EXCLUSIVE | Stan Collymore: ‘If I could do it all again I’d play for Sevilla or Real Betis.’ | OneFootball

Get Spanish Football News sat down with former England international Stan Collymore to talk about his former club, Real Oviedo, and their return to the top flight of Spanish football, and to look at why more British players are treading a similar path and moving away from the Premier League.

Real Oviedo are back in the top flight for the first time in 24 years. How big an achievement was it for them to return, and what do you think of their chances of remaining in La Liga?

Yeah, it’s difficult; they’re near the bottom of the table, and there are some serious teams down there. The likes of Girona, Mallorca, Real Sociedad. So it’s very early days, a bit like Aston Villa, which is the club that I support, the club that I played for. [Like Oviedo], they’re on six points after their first few games.

I think having a player like Santi Carzola there, that bleeds blue, that people can rally around, is incredibly important, and his experience is going to be incredibly important. I wasn’t across all the outgoings and incomings, but I know that they’ve been active in the market and took Leander Dendoncker.

In terms of how difficult it’s going to be, I think when you’re a promoted team, it’s that first season. You see it year in and year out. If you can get beyond the first season in any of the three big leagues, Italy, Spain, or England, then you’ve got a real chance of staying. And I hope they do stay up; it’s a huge club.

My time was short there; it was fractious, and there’s no need to massively delve into that. But I do keep an eye on how they’re doing, and I hope they do well. It’s a really important footballing part of the country, the Asturias, not just Oviedo but Gijon as well. I’d love to see both of them in the top flight.

The first season is the most important, and they’ll start to get the area and the region believing that they are a top-flight Spanish club again. Just the one win so far, but that’s not so bad. They haven’t lost all their games, and winning one is vitally important.

I think they’ll probably have another look at the transfer market come January. And I always think again, it doesn’t matter the name of the club really, if you’re back in the division for the first time. If you can nick one, two, maybe even three players on loan that have the experience of the level and can help you for six months, and pay their wages, that’ll be vitally important for Oviedo moving forward as well.

So to answer your question, it is just about getting enough points for the first season, as from there you can start to recruit on the basis that we’re a La Liga staple.

Your time at Oviedo was famously short (lasting only five weeks). But can you tell us about your first impressions of Oviedo and why you wanted to join?

I wanted to play abroad. When I was a kid, a lot of British and Irish players were playing in Italy, the likes of Trevor Francis, Liam Brady, Joe Jordan, Ray Wilkins, and La Liga was very much the place to go.

The Tartiere is a fantastic stadium. We used to train at the old [stadium]. And then obviously playing at the new one, a beautiful 30-odd thousand seater stadium.

So Oviedo obviously wasn’t a cosmopolitan place like Madrid or Barcelona, but I spoke to Radomir Antić (the manager of Oviedo at the time), someone I knew, as I was a bit of a football geek as a kid, from his time at Luton Town. I spoke to Radomir, and he sold the club very well. He sold the region very well. It’s a beautiful part of Spain.

I met them and I went out there. After that, I don’t really need to go into it, as it’s all on record. But in terms of wanting to join the club, absolutely, I did. I had a young family at the time, and I was to take them out and live the life there, and to play in La Liga.

That was the other thing, I’d played in the Premier League for a number of years, you could argue now that the Premier League is the pre-eminent league, but at that time, you had players like Steve McManaman, Michael Owen, and David Beckham going to Real Madrid, and you could argue that La Liga was the pre-eminent league.

I remember one of the magazines, and I was on the front of it with Pablo Aimar, and the headline was ‘Liga de la Estrellas’. It was a very exciting time to join any La Liga club; it still is. Whether it be marketing or the talent, I’d say the Premier League is better now, but back then, La Liga was the place to go.

There’s been a bit of a returning trend of England internationals moving out to La Liga, like with Trippier, Gallagher, Bellingham, and now Alexander-Arnold. Can you talk a bit about the appeal of the league?

I think Real Madrid will always sell itself. Players will always want to go there simply because of their Champions League legacy. I think players know Real Madrid as the biggest club in the world. And I don’t think you’d have any pushback from a Liverpool fan, Manchester United fan, Arsenal fan, or a fan from any other Premier League club if you said Real Madrid is bigger than your club. I think most sane fans would say ‘Yes.’

