Carlos Cuesta, towards the end of his first major interview, briefly lets himself wonder how far his journey will take him. “Maybe one day it brings the Maldives,” he says with a laugh, the joke being football managers can quickly be banished from view, twiddling their thumbs on the beach, once their star has faded. Still, would that be so bad? “It could be better or worse, it depends when or why. If it’s because you want it, or if it’s because somebody told you to go.”
If soaking up rays sounds like anathema to Cuesta it is because, in a remarkable ascent, he has barely wasted a minute. In June, shortly before turning 30, he took the reins at Parma and became the youngest head coach in Serie A since 1939. Half of his short life had been spent building up to that moment, the realisation crystallising in his late teens that no other calling would do. “I felt that I needed to coach,” he says. “It was like an inner necessity that I had inside of me.”
Cuesta had been coveted long before his arrival in Emilia-Romagna. It was during a five-year spell as one of Mikel Arteta’s assistants at Arsenal that he matured from inquisitive, ferociously diligent tyro into an elite manager in waiting. Nobody involved with the Premier League leaders would play down Cuesta’s influence; the public received a glimpse when he featured in the club’s All or Nothing documentary three years ago. Parting ways brought its own agony.
“It was maybe the most difficult decision of my life,” he says of the moment Parma called. Cuesta had to weigh the sense he was aboard a rocket ship against the privilege of being sought by a club feted for its success in the 1990s. “I was incredibly happy at Arsenal, surrounded by incredible people in an incredible project. Not only with great players and a path that is only growing and growing, but with a person who has been incredibly important for me, which is Mikel.”
Arteta would never have stood in Cuesta’s way. Other clubs had long been hovering. “I needed to consider a lot of things but in the end I had a great feeling with the people at Parma,” Cuesta says. “It’s an amazing, historic club. You can feel there has been success here and, at the same time, there have been many ups and downs. Right now, we are trying to create our own path and our own chapter.”
To Parma, all the way from Palma. Cuesta was born in Mallorca, the youngest of four siblings, then 12, 11 and nine. “I was like the penalty,” he quips, but the age gap with his sister and two brothers meant there was little sparring. “It was the opposite,” he says. “They are like extra dad or mum figures. They’ve helped a lot in my education, my standards, my way of approaching life. I guess, through my childhood, I was living in a process that helped me mature a little bit earlier than usual.”
He played for Santa Catalina Atlético, a local lower-division side, until 18 but knew his prospects were limited. “I was a footballer that was on the pitch but not making a difference,” he admits. Life nonetheless revolved around the club. His mother ran its coffee shop; he would go there after school, hang out into the evening, immerse himself in the institution’s rhythms. “In this kind of way, I think it got into my blood,” he says.
By 15, he had been invited to coach youngsters at Santa Catalina. What had the club’s elders spotted? “Passion for the game, I guess. And maybe a kid that had some time off, spending so long there! Perhaps when I was playing I was a little bit vocal too. But I was watching a lot of games and trying to understand the ‘why?’, trying to understand how things can improve.”
The die was cast. Cuesta was confident, academically bright and ambitious. He wanted a career around football and for a short time considered sports journalism. The inner cry to make his name in coaching had become overwhelming by the time he began a sports science degree in Madrid.
“I tried to be proactive in order to make it happen,” he says. Social media proved invaluable. Cuesta followed a number of staff from Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid on Twitter, eventually striking up conversations that brought a role in the latter’s academy alongside his studies. Atlético was “almost like the real university”: their coaches had spotted a precocious talent and he began working with their under-nines, eventually taking charge at under-14 level.
Cuesta was motivated “to try and spend time with people that could add value for me”. During a year out after leaving Atlético he crammed in visits to clubs, managers, seminars and tournaments. Among the yields was a connection with Juventus, where he spent two years with the under-17s and under-23s. He was 22. “If Atlético was the university, Juventus was the master’s,” he says. “An incredible experience. Learning things like the attention to detail on tactics, on defensive aspects of the game.”
Then came the call from Arteta, who was eight months in at Arsenal. The pair had forged a relationship during Arteta’s time at Manchester City when Cuesta “had the opportunity to share some thoughts” with a coach whose outlook he already admired. He became one of Arteta’s most trusted lieutenants and the pair still communicate regularly. His face illuminates with every chance to extol his mentor’s virtues.
“An incredible person,” he says. “He has always been extremely supportive through the whole process and still is. I can’t speak well enough about who he is, not just as a leader and a coach but as a human being.”
The clarity, single-mindedness and intensity Cuesta exhibits during an hour-long conversation at Parma’s training centre bring easy comparison to the Arteta who, before his playing days wound down, was sketching out detailed visions of a life in management.
Sometimes Cuesta finds himself rising at dawn and finishing work at 10pm, although he will try to at least operate from home in the evening. Long hours are an Arteta trait and so is a pragmatism that Cuesta, in trying to keep Parma from the relegation zone, may need to deploy at the expense of idealism.
“You have your own sensibility and beliefs about what the game is, but I think it’s very important to have this flexibility to understand what the context requires,” he says. “It’s not always possible to do what you like, but you always have to do what is needed. There will be moments where what you like is needed or possible, but there will be many others where you just need to maximise the resources at your disposal and do your best.
“That’s why I think, the bigger the spectrum of your knowledge and ability to convince players to do certain things, the better a coach you will be. I try to learn from many.”
His initial role at Arsenal was individual development coach, which involved one-on-one work with players focusing on aspects of their game. The dressing room of Arteta’s early days was not outwardly the easiest to enter, even before considering Cuesta was 25 and almost unknown. Senior players embraced him swiftly though; the All or Nothing clip in which he animatedly, yet concisely, talks Ben White through his “world-class” attributes is a widely available example of his talents.
“I tried to observe, to listen, to intervene only when I thought I could add some value, and from there to slowly try to get their credibility and trust,” he says. “When the player feels you can do that, and that you’re a good person with honesty, good intentions and good values, they follow and respect you.”
Any flicker of fame from becoming a minor television star was, he says, blanked out by obsession with the day-to-day. That focus continues at Parma, where he oversees the third-youngest team in Europe’s top five leagues. We meet soon after a win at Pisa that pulls them well clear of the drop; three days later they are dragged back towards it by a home defeat to Lazio, whose winner comes after they had two men sent off. Consistency will take time.
Perhaps his youth helps him relate to a much-changed squad that lost players such as Giovanni Leoni, who signed for Liverpool, in the summer. “Maybe the age can be a factor in terms of empathy,” he says. “We’re trying to create the competitive mindset we need to overcome adversity and develop. The players have been absolutely incredible – they are growing.”
The quest for self-growth continues too. Cuesta reads voraciously: he frequently dips into a translation of the Chinese text Tao Te Ching, one of whose central tenets is self-awareness. Sacred Hoops, by the former NBA coach Phil Jackson, is another that “I usually have around”. Inspiration comes from numerous sources and the days when the wallpaper on his phone was a picture of the Champions League trophy, incentivising him with the most thrilling target available, are long gone.
“Not any more, look!” he says, holding up a more nondescript background. “The only thing I have is the present. In this job you need to reframe ‘time’. For me, time right now means today is my everything.” The Maldives still feel a galaxy away.
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