When you hear the name Raul, you probably think of the former Real Madrid striker’s legendary 16-year playing career with the club.
Raul scored 323 times in 741 games for Madrid after joining their academy from city rivals Atletico in 1994 and rose to become captain. Only Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema have more goals in the club’s history and nobody has made more appearances.
You probably don’t think about Raul the coach.
After retiring in 2015, the Spaniard joined the Madrid youth set-up and has been in charge of their ‘B’ team, Real Madrid Castilla, for the past five years. There have been regular links to the main job at the Santiago Bernabeu and to another of his former clubs, Schalke in Germany, among others — but nothing has materialised for now.
So, what is the 47-year-old Raul like as a manager and what does his future hold?
Why is Raul such a big deal at Real Madrid?
Raul remains one of the most important players in Madrid’s history. His goalscoring and longevity speak for themselves, while he won three Champions League trophies and six La Liga titles during his time at the Bernabeu.
He was the youngest player to be made their captain at 27 and is still seen as someone who always represented the club’s values on the pitch. “If, one day, there is a (football) war, Raul will carry the Madrid flag,” former player, coach, sporting director and now-pundit Jorge Valdano told online outlet La Galerna in 2021.
Raul left for Schalke in 2010 at age 33 after a season in which he lost his starting spot to Cristiano Ronaldo and his relationship with club president Florentino Perez has gone through ups and downs. He moved on to Qatari side Al Sadd in 2012 and spent two years there before hanging up his boots in the U.S. second tier with New York Cosmos.
Even so, he remains an incredibly important figure in Madrid’s consciousness and is rumoured to have a lifetime contract as a club ambassador.
What is his relationship with Perez like?
Raul was an imposing presence as a player at Madrid, so it is perhaps no surprise he did not always see eye-to-eye with Perez.
Perez has spent two spells as club president, from 2000-2006 and now since 2009. In 2021, Spanish newspaper El Confidencial published leaked conversations from Perez in which he appeared to blame Raul as one of the people responsible for his resignation in February 2006, when Madrid were on course for a third successive season without major silverware.
“As he thinks he’s finished, he says, ‘Before I’m finished, I’m going to finish Madrid’,” Perez can be heard saying. “He’s a negative guy, he’s destroying Madrid, the players’ morale. So that they say, ‘Madrid are bad, not Raul’. It’s terrible how bad this guy is.”
In a club statement responding to the publication, Perez said: “They are loose phrases from conversations taken from the broader context in which they occur.”
In 2017, Raul told Panenka magazine that his Madrid exit “could have been better” but that “it happened in that way and time puts everything in its place”. He was eventually given a Madrid testimonial in 2013, suggesting differences had been put aside.
There was some talk in 2015 of a possible joint candidacy for the presidency with club legends Fernando Hierro and Manolo Sanchis, but that did not go any further. The club tried to get Raul to rejoin in a non-sporting role, but it was only in 2018 that he agreed to come back as an academy coach, when tensions with Perez had eased.
Has he done a good job at Castilla?
Raul made a fine start to life as Castilla coach, winning the club’s first UEFA Youth League title — the under-19s equivalent of the Champions League — in his first, pandemic-affected season.
His team also came close to promotion to the Spanish second division in 2022-23, beating Barcelona Atletic (formerly Barca B) in the play-off semi-finals before losing the final to Valencian side Eldense. Castilla remain in the regionalised third tier, Primera Federacion, where they are currently third-bottom in their 20-team league.
Raul likes his teams to dominate and is very hands-on with his players, obsessing over details and regularly correcting them during games. Sources close to some players — who, like all those cited in this article, asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships — describe him as “strict”. That has not always worked in more difficult cases such as that of Iker Bravo, a forward who spent two years with Castilla but left for Udinese of Italy this summer.
Raul’s main job is to provide the Madrid first team with promising players — and he hasn’t exactly succeeded. While he and senior-side counterpart Carlo Ancelotti have a great relationship and there is fluid communication between the coaching staffs, only left-back Fran Garcia has established himself in the first team after making the step up. Even then, he had to spend three years at Rayo Vallecano first before Madrid bought him back last year.
There are two other clear examples of talented players who have worked under Raul but had to look elsewhere for senior opportunities. Sergio Arribas played just 28 minutes in 2022-23 before being sold to Almeria for €8million (£6.7m/$8.8m at current exchange rates) while Nico Paz went to Italian side Como for €6m this summer, after just 128 minutes with the first team.
That is mainly down to Ancelotti’s reluctance to use young players — The Athletic has regularly reported on the ‘Via Carvajal’, whereby academy graduates seek opportunities elsewhere, before rejoining Madrid as part of the first-team squad. Some players have not been satisfied with their development under Raul, although those who have excelled in his Castilla teams are understandably complimentary about his style.
Why is he always being linked to Schalke?
Despite only playing in Germany in the twilight of his career, Raul also became a legend there.
He helped Schalke win the DFB-Pokal, the German version of the FA Cup and Copa del Rey, in his first season and to their first Champions League semi-final with five goals in the competition — scoring a crucial effort against Inter Milan in the quarter-finals. Fans idolised him and nicknamed him ‘Senor Raul’. After winning the German Supercup, scoring 21 goals and providing 11 assists in his second season in Gelsenkirchen, Schalke fans gave him an emotional send-off to Qatar.
Schalke have struggled in recent years, and this is their second successive season in 2.Bundesliga, the German second division. Raul has been linked with a return to the German side several times since becoming a coach.
A senior source at Schalke told The Athletic they understood why that was the case and did not rule him out as a target for the future, but they strongly denied they are looking to appoint him now, given the Spaniard would not leave Castilla mid-season. Raul’s camp are aware of reports linking him to a move to Schalke in the past year but have played them down.
Raul has previously been approached by clubs including England’s Leeds United and Eintracht Frankfurt, another German side, but neither of those convinced him because of timing — with both in risky league positions and offering no guarantee of a long-term project.
The only real possibility for Raul’s exit came at the start of last season, when he held talks with La Liga’s Villarreal. Those did not come to anything though, and they appointed Pacheta instead.
Could he be a future Madrid boss?
Raul still has his supporters within the club and some voices continue to name him in lists of possible future coaches (although the big favourite to take over at some point is Xabi Alonso, the former Madrid midfielder who won the German title last season with Bayer Leverkusen).
But the reality is that, as long as Perez is president, it’s hard to see Raul being appointed.
One source close to him explains that he remains “obsessed” with Madrid. Another suggests the easiest way for him to become a first-team coach is to continue at Castilla and wait for his chance.
What everyone The Athletic consulted agrees on is that he is in no hurry to leave his current position, despite spending the past five years there. They cite the example of former Madrid youth coaches such as Luis Molowny and Vicente del Bosque, who spent many years in the club’s youth system and made the step up when they were needed, with great success.
But times have changed.
Other former players such as Santiago Solari (the director of football) and Alvaro Arbeloa (their under-19s coach) are still at the club and could make the leap. That’s without mentioning Zinedine Zidane, who has been out of the game since ending two trophy-laden spells in charge of Madrid in summer 2021, and Davide Ancelotti, Carlo’s son and senior assistant, who aspires to be a head coach.
(Top photo: Angel Martinez/Getty Images)
