It’s August 15, 2004, and Manchester United are about to play their first league game of the season away to Chelsea, who have a new manager, Jose Mourinho. Ruud van Nistelrooy and Louis Saha are out. Their fellow striker Diego Forlan hopes to start, but 2004 has been a difficult year for him so far.
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“At the start of that year, I had an offer to go to Levante in Spain, but I didn’t want to go,” the Uruguayan, now 41, tells The Athletic. “Soon after, Sir Alex Ferguson had told me that I had to wear bigger studs. I tried for a couple of games and didn’t like them. I told this to Albert, the kit man, and nothing more was said. I returned to my normal studs.
“Then, before the FA Cup final against Millwall (three months before that Chelsea season-opener), Sir Alex said to me that it might be difficult for me to play a lot of minutes the following season. I stayed at United and played pre-season, but the club had signed Saha and Alan Smith that year. I realised that I was going to be fourth-choice striker and that was difficult for me. Even with injuries to strikers, when the season started at Chelsea I was still on the bench.”
United, with Liam Miller and Eric Djemba-Djemba starting in midfield, are trailing 1-0 when Ferguson tells Forlan to warm up.
“I came on for the last 15 minutes and had a chance to score, but I slipped and mis-controlled the ball,” says Forlan, as he drives home from training along the banks of the River Plate. He’s now a manager at second-tier Uruguayan side Atenas de San Carlos and has ambitions to rise step by step. But back to that summer day in west London.
“We lost 1-0. I knew the gaffer would not be happy. I went to the dressing room to take my boots off, maybe hoping that he wouldn’t see them. It was too late. He was shouting and very angry. He picked up my boots and threw them away. He shouted at the kit man too, blaming him for not making me wear the boots he thought I should be wearing.”
Forlan knew his time at United was up, knew that they were trying to sign yet another striker, Wayne Rooney, who would join from Everton by the end of the month.
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“The next day, we had an offer from Villarreal,” says the father of four. “It came about because my agent also looked after Juan Roman Riquelme, who had moved there from Barcelona. I went to see Sir Alex. He was good with me. He said I’d been a great professional and that he had hoped to play me more. He told me that he wanted to keep me, but that if I wanted to go, I could.
“He understood my reasons and told me many times since that he wished I’d stayed, but at the time, I needed to play more football. It was my decision to leave.”
Forlan was waved off with newspapers highlighting his unenviable record of 17 goals in 98 United appearances across all competitions.
“I only played five minutes in some of those games,” he points out. “It’s difficult to adapt when you play a game and then don’t play for another two weeks. It’s hard to settle.”
Ferguson had tried different options with Forlan, who had taken 27 games to score his first United goal, a penalty in the 89th minute of a 5-2 Champions League win over Maccabi Haifa.
“We tried Diego Forlan off the front,” Ferguson writes in his autobiography, “but we had been playing a lot with Juan Sebastian Veron, Paul Scholes and Roy Keane in midfield.”
Ferguson also explained Forlan’s situation in the context of lead striker Van Nistelrooy’s tunnel vision when it came to scoring goals, suggesting the Uruguayan “ran up against the problem of Ruud’s singularity”.
“Ruud wanted to be the No 1 finisher, that was his nature,” said Ferguson. “Diego Forlan didn’t register on his radar at all, so when you put the two of them out there together, there was zero chemistry. Diego was better with a partner. But he scored some priceless goals. Two at Anfield, a goal with the last kick of the game against Chelsea. He was a good player and a terrific pro.”
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Ferguson obviously liked him, having later cited his positive qualities as both a person (“He was great about the place, always smiling… a breath of fresh air, as a person”) and as a player (“He floated over the ground… he was small but had good upper body strength”) but none of that changed Forlan’s desire to leave, a move he didn’t regret.
“I just needed to play 90 minutes every week,” Forlan says. “I was 25 and Villarreal offered that. I wish it could have worked out better in Manchester but I still learned a lot playing with great players, still scored some important goals. I just wanted to show the player I was, and that was not going to happen at United.”
As for that relationship with Van Nistelrooy — a striker who scored 150 goals in five years at Old Trafford, but wasn’t exactly known for selfless play — Forlan is diplomatic: “Ruud was a great striker who likes playing on his own. He was not comfortable playing with another striker alongside him. We were different types of players in different moments in our career. He wanted to be the main reference and if another striker played along his side, that meant he had to move from the position which he preferred. But he scored many goals. He was one of the best strikers in the world.”
Besides, there were other advantages to moving from Manchester to Spain’s Mediterranean coast: “I lived by the beach at an ambitious club with a lot of South American players. I got a pay rise too. What I’d learned at United started to pay off at Villarreal.”
Forlan quickly realised the big differences between the clubs but recognised they shared the same level of ambition. “The training ground and stadium were excellent, too. Villarreal looked to teams like Deportivo La Coruna, who were from a small city and had played in the Champions League. The president (ceramics industrialist Fernando Roig) liked Argentinian players and we had some very talented ones — like Riquelme. I’d known him from when we played in Argentina.”
Riquelme was waiting when he arrived.
“We still didn’t know each other that well but he shook my hand at training and insisted that I was eating at his place that night. He asked what food I liked. I said, ‘Milanesa’ (breaded meat fillet). I arrived at his place to milanesa and mashed potatoes, cooked by Roman, that only my brother’s cooking could match. Roman was a potato specialist.”
