‘Don’t put me in a box’: Pellegrino Matarazzo’s extraordinary journey from New Jersey to Real Sociedad

Real Sociedad’s coach’s career reveals plenty about the man leading the proud Basque club to only their eighth Copa del Rey final There is a moment, about halfway through a long conversation about an extraordinary journey from New Jersey to Seville, when Pellegrino Matarazzo stops mid-sentence. “I keep using that word: ‘special’. I’m realising now that my English is terrible,” Real Sociedad’s coach says. So much so that when it finally comes to an end, after he has moved from management and mathematics to music – to OK Computer and Nino D’Angelo, tapes in the old Chevy and all-night sessions on guitar and baglama – he has a suggestion. Laughing now, about to bid farewell, he says: “Feel free to replace any words I used over 10 times. So: ‘special’…” Let the record show that “special” appears in the transcript 11 times. Only “solution” comes close, which fits. But 11 doesn’t seem excessive among thousands of words more and, besides, this is special. Matarazzo, whose first language was Italian at home and English outside it but says German overtook both and is now learning Spanish and bits of Basque, rightly applies it to “club”, “cultu