One thing is missing from Juan Mata’s medal haul. Here, he talks titles, the comfort zone and his time in England with Soccer Saturday’s Johnny Phillips.
It is a medal haul to make your eyes water. Juan Mata has won the World Cup,
the European Championship, the Champions League, the Europa League, two FA Cups and a Copa del Rey.
If the Spaniard walked away from football tomorrow he would be doing so with a list of honours that would be the envy of the football world.
But there is still no league title in that list, and that is something the Manchester United midfielder would like to put right in his time in England.
“I would love to win it,” he told Soccer Saturday. “I have been lucky enough to win so many trophies already. But I’ve been in England six seasons now and haven’t won it yet.
“I’m 28 years old now and time flies. It feels like yesterday that I was playing in my first year at Valencia when I was 19.
“There are so many good and bad things that I’ve been through, flying through the years, so you need to sometimes take a step aside and think about what you are doing and what you still want to achieve.
“Because for me it’s very important not to relax as a professional footballer and think I’ve won trophies with great teams and that is success.
For me it is about always getting hungrier, trying to improve and trying to be better.”
Those words will please his manager at Old Trafford. Last week, ahead of that 3-0 win over Champions Leicester on Sunday, where Mata scored the third goal of a clinical performance, Jose Mourinho spoke about the mentality of his players and why it is taking them time to reach peak performances at the club.
“They need that time to go out of their comfort zone or a zone where they are protected because we assume that the objective is not to win, that also takes time.”
It wasn’t so much a veiled criticism of his team’s mental strength, more a frontal assault on his players’ attitude. Mata was considered in his response when asked what he thought Mourinho meant by talking of players operating in a comfort zone at United.
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