When I first learned about former footballer José Luis Villanueva’s career, my first question was “where hasn’t this guy been?” Spanning 14 years, José’s career took him on a trip around the world and the list of clubs he has played for read like a ground hopper’s wet dream.

 

Having started out with  in his native Chile, José’s career kept taking him (roughly) eastwards, going on to play for Racing Club in Argentina, Vasco da Gama in Brazil, Bunyodkor in Uzbekistan and Tianjin Teda in China- a list which doesn’t include several short stop offs in Mexico and South Korea.

 

From playing alongside and being coached by Simeone at Racing (José was the first no.9 Simeone selected as a coach), to sharing the pitch with Romario at Vasco before being asked by Bunyodkor to help convince Rivaldo to join the club, the list of players José has played with is just as impressive.

 

In this interview, which was intended to be a podcast, I spoke with José about all of the above and more. I’m grateful to José for being so generous with his time!

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Ili: Let’s go back to your roots, to where it all began for you. Tell me about how you fell in love with football.

 

José: Growing up in Chile at that time, for the people, for the kids, you know in ’81 it was very good. It was very safe, nothing ever happened, I remember we could leave our bikes outside the door and nothing would ever happen- no robberies, nothing! I’m from Buin, a small town 35km from Santiago and it’s surrounded by countryside. So as a kid, it was beautiful. I remember on holidays, I would spend all day playing outside. Of course football was the most fun part, the part I loved the most. My first memory of football was when my dad took me to a town called Valdivia de Paine- a very rural place where he spent his teenage years. He took me and my cousin to the field he used to play on and I remember I scored a goal and I started celebrating like crazy and we were only having fun but I felt that thing where I knew that I wanted to do this all the time. If I could define my life, it would be about passion. It’s everything for me.

 

Ili: So football was your first love. Can you give me a snapshot of some of your experiences playing street football in Santiago?

 

José: When I was 7, we moved from my grandmas house to another house and there was a pitch one block away. It was a dusty field but it was amazing. We spent a lot of time there. Our balls lasted a month because of the surface. Our white socks would be brown. I remember my mother constantly washing them. But I always need more football, more football, more football, competing with my friends and that was a feeling I loved.

 

Ili: What was the style of play like on those pitches?

 

José: It was a little bit of everything. There wasn’t a coach or referee so it was very different to what I see here in the United States. You’re from England and in Europe, you guys have real football in your blood. Same in South America. You just have the ball, a player in front of you and you have to find a way to dribble and get past them, regardless of how big the guy in front of you is. I remember the games against bigger guys, they beat me a lot of times- there was a guy that gave me a purple eye. I was kind of blonde and in Chile there weren’t many blonde kids and coming from a middle class family they nicknamed me after a blonde girl from a famous telenovela- so every time I beat them they would insult me. I was very confrontational because I didn’t want to let them beat me. It was part of the game, different times.

 

Ili: I grew up spending school holidays in Kosovo and Germany and at times playing football was all about finding a way to win, even if it meant “cheating” a little. It sounds like it was similar for you, all about finding a way to win no matter what- the classic South American way…

 

José: Absolutely. At some point they put up a fence around the pitch. So we started using the fence as a 1,2. This was great because we learned how to use it, learned about timing. As a professional it was very easy for me to know exactly when to pass and go, to read the movements of the other play and wait for the right time to make the pass. But also to decide what type of pass you want to make. Outside of the foot, the inside or maybe you can two touches to wait for your teammate to be in the right position. I scored a lot of goals with my left despite being right footed because I had to adapt as a kid and also because Marcelo Salas was my idol.

 

Ili: If Salas was your idol, who did you support growing up? Were you a fan of Universidad?

 

José: Colo-Colo because they were the most popular team at the time and my father was a fan of them. I was actually a mascot for them during the Copa Libertadores. My father was a truck driver and he would often drive to the wine regions in the south. As a result he would often give the stadium security wine so they could let me pass through and meet the players. As a mascot for the team, I remember the big players, of course, the smell of Calorub, used for massages at the time. I can close my eyes and remember the smell of the bengalas (pyrotechnics). You know they used to have this “air sleeve” where they players would walk through. The players would be jumping, shouting and hitting the sides of it and I was in awe. When the “manga” was opened, I could hear the explosion of sounds- the fireworks, bengalas, papelitos. Wow.

 

Ili: Was it your dream to play for Colo-Colo then?

