Gustavo Poyet on Life, Football, and Winning the ’95 Copa América with Uruguay | OneFootball

With a well-traveled playing and coaching career, Gustavo Poyet has amassed a wealth of knowledge and experience in the world of football. He shares some of his wisdom with us in an exclusive interview. 

Gustavo Augusto Poyet Domínguez was 20 years old when he left his hometown of Montevideo, Uruguay for Europe. He was 27 when he became a champion of Europe and South America in the same summer, and he was 32 when he won the oldest national football competition in the world. Now 58, he’s searching for a new chapter in what has been a storied managerial career.

Poyet may have grown up in football-crazed Uruguay, but his lineage is far more intrinsically related to basketball. He is the son of Washington Poyet, who played basketball in the 1960 and 1964 Summer Olympics, and the brother of Marcelo, who played professionally in South America. However, Gustavo developed a predilection for football and honed his skills with Club Atlético River Plate of Montevideo before making the jump to Europe with Ligue 2 outfit Grenoble Foot 38 in 1988.

He scored eight goals in 39 appearances with the French club before returning to River Plate, where he spent a couple of months until deciding to return to Europe, this time to La Liga side Real Zaragoza. It was with the Aragon-based outfit where Poyet would break through, making 276 appearances for the club over seven seasons, winning a Copa del Rey and UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup in back-to-back seasons.

Poyet also brought his winning pedigree to the Uruguay national team, as Los Charrúas defeated the reigning world champions Brazil in the 1995 Copa América final.

“On the day of the [Copa America] final, I remember from the moment we left until the stadium arrival, it was more than half an hour on the bus, and you’d see people on the streets with Uruguayan flags giving us the extra strength,” said Poyet in an exclusive Urban Pitch interview. “You were on the bus, and you were feeling it already.”

“When we got to the stadium, the goalkeeper, Fernando Alves, the one who saved the penalty — thank you, Fernando — before getting out of the bus, said, ‘Gents, we must win, because the way back is not gonna be the same with the fans. It’s gonna be completely the opposite, so that shows the kind of pressure that you have in your way.’ And at halftime, we were losing 1-0 against Brazil. Brazil, the year before, was world champion, and it was a massive pressure. The coach made a change at halftime, Pablo Bengoechea came on and scored a spectacular free kick, and the match goes to penalties.

“We had some very good penalty takers, but we also had one or two who were missing, and somebody needed to step up. I never took penalties in my life, I was not a penalty taker: I took one for Chelsea, and one for Spurs, one I scored and one I missed, so I was not a specialist. I remember being on the floor, stretching with one of the physicians because I was destroyed from playing the Copa on the dead grass in the winter. The assistant coach came and said to me, ‘You are No. 6 in the rotation,’ and I say, ‘Okay.’ And then when they started scoring, I started thinking, ‘Maybe I need to take a penalty.’

“I will always be grateful my entire life not only to Fernando Alves, who saved in the shootout, but also everyone who scored. Especially the last one — Sergio ‘Manteca’ Martínez — because if he missed, then maybe Brazil would score the sixth and I’d have to take a do-or-die penalty, and then, [experience] the biggest emotions that you can have as a football player. That’s the proudest moment I’ve ever had as a player. To be champion with your national team is another dimension.

“With your club, it’s your club family and the fans of the club, maybe the city, if it’s like Zaragoza, but Uruguay is the country. It’s your school, it’s your friends: I had a friend that said to me after, ‘Good thing that you won, because if not, when I went into work on Monday morning, everyone in the office would tell me that my friend was a disaster!’ It’s so many people involved that you made happy that day, and it was amazing, the celebration was spectacular.”

Though he was never able to compete in a World Cup, Poyet nevertheless scored three goals in 21 appearances for Uruguay between 1993 and 2000. And shortly after the Bosman ruling allowed players to leave their clubs at the end of their contracts without a transfer fee being paid, in addition to getting rid of foreign player limits, Poyet decided to end his Zaragoza tenure after a stellar 74 goals and two assists, joining Chelsea on a free transfer in 1997.

Poyet kicked off his Chelsea spell in red-hot form before tearing his ACL, but he returned in time to help the Blues win the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup, before leading them to victory in the 2000 FA Cup. But after falling down Claudio Ranieri’s pecking order, Poyet decided to end his Blues chapter after 49 goals and 16 assists in 144 appearances. He traded West London for North London and joined Tottenham Hotspur in May 2001 for £2.2 million, where he racked up 23 goals and 10 assists in 98 appearances.

By the time the mid-2000s rolled around, Poyet was becoming increasingly riddled by injuries. It’s why he decided to hang up his boots and join Swindon Town in July 2006 as a player/assistant coach alongside ex-Chelsea teammate Dennis Wise, before following Wise to Leeds United three months later. After a year at Leeds, Poyet assisted Juande Ramos at Tottenham Hotspur, where he helped guide them to the 2007-08 League Cup, their last trophy for 17 years.

