This is a romantic story. Coming home after a few years on the other side of the world, choosing the club you have always loved, dropping down a division without taking a salary. Ander Herrera has decided to slow things down, leaving Boca Juniors to play for the club he has always supported, Real Zaragoza, a noble club that has spent years dealing with financial problems and a sporting crisis that now seems almost impossible to reverse, a crisis that, for the first time in its history, has taken Zaragoza down to the third tier. That is also why the former Manchester United and PSG midfielder told his old club that he did not need a salary, that he was perfectly happy to play for free.
Herrera’s last competitive appearance came in front of a feverish Bombonera, wearing the Boca Juniors shirt in the Copa Libertadores; his next will come in Spain’s third tier, in front of around 6,500 people and against a side that is hardly famous, Gimnàstic de Tarragona. And yet, for Herrera, returning to Real Zaragoza from Boca as a free agent carries an importance equal to, if not greater than, any other decision he has made in his career. “Probably this was the last dream I wanted to fulfil,” the Spaniard tells BBC Sport. “To come back home, to the place where I grew up, which gave me the opportunity to become a professional, not only in football but also as a person. I still have the passion, I still have the desire. I still have that love for football, and being able to live it at home is the best way to finish my career. In Spain we say it’s like closing the circle.”
The midfielder has returned to the club of his childhood after 15 years away from Zaragoza, during which he wore the Athletic Club shirt twice — he was born in Bilbao and moved to Aragon to follow his father, a Zaragoza executive — and played for Manchester United, Paris Saint-Germain and Boca Juniors. He is 37, has won a Europa League, the FA Cup and several league titles, worked with managers such as José Mourinho, Thomas Tuchel and Marcelo Bielsa, and shared dressing rooms with Lionel Messi, Neymar and Wayne Rooney.
Now Ander is home again, to lend a hand and try to set in motion a recovery that will be very, very difficult. “It was very sad, obviously, for all of us Zaragoza fans,” Herrera says, having watched the club’s decline from afar over the years. “Real Zaragoza belongs in Europe, it belongs fighting for trophies, it should be competing with the biggest clubs in Spain and Europe. That’s why I want to put my quality, my experience and my passion at the service of the team, to try to help my club return to where I believe it deserves to be. But from the first day I arrived I don’t want to talk too much about the past. We have talked far too much about what we did wrong. We keep asking ourselves why it happened, we keep thinking about the negative things. Let’s stop crying over what happened in the past. Let’s build the future. Let’s come in every day to train with a smile.”
When Herrera left Real Zaragoza in 2011, at a time when the club was struggling financially, he already knew that one day he would return. He could not have imagined what he would find when that day came, but in the end he chose to come back at the most difficult point in the club’s history, and has even decided to give his salary to the club’s foundation. “I don’t need a contract. I’ve had a very successful career and I’ve managed my money well,” Herrera explains. “I can give myself this gift. To wear that shirt for free, because I want to help my club, my team, my city. It’s something I feel I should do. It’s something I can afford to do and it makes me very proud. I feel privileged to be able to do something like this.”
Before he was a player, Herrera was a Zaragoza fan: his idols wore the club’s shirt and his biggest inspiration, his father Pedro, had been a footballer himself before becoming Zaragoza’s general manager. It was during the years his father worked at the club that Ander formed his earliest football memories, among them the unforgettable one from 1995, when Zaragoza won the Cup Winners’ Cup. Herrera was still a child when he watched the final against Arsenal from home, his club winning at the Parc des Princes in Paris, the same stadium that many years later would become his home with PSG. The ambitions are obviously smaller now, but somewhere the climb has to begin. “I like working with young players,” Herrera says. “I like seeing their development, following their journey and helping them avoid some of the mistakes I probably made. I’d also like to help families deal with personal situations that I’ve been through in the past and probably didn’t handle in the best way. I don’t know if I’ll become a professional football coach. I don’t close any doors because I love football, it’s my passion, it’s something I’ve done all my life, but I still don’t know what role I’ll find my place in.” For now, though, he has found his place as a footballer. He wanted to find it, he chose it and he has embraced it: home.