Almost before becoming a player, Ibai Gómez was a coach. He is 34 years old and 21 years ago he was already coaching kids. “I was a late bloomer, I didn’t really make my big stride until I was 17,” says the former Bilbao player for Athletic and Alavés. “Those my age were much older than me physically and I didn’t play much in the games on the weekends. As I had always been with my aita (father in Basque), who has been a coach all his life, when I was 13 he suggested that I take on a team of five-year-olds. I taught them basic concepts and I liked that. I was there for 13 years straight, until I was 26, when I signed with Alavés,” he recalls. That first season in Vitoria, he still continued to go back and forth to Bilbao every afternoon to keep up with his boys, but in the second season it became very difficult for him to do so. He put it aside until a year and a half ago when he hung up his boots and took up the coaching staff again. “I always knew that I wanted to be a coach after finishing my career as a player,” he explains on the other end of the phone.
What he did not expect was that, just a few months after starting his life as a coach, now full-time, he would be in charge of a national team at the Games. He is the coach of the Dominican team, Spain’s second rival in the tournament (15:00), which drew 0-0 with Egypt on the first day. “There was more positive than negative. We scored, but they didn’t disallow it due to a refereeing error. Let’s see if we are capable of competing tomorrow. We know that it is another level,” analyses the Basque, who was left without Junior Firpo at the last minute because Leeds did not give him permission and has the Real Madrid youth player Peter Federico, a new signing from Getafe, as a player with more fame. There is also the winger Óscar Ureña, who was loaned out last season to Leganés from Girona with little success. The list is made up mainly of youngsters from various Spanish reserve teams (Leganés, Osasuna, Elche and Alavés), from modest European youth teams (Volendam, Ingolstadt and Union Saint-Guillois) and some from the local league.
He says that he likes teams that are “happy, attractive, brave, organized and protagonists in the opposing field.” That is what the Caribbean federation must have seen last season in the Santutxu youth team, the first team he managed after announcing his retirement as a footballer in 2023. Half a year after starting his new life, one day in December, two representatives of the country approached the Bilbao club, where the former player’s father (Mitxelo) is also president, and they began to talk. “I knew little to nothing about Dominican football. But we analyzed more than a hundred players, some of them with dual nationality, and we saw that there was capacity and that we could contribute,” he says about the great leap he has made.
Coaching from the age of 13, albeit initially with very young children, Ibai Gómez’s mind in his 193 games with Athletic and the 92 with Alavés never thought only as a player. He took notes from all his coaches, kept them at home and Marcelo Bielsa even asked him for them at the end of his two seasons at San Mamés.
“It’s a very different way of training that caught my attention. I liked those associations between two or three players in an area of the pitch, that occupation of spaces, that vacating to occupy, the deep runs and support, finding the free man… Then I also picked up concepts from the rest. From Marcelino and Ernesto (Valverde), the defensive and offensive order, how to press in the opponent’s half, Marcelino’s transitions in a medium block… Quite a few things,” he says. Notes that he has always had “very close at hand” because, he says, he has never stopped being a coach or “being in that world.”
The risk of the ex-football coach
His last years as a footballer were complicated from a mental point of view. Ibai Gómez has publicly acknowledged that he lost confidence and even the desire to go to training, a difficult experience that, he says, also helps him in this new stage. “I can be closer to knowing what a player feels and the importance of the head,” he says. “We are a very demanding coaching staff (he is accompanied by, among others, Fernando Amorebieta), but accessible. There is one thing that I have given a lot of value to as a player and I hope I do not forget it as a coach: sincerity with the footballer. When you lie to a player, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Every day I tell myself that I must not forget what I have required as a footballer. There is a risk that this will happen. I have had coaches who have had this happen. Surely, there are things that I will not be able to maintain, but that is key,” he points out.
After the Games, he will conclude his Dominican experience – “nobody has told me that he will continue” – and will start in a historic Arenas de Getxo, in the Second Federation. But these days, in the Olympic conclave, the long career on the bench of this 34-year-old is experiencing its unexpected climax. This Saturday, against Spain.
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