Last Tuesday Ernesto Valverde greeted from the front page of the daily newspaper "Sport". This does not happen very often, although he is coach of FC Barcelona and the whole thing turns around that club. Valverde, however, lacks the strong sentences, the charismatic gestures. If you want to express it in light of the Champions League semi-final against Liverpool (21 clock, live ticker SPIEGEL ONLINE; TV: Sky and Dazn): The 55-year-old is an anti-Jürgen Klopp.

He made the lead because of the holiday Sant Jordi, where the Catalans traditionally give books. Valverde posed with one of his favorite illustrated books, because his love for the photo belongs to the characteristics of this man, whom many consider to be without qualities.

As an active footballer, he bought a camera from the first salary and studied at the Catalan School of Photography. Later, he was one of the founders of a similar institute in Bilbao, showed in an exhibition and published in 2012 under the title "Medio Tiempo" a collection of his works, which are exclusively black and white, capture mainly street scenes and radiate a certain melancholy.

"In the end, it's about winning"

"Of course, photography escapes a form ( football, the Red. )", Valverde told the newspaper "La Vanguardia": "But she is not a hobby for me, but something very serious in my life." The football certainly too, but for "more serious than life and death" as Liverpool coaching legend Bill Shankly he would not explain it. Valverde considers the exaggerations of the industry to be absurd. "If you lose, the world seems to be going down, but in the end nothing happens, the curtain falls, a new season begins, and if necessary, you go somewhere else."

Albert Gea / REUTERS

Ernesto Valverde on the training ground

Valverde did that several times, first as a busy winger - from then comes his nickname "Txingurri", Basque for: the ant -, later as a coach. After stations in Spain's upper middle class (twice Bilbao, Espanyol, Villarreal, Valencia) and Greece (twice Olympiacos) Barça undertook him in the summer of 2017. There was also a certain stall smell as an argument, he had played here for two years.

Valverde proves since then in fact as a loyal man of the club. Footballian, however, he stands for an ultra-pragmatic interpretation of the Barça philosophy. Taking aside the ingenuity of Lionel Messi, the current team is solid. "In the end, it's about winning," Valverde emphasizes again and again.

First double, now triple?

And that's what his Barça does - against initial assumptions. When he came, he found a vortex of negativity and hysteria. Soon, Neymar announced his move to Paris, and after clear Super Cup defeats by Real Madrid in their first games of the season, defense chief Gerard Piqué said: "For the first time in ten years, I feel they are ahead of us."

Valverde? Said little and made himself - photographer, who he is - a precise picture of the situation. He stabilized the defense, won the first games and never looked back. The next time it went to Madrid, they won 3-0. This season you dominate the archrival even more clearly. At the weekend Valverde won the league for the second time confidently, after the double of the preseason even the triple is now possible.

To de-dramatize him may cost him headlines, but is certainly one of the success secrets of a coach who has just lost three league games in two seasons. "Valverde relativizes even the relative", observes "El País", and thus even things appear natural, which would hardly be accepted by others.

For example, that he was employed both as a player and as a coach in the local rivals Espanyol and Barça. Or that he leaves Messi more often on the bench. Most recently, he brought the five-time world footballer in two league games sequentially only in the second half. What would have provided for endless debates in the past, has long been accepted. Not least because it happens in consultation with Messi.

Nick Potts / DPA

Even Messi praises Valverde

The Argentines captain since this season, holds a lot of Valverde. After a win at Betis, he publicly praised: "The coach has read the game very well, his match plan was perfect." Nobody could remember that a coach would have been so explicitly appreciated by the silent superstar.

Messi and the entire team value Valverde's expertise and talent, firstly, not to create problems and, secondly, to solve noiselessly, as this season's Ousmane Dembélé's indiscipline. The players know that Valverde would never make a name for themselves or be responsible.

The same was true of the night against which Barça played this season: the 0-3 draw in the quarter-finals of the Champions League last year at AS Roma. As a result, internally Valverde's future was questioned, stoically it was the coach endure, and now he has extended his contract until 2021. "We all learned from Rome," he said recently.

After losing with Espanyol as a player against Leverkusen in 1988 and as a coach against Sevilla in 2007 on penalties the Uefa Cup final, he undertakes the next attempt on his first European Cup victory. If it succeeds, one will understand that it behaves with this inconspicuous coach as with a good photo: Ernesto Valverde gets better with every look.