How Picasso and Old Trafford nerves inspired Juan Mata's art exhibition

Times

12 hours ago

Juan Mata is speaking to me from Asturias in northwest Spain. It is a chat via Zoom and so to bridge the gap to London I hold up my tea, which is in a bright red and yellow Valencia CF-branded mug, and in a flash we are smiling and joking like old friends.
'Valencia was very important for me, it was the beginning of everything. So yeah, it should be also in the conversation,' Mata, who made 174 appearances for the Spanish club before joining Chelsea, with whom he won the Champions League, Europa League and FA Cup, in 2011, and then Manchester United three years later.
His is an exceptional career in which he also won the World Cup and the Euros with Spain, and it is not over yet. He spent last season in Australia with Western Sydney Wanderers and has yet to decide if he will return there in August. His friends warned him, when he told them he was joining the A-League, that Australia was a cultural desert. And why should this have worried them? Because Mata, 37, loves art. He loves it so much that he has curated, for Manchester, an exhibition, Football City, Art United, where visitors can experience collaborations between 11 artists and 11 footballers.
It is an intriguing idea, the most compelling of which comes from the imagination of Eric Cantona, and is about encouraging visitors to understand the pressures of fame by picking out at random a member of the public and placing them under a constant spotlight as they explore the art space. Is such a spotlight something that has been a strain for Mata over his career?
'I love to be anonymous,' he says. 'I love to be in places where you don't get so much attention. I enjoy very much the attention on the pitch. I like to be a kind of protagonist on the pitch every time I try to play football. But off the pitch I'm more comfortable not being in the spotlight and being a bit more relaxed. I had experiences in Japan [with Vissel Kobe] and in Australia where you can live a little bit more relaxed than in certain cities in Europe due to the relevance of football. But one who has been, and still is and probably will always be, in the spotlight is Eric Cantona.'
As someone who knows exactly who is her favourite painter — and Mata very politely asks me to spell out Vilhelm Hammershoi so he can look him up — I naturally want to know who is his favourite, but he says it is a process that has taken him from Picasso to Pollock.
'I love to be anonymous and in places where you don't get attention'
'It's for me difficult to have one favourite thing,' he says. 'Whenever I did interviews in the past about one movie, one song, one book, I have many, so it's difficult to single one out. My journey with art started when I was living in Madrid and Reina Sofía is one of my favourite museums. So whenever I wanted to disconnect, apart from doing many other things, I used to go there. And when I saw Guernica, the Picasso painting, for the first time, it was quite striking. After that, and as I got older, I started to read more and visit more galleries and exhibitions, and when I was living in England, I used to go to Whitworth Gallery a lot, which I love.
'It's one of my favourite spaces in Manchester. And then I started to get to know people, like Hans [Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery and co-curator of the Football City project]. I also met people in Spain, art historians, and I started to learn about the different periods in time. And then I started to realise, oh, okay, I like abstract expressionism, for example. So I like Pollock, I like Lee Krasner, I like [Mark] Rothko. But I also like [René] Magritte, a surrealist. And I also like architecture, for example, Le Corbusier or Tadao Ando. It was very common to see buildings from him when I was living in Japan. And in Japan, I had the chance to go to Naoshima, which is this beautiful island full of art. So it's difficult to pick a single, one artist. It's just a process.'
Mata switches effortlessly from discussing art to football, which is why, presumably, this new exhibition is possible. Visitors will gain entry through a tunnel devised by Edgar Davids, the former Dutch midfielder, which is supposed to help the public experience what it feels like to leave the quiet of the dressing room and then stride into a baying arena.
'For me, the tunnel at Old Trafford has always been really special,' he says. 'I mean, it's that beautiful stadium, the Theatre of Dreams, and you're there every two weeks walking through that tunnel and getting to a pitch where you know there's going to be 75,000 people.
'It's quite intense, but also exciting. So it's just the moment before you have to perform and it's the moment where you actually can think about what you want to do. And you can feel the nerves of your team-mates, you can see the opposition team at the same time, lining up. I think it's a very, very important ritual that we have in the sport.'
The time difference in the Antipodes meant Mata could not watch as many United games as he would have liked, but he saw enough to understand the club suffered a 'tough season'.
'I like the coach [Ruben Amorim], a young coach with a lot of positivity and energy, and hopefully he can turn things around. Of course, there has been a change in the ownership of which are trying to create financial sustainability in the club. I think they admitted that that was their priority. So hopefully from now on they can really grow on the pitch. That's what I would love. I love the club.
'I like Pollock, I like Krasner, I like Rothko. But I also like Magritte'
'I have so many friends there. I speak a lot with Bruno [Fernandes], who is a very enthusiastic player. And when things are not going well, he suffers a lot. So, I hope that this year is the year where things can be a bit more stable on the pitch and they can really build and bring United where I believe they should be, which is fighting for the biggest trophies there are.'
I mention how the arrival of Amorim was widely assumed to mean Fernandes would struggle to be involved.
'I think if Bruno doesn't fit into any system, you should create a system in which he can fit because he is just so good as a player and as a person, as a leader,' Mata says. 'I think he is instrumental for Man United.'
United's decline is one of football's great mysteries, as is the way Spain, at club and international level, know how to win so unerringly. When Chelsea won the Conference League in May it brought to an end a run of 27 finals involving Spanish domestic and international teams that they had won.
Mata also won the Champions League and Europa League with Chelsea
DARREN WALSH/GETTY IMAGES
'I don't have the 100 per cent accurate reply,' he says, before giving as close to a complete assessment as you will get, 'but I think it's a combination of things.
'I think one is the relevance and importance of football in our society and of course it is the same in England too and in other countries. But in Spain, football is like a religion. You have the big teams, you have the smaller teams, which in the smaller cities everyone follows.
'All kids play football since the age of two or three. Before more than now, I would say, and I think that's something generational. But we have, I believe, a good understanding of the game.
'We have good coaches, so we have good education coming through the academies. We have teams that normally give opportunity to the players, so we have a good system of how to get to our first team with the academy, with Segunda División and the different leagues that we have. We have, I would say, a good mentality and a good understanding of what being a professional football player means. So, like you say, competition is something that we are born with.
'I saw foxes… I don't know if that's a sign that my spirit animal is a fox'
'We always think about playing in a nice way, but also trying to win all the time. I remember when I was in the Spanish national team, under-15 and under-16, we were always competing for winning. I think that gets into your DNA. Basically, I think it's a great system, a good context, great coaches, and innate talent with the ball, which comes from so many people playing in the streets, in the parks and everywhere else.'
Mata believes Spain's all-enveloping football culture has been key to their success in the sport
ANTHONY DEVLIN FOR THE TIMES
And then comes the most surreal moment of any interview I have conducted with an elite player as Mata asks me if he should be buying chicken for the foxes that cross his path. This is because Ella Toone's artwork is inspired by the United midfielder's spirit animal, which is a Shetland Pony — which leads me to wonder if Mata has a spirit animal.
'Lately, and this is actually very good timing for your question, I keep seeing foxes. I don't really know what that means, but over the last year, I was living in London for some time before going to Australia and I was seeing foxes more often than other people that I know, especially at night. So I don't know if that's a sign that my spirit animal is a fox.'
Cue a lecture from me on how I keep an extended family of foxes going with shed loads of fresh chicken every week.
'Oh, wow. OK,' he says. 'Good idea.'
And my work is done.