Roberto Olabe will leave Real Sociedad at the end of the season. A bidding war could ensue for his services, but what exactly has he done at La Real that’s made them so successful?
The Basque Country, a region full of authentically innovative cuisine, boasts of having the highest concentration of Michelin star restaurants per capita in the world. But it’s not just the chefs from the region who have been cooking in recent years.
One look at the list of managers in top-tier football and you have your A to X of Basque football management. From (Mikel) Arteta at Arsenal to Xabi Alonso at Bayer Leverkusen, managers from the province of Guipúzcoa in the Basque Country have taken the footballing world by storm. In addition to those already mentioned, Andoni Iraola’s Bournemouth play an exciting, high-energy style of football and Unai Emery guided Aston Villa to the Champions League last season and continues to have them competing in the upper echelons of the Premier League.
Basque football management is in vogue.
All of those managers mentioned, aside from Iraola, spent time at Real Sociedad during their playing careers. Iraola spent the majority of his at Athletic Bilbao, playing over 400 times for the club. The two powerhouses of Basque football have a knack for developing thoughtful, innovative coaches.
Roberto Olabe, the sporting director and architect of modern day Real Sociedad, announced recently that he will not continue next season, leaving the role he has held now on three separate occasions – from 2002 to 2005, in 2016 for just eight months and from 2018 until now. The announcement put decision makers at the biggest clubs in the world on notice. With Edu leaving his role as sporting director at Arsenal recently, the obvious links to that position have been made but nothing is official. Luís Campos at Paris Saint-Germain has also been linked along with Simon Rolfes at Leverkusen.
But enough about the future and what might happen. Let’s look back on what Olabe has built at Real Sociedad. For a man who says “it’s not about the sporting director but the sporting direction of the club”, he has taken La Real a long way since he took over six years ago.
Building a Culture of Development
It’s not about the players making it as soon as possible, it’s about them making it when they’re ready; that’s Roberto Olabe’s philosophy on the development of players.
“The learning stage is an investment not just in terms of money, but in terms of time and space you give to the kids’ wider group,” he told El Voz de Galicia. It’s a recurring theme in his interviews.
“I’ve been at clubs where I had to sign 17 players,” he said. “Or at clubs where the objective every year was to make changes. I never felt comfortable with this.”
Olabe prefers to bring players through the academy or sign promising players from the region. Looking at the graphic below, you can see how he has built the spine of this current team with players from the youth system and supplemented it with players from the region.
When you look at players who have played the most minutes over the last four seasons, the vast majority arrived well before their peak years and most came from the academy, including Mikel Oyarzabal, Igor Zubeldia and Martín Zubimendi. The club try to implement an 80-20 split between Basque players and those from further afield. It’s the platform upon which Olabe has build the Real Sociedad squad.
As you can see from the table below, eight of the ten players who have played the most minutes since 2018 are from Real Sociedad B.
Zubimendi, a player who has been at the club since before he even reached his teenage years is testament to the culture Olabe has built. The 25-year-old could have had his pick of any top club in the world in pre-season, with Barcelona regularly showing interest and others like Arsenal and Bayern Munich being linked regularly, too. But he has rebuffed several offers, preferring to stay in San Sebastián. “A large part of who I am is Real Sociedad,” he said during the summer. “Real Sociedad is my life.”
Aside from his commitment to the club, he plays like a player steeped in the values Olabe talks about. He is technically brilliant, cerebral and always on hand to help. Despite being one of the top pivots in the world, he found himself playing second fiddle to Rodri for Spain during the Euros. “I’m here to help,” he said. “I’m not here to be a nuisance.”
Tapping Into the Essence of the Club
This is an aspect of Olabe’s leadership style that might be hard to copy and paste at another club, because it’s obvious Real Sociedad’s brand of football is built around how he views the people from the region. The team is constructed in the image of those who support the team.
“The people from Guipúzcoa have a co-operative mindset, with a committed, honourable and hard-working style,” Olabe has said. If you’ve ever been to the Basque Country or spoken to people from there, you’ll agree there is a humility to their nature that underlies a steely determination. The football played in the region is physically demanding but technically excellent at the same time. There’s a ruggedness to how Athletic and La Real play, and while they’re not one and the same, they do share a lot of the same characteristics.
La Real don’t have many players who are considered superstars, but they work tirelessly in pursuit of a greater goal.
For instance, they’re relentless when pressing. We can use PPDA (opposition passes per defensive action) to calculate pressing intensity, and their average (9.6) is the second lowest in La Liga this season behind only Hansi Flick’s high-energy Barcelona. They had the lowest PPDA in the league last season, which was a trend that had been notable for a while.
