The player who said no to Liverpool – and paid a private price
Long before he became a manager, Iraola was already writing one of the more curious footnotes in Liverpool’s recent history. In late 2013, as captain of Athletic Club and approaching the final months of his contract in Bilbao, the right-back was targeted by Brendan Rodgers’ side. Michael Edwards, then operating in the club’s recruitment structure, led the pursuit.
According to the recovered material, Iraola drafted a personal letter declining the approach. He has since confirmed the existence of that letter in interviews, but the documents add colour: colleagues at the time noted that the decision weighed heavily. One internal note from an Athletic staff member described the captain as “quietly unsettled” in the weeks that followed, even as he continued to perform at a high level.
Iraola has always insisted he never seriously wanted to leave the Basque Country. Yet the papers suggest the rejection carried an emotional aftertaste. He remained at Athletic until 2015, made more than 500 appearances, and later admitted that the physical toll of those final seasons – including cortisone injections just to play in the Europa League and Copa del Rey finals under Marcelo Bielsa – left him unable to kick a ball properly afterwards. When Spain came calling for Euro 2012, he told selectors he was not fully fit rather than risk being a passenger. He could have collected a medal in silence. He chose honesty instead.
After a short, reflective spell with New York City FC in MLS, he retired in 2016. The documents from that period show a man already thinking several steps ahead. He returned to his boyhood club Antiguoko and began coaching. The path to Anfield had started, but few could have predicted how rocky it would become.
Cyprus: the first public failure
In June 2018 Iraola took his first senior managerial job at AEK Larnaca in Cyprus. He inherited a side that had just won the Cypriot Super Cup. Within months the project collapsed.
The leaked performance summaries are blunt. After nearly two months without a win, the board lost patience. On 14 January 2019 he was dismissed. Contemporaneous notes from staff describe a young coach still learning how to manage the politics of a dressing room and the expectations of owners who wanted instant results. One review called the spell “a necessary education in the realities of the job.”
Iraola has never publicly dwelt on the sacking, but the documents suggest it left a mark. Friends and former colleagues noted a period of intense self-examination. He returned to Spain, took charge of Mirandés in the Segunda División, and began rebuilding his reputation the hard way – no shortcuts, no big-club parachute.
Rayo Vallecano: promotion, pressure and the Leeds approach
At Rayo Vallecano the pattern repeated in more sophisticated form. Iraola delivered promotion in his first season and guided the modest Madrid club to consecutive top-flight campaigns and two deep runs in the Copa del Rey. The football was high-intensity, proactive and recognisably “Iraola.”
Yet the internal papers reveal constant tension. Budgets were tight. Results fluctuated. In February 2023 Leeds United, then in the Premier League and searching for a new manager, made a formal approach. Rayo refused permission for talks. The documents show Iraola was intrigued but ultimately stayed. Staff notes from the time describe a coach who valued continuity and family stability over a premature leap into the Premier League pressure cooker.
He left Rayo in the summer of 2023 with his stock rising but still unproven at the highest level. That next step would nearly break him.
Bournemouth: the nine-game nightmare that almost ended everything
The most dramatic material concerns Iraola’s first months on the south coast. Appointed in June 2023 on the recommendation of then-technical director Richard Hughes – the same man who would later recruit him to Liverpool – he arrived with a clear plan: high press, aggressive transitions, and a demand for intensity that initially left players bewildered.
The results were catastrophic. After nine Premier League games without a win, Bournemouth sat second bottom. A 6-1 thrashing at Manchester City in particular is described in one internal review as “a tactical and psychological low point.” Iraola later admitted he hated the passive shape he had chosen that afternoon and learned a lasting lesson.
The documents capture the mood inside the club. Senior figures debated whether to cut their losses. Betting markets made Iraola favourite to be the next manager sacked. His assistant Íñigo Pérez was denied a work permit, leaving the Basque short of trusted staff. Injuries to key summer signings compounded the problems. One performance note from October 2023 is stark: “Players do not yet fully understand the methods. Results are putting the project under extreme strain.”
Hughes and the ownership backed him. Slowly the team adapted. By the end of that first season Bournemouth had climbed to safety and shown flashes of the exciting football that would later define them. Consecutive finishes of 12th, ninth and, in 2025-26, a club-record sixth place with Europa League qualification followed. Yet the early crisis remains the clearest evidence that Iraola’s methods are not instantly successful. They require time, belief and, crucially, patience from those above him.
Touchline discipline issues also surface in the papers. Iraola collected yellow cards for animated protests and served a ban. He later sought a meeting with Howard Webb of PGMOL to discuss the pattern, acknowledging that his gestures sometimes created problems even when his words did not. The documents frame this as another learning curve rather than a character flaw – a coach still calibrating how to operate under the microscope of the Premier League.
Family, identity and the refusal to become the protagonist
Throughout the recovered material runs a consistent personal thread. Iraola has repeatedly prioritised family considerations and a refusal to “sell himself” as the central character of any story. When Liverpool finally came calling in late May 2026, days after Arne Slot’s dismissal, the process moved with remarkable speed. Verbal agreement was reached quickly. Iraola flew from San Sebastián, signed a two-year deal – shorter than many expected, but consistent with his previous contracts – and was presented at Anfield within a week.
Yet even in the glow of the appointment he has been careful. In early interviews he declined to dwell on the 2014 letter to Liverpool, saying he did not want it to look as though he was marketing himself before results on the pitch. The documents from earlier in his career show the same instinct: a preference for substance over narrative, for collective over individual.
Sources close to the process say the club’s hierarchy – including Hughes and Michael Edwards – were fully aware of the bumps in the road. They viewed the Cyprus sacking, the Bournemouth near-collapse and the touchline friction not as red flags but as evidence of resilience and capacity for growth. In an era when many coaches arrive at elite clubs with carefully curated success stories, Iraola’s file contains something rarer: proof that he has failed, adapted and improved.
What the papers ultimately reveal
The leaked documents do not expose scandal in the conventional sense. There are no hidden transfers, no personal controversies of the kind that destroy careers. What they expose is something more ordinary and, in its way, more revealing: the grinding reality of a coaching career built without shortcuts.
Iraola was sacked in Cyprus. He was almost sacked at Bournemouth. He turned down bigger jobs when the timing felt wrong. He played through pain, told the truth about his fitness when a medal was on offer, and wrote a letter declining Liverpool more than a decade before they finally appointed him. He has gesticulated too much, learned to gesticulate less, and kept returning to the same core idea – high-intensity, proactive football that asks a great deal of players and even more of the man asking.
As he begins the biggest job of his life, those papers serve as a reminder. The path to Anfield was not inevitable. It was forged in difficult periods that few outside the game fully appreciated at the time. Whether that history becomes a source of strength or a warning will be decided on the pitch in the months ahead.
For now, the new Liverpool head coach has the full backing of a hierarchy that believes the scars are part of the story. The documents simply ensure that the story is no longer only the polished version. The difficult years, the near-misses and the private doubts are part of the record too.