It is Wednesday afternoon at Watford’s training ground in Hertfordshire and, according to the app on his phone, Quique Sánchez Flores has run 40.1km since the beginning of the week. The club’s manager is addicted to his hobby – it is part release, part enjoyment – and, as a Hampstead resident with the heath on his doorstep, lives in an ideal spot for it.
“I’m a little bit like Forrest Gump, like this,” Flores says, miming the style of the movie character and laughing loudly. “I love Hampstead heath, so when I have time I go there. I could be there for hours. I don’t mind if it’s 12, 15, 17km. When I want to run back, I run back.”
Flores has no time for a run later on Wednesday but he will add to his distance-covered stats in a different way. “I have a seven-a-side match in the evening,” Flores says. “On my team is Dean Austin, the coach; Jack the physio; Lorenzo, who is an interpreter. Who else? My son, Quique [who is 14 and now at the Watford academy]; Coté, a member of my analysis staff, and one nephew who is also working here.
“It’s my idea because I love to create atmosphere. In every club that I have coached, I love to create atmosphere … with the physios, the kit men, the staff. Everybody who wants can play.”
Yet this is no in-house kickabout. Flores has registered a Watford team in a local Wednesday night league. There are eight other teams, made up of regular guys and, presumably, no other former Real Madrid and Spain right-backs – Flores, now 50, was an unused member of his country’s 1990 World Cup squad.
“We play one team every Wednesday night, 16 matches in total and when we finish, we go for another league,” Flores says. “Non-stop! We are top of the table. Of course! We are representing Watford. The name of the team is Watford.
“I’ve played in all of the games so far and I never substitute myself. I always stay on. I’m playing badly? I stay. I haven’t had the man of the match yet so I’m not happy with my performances. I try. I am still working. I am still running.”
It is a revealing insight – a Premier League manager playing blokes’ seven‑a-side – but it cuts to the heart of Flores’s openness and enthusiasm, not to mention his love of the game and his desire to win.
Flores is of rich stock. His father, Isidro, played for Real Madrid before him, where he befriended the legendary Alfredo Di Stéfano – the man who would be Flores’s godfather. His mother, Carmen, was a singer and actress, and his aunt, Lola Flores, was the nation’s most famous flamenco dancer. Lola was, indeed, a showgirl. Flores describes his family as being “completely full of artists” but the competitive fires have always burned brightest.
“Everything I lived with my family was success,” Flores says. “But it came because they fight a lot for it. Our family is this kind of family. There are actors and artists but they fight a lot for success. My aunt, Lola Flores, was working until the last moment before she passed away at 72. One day before, two days before, she was working. This is our attitude in life.”
Flores looks like an actor – he is a ringer for Hugh Laurie in House – and his style is a world away from that of the traditional English manager, with his shirts and cardigans and slip-on suede shoes. He never wears branded gear. He is one of London’s most eligible men and, before this interview, Guardian colleagues – both male and female – say they want to marry him.
Flores is separated from his wife, Patricia, but she and their four children moved to London when he got the job at newly promoted Watford last June. It was Patricia who chose Hampstead and Flores has taken a pad close to theirs. He has retained an amicable relationship with her. “My kids and my ex-wife live close to me, always they live close to me,” Flores says. “I always want to be close to them, as close as possible to my kids.”
It would be wrong to consider Flores the Latin free spirit in his professional life. He is meticulous in his attention to detail and is, essentially, a pragmatist. He talks about how he can protect his team in a league that devours the weak like “a lion” and has made it his priority to keep things tight defensively. The creative adornments can be added and, so far, he is on track.
Before Saturday’s early kick-off against Manchester United at Vicarage Road, Watford have 16 points from 12 games to sit 11th in the table, having conceded only 12 times – the joint fifth-best defensive record in the division.
“It’s very important to play with a good distance between the defensive line and the strikers and, for me, a good distance is 35 metres, maximum 40 metres,” Flores says. “After that, you decide how you want to play. You want to put it into offensive spaces like Barcelona or defend deep like Atlético Madrid? Both of them are playing in 35-40 metres.
“This way, you counter the transitions, what happens when you lose or recover the ball, and they are very important, especially in England. When the team is longer, more stretched out … everything is possible. You are out of the plan.”
Bournemouth are brought up as an example of a promoted team that played fast and exciting football in the Championship and have attempted to carry the fight to their more illustrious rivals in the Premier League. Flores prefers a more reactive approach.
“Bournemouth is a great example,” he says. “In the Championship a few teams are playing football. But in the Premier League there are a lot of teams that are going to take the ball more than you because they have the best players. It is not the fight of the humble teams to have more of the ball, rather to protect themselves. If you are really open against really aggressive teams it could be a bit of a disaster.”
Flores says he has a fear of embarrassing himself and that is what drives him to give his all. The objective this season is survival and he would love to entertain the Watford fans while doing so and establish a connection between the pitch and the stands. But the results have to come first.
“I think that the artist is not living inside me, rather the pragmatist, with the intense focus on work,” he says. “Maybe you can call me an egoist. If I don’t have success I am embarrassed and that’s why I need to be focused. I need to feel secure and to transmit that to my players. It’s about what I can do to get the victory. If we can do more, we can do more, but the plan I try to give to the players is always very simple.”
Flores has made tough decisions, particularly in the summer, when there was a massive churn of players in and out and it is plain some of that was difficult for him on a personal level. The fan favourites Matej Vydra and Fernando Forestieri, for example, were shipped out. Vydra scored 16 times last season but Flores feared he was not buying into his methods. Vydra is on loan at Reading.
“Those decisions were particularly painful for me,” Flores says. “They fought last season and they deserved to enjoy this year. In the end we are talking like a business but it hurts and I think it’s important to take that hurt. If you want soul in what you are building, you need to hurt. When I started as a senior coach 12 years ago I worked really hard to create a red line that players couldn’t cross but I now know that this red line has to be much thinner.
“What is essential, though, is the level of involvement [from the players] in the system and the training sessions. If I see that the concentration of one player is not enough, then I lose confidence in him and, normally, my idea is to separate. I don’t want to talk just about Vydra but for me this is very important. It’s very easy to see it in training and it’s even easier to feel. I go a lot with my gut. The feelings that I have inside here are normally my response for everything.”
Flores had no second thoughts when Watford came calling, despite the Pozzo family who own the club having gone through four managers last season – and that was when they won promotion. The fourth, Slavisa Jokanovic, departed after a row over his demand for a Premier League pay rise. Flores simply backed himself, as he has always done. He has been sacked only once in his coaching career and that was in his third season at Valencia, when his relationship with the president, Juan Soler, broke down. He was dismissed in October 2007 as his team lay fourth in La Liga, four points off the leaders, Real Madrid.
“Was I afraid to come to Watford because they changed a lot of managers last season?” Flores says. “No. I asked myself how many times I had passed through this situation – it was just once and it wasn’t deserved. So I am very secure in my work and who I am. As a coach, the most important thing is quality, not quantity, and this is true of everything in life. How long do you stay married? Twenty years very sad? Or two years very happy?”