José Manuel Esnal

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Mané
Personnel
Surname José Manuel Esnal Pardo
birthday March 25, 1950
place of birth Balmaseda ,  Spain
Stations as a trainer
Years station
1979-1981 Balmaseda
1980-1981 Basque Country (youth)
1981-1982 FC Barakaldo
1982-1984 Sestao SC
1984-1985 Deportivo Alavés
1985-1987 UE Figueres
1987-1988 Basque Country (youth)
1988-1995 UE Lleida
1995-1996 RCD Mallorca
1996-1997 Levante UD
1997-2003 Deportivo Alavés
2005-2006 Levante UD
2006-2007 Athletic Bilbao
2008-2009 Espanyol Barcelona
Mendizorroza Stadium, Deportivo Alavés (Vitoria) field.

José Manuel Esnal Pardo , also known by his nickname Mané (born March 25, 1950 in Balmaseda ) is a Spanish football coach. In addition to positions at clubs such as Espanyol Barcelona , Athletic Bilbao and UD Levante , he led the underdog Deportivo Alavés to the final of the 2000/01 UEFA Cup , which was only lost 4-5 after a golden goal against English representative Liverpool FC .

Coaching career

Beginnings

José Manuel Esnal began his coaching career at the age of 29, his first job being that of coach from the local football club in his hometown of Balmaseda in the Basque Country . After two years of successful work in Balmaseda, Esnal was hired as the new coach of the Basque youth team in 1980, where he subsequently remained in office for a year. In 1982, the young coach signed a working paper at FC Barakaldo , a club from the Basque Country that is already well known across the region. José Manuel Esnal was only under contract with the then third division side and missed the return to the second division. After that, Esnal trained Sestao SC from 1982 to 1984 .

In 1984 he took over for the first time at Deportivo Alavés , the club that years later under Esnal would celebrate the greatest successes in its club history. Mané's first term in Vitoria-Gasteiz , however, was characterized by massive financial problems that made great success impossible, and lasted only a single year, the Deportivo Alavés spent in the Segunda División . As a result, Esnal stood for two years on the sideline of UE Figueres, with whom he rose from the third to the second division in the 1985/86 season and was able to establish the club, which had never been second-rate before, there. In 1987 Esnal resigned from Figueres and again took over the post of youth coach of the Basque football team, where he worked from 1987 to 1988. He then signed a contract with UE Lleida and stayed there for seven years until 1995.

Work at UD Lleida

In Lleida Mané inherited Koldo Aguirre in the fall of 1988 and took over from this one in the relegation battle of the Segunda División team. And in fact, at the end of the 1988/89 season, the transition to the third division had to be started. But the club management stuck to coach José Manuel Esnal and could see themselves confirmed in the third division season that followed, when UE Lleida finished Group 2 of Segunda División B first with five points ahead of the second team from CA Osasuna and managed to get promoted again . As a newcomer, José Manuel Esnal's team did surprisingly well in the Segunda División 1990/91, because after all the game days they were in sixth place in the table and had participation in the playoff games for promotion to the first division by only three points missed compared to CD Málaga . In the following season they finished fifth and again failed to participate in the promotion round by just a few points, Betis Sevilla was three points better this time.

In 1992/93 things went even better for José Manuel Esnal's UE Lleida, because the team dominated the Segunda División for the entire season and ended up at the top of the table with five points ahead of second promoted Real Valladolid and just as many points before the first relegation place, occupied by Racing Santander . In the promotion season, UE Lleida was characterized above all by an excellent defense, spread over the season you had to accept only twenty goals. The offensive with 56 goals was almost the top value in the league.

For the first time since 1951, UE Lleida was promoted to the Primera División , the top division in Spanish football. There they did not really know how to convince and only finished nineteenth in the Primera División 1993/94 , which was not enough to keep them up. Thus, after only one year of first class, UE Lleida had to go straight back to the second division, just like the club had fared during its first interlude in the Primera División in the 1950/51 season . Back in the Segunda División, Lleida played again with the top and was fourth in the 1994/95 season, where they missed promotion by just one point against UD Salamanca . After this narrow failure in the battle for promotion, José Manuel Esnal's tenure at UE Lleida ended after seven years, he signed a contract with RCD Mallorca for the new season .

Mallorca and Levante

In Mallorca , José Manuel Esnal took over a second division team with the aim of making the return to the Primera División. The 1995/96 season ran relatively well and was finished with a third place, which meant participation in the playoff games for promotion. There they failed 1-0 and 0-2 to Rayo Vallecano , who avoided relegation from the top division. After the missed promotion, RCD Mallorca separated from José Manuel Esnal and replaced him with Víctor Muñoz , with whom they could not only celebrate the return to the top class, but also the entry into the final of the Copa del Rey .

