Ro-ch. If you ask in Villarreal about the secret behind the untrue success of the local football club, you will receive an answer that sounds like the sea in the distance, as it rises here on the Valencian coast and disappears in waves on the beige beach. Ro-ch. Ro-ch.
Ro-ch is the pronunciation of Roig, Fernando Roig (74). The richest tile farmer in Europe, with a Forbes estimated assets of 1.4 billion euros. He also owns Villarreal CF, a football club from a small town of just under 50,000 people that knocked Bayern Munich out of the Champions League at the beginning of April, and wants to take on Liverpool in the semi-finals on Wednesday evening.
A place in the final – and what else? – would be the ultimate stunt of el Submarino Amarillo, the Yellow Submarine, the nickname given to the club in the canary yellow uniform in the 1960s after the then newly released Beatles song. And that while the fans already saw their wildest dreams come true with the win in the Europa League last year, when giant Manchester United were defeated on penalties.
Every flat a yellow flag
One man was missing on May 26, 2021, the day of the won EL final in Gdansk, Poland. It is precisely Fernando Roig who was not allowed to enter the stadium after he tested positive for the corona virus a week earlier. Roig, who had cleverly avoided flying restrictions by catching a private jet, was faced with a problem that money could not solve.
It must have been incredibly frustrating for the billionaire, who is used to bending the fate of an entire community to his will. Roig’s power can be seen and felt everywhere in Villarreal or Vila-Real, the city’s official Valencian name. An ordinary provincial town full of hardworking people without extravagant dreams, who are allowed to watch top football every two weeks and wonder what the hell they owe it to.
One such person is Modesto Sánchez (59), a shy man with glasses and gray hair a shade darker than that of his dog Chispa, Spanish for spark. Sánchez, dressed in a dark blue track jacket with the yellow Villarreal logo, walks Chispa between the austere rows of apartment buildings that together form the city center of Vila-Real. A club flag flies from a balcony on most buildings.
“None of us dared to dream this,” says season ticket holder Sánchez about the European success. “As a child I saw Villarreal play in a small regional league.” And look at his club now. “All thanks to Fernando Roig. He put a lot of money into it.’ Sánchez doesn’t have much time to talk. It’s his lunch break, he has to go back to the workshop in a minute. In the Pamesa ceramics factory, he is the man who applies glaze to freshly baked tiles. His boss’s name? Fernando Roig.
Suspicion of bribes
Before the local slog team became a European superpower, Vila-Real was mainly known for its ceramics. Spain is the ceramics champion in Europe and nine out of ten tiles come from this area. From the 1980s, mass production took off, with Fernando Roig in the cockpit. In 1977, at the age of 30, he took charge of Pamesa, which had been founded by his father five years earlier.
Under his son Fernando, the ceramics factory grew into the largest in the country, with a turnover of 780 million euros in 2020. He also owns 9 percent of Spain’s main supermarket chain, Mercadona, where his even richer brother Juan is the big man. In short: Fernando Roig no longer had to pay attention to the little ones when his eye fell on Villarreal, a mid-engine in the second Spanish division, in 1997.
On May 15 of that year, Roig announced his purchase in a back room of restaurant 41 Avenida. For 72 million pesetas, about 432 thousand euros, he became the owner of Villarreal. Better than the press conference that day, or the negotiations that were conducted in her restaurant in the run-up to it, hostess Inés Abril (60) remembers the party the club organized there after its promotion to the highest level, barely a year later. “All those people here… That was fantastic.”
Nothing reminds of that origin story in the restaurant that Abril, a friendly face with bleached hair, and her brother Ximo (64) have been running together for 38 years. Today it is called Birbar Espai, a modern tent with concrete pillars and pressed wood walls. Roig still regularly eats at his place and then takes employees with him, says Ximo, a big round cook, the kind who claims to be extremely discreet in the sense of dispensing a juicy anecdote afterward. ‘Sometimes those employees get to hear a lot’, says Ximo, while he runs an index finger down his throat. ‘Anyway. Those are entrepreneurs.’
Glory times
Although Villarreal was immediately relegated again in the year after the first promotion, the tone was set. Glorious times dawned from the return to La Liga in 1999. In the decade that followed, Villarreal stormed the Spanish top, finishing third and even second. With wizard Juan Román Riquelme in midfield and sniper Diego Forlán as striker, the club even reached the semi-finals of the Champions League in the 2005/2006 season. That was lost against Arsenal after a missed penalty by Riquelme who still intrudes in the nightmares of fans.
A sporting slump followed in 2012 and a dramatic relegation to the second tier, but again Villarreal returned within the year, and the Yellow Sub has continued to compete with the big boys ever since. Roig didn’t achieve that success by throwing money at stars like so many other club owners; the purchase of the Dutch wing striker Arnaut Danjuma set the record last summer of ‘only’ 23.5 million euros.
The 190 million euros that the ceramic king is estimated to have put into the club went primarily to building a first-class football organization. Roig built a modern training complex and established a youth academy that produces top players such as Pau Torres, central defender in the Spanish national team. He renovated El Madrigal, the stadium that used to fit 3 thousand people and that now seats 23,500 spectators, almost half the population of the city. In 2017 Roig changed the name to Estadio de la Ceramica† The Ceramic Stadium.
‘It is a genius,’ concludes Inés Abril from behind the bar. And although bad tongues claim that not all Roig’s affairs are equally legal – he is suspected of paying a bribe to a former regional president, among other things, brother Ximo does not want to hear about it. “Why should you when you’re already so rich?”
Season pass? It’s free
The Vilarrealenses know better than to question their genius. They prefer to enjoy the top football that he has donated to their town without any worries. One week before the match against Liverpool. In its own stadium, which is completely covered with shimmering yellow ceramic tiles, Villarreal will play against regional rivals Valencia that evening before the competition.
The rain comes pouring down from the sky; outside the stadium, fans of both clubs take shelter from the rain under the stands. Also Elena Granados (25), with a Villarreal scarf, and her friend Judith López (25), who, as a Valencia supporter, wears a white shirt with orange accents. Her season ticket cost her nothing this year, Granados says. A present from Roig. “For our support of the club during the corona crisis.”
The atmosphere in the stadium is also friendly, which is packed with advertisements for Pamesa. Partly due to the rain, it is not nearly full – the stands will only be completely covered from this summer. In a corner a group of fans with drums creates some atmosphere.
On the pitch, Villarreal is more compelling. With the help of Dani Parejo, the brilliant captain, who was dismissed by Valencia in 2020, the opponents from the regional capital are already put at an unbridgeable 2-0 deficit before halftime. Both times it is Danjuma who lets his goalkeeping compatriot Jasper Cillessen fish. First after a penalty, quickly followed by a one-on-one situation. ‘Dan-Ju-Ma! Dan-Ju-Ma!’, rolls off the stands en masse.
It was a great dress rehearsal for Wednesday, although Valencia is not Liverpool, arguably the best team in the world right now. Despite Roig’s semi-divine status, the residents of Vila-Real know after Riquelme’s missed penalty in 2006 that they need the favor of even higher powers to reach a Champions League final. The black graffiti on a statue in the center of San Pascual, the local saint of service, testifies to this. “Where were you,” reads the faded indictment. “It was a semi-final, and you didn’t show.”