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Disappointingly, a two-minute cameo for United in a Champions League qualifier against Dinamo Bucharest in mid-August meant he had to sit out all 12 of Villarreal’s European games that season, including one against Middlesbrough, the club who thought they’d signed Forlan in 2002 before United snuck in and collected him at Heathrow.
So, for Forlan, 2004-05 would be all about La Liga. He scored on his debut against neighbours Valencia in the first game of the season, a 78th-minute strike in a 2-1 defeat. He then went without a goal for four full games before getting one in each of the next three. There were no further goals in the next six and Villarreal were 15th after 14 games.
“It took time to adapt to a new league, new players and a new country,” explains Forlan, having just joined a new club himself as a manager back home in Uruguay. “But once I settled down I kept scoring goals.”
Forlan then scored in 21 goals in the next 23 games, including two in a 3-0 win over Barcelona. By the time The Yellow Submarine had risen to third 31 games into the season, Manchester had long since disappeared from view. Did he miss anything about England?
“Custard,” he says. “I used to eat it with Roy Carroll after training. I liked it. And then I was in Spain with sunshine, but no custard. I missed original films too. I didn’t like to see Jack Nicholson talking (dubbed) in Spanish because I knew his voice.”
Forlan managed to put the absence of custard behind him sufficiently to settle off the pitch in his new Spanish home.
“The players didn’t do the cooking, their family and friends did,” he says. “Every Thursday, I’d invite the South American players and their friends to my house in Castellon, the closest city to Villarreal. Nobody actually lived in Villarreal, apart from Riquelme. So the players would come to mine and listen to music we knew. Some of the Spanish players came too. We some good times, especially when it was warm.”
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Forlan was now in a race to win the “pichichi”, the award for La Liga’s top goalscorer of each season.
Manuel Pellegrini, Villarreal’s manager at the time, tells The Athletic why his new striker was suddenly finding the net so frequently. “A lot of Diego’s goals came from passes from Riquelme and they allowed him to be one on one with the goalkeeper.”
Forlan doesn’t disagree with this analysis. “We clicked on the pitch. We’d both had difficult times at our previous clubs but at Villarreal, we came alive under Pellegrini, who knew us both from Argentina, where he’d managed San Lorenzo and River Plate. Riquelme would anticipate my runs and give me balls every striker would dream of. I scored from them, often.”
Pellegrini saw a huge improvement over Forlan’s first season, where he was hungry for success after his relative drought at Old Trafford. “Diego wanted to be the top goalscorer in the league. He was so determined to be the top scorer that, near the end of the season, he tried to shoot from kick-off in a game against Malaga. Samuel Eto’o was trying to do the same for Barcelona.
“He didn’t score and I substituted him after 70 minutes and he was shouting at me saying, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing? I want to be top scorer’. And I said to him, ‘If you are the top scorer, it’s because of the way we play’.”
“He was calm, even when I wasn’t,” Forlan admits. “I was scoring a lot of goals but was still four behind Eto’o when we played against Barcelona (in the penultimate league game). They were champions, but I scored a hat-trick in the Nou Camp and we held them 3-3. Eto’o missed a penalty.” The next visiting player to score a hat-trick at the Nou Camp was Kylian Mbappe, three months ago.
“My confidence should have been high, as I was just a goal behind Eto’o with a game to play; yet I was often overcome by anxiety and nerves. That was my personality and Pellegrini knew that. He also knew how to manage me and took me off in that match.”
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Pellegrini was proved right. “In the last game, Villarreal beat Levante 4-1 and Diego scored twice. He was the top scorer in Spain, with one more goal than Eto’o.”
Forlan has always pointed out that Pellegrini was a master psychologist. “‘Be calm tomorrow’,” he’d say. Simple, soothing and yet effective words, like hearing a doctor say that you will be OK. Because I trusted him, I believed him.”
Forlan won the pichichi with 25 goals, having played in all but one of the 38 league matches. He pays fulsome tribute to Riquelme for getting him there.
“Juan Roman was big for a No 10, but his technique was beautiful. He’d put the ball through the legs of opponents, he’d protect the ball so nobody could get it. He gave accurate, measured passes to players in dangerous positions. He was an artist, so enjoyable to watch.”
Those 25 goals also brought him the European Golden Shoe, shared with Thierry Henry of Arsenal. “Roman scored 15, so that was 40 of Villarreal’s 69 league goals as we finished third, the club’s highest-ever position. At times, we were like kids on a playground, full of love for football.
“One goal against Real Sociedad was a favourite, we both had the chance to shoot and score but kept passing the ball to each other in front of the goalkeeper until I put the ball in the net.”
The move to Villarreal could not have gone much better. They reached the Champions League semi-finals the following season but if you disregard the Intertoto Cup, which you may well be inclined to do, the club have never reached a final in any competition — until this season.
Wednesday’s Europa League final between United and Villarreal could be deemed the Forlan Derby.
Forlan is still a fan of his first Spanish club, even if his loyalties will be split when the two sides play in the Polish city of Gdansk.
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“I watch every club I played for, and of course I’ll be watching the final,” he says. “It’s hard for me to support either team, I will be happy for the winner and wish them both all the best.
“I had to leave United for Villarreal. Something inside told me I needed to turn a page, start again. And I’m glad I did, that season turned everything around for me, but I could have gone back to England several times. Roy Keane called me when he was at Sunderland. ‘Diego’, he said. ‘I know you like a beach — we have one here at Sunderland’.”
He laughs out loud as our call ends.
(Top photo: Getty Images/Design: Sam Richardson)
