Barcelona legend Andrés Iniesta won the Champions League and scored the winning goal when Spain won the World Cup, but his successful escape from the ‘bottomless pit’ of depression may be his greatest victory.
In it, Iniesta's mother talks of the pride she feels, not about him winning all 35 trophies, including four Champions Leagues and a World Cup, but that compatriots in Seville, Valencia and Madrid applaud her son. She comes from a humble family close to Albacete, where her son, by the age of five, was “at the level of a 12 to 14-year-old player” according to his coaches.
All Spain's clubs wanted the prodigy, but he chose Barcelona and a new life far from home at the age of 12. It was difficult, she remembers – “he wept silently” – and life continued to be so sometimes when he'd made it as one of the world's best footballers.
In 2009, Barça were the best team in the world. They'd assumed that mantle by beating Manchester United in Rome in May. The birth rate in Barcelona rose 16 per cent from babies conceived that month.
“I'm glad I could contribute to such important work,” Iniesta says, smiling. In the film we see Pep Guardiola's brilliant Barça eliminating Chelsea along the way thanks to Iniesta's dramatic late goal at Stamford Bridge as Guardiola runs down the touchline at full speed in celebration, only to be alarmed that the rest of his bench could run faster than him.
Guardiola is one of many from football's A-list shot in soft focus for The Unexpected Hero. Petr Cech still insists he was “18 millimetres from saving Iniesta's shot” at Stamford Bridge. Other goalkeepers, including Gianluigi Buffon, talk of Iniesta's magic.
Former teammates and managers Lionel Messi, Neymar, Gerard Piqué, David Villa, Sergio Ramos, Samuel Eto'o, Carles Puyol, David Silva, Louis van Gaal, Guardiola and Luis Enrique all try and articulate what Iniesta means to them, some better than others.
They paint an image of a footballer who dances with the ball, of a reserved man from a rural village who prefers to express himself on a football field. Guardiola compares him to a bullfighter; Piqué states that it's impossible to get the ball from him; Xavi says he's the greatest talent in Spanish football that he's ever seen.
These are not just anodyne comments from Iniesta's pals, the usual platitudes churned out for an admiring audience predisposed to marvel at the man Neymar calls “a wizard”. Iniesta has earned this praise and the footage reveals exactly why.
Yet, despite all he'd achieved, Iniesta felt empty in 2009 and the film here takes a darker turn. He had everything, he made those around him happy and Barça fans too. But he was distant, even when among friends and family, amid the beauty of the Costa Brava on holiday. He wanted to sleep and be alone, but he couldn't sleep. He was so depressed that when his parents stayed with him, using the room downstairs, he came down in the middle of the night and asked his mother if he could sleep with them again, like he had as a small child. That's when his parents knew he was really sick.
Iniesta didn't tell his teammates much, but he sought professional help. His psychologist discusses his illness on screen, likening it to postnatal depression after the high of childbirth. She talks about how he never missed an appointment to see her and would arrive early week after week as he struggled to get out of what she considered his “bottomless pit”. His teammates tell us they wish he'd told them more; Guardiola was understanding and compassionate.
That 2009 summer should have been a high point, but Iniesta's low mood was compounded by injuries and the sudden death of his friend Dani Jarque, the captain of Espanyol. Within a year, Iniesta would score the winning goal in the World Cup final, a 116th minute strike against Holland in South Africa. He celebrated by lifting his shirt to reveal a T-shirt on which was written “Dani Jarque, siempre con nosotros” ("always with us"). That tribute immediately won him the love of Espanyol fans, while the rest of Spain celebrate him most as the man who scored the goal that brought his country's first and so far only World Cup.
There's not much dirt to go on. He isn't Maradona, subject of another recent footballer feature documentary. Not that a Rakuten TV production would be digging deep to find any on a Barça legend… Rakuten (think a Japanese cross between Ebay and Amazon) are owned by Hiroshi Mikitani, a Kobe native.
Mikitani, 54, has amassed a net worth of $6 billion. Rakuten now sponsor Barça and Mikitani's own Vissel Kobe, the J League team who Iniesta now plays for. Mikitani describes Iniesta as “God” and the reaction you see when the player walks into a Japanese café looks close to worship. Iniesta has sanctioned everything in the film, he appears throughout and it's one reason why he was such an attractive signing to Kobe.
I went to see Iniesta in Kobe in November and he's massive in Japan's fifth biggest city. The Manchegan's boyish face adorns the city's travel cards and it's on the side of the stadium along with other high-profile imports David Villa, Thomas Vermaelen and Lukas Podolski.
Kobe provides a cultural contrast to take the story away from Spain, a dramatic Blade Runner-esque backdrop for segments where the Iniesta family are so far out of his comfort zone that his wife Ana admits they'd never expected to move there.
Kobe, despite their superstar additions, were having a very poor season when I visited, which the documentary omits altogether, instead preferring to show how they did salvage the season in some style by winning the Emperor's Cup at the start of this year, their first ever trophy. They'll play in the Asian Champions League when football resumes.
Those “The No1 club in Asia” slogans that accompany Vissel's slick marketing are the equivalent of Brighton claiming they're Europe's pre-eminent force, but they could become true. The odds are slim, but such unlikely success would also be Iniesta's nightmare: having to play his beloved Barça should Kobe and Barça win their Champions Leagues.
The Iniesta family – he and Ana have four children – are now content in Japan. Like a lot of the Western footballers who moved to the Osaka region, they live in surprisingly modest apartments on the man-made Rokko Island just off the coast of a city wrecked by a 1995 earthquake.
They get ample time as a family, which wasn't possible at Barça and Ana – a former waitress from a working-class town north of Barcelona whom Iniesta was smitten with from the minute he saw her working – is obviously his rock. She's a perceptive commenter, pointing out that everyone wanted a piece of him.
Their love for each other comes over strongly and the intimate details are very touching. In 2008 he was in Japan on tour with Barça and couldn't get her out of his head, even though she wasn't his girlfriend. He saw everything as a sign they should be together, like the name of the Japanese national carrier, ANA. He bought her a model plane, an unconventional way of wooing her, but it worked. She also reads a letter every day that he wrote to her when she lost their child.
There's more to The Unexpected Hero than peers talking of his football brilliance and footage of him beating bedazzled opponents. Iniesta, the film shows us, may be a quiet family man, one of the greatest footballers of his generation, but depression, death and the tragedy of losing a child to a late miscarriage means it is far more than a parade of talking heads, no hagiography.
Andrés Iniesta: The Unexpected Hero is available for free on Rakuten TV.