Eder Sarabia's moment has come
Elche are the form side in Spain's second tier, and will test Sarabia's unique approach against giants Atlético Madrid in the Copa del Rey on Wednesday.
There is no manager in Europe's top league with as much influence on his team's style of play than Eder Sarabia. That's according to Julian Calero anyway. Calero was over Burgos at the time he made that comment and the current Elche coach was at FC Andorra where he was guiding them to their highest ever league position.
Sarabia took over the club in Segunda Division B before leading them into the second tier of Spanish football. From there, they took on the, relatively speaking, heavyweights of Spain's Segunda Division and managed to finish 7th. A staggering achievement for a team in its first season reaching such heights.
Listen to anyone speak about Sarabia who has worked with or under him and they all say the same thing. He's incredibly intense and is obsessed with the finer details of the game. In an interview with Pepe Contreras, Elche's sporting director, he tells a story about going to a game with Sarabia, who correctly predicted exactly what was going to happen after watching the beginning of the game. Sarabia speaks in the language of systems and structures.
That hasn't always translated into results. To the contrary, maybe his suffocatingly intense style has, at times, had the opposite effect. The dynamic between Messi and Sarabia when the latter was Quique Setien's assistant coach at Barcelona "wasn't ideal" as Sarabia says himself and admits he was “really annoying” during his time at the Camp Nou.
“To carry this model out and to transmit it to the players, you have to be an extremist,” he says. “Because the moment the player sees even the smallest doubt. If the player doesn’t come to receive it, the keeper sends it long… it’s all wrong.”
He requires a specific type of player who is willing and able to do specific things on the field. Without that buy-in, it can look schoolboy at times. But when things go well, as they are at the moment, Sarabia's sides are almost impossible to play against and exciting to watch.
They just beat Las Palmas to set up a tasty Copa del Rey clash with Atlético Madrid on Wednesday and they sit second in the league. We have written about them before here and here. Sarabia was at Andorra on both occasions. The first article was an introduction to Sarabia’s style, the second a doubling-down titled ‘Eder Sarabia and Andorra's second act’, but this one is looking at how Sarabia is within touching distance of the summit.
He will get there before long but the path to LaLiga is paved with suffering. There are plenty of leagues around the world that claim to be the most difficult to compete in and win. I won't argue for Spain's second devision as the most difficult here, but it most certainly is a slog with 44 games and a playoff system that drags into the dogs days of Spanish summer.
Presuming, then, that you're not peaking from August until the following June, you'll have to learn how to suffer from time to time.
Can Elche sustain their current pace? Do they have the players and squad to keep realising Sarabia's vision on the field? How have they managed to get to within three of the top despite a shaky start?
Let's take a look.
Sarabia’s Style Hasn’t Changed
Eder Sarabia's style of football is very particular. Just like the man himself. He demands that his teams keep the ball and dominate through possession. As we wrote about him during his time at FC Andorra and not much has really changed from that.
The principal idea behind Andorra’s build-up is to both control the game positionally _and_ create the conditions to attack at speed. It begins slow, where the deliberate patience is used to attract markers, and is then intended to finish fast once Andorra have taken players out of the game and opened up space in the opposition half.
For the opponent, it becomes a problem of managing distance. By populating their build-up with short connections and inviting pressure on the ball, Sarabia’s side are constantly asking their opponents to weigh up how much they can sit off (without giving Andorra a free ride) and with what amount of conviction they can commit to their pressure, knowing that if their teammates aren’t co-ordinated with them, they present a real point of attack for Andorra.
Signing for Elche, relegated from LaLiga two seasons ago but committed to being a possession-orientated team, has helped Sarabia. "The clarity surprised me, how close they all are and how many football people there are with a very clear idea of what they want," Sarabia said.
Eder Sarabia understands better than anyone how important it is that he is given time to implement his style of play and in every interview he gives, he stresses how this is one of the deciding factors in where he manages. Will he be given time? Do the stakeholders appointing him understand it’s a process to install the system he wants to play.
Currently, his Elche side are 1st in each of these categories: touches, passes, possession, passes in their own half, passes in the opposition half, 10+ pass sequences and passes per sequence.
In a speech he gave to the Gizpuzkoa football federation, he speaks about certain players not being able to reach a certain technical level. But, he said, the majority of players can understand and see the game through an incredibly complex mental model. In the same talk, he rifled through some of his main principles of play.
Order → System, Structure
Mechanisms → The system the opponent plays and wants you to play
Free man → Indentify the free player, understand it.
Passes with intention
Short pass combinations
The type of pass you’re playing → body position
Superiority → numerical, positional, quality → generate advantages
Play into one zone to progress in another.
