But it’s about putting in the hard yards and staying committed to a goal even when the going gets tough.

Had Gaizka been one of those players who accepted others opinions of him after his first training session at Valencia (by the way, he’s 5 feet 8 inches tall), the world of football may have lost a fantastic footballer. Fortunately for us, he didn’t, and we had the privilege of witnessing a hugely successful 17-year professional career spanning more than 360 games. Not bad for someone not blessed with tekkers, yeah?

So that’s a message for all the young boys and girls out there – if you don’t think you’re good enough today, it don’t mean you ain’t good enough for tomorrow.

We’re blessed with different talents, but the one all of us have in common is a talent for learning.

This piece has been inspired by Graham Hunter‘s outstanding podcast interview with Gaizka Mendieta. Go here and have a listen. Well worth your time and some.