 

José: Of course, for every kid. They were the pride of the country at the time. You know, we’ll speak about it later but In Uzbekistan every kid wanted to be a Pakhtakhor player because they were Soviet champions and it was the same in Chile, everyone wanted to play for Colo-Colo.

 

Ili: What were the moments that defined you as a young footballer?

 

José: You know there were three moments that made me want to be a professional footballer. When I first scored that goal on the field as a kid, the experience of Colo-Colo as a mascot and fan and then as a sixteen year old when I watched my Colo-Colo academy teammates on TV playing in a final and I said, “no man, I want some of that!”

 

Ili: Well, you did eventually go pro yourself, with Palestino right? One of three major immigrant founded clubs in Santiago. What did it mean to represent them as a player. Is the context of the Palestinian community at the front of player’s minds?

 

José: Well, they were the closest club to my house. Coming from Buin, the south of Santiago, Palestino was the only team located closest to me. You know, usually people want to connect politics to sports but I think that the further apart they are, the better. Palestino of course have this connection but as a kid you don’t think about what is behind the name, the reason they were created. Palestino was very good to me. I learned a lot about business because of them. It’s a small club but they’re involved with a lot of businesses in the area.

 

Ili: Do you still feel connected to the club?

 

José: I really care about the club. I check their results all the time and speak to my friends there. They’re a very powerful community in Chile. You have many who own small businesses, selling clothes, and others that own the biggest bank in the country. I really loved my time there, it was very good. But we didn’t have many resources at that time. One owner of a socks company provided the socks for a trip, one owner of a clothes company gave us shirts, another shorts, someone else jackets.

 

Ili:  During your time at Palestino, you went on loan to two clubs- Deportes Temuco, Marcelo Salas’ youth club, then Deportes Ovalle. You first move abroad was to Argentina to play for Racing Club. Can you tell me about your first experience of Argentine football?

 

José: First of all Marcelo Salas was my idol, an idol of River Plate. I watched very single game of his. And when he scored, fans would start chanting “Chileno! Chileno! Chileno!” That was my dream. Before moving to Racing, I was at Universidad Catolica and doing very well. They offered to make me the best paid player but I decided to go to Argentina for half of what I was offered at Catolica. Imagine that. For me it was only about going to Argentina and seeing if I could make it there and it never crossed my mind that I would fail there.

 

But in my very first training session, I was partnered up with Diego Simeone. And we were doing a drill where he as a midfielder would have to pass to the attacker and I would have o pass back with one touch. I was kind of nervous, of course, it was Simeone. He passed me the ball, I gave a bad pass back- he said nothing. Did it again, this time I gave a short pass. “Dale chileno!” “Okay”, I said to myself. He gave me another one, and I passed it back short again. “Chileno, la concha de tu madre- one more and I’ll really start insulting you!”, he shouted at me. I was very nervous at the time. He gave me the ball, I gave a decent pass back, not perfect, but he was like “okay no worries.”

 

Ili: Did you break into the first team quickly after that or did it take some time to adjust to the new environment? And what’s the main difference between Argentinian and Chilean football?

 

José: I thought that I would play in the first team but they sent me to the reserve team in my first week. I scored a very beautiful goal. After that I thought okay I’m done, next week I’ll be playing with the first team. But nothing happened. I was training like I trained in Chile, taking care of my teammates so they wouldn’t get hurt, not playing too hard. But everyone went hard on me. I think in Argentina it was easier to play than to train. They train worse than they play, like criminals. But by the time I realised, I had already spoken to the coach and told him: “I came here to play with the first team, not the reserves. If you see I’m not ready to play with the first team let me fix it in training but I don’t want to play with the reserves anymore”. It was like a moment of maturity for me because I showed them I’m not just the little “Chilenito” who was there to ask for permission. And the week I started training aggressively was the was week the coach put me in the squad.

 

Ili: Did you end up getting any minutes on the pitch?

 

José: That week we played against Olimpo at the Cilindro and we were losing 2-1. I was on the bench. And the coach called Ledesma, a player who is now a coach here at Inter Miami. When the coach called him up, the whole stadium stopped the substitution by chanting “Pone al chileno, la puta que lo parió!”- they didn’t even know me but I was the only forward there. They were against putting on a midfielder instead of a forward when we losing the game. At the moment I created a special bond with the fans. I went in, I played very good, we tied 2-2 and after that game Rivarola, the coach was sacked. Because after the game, the fans went to the coach’s hotel, stopped his car and he magically said, “OK, I quit”. That’s the way it is in South America.