Real Madrid are always cyclically going to be able to take [players like] McManaman, Owen, Beckham. Trent Alexander-Arnold has obviously gone out there. Beyond that, I think there is a rejuvenation of Barcelona; both Real Madrid and Barcelona have had financial issues. I think Atlético Madrid, with the likes of Connor Gallagher, was an interesting one.

I think players will continue to go out there, but I think players will naturally gravitate to those three or four clubs. Like for example, I go out to Seville three or four times a year and see my mate who’s a huge Real Betis fan, and we’ll go and watch Betis, and we’ll also go and watch Sevilla as well. And we haven’t really seen many English players or British Isles-based players go to Betis, Sevilla, or Valencia.

There seems to be a lot of the younger players [leaving the Premier League], like with Jadon Sancho when he went off to Dortmund, likewise Jude Bellingham. You see players going on loan to the likes of AC Milan, another huge club that sells itself. But I’d actually like to see more English players go and play for provincial clubs in Spain, Italy, France, and Germany.

One, because they’ll still get paid Premier League wages, which is the biggest motivation for most moves. I really like the fact that lots of younger players are going out and embracing the lifestyle. You look at Scott McTominay in Naples. The man is almost a god now. If you had said he’d go from being a bit of a laughing stock in Manchester to treading in the footsteps of Diego Maradona in Naples, people would call you crazy.

Why English players haven’t gone much beyond Madrid, I think, is obvious. The language, the culture, but as we’ve seen [something new] with players that have gone to Italy and Germany. You know Dortmund is in the Ruhr Valley, a steelmaking industrial part of Germany; it’s not a particularly sexy part of the world. Likewise, Naples, a beautiful city, but a reputation of being a bit sketchy.

I’d absolutely love more English and British players to go to Spain, and if they did, I’d give them a huge tourist pack of Seville, because I think, particularly playing for Sevilla or Betish, two clubs that in any season could be competitive towards the top of La Liga, and live the lifestyle that the city offers is almost perfect. It’s certainly one that if I had my time again, Sevilla or Betis, I’d have been all over that.

There was a strong reaction from some Liverpool fans over Alexander-Arnold leaving for Madrid at the end of his contract. Can you understand it, or do you think it was unfair?

It’s the modern reality of the game. I wrote a column the other day about the way Raheem Sterling and Axel Disasi at Chelsea. And I use that as an example of why players either run their contract down or they say, ‘I’m not turning up to training, I’m going.’

Players talk to other players; they’ve all got their WhatsApp groups. Even if they’re playing for the same club, they’re keeping in touch, of course, they do, why wouldn’t you? You grow up with them, you play with them at underage levels. And a lot of players would have seen Sterling playing at 8 pm on AstroTurf, which is not the norm; he trains mostly at the Cobham training ground.

The takeaway is ‘Look, once we don’t care about you, you’re out, you’re finished.’ Now Chelsea have a responsibility to that player, so when the players all talk, the likes of Yoanne Wissa and Alexsander Isak will go, ‘Look at Sterling, look at how he’s been treated. Brentford and Newcastle are saying they want us to stay here and will lavish us with long contracts, but if we were surplus to requirements, we’d be doing what Sterling was doing.’

And it’s exactly what’s happened with Liverpool, whether Alexander-Arnold’s a scouser or not. A lot of Liverpool fans will be angry because they hold him to a different level because he was the scouser in the team. But the reality is, if you can run a contract down, you’re going to get paid an extra, particularly with Real Madrid, and you saw they paid the £10m just to get him there for the week in the FIFA Club World Cup, which is crazy, but they wanted him there. That he will pocket another £30m or £40m, and that’s the reality of it.

And for us football fans, and I’m a match-going fan as well as a former player, you just have to accept that while they’re playing in your shirt, enjoy them, when they’re not playing so well, they’ll go off radar and go somewhere else. And I think if you take that attitude, you can still love your club, you can still support it, but with a lot less anger and less concern.

Liverpool have got in now, Jeremie Frimpong and Milos Kerkez, and they’ll settle into the team, and you’ll see their performance become more and more consistent. But to go back to my first answer to you, once Real Madrid comes knocking, they’ll get you. If they say enough times, ‘We want you to come to Real Madrid’, there are very few players in the world that will resist.

Stan Collymore was speaking exclusively to Get Spanish Football News on behalf of NewBettingSites.uk.

GSFN | Nick Hartland