I wanted to know why a young player would want to play in several countries by the age of 21, given all the upheaval it causes. So I asked Mikel Merino, who spoke brilliantly about being a sponge, elite-level thinking and smelling the grass.
Mikel Merino responds extraordinarily quickly to a question that is broad in the extreme. He has been asked what his perfect performance would look like. After taking a moment to clarify that he is still waiting for it to arrive, he rattles off a list.
Complete focus on the match itself – no distractions. Helping teammates play as near to their perfect as possible through seamless communication. A perfect passing record, but also the right passes. Offering in attack and defence, but always making a mark physically. Subconsciously or otherwise, he’s clearly thought about this before.
Everything came quite quickly to Merino. A week after turning 23, he won the Under-21 European Championship to go with his winner’s medal from the Under-19 edition. He had already come through the ranks at his hometown club Osasuna, left for Germany, moved to England first on loan and then permanently, signed for Real Sociedad and established himself in their first team.
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It strikes me that this sort of thing probably comes with age. After all, Real Madrid’s three central midfielders in the Champions League final were all aged 30 or above. Merino agrees: “Sometimes when you are young and you lack experience, you think you know everything about the game. Once you get older, you learn tricks that help you. For example, perhaps it’s better to give a message to a team-mate to move into space rather than play the pass to them straight away. It all comes with experience.”
Now 26, with 11 Spain caps and having settled at Real Sociedad and about to enter his third consecutive season of European football, Merino has aimed to shortcut that journey. He left Osasuna, the club where his father played and coached, for Borussia Dortmund. After a single season he was loaned to Newcastle United and then joined them permanently. This wasn’t just about finding a team to play regularly in; he could have done that in Spain. Instead, he was attempting to “age” himself as a footballer.
“With every single game, every single club, every manager, every country and every action, you learn something new. It isn’t about age; it’s about experience. It changes your mentality. At a young age you are a sponge. You have your eyes and ears open and you soak up everything without even realising. You do not know what it will be like until you get there, but that’s good.
“At Dortmund and Newcastle, everything was very physical. Not just the matches or the training, but the way the fans live through football. It made everything very intense. But then you learn to be ready for it and you have to live it too. If you don’t do that, you risk the experience passing you by. That gave me the tools to be the Mikel Merino you see today.”
There are risks. It has become a cause célèbre to advise young footballers to move abroad, particularly in England where the desperation for the national team to succeed drives the missives, but it can be hard. New cultures, new languages and new team-mates can make for a lonely existence. As Merino points out, sympathy is also understandably low because of the money involved and because the performance of the team comes above everything else in the eyes of the public.
“I think that nobody can be completely comfortable with changing country at a young age, that’s not normal,” he says. “That’s when you have a lot to learn in football but also in life. And there are no excuses. You cannot say ‘Hey I’m a dumb kid away from my hometown and I need time to focus’. I can’t pretend that it wasn’t hard.
“But I’m so happy that I did it, because only by doing it was I able to make mistakes, to take the good out of every experience. I know it did that for me and I’m so happy how it has made me as a person and a player. And even when things do go wrong, if you have given your all you can sleep properly. You have no demons in your mind.”
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Germany taught him to live abroad for the first time. England taught him physicality and the need to think at speed. Both helped him to learn how to separate off-field from on-field and avoid any distractions from the performance. And psychologically, that’s all that matters. If you believe an experience has helped you grow, it has helped you grow.
Just as importantly, Merino believes that submerging yourself in different football cultures is how you learn to be so grateful for your career and for those experiences that football has provided you with. Whatever happens at Sociedad this season and over the next half decade, he will always be an amalgamation of the things he has seen.
“It’s all about the experience,” he says. “You try to enjoy the smell of the grass, the sound of the ball when you touch it. But in Pamplona, Dortmund, Newcastle and San Sebastián, it’s the people I met, the people who enjoyed watching us, that made me. You can give a child the best day of their year with a high-five or a photograph. That’s the greatest gift I took with me.”
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