After two years outside Spain’s top flight, Elche sealed their automatic return to La Liga with a thumping 4-0 win at Deportivo in June.
As the third largest city in the Comunidad Valenciana and the 20th largest in the whole of Spain, Elche could hardly be classified as one of those clubs pundits like to describe as “punching above their weight”.
That did not stop most pundits from granting them the dubious distinction of being – along with Real Oviedo – favourites to drop straight back into the second tier.
So far – so wrong. With more than a quarter of the season played, Eder Sarabia’s side go into Sunday’s game at Barcelona eighth in La Liga after 10 games – with three wins, five draws and just two defeats.
It will be a poignant occasion for the Bilbao-born coach, who returns to the Catalan club for the first time since an eventful seven-and-a-half month stint as assistant to Quique Setien in 2020.
I met with Sarabia to talk about his indifferent playing career, his famous father and his return to La Liga.
What do we know about Eder Sarabia?
They say the apple never falls far from the tree, although in the case of Eder Sarabia the skills he inherited were different to those possessed by his father Manu.
Manu is a legend at his beloved Athletic Club after winning back to-back titles between 1982 and 1984, including a league and cup double in 1983-84.
Eder never came close to matching his father’s footballing prowess a player and did not play any higher than the third division – although not for a lack of trying.
“I thought I was going to be a footballer, but it didn’t work out,” he says. “I ended up as an amateur – I started coaching and felt fulfilled from the start. I’ve kept going in that direction and I’m very happy.
“My parents were afraid that not fulfilling that dream would traumatise me, but they were relieved to see that coaching suited me.”
However, it was not all plain sailing when it became clear he was not going to reach the playing heights achieved by his father.
For that he has his mother to thank – who persuaded him to study engineering when perhaps a course in physical education might have seemed more logical.
“We lacked for nothing but when I wanted to buy a car I had to work hard before I could buy it,” he says.
“When I wanted to do a master’s degree after I finished engineering my parents told me to get a job.”
It led to him working in a Bilbao supermarket, first as a shelf stacker and then in charge of the fruit counter.
Looking back on those times, he says: “It’s all about valuing things, knowing what they really cost, and learning from what happens to you in life.”
How did he get to Elche?
Sarabia brought the curtain down on his playing career aged just 24, knowing deep down he could not reach the heights he had hoped to.
Instead, he began to teach youngsters at Cruces, before heading to the youth section of Danok Bat – one of the Basque country’s main feeder clubs that helps develop players for the region’s senior sides.
In 2011, Sarabia moved to Villarreal, and after stints with various youth sides, he was named as manager of their C team in October 2013.
Crucial to his development was his meeting with Setien – the man he would spend the next five years working with and who had played alongside Sarabia senior at Logrones.
The effect Setien had on the younger Sarabia was profound.
“My father and Quique were my two footballing fathers,” he tells me.
“I met Quique when I was eight years old and he was probably my father’s best friend in football, so we were close for a long time.”
While at Villarreal he was in contact with Setien – who was coach at Lugo – making suggestions about how he could improve things.
Setien, in turn, had seen Sarabia’s Villarreal youth team play, liked what he saw and promised him a job whenever he left the Galician club.
True to his word, as Setien joined Las Palmas in October 2015 one of his first calls was to the then 34-year-old Sarabia, offering him the role of assistant.
When Setien received a call from Real Betis 17 months later – and again from Barcelona in January 2020 – Sarabia followed him on both occasions.
It was at a Lionel Messi-led Barcelona where Sarabia discovered in no uncertain terms what it would feel like to be outside of his comfort zone.
Cited by the media as the main reason for a rift between the dressing room and the coaching staff at the club, highlighted during a match against Celta Vigo when Messi was seen to openly ignore him, he would later admit to an argument between squad and staff after the game.
These days however he has only positive things to say about his time with the Blaugrana – and Messi in particular.
He says of the Argentine genius: “Leo isn’t just the best of all time – he’s probably the one who understands [football] best of all time. He understood things incredibly well.
“He’s a great winner. He’d get angry if you whistled something against his team in training or if they lost, and we had our ups and downs.
“But he wanted to be better and for the team to be better, for the common good and because he wanted to keep winning. He had the dream of winning another Champions League.”
Setien was sacked seven months after his arrival, and although Sarabia’s time at Barca was short, he looks back on it as a “learning curve”.
After three seasons at Gerard Pique’s FC Andorra, Eder joined second-tier Elche on an initial one-year deal.
The club won promotion back to La Liga after a two-year hiatus, earning him a contract extension until June 2027.
Despite a recent blip that has seen his side lose two and draw one of their past three, Sarabia’s Elche side have shown their innovative, adaptive, attacking style should be more than enough to stay up.
The tendency of some promoted clubs is to set out defensively in survival mode rather than going for it. But that is not going to happen with Elche.
If they are to go straight back down – which at the moment seems improbable – they will at least go down swinging, playing their own brand of football, remaining true to Sarabia’s ethos: making fans happy.
He says: “We have a general idea and a model, but we never play the same way.”
Fundamental to his ideology is a non-negotiable demand that players should be honest in the way they compete.
He explains: “In Basque, there’s a word ‘jatorra’. There’s no exact translation, but it’s like being a good person, honest, doing it the right way.
“Not everything goes as long as you win. That’s a hallmark and something my father instilled in me – football is for clever people, but not for cheats.”
Sarabia believes football should be about more than just results, wins, or dealings in the transfer market – and focus instead on the wellbeing of a club.
“I think about the club’s growth in the short and long term,” he says.
“If I stay for life, great, but if it’s six months or three years I want to leave a legacy so the club continues to grow and improve.”