 

Ili: After Argentina, you played in Mexico, South Korea, Brazil, Uzbekistan, China and back to Chile via a brief stop in Argentina. Before getting into your time in Uzbekistan, there’s one move I’d like to discuss. In January 2008, you joined Vasco da Gama and on the same day Romário also joined the club as an assistant coach/player. Tell me more…

 

José: Of course Romário was one of my icons as a kid. When I was younger my father bought a computer with a printer and started printing out pictures of players that I loved- Shevchenko, Rivaldo, Ronaldo, Vieri, Ravanelli etc so when I was there in the locker room with Romário that was crazy. There was an empty spot in the locker room, number 10, that used to belong to Dario Conca who went to Fluminense. I should have sat there but Romario was sat in my spot when I first went there!

 

Ili: What was he like to play with, to be a teammate of someone you idolised?

 

José: He was like 42 so he had his own physio. He decided when to go to train. If it was too hot, he’d just come back and do his things in the locker room. But when we trained it was amazing. I played with fantastic players but when you play with a Balloon d’Or player, it’s a different thing. They have an understanding of the game and capacity to do things no one else can do.

 

Ili: So after spending 6 months with Vasco da Gama, you moved to Uzbekistan to play for a team called Bunyodkor. The story of the club is super interesting because when you joined them they were only three years old and were owned by an oligarch obsessed with Barcelona. They even changed the badge to one that looked exactly the same as Barça’s…

 

José: They [Barcelona] came to work with us. Even Messi came to do clinics and the club paid them a lot to come. They gave them everything, watches, money. It was madness.

 

Ili: How did the move to Bunyodkor even happen for you?

 

José: Actually I was forced to go there by my agent. He was doing some business there but I wanted to go back to Chile, to Catolica. The fans had created a Facebook fan page ‘Bring Villanueva Back’- it was the beginning of social media so for a non social media native I was like “Oh they love me, they want me to be there”. But my agent didn’t let me because I had a contract signed with a club called Locarno, a team that bought South American players before selling them on. They used me to secure the federative rights so they told me I had to go to Bunyodkor or they wouldn’t let me play anywhere.

 

Ili: So you were caught between your agent, Locarno and Bunyodkor who were all connected?

 

José: Yeah Bunyodkor had links to my agents who used to work with Barcelona closely so that’s how the club became linked with Barcelona. The kits we used in my second season were Nike at that time but the owner of Bunyodkor wanted them to be made in the same factory as Barcelona’s- that was the level of fanaticism from the owner. He wanted Bunyodkor to be the biggest club in Asia and we even went to pre-season training in Barcelona, stayed in the Rey Juan Carlos hotel, trained at La Maria and played against Barcelona. We tied 1-1 and I gave the assist to my teammate Djeparov.

 

Ili: There were a few other clubs around that time doing similar things, trying to attract foreign stars- Anzhi Makhachkala in Russia were one of them. You joined Bunyodkor in the summer of 2008, it was rumoured Eto’o was going to join. He didn’t in the end but Rivaldo did, what’s the story there?

 

José: I was home one day and the translator came and asked me if I could receive Rivaldo at lunch. He told me they were speaking with him and that he wanted to speak to a Latino person to see if it was worth coming to Tashkent. They briefed me on everything I needed to say and within two hours I had Rivaldo sitting at my table!

 

Ili: From Romário to Rivaldo in six months…if your career path was more “conventional” it would be believable. But you met a 42 year old Romário at Vasco da Gama and played with World Cup winning Rivaldo in Uzbekistan.

 

José: Just like that…it’s so, so strange. You know, I’m really proud of my career because it made me the person that I am now. I’m pretty sure if I made it in Europe I wouldn’t be the smart guy that I am now. I would’ve have been with my cousins, I would have brought my family over and had parties etc. So yeah, life took me this way.

 

Ili: Travel widens perspectives and taking on new experiences and opens up your world and I guess, as you say, if you had played in Europe you wouldn’t have immersed yourself in a totally new culture. From a football perspective what was your time in Tashkent like?

 

José: I have a theory that when you go to a lower level coming from a higher level, you have six months to make a difference because you’re used to a faster speed and understanding of the game. You also need to have good luck. But I can say that it wasn’t easy just because I scored a lot of goals. Sure, we had the best players in the country but I trained well and gave my best all the time.

 

Ili: What were your observations on the football culture in Uzbekistan? From the stadiums to the crowd that filled them?