Mané took over the coaching position at UD Levante in Valencia in the summer of 1996 . With the then second-rate suburban club, Esnal took ninth place in the Segunda División and had nothing to do with promotion or relegation. At the end of the season Levante and José Manuel Esnal went their separate ways and he began what was probably the most successful time of his coaching career.

Success with Deportivo Alavés

On his return to Deportivo Alavés, Esnal started in the second Spanish football league, where the club had only finished a disappointing 13th place in the previous season. But all of a sudden and quite unexpectedly, the Mané team improved considerably in the 1997/98 season and at the end of the season sensationally placed themselves first in the Segunda División with 82 points on the credit side. A total of nine points separated the team from the first relegation place, occupied by UD Las Palmas . For the first time since the mid-1950s, the Basque club was promoted back to the Spanish first division and they managed to establish themselves immediately. Unlike his tenure in Lleida, Esnal did not relegate his promotion team straight away, but occupied sixteenth place in the table, with a single point separating Alavés from FC Extremadura , who occupied the first relegation place. Then a year later in the Primera División 1999/2000 , the underdog surprisingly came sixth in Spain's elite league, laying the foundation for the international success that would follow the following year. As sixth in the Primera División, Deportivo Alavés was eligible to start in the 2000/01 UEFA Cup , but where they were not counted among the favorites.

In the UEFA Cup, Deportivo Alavés initially proved to be very strong away from home, but also quite weak at home against relatively weak opponents. In the first round they defeated Gaziantepspor from Turkey , in the second Lillestrøm SK and in the third Rosenborg Trondheim , each from Norway . In the fourth round, the French representative Girondins Bordeaux was a strong opponent for José Manuel Esnal's team for the first time, but they surprisingly defeated them 6-2 on two legs. Then it went in the round of 16 against Inter Milan . After a 3: 3 at home Estadio Mendizorrotza , Esnal's team won 2-0 in Milan and progressed. After Rayo Vallecano was thrown out of the tournament relatively easily in the quarter-finals, the German representative 1. FC Kaiserslautern also got under the wheels in the semi-finals. Alavés prevailed against the Palatinate team with a score of 9-2 on aggregate and were in the final of the UEFA Cup . There the team met players such as Jordi Cruyff , Cosmin Contra and Javi Moreno on the English representative FC Liverpool . Judged by experts as having no chance, Deportivo Alavés balanced the final and fought an extremely spectacular battle with Liverpool for the second most important European title. Alavés was four times behind, equalized just as often and thus worked out the extra time, in which you had to act twice short at the end. When everything pointed to a penalty shootout, Alavés defender Delfí Geli hit his own net and decided the final in favor of Liverpool FC with a golden goal .

As rapid as the rise of Deportivo Alavés from the second division to the European Cup finalists, it then went down again as rapidly. Little by little, the players of the successful 2000/01 season migrated, the club found itself more and more in a relegation battle. In the 2002/03 season they ended up on the penultimate place and had to go back to the second division, just three years after the big final in Dortmund . José Manuel Esnal was sacked seven game days before the end of the season and by Jesús Aranguren , who could not turn things around either. Deportivo Alavés has not been able to recover properly from this relegation until today, but is now at least back in the Segunda División.

Further career

After his release from Deportivo Alavés, José Manuel Esnal was unemployed for two years. It was not until 2005 that he took over the coaching position at UD Levante, for the second time. With Levante Esnal rose in the Segunda División 2005/06 as third in the table behind Recreativo Huelva and Gimnàstic de Tarragona , but left the club again at the end of the season.

In the 2006/07 Primera División Mané Athletic Bilbao , returning to the Basque Country, where he had spent most of his coaching career. At Athletic Bilbao, however, there were no successes, Esnal's team found themselves at the bottom of the table early in the season against all claims and the coach himself did not survive the entire season. His successor Joaquín Caparrós finally saved Bilbao after Esnal's dismissal only barely from looming relegation.

José Manuel Esnal had his last coaching position from 2008 to 2009 at Espanyol Barcelona , where he was not very successful either. In January 2009, the coach was dismissed from eighteenth place in the table and replaced by the Argentine Mauricio Pochettino , who still led Espanyol in tenth place. Since then, José Manuel Esnal has been without a job as a football coach.

successes

2000/01 with Deportivo Alavés
1992/93 with UE Lleida
1997/98 with Deportivo Alavés
1985/86 with UE Figueres
1989/90 with UE Lleida

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Esnal, José Manuel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Esnal Pardo, José Manuel (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION spanish soccer coach
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Balmaseda