The evening of August 15, at Manchester's Etihad Stadium.
The players had already taken the hands of the ball boys and, led by referee Mike Dean, walked onto the pitch amid the roar of the crowd. The curtain was about to rise on the Premier League's opening match of the new season.
Thirty-eight-year-old Brendan Rodgers stood sternly inside the players' tunnel, his eyes fixed on the exit ahead as he struggled to calm himself.
He was dressed very formally that evening: a black suit and tie, with a pocket square carefully placed in his breast pocket. His hair was combed immaculately over his high hairline, giving him an intensely ceremonial air.
This was the Premier League he had waited years for!
And a match he had long looked forward to!
Although he was only thirty-eight, Rodgers had already been coaching for seventeen years.
That year, at the age of twenty, he had been forced to retire early because of injuries, so he went on to study coaching.
In 1994, he joined Reading's Youth Team, rising step by step to become its youth development director and an assistant coach with the First Team.
That was the golden age of La Liga football.
Bosque's Real Madrid at the turn of the century, Irureta's Super Depor, Cúper and Benítez's Valencia, and later Rijkaard's Barcelona—all of those teams had made a great name for themselves in European football.
Almost every well-informed observer agreed that the strength of Spanish football was no weaker than that of Serie A, the "Little World Cup."
During that period, Rodgers often went to Spain under the pretext of studying Spanish. More importantly, he went to learn about and understand Spanish football, which opened up an entirely new world for him.
Because he was fluent in Spanish and deeply