He then decided to branch out from an assistant role, taking charge of League One side Brighton and Hove Albion. After saving them from relegation, Poyet led them to promotion in his first full season before spearheading them to 10th and fourth-place finishes, losing to Crystal Palace in the promotion playoff finals. And after coming to blows with the Brighton hierarchy, he was sacked from his position in 2013.

“Brighton was my best managerial job by far because I was the manager, I was not a coach,” stated Poyet to R.Org. “I had a stupendous, tremendous relationship with the owner Tony Bloom, we were on fire together, we were explosive, and that’s why we had so much success. In terms of achieving incredible things with a group of players, Brighton was spectacular. I mean, the way we played football in Brighton was not seen in the lower divisions for many years. It was the beginning of the Brighton that everybody now wants to see.”

Photo by Richard Sellers/Getty Images

Poyet then took charge of Premier League side Sunderland in October 2013, leading them to the EFL Cup Final and saving them from relegation, before departing in March 2015 and taking the reins at AEK Athens. A brief spell at Real Betis would follow before enjoying roles at Shanghai Shenhua, Girondins de Bordeaux, Universidad Católica, and the Greece national team.

Next up, he took charge of Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors and won the two biggest trophies in South Korea, the K League 1 and the Korea Cup, before stepping down after a year. He’s spent the past few months in the chic London neighborhood of Battersea, and after a brief hiatus, he was named manager of Saudi Pro League side Al-Khaleej. We sat down with Poyet for a Q&A session, where he reflected on his career and the changing tides in the world of football.

Urban Pitch: Does Uruguay have 4 stars or 2 stars?

Gustavo Poyet: Well, I think it’s a very good question, and as I started playing for the national team, I always ask that. I think the stars is a recognition, internally, and I understand that until 1930, there was no World Cup. But, obviously, the stars are for the World Cup.

The only way to have a worldwide trophy was by playing the Olympics. I think it would be unfair with teams winning the Olympics after that, not having the stars in the shirt, so when they ask me how many World Cups that Uruguay have won, I say two, not four.

The stars is just a meaning, because it’s true that people nowadays, especially the millennials, they cannot even think about how in 1924 and 1928, a team from Uruguay somehow traveled by boat from Uruguay to play in Amsterdam, or to play in Colombia, and win a tournament and then go back. They were different times, but, like I said, it’s just a matter of having the stars. For me, Uruguay won two World Cups, and that answers the question.

During your 18 years of professional football, there were quite a few changes like free transfers, the back pass, and getting rid of foreign player limits. What do you think was the biggest change from when you started out in 1988 to when you retired in 2006? How do you think the game changed the most?

Well, with any doubt, the Bosman Ruling was unique. I think it was very clever from Mr. Bosman, because if any European worker was able to go through Europe and work anywhere, why not a football player? That was an easy one, so it was a good fight for the football player. I think that completely changed football everywhere, because there were many teams that started bringing foreigners that sometimes they were cheaper than the locals, and maybe as good or even better. There were big discussions during that time, who to bring, or how many players you want to play.

Every country tried to put different restrictions. But because I was already settled as a foreigner in Zaragoza, and I had a European passport, Spanish in my case, it made it easier for me, because I wasn’t occupying a foreign place, or extra-European community player. But yes, that allowed me to participate on certain things. At the end of the day, I remember clearly, when we were playing in Europe in 1995, that was my best time in Zaragoza, when we won the Club Winners’ Cup, I was still a foreigner. We played three foreign players in the final because we were not allowed more than three.

I always remember that in that particular final against Arsenal, two other foreigners from the team, Dario Franco, an Argentina international who won the league in Argentina, came and helped me a lot, because he was playing behind me, and he allowed me to be free to go forward, and also Cafu. Nobody knows that in this Zaragoza team, Cafu was in the squad as well. And it was only three foreigners: Fernando Caseres, myself, and Juan Esnaider, which shows that we were still counted as a foreigner at that moment in time.

Football changed, in terms of analysis, football changed in terms of participation of foreigners, especially in England. When I had the chance to go to England, the presence of European footballers was tremendous. For example, I was the captain of the first team in England to play without British players. It was a game that Chelsea played away at Southampton. We started a game with 11 foreigners, and that was a big impact. Obviously, we made sure the foreigners, that you needed to win that game. Because if you don’t win that game, then you’re gonna get the blame, so we won it, and nothing happened after. It was just an anecdote.

Lastly, do you think you would ever consider going back into an assistant role, or are you solely interested in head coaching roles?

To an assistant coach? No chance. The problem is that when I was an assistant, I needed to support the coach 100%, not 99, 100%, even when you don’t agree. I did that with Dennis Wise until the end, and Juande Ramos until the very end. It was very strange, because Juande and I were in a hotel, and the chairman of Tottenham called to sack us and send us home. He first called Juande and his fitness coach, and I’m a little bit nervous. I don’t want to take the team the day after.

I was very upset, because I thought they talked to him first and sacked him, and then they would talk to me and say, “You’re taking the team tomorrow.” But no, I was getting the sack as well. I don’t know why they didn’t take us all together, but I was very upset. I will never do that again. When I finished that, I decided that I need to make decisions. And to make decisions, you need to be number one. You cannot be number two.