The ideas don’t change either depending on the rival.
We saw this, most recently, against Las Palmas in the Copa when Elche dismantled Diego Martinez' side as they pushed up on their build-up and tried to force mistakes. So attuned are Elche to the importance of attracting pressure that the second division side never flinched. We saw this from the start as Diaby stood with the ball at his foot for 12 seconds waiting for Las Palmas to bite.
That play didn’t lead to anything and it might not seem like much but it’s rooted in Sarabia’s principles and takes a lot of guts to pull off against an in-form top flight side.
The build-up is orchestrated by David Affengruber, the 23-year-old centre-back. He is touching the ball 85.51 times per 90. Only Pedro Bigas (also playing with Elche), is touching the ball more per 90 among players with at least 500 minutes. Aleix Febas is the sole holding midfielder and he works hard to make himself available for the ball often dropping into the defense to draw out a team’s press.
That can sometimes turn into two holding midfielders when, for example, against Castellón, the two midfielders ran towards the ball during build-up to draw out Dick Schreuder’s side, who press aggressively.
Sarabia is constantly tinkering. According to stats from Opta, they have played 13 different formations this season. He has played three at the back on five occasions, four at the back on six occasions and five at the back twice. As a build-up obsessive, it’s where Sarabia tinkers most. Once they do break into enemy territory, they have options to hurt teams but Nico Fernandez is the central hub of creativity around which everything revolves.
Opening the centre for Nico Fernandez
The keys to promotion lie at the feet of Nico Fernandez. The 24-year-old is Eder Sarabia's most important player from an attacking standpoint and, you could say, everything they do in possession is with an eye in finding the Argentine in the half-space or sending the ball out wide before cutting it back to him as he arrives in the box.
He leads the team with in goals + assists with eight (four goals, four assists). He is also second behind only David Affengruber in touches (1522 to 1275), and he does it in a far more advanced area of the field. He has also created by far the most chances from open play on the team (36). Yago Santiago has the second-most with 22.
Fernandez (24) arrived from San Lorenzo back in 2022, and has since consolidated himself as the conductor of the attack.
Only the phenomenon Yeremay Hernandez has more successful take-ons per 90 than Fernandez among players with >1000 minutes played this season. However, the Argentinean’s success rate is much higher than Hernandez.
Another player who Sarabia has put his faith in is Rodrigo Mendoza, who has been recently linked with Real Madrid. He plays largely from the left half-space across from Fernandez and has enough technical quality to understand and implement Sarabia’s style of play. Sarabia has a track record of seeing something in specific players and elevating them to the next level. Think Mika Marmol at Andorra.
Do They Know How To Suffer?
If you listen to a press conference from any manager, you'll hear the word sufrir or to suffer. To suffer is to know how to soak up pressure, to understand the moments of the game and act accordingly. But Sarabia's side try to play the same way regardless of the score.
One stat mentioned previously is that Elche lead the league with the fewest goals conceded in the league, as well as xG against per game (0.93). They have the best defensive record in the league despite playing a dynamic system with defenders following their men practically everywhere. They've given up the fewest shots too (204).
Again, it's down to the mechanisms of Sarabia's system. It asks a lot of players, has a lot of moving parts and demands full concentration for the entirety of the game. It’s why when the collapse eventually came at Andorra, it felt like there was no turning back. Like a Marcelo Bielsa team, the levels of concentration it takes to implement the system can be too high for players and this is why it needs that collective buy-in.
He has admitted as much and seems to be learning from this. In an interview recently with Relevo, he said:
Sometimes I want to be demanding and to do everything now but sometimes you have to give it time. Because if not, you get frustrated or get too demanding and sometimes the footballer isn’t able to respond how you’d like. I am very clear with what I want, I am very clear about how to go about it. I dedicate many hours to football, analysis, preparing for games and sometimes when it doesn’t look perfectly how I want, it would really annoy me. Now, between last year with Andorra and this year with footballers with a lot of experience, with a lot of quality, I have learned to give them a little bit more space, to understand the process because the quality of the players allow us to play different ways and to become a more powerful team.
They play Atlético Madrid on Wednesday in the Copa and Sarabia will no doubt tinker again. He’s likely licking his lips at the chance to show how much he believes in what he says. The defensive side of things will need adjusting too and will give us insight into how Sarabia views playing against teams much bigger and better than Elche.
Can he apply the lessons the players have thought him when the going gets really tough later in the season, as it no doubt will for Elche. Or will he lean even more heavily into his idiosyncracies as a coach? This answer to this will define Elche’s year.