 

José: Pakhtakhor were the pride of the country. Then you had small teams all over the country in rural communities whose fans boo’d us all the time. Uzbekistan was a country with a very low income for people in the countryside so when they saw in the news that Rivaldo was coming and that Scolari was making 8 or 10 million, it was kind o insulting to them. But they treated me very well, all over the country. I still receive messages from people there, I felt very liked there by the Uzbek people.

 

Ili: What was your life in Tashkent, did you bring your family over?

 

José: Yeah actually my wife was pregnant and after one month, she flew to Uzbekistan and the first few months of my son’s life were in Uzbekistan. We lived very, very good. We had everything, a chef, nanny, driver, two cars, a beautiful house- all I had to do was just play.

 

Ili: Was there a Latin American community in Tashkent that help you integrate?

 

José: No, no just me, Rivaldo and Luizão.

 

Ili: Now, Bunyodkor reached the semi-final of the AFC Champions League just three years after being founded. What are your memories of playing in Asia’s biggest club competition?

 

José: I was the top scorer of the play-off round, scoring 4 goals. I played very well. I have beautiful memories because my father was there and he became loved by the fans, spending time in the stands with the supporters and they started chanting his name too.

 

Ili: The AFC Champions League is super interesting to me because of the teams involved and the cities players have to travel to. We’ve seen Ronaldo visit Iran, Benzema play in Iraq it’s just a totally different experience for these world famous players. Who are some the most interesting clubs you played against?

 

José: I played against Saipa in Iran. It was impressive. I once went out of the hotel wearing shorts and a lady started yelling at me and hitting me with a bag- a different experience. Then we went to the stadium with a 100,000 people all wearing white and we thought they were gonna “kill us”. Rivaldo was making his debut in the competition so it was full of people. We tied 2-2, I scored one and gave an assist to Rivaldo. In the return leg back in Tashkent, I scored 3.

 

Ili: Iran’s got a big football culture, super dedicated fans. Who in your view has the “best” football culture in Asia, based on your experience of the AFC Champions League.

 

José: Iran are super South American. But with Iran, I don’t know because for me football is a place where everyone can go and because of their culture at the time only men could go to the stadiums. So that party that I like, you don’t get to see as much as they still enjoy the game. So I would say Japan. They love it. They’re not as aggressive as we are, so they’re not gonna kill you if you lose but Japan has all the flags and supporters. But as a South American it’s strange to see them use megaphones. No man, if you don’t chant with your voice, it doesn’t count. You have to show your support until your vocal chords are dead.

 

Ili: You left Bunyodkor in January 2010, 6 months after Felipe Scolari joined the club. Why?

 

José: I was very loved by the fans but I left because Scolari wanted to bring in more Brazilian players. In my point of view, he wasn’t the proper coach for us in that place. He was always shouting “You have to do this! You have to do that!”. We had Zico before and he was very, very good. Scolari was more old school and you can’t be old school with a guy [Rivaldo] that won you the World Cup. He was trying to change the thing that Rivaldo and we had built.

 

Ili: So what was the playing style he was trying to get you guys to follow? What was he trying to implement?

 

José: The small details, for example he started pushing us to play with shin guards in training. Stuff like that. Very subtle things where he was like “You can’t do that! Follow my rule!” Those kind of things don’t work anymore. It was strange.

 

Ili: If I track your career path, it follows roughly east around the world. From Bunyodkor you went to Tianjin in China for a short time. How hard was it for you to make an impact there?

 

José: You know something? Two days ago a Tianjin fan who lives in Canada took a plane to Miami to come to meet me. So I brought him to my training sessions, we spent a lot of time together, we made some videos, he gave me a kit- it was very beautiful. I didn’t even play good in Tianjin, I only scored one or two goals. But he told me that he loved me as a player because I scored a goal in the very first game he watched in his life with his father. So I said to the kids I was training: “When you’re a football player, you have no idea what mark you give to people just by playing”. This is the responsibility we have because like it or not, you are an example and you’re important to someone, no matter if you’re Rivaldo or just José, no matter if you’re playing in Barcelona or 4th division in England, you can be important for some kid.

 

Ili: How did the move from Bunyodkor to China happen? Was it a similar story to when you had to move to Uzbekistan or were you curious about life in China?

 

José: When I finished my contract with Bunyodkor, I came back to Chile and I was in the middle of a discussion with Locarno and my agent to leave them. So I went to FIFA and I had to stay 6 months without playing so then when I got my right to play back, I went to China. It was an option for me as I had already played in Asia so I wanted to keep doing it.

 

Ili: This is the second time you’ve mentioned the situation with Locarno. Locarno is a Swiss team right?

