Raul calls time on a storied career with NASL title

By on November 15, 2015

The press know a man by the name of Raul Gonzalez. A figure just as introverted and softly spoken at thirty-eight as he was at seventeen; over the course of a twenty-odd-year career at the top of world football he did but a rare interview and shied away from headlines.

On the pitch, this man transforms. “Behind his mask of an introverted and shy kid is hidden a dominant character who intimidates teammates, and even his coaches,” journalist Diego Torres wrote in El Pais many years ago. “His is self-esteem colossal, fed without a break by uninterrupted success and praise.” Real Madrid center-back Pepe still called the Spanish legend “skipper” in a tribute video six years after Raul left the Spanish capital.

This immense talent and unwavering confidence kept Raul going for twenty-one years in professional football and an unparalleled sixteen years of success at Real Madrid. This is the man who was the King of Madrid.

In mid-October, the public figure Raul quietly announced his retirement from professional football at the end of the New York Cosmos’ NASL playoff campaign. Last Saturday, his career appeared to be closing with just under a half hour to play against the Fort Lauderdale Strikers. But the footballer Raul was having none of it, and he scored a late winner to give him one last hurrah in the NASL Cup final. New York beat the Ottawa Fury 3-2.

Madrid legend and Raul’s former teammate Fernando Hierro once famously said, “[Raul] was not a 10 out of 10 in anything but he was an eight-and-a-half in everything.”

But Raul never did really fare well in debuts. In 1994, he was still a skinny, seventeen-year-old teenager and had been brought up from Madrid’s C team directly into the first team. On a chilly, late October night he was sleeping on the bus down to Zaragoza, where he made his senior debut. A lesser men might have wrung his hands and felt a pit at the bottom of his stomach on that bus ride, but not Raul.

Not thirty-seconds into the match, Raul scuffed a one-on-one (letting the ball run away from him and stabbing a poorly hit effort far wide). Then he rounded the goalkeeper, only to sky a tap-in, before hitting a tame effort straight at Real Zaragoza’s goalkeeper after finding himself clear through on goal. He curled another golden opportunity just wide, and we’re still in the first half.

Lesser men, much less a scrawny seventeen-year-old boy, might have had his confidence destroyed; but not Raul.

He had showcased some bright moments on his debut and the record books will note he assisted a goal, but moreover, he created every chance he missed with searching runs in down the channel and intricate plays. The very next month, the next match that Raul started was a Madrid derby. On that famous night, Raul scored a classy left-footed strike, assisted another goal and won a penalty.

Real’s assistant coach was Ángel Cappa back then and the Argentine manager said, per The Guardian: “Raúl was a surprise to us, but not to himself. Raúl carries the ball badly, he dribbles badly, he can’t head the ball, he strikes it badly,” Cappa says, pausing to add: “… and then the game starts. When the game starts, he carries the ball well, he dribbles phenomenally well, he can head it, he scores a thousand different types of goal. He is suddenly perfect. Raúl is a born competitor. He’s unique.”

It encapsulated a skillful, classy forward good on the dribble, decent in the air, great at finishing and fleet-footed; relentless in his boundless energy and conviction to make him a constant threat. It was this well-rounded skill-set that made Raul so ruthlessly effective and consistent. His records would vary by year and the team around him but he managed an impossible feat of remaining a starter for the entirety of his sixteen seasons at Madrid, winning three Champions League titles, six La Liga trophies and two Intercontinental Cup competitions.

His one hole might have been a failure at translating this success into the national team. His misfortune began in a penalty shootout for the Spain Under-21s in their European Championship final defeat to Italy, missing his penalty. He began the 1998 World Cup as a starter and ended it as a substitute and injury denied him a chance to play in Spain’s 2002 World Cup quarterfinal exit.

Yet it was in the sixth months that he was injured over the summer of 2002 that Raul reinvented himself on the pitch to the physical limitations of age. He scored two goals in his last match before the World Cup in Spain’s 5-0 win over Northern Ireland and came out of the process just that yard slower and energetic, but more intuitive on the pitch and more adept at using his intelligence to put himself the right place at the right time.

This Raul created fewer chances and made fewer assists, but an excellent burst of form in between 2007 and 2009, in which he scored forty-seven goals in the space of two seasons, proved he was no less lethal.

Yet his time left at the top was clearly dwindling by 2010, at which point he was already past the age of thirty-two, and having spent one season with Cristiano Ronaldo at the Bernabeu it was time to pass on the torch. This is how, as Raphael Honigstein related in 2011, Raul found himself at a Christmas party in Schalke with the local side’s fans, in front of a crowd of inebriated supporters with a microphone in his hand. Despite his inadequate German, he sang “a traditional Schalke” song to the crowd on a karaoke track.

Raul meshed into the Schalke scene with surprising ease, although they lost on his Bundesliga debut (he did score on his club debut, though). Raul scored an average of twenty-goals-a-season in his two years at Schalke and at the same time, became the all time top scorer in the Champions League. Although Schalke barely avoided relegation in the Bundesliga in 2010/2011, Raul lead them to the Champions League semi-finals, where they lost to Barcelona.

After a brief stint in Qatar, Raul found himself in New York last year. On his first match for the Cosmos, he sustained a disappointing injury but rebounded to lead the Cosmos to the cup title and the NASL into a new frontier. He is legend at every club he has left in his career and bows out of football as one of a generation’s greats.

Homepage photo credit: DerHans04, via Wikipedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.