Over the last three and a half years, since the start of the 2021-22 season, only Atlético Madrid (0.84) and Athletic Club (0.83) have a better xG against per game in their home matches than Real Sociedad (0.89). The newly refurbished Reale Arena has become a fortress as Olabe and head coach Imanol Alguacil have tapped into the energy of the fans. The redevelopment of the old Anoeta stadium removed the running track around the field, quite literally bringing supporters closer to the team.
It’s a team with an in-house manager and several academy players who they can identify with and get behind. “We’re ambitious and the fans are too,” Zubimendi said when renewing his contract back in 2022. “They’re on the same page as us.”
Picking the Correct Person To Lead
Aside from developing players, Olabe has a knack for picking the right managers for projects he is overseeing. During his first stint as Real Sociedad’s sporting director in the early 2000’s, he picked Raynald Denoueix to manage the team; the Frenchman led them to within a point of La Liga success in 2002-03, losing the title on the last day in a defeat to Celta Vigo.
Olabe chose Alguacil to manage Real Sociedad back in December 2018 after the club had gone through a period of adaptation and modernisation to their style of play. While Olabe says, “copying and pasting this model somewhere else wouldn’t be easy”, his selection of manager does leave some clues as to how he thinks about picking the people to organise the team.
Like much of what Olabe does, it is based in a process of development. When Real Sociedad needed a manager, they went looking for a specific profile, not a name. Alguacil was certainly not a “name” as hardly anyone outside of Spain would’ve heard of him given he’d only ever coached as high as Real Sociedad’s reserve team save for an interim spell in charge of the senior side at the end of the 2017-18 season.
Alguacil had been at the club since 2011 and had also come through the team’s youth academy before playing for the senior side in the 1990s. “He’s a guy from Orio who understands the importance of what Sanse [the reserve team] is,” Olabe says. “He had the humility to take the first team on an interim basis with the idea being to go back to the reserves.”
Alguacil was Olabe’s first and only appointment this time around and it has been a resounding success, helping the club to their first Copa del Rey in over 30 years back in 2019-20 and guiding the team to the Champions League last season too.
Dipping Into the Transfer Market Occasionally
With the culture of development in place and the majority of your players being from the club, you can then experiment a little in terms of signing players. It offsets some of the potential damage one single signing can do if it doesn’t work out.
Olabe is not only concerned with developing players from the academy, he has also worked over the years at turning players whose careers had stalled into valuable squad members and, in some cases, superstars. By creating the culture spoken about before, players are aware they are arriving into a stable environment that prioritises development. That in itself acts as a magnet for ambitious young players looking to take the next step.
Martin Ødegaard is one such example of this. He was signed by Real Madrid as a teenager, but after a couple of years at Real Madrid Castilla and then two loan spells with Heerenveen and Vitesse, many wondered if he’d ever fulfill his potential. This is where Real Sociedad come in. During his loan spell in San Sebastián, he played 2,934 minutes across 34 competitive games, scoring seven goals and recording nine assists. It was arguably the move that set him on course to becoming one of the standout creative players in the world at 25.
Alexander Isak is another example of a player whose career had stalled. He signed for Borussia Dortmund after a battle for his signature that included Real Madrid and other big teams. His time in Germany was not a success and Real Sociedad acquired him hoping they could get his career to take off. Isak spend three years at the club and made 132 appearances, scoring 44 goals and setting up another eight before moving to Newcastle United for more than four times the amount La Real paid for him.
We are currently witnessing Takefusa Kubo on a similar trajectory. Kubo’s career was turning into a series of loan moves where he showed flashes of his technical brilliance but ultimately failed to convince the manager to give him sufficient minutes. He spent time at Mallorca, Villarreal, Getafe and Mallorca again after signing for Real Madrid in 2019. He failed to make a lasting impression at any of those clubs. Enter Real Sociedad.
He has started more than 30 games in the last two seasons having not done so in any of the four years before his arrival on the north coast of Spain. He is still only 23, and while Real Sociedad are not a club specifically looking to flip these players for big money, they will likely make a handsome profit on Kubo if they’re ever forced to sell having signed him for less than €10 million.
That’s not to say Olabe’s track record is perfect when it comes to signing players. They haven’t been able to find a replacement for Isak even though Alguacil said he wanted to keep hold of Alexander Sørloth after a successful loan spell. Since then, Alguacil has been forced to experiment with Oyarzabal as his number nine and suffice with under-performing Umar Sadiq.
The majority of Olabe’s success has come while linked to Real Sociedad and he has done an incredible job as their sporting director. But he says several times that it’s not an easy model to replicate. Much of what he’s built has been on a platform that was already pretty solid to begin with. And he understands the place, the people who play for and support the club better than anywhere else.
Olabe has helped to shape Real Sociedad’s culture and some of that has seeped back into him. Can he move away from San Sebastián and still find the same success? We’re about to find out.
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