 

José: Yes, Swiss team, 2nd division. So for example, they bought me from Palestino and I went to Racing but my rights were moved to Locarno and I was given on loan to Racing so I always had to go back to them. But they’re very tricky. There was a season where they were relegated from 2nd to 3rd division which was an amateur league so they needed to release all their contracts. But magically some other team was relegated in their spot. It was evident they paid somebody to change places because it would have been too expensive to pay out all their players.

 

Ili: You moved to Tianjin just before the Chinese Super League really started to spend money and were part of the first wave of foreign players to move there. What type of player do you have to the experiences that you’ve had in your career? Was it always in your plan to travel through football?

 

José: Not at all. Of course I wanted to know the world but I wanted to play for Real Madrid, Barcelona, england or wherever. But I was always pretty open to the things that happened in my life. I don’t make the rules! If something happened, I had to give my best because it was for a reason. Because at that people were saying you were better than the career you had, but I’m pretty sure my post-football is better than a lot of players. This is of course because of the money I made and the experience and learning I got from playing in these places. I don’t know if someone would want to have the career that I had- you don’t dream of that but I think that if life is sending you to these places, the type of player you should be is very open, ambitious and clear headed.

 

Ili: So you may not have played for some of the teams you dreamt of playing but you gained so much more from having these experiences around the world.

 

José:At that time I was just thinking about financial reasons and not the experiences I would gain but it helped me a lot because in places like Uzbekistan, China and South Korea you don’t have TV you can understand so I read books and started reading about business and now I’m a businessman!

 

Ili: Did you ever have any opportunities to play in Europe?

 

José: Yes, two. When I went from Racing to Morelia in Mexico, I was actually very close to going to AEK in Greece. I had an opportunity to go there, we had an offer but my agent at the time didn’t let me because he had a deal done with Morelia. The other opportunity was when I spoke to Manuel Pellegrini who was coaching Villarreal, I didn’t have an offer but we had a conversation.

 

Ili: As you’ve said, you’re now a businessman, you’rethe founder of Golazo Training among other ventures and you’re now settled in Miami. What brought you to the U.S?

 

José: I think we have a big opportunity here. What we do with Golazo is not only training. We have a platform which creates job opportunities by connecting amateur players with coaches that train using our method. Here in the U.S there is a lot of training. All the kids playing in clubs pay a lot and there is a lot of extra training. And these training sessions are very atomised because every coach has their own book and there are good and bad coaches. And as you can see the results of “soccer”, it’s not great so there is something that doesn’t work.

 

Ili: What needs to change?

 

José: I think the way they train. The American way is to win all the time, even if they are five years old. So players are taught not to lose and skip the creativity stage. They know how to move but don’t know what to do with the ball and they don’t have the capacity to improvise. So what we did with Golazo is create a method with former Atletico Madrid physical coach Oscar Ortega so no one can say they are not properly trained. Then we have Rivaldo who helped me recreate the game he did when he was a kid. So we created this method, put it on a platform so kids can download the programme and try it with one of our coaches available on the app.

 

Ili: With the Club World Cup this summer and the World Cup next summer, where do you see football in the U.S going?

 

José: Anybody can be a coach here. This is what I’m trying to change with Golazo because there are a lot of “daddy coaches”, parents coaching teams and they don’t know how to do it. There is also the “train like a pro” statement. No man, you don’t have to train like a pro, you have train the kids as kids because you have to develop them. You see drills made for Jack Grealish being used by coaches training an 8 year old who then only has one shot. You can’t train a kid as a professional footballer.

 

Ili: How do you replicate the football you played growing up in a country like the U.S where street football in the South American sense is not common?

 

José: One thing I don’t like is that you can go to a park and you’ll see one guy recording his shots on the phone and the another one using the other goal to make a TikTok. Man if I see someone in the park the first thing I do is ask if someone wants to play. So that thing is kind of generational but also speaks about the culture. Here it’s pay to play and that’s why I came to do business here. We need to educate because if people recognise us as a platform that is educating players and coaches, parents will see that and demand a higher standard from coaches.

 

Ili: José, last question for you. With everything you’ve seen, everywhere you’ve been, are there any plans to write a book?

 

José: If you want to write it, let’s write but I don’t have time to do that right now. Actually, my wife is a journalist so you can write it with her! I just got investors for the first time, so I have to be responsible with their money so I’ll have to pass on writing a book right now. But if you find a way, I’m sure we can make it work- not just about me but football in different countries.