I was a paramedic before falling into football while backpacking – now I’m about to face ex-Chelsea star Hernan Crespo

ALBERT RIERA left his job as a paramedic in Catalonia to go travelling for a year in New Zealand.

While most twenty-somethings who leave Europe for travel end up sightseeing, maybe getting a bar job to pay the bills, Riera wound up winning the Champions League.

The diminutive 5ft 8in midfielder, now 40, had balanced his ambulance work with being a part-time footballer in Spain’s fourth tier.

But after landing a one-year visa to head to New Zealand, the midfielder had no intention of playing football Down Under.

After his dad pointed him in the direction of Auckland City’s Catalan coach Ramon Tribulietx, however, he ended up somewhat reluctantly sending over footage of his games.

Tribulietx liked what he saw enough to offer him a trial, and Riera never looked back.

“I thought that would be it,” Riera admitted while chatting to The National. “But after one week he said that he wanted to sign me for the rest of the season – two months.

“My friends said, ‘We’ve come to travel, not to play football’. I said, ‘Look, in two months I’ll finish and then we’ll hire a van and travel’. In the meantime, we won the Oceanic Champions League and I travelled to New Caledonia, to Tahiti for free. Football was letting me travel.

“At the end of the season, we still hired the van and goofed around New Zealand where you work for people in return for accommodation.

“We were in a hippy community in the bush and we were gardening, cleaning, chopping wood, making buildings. We were also packing kiwi fruits – you soon get sick of them.

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“We’d work night shifts for 10 hours per night just to save more money to travel again.

“The idea was six months in New Zealand and six months travelling back to Spain via Asia – Tibet and places like that.”

Having doubted that he’d even be good enough to make Auckland’s squad, Riera found himself being offered an opportunity to stay for the following season.

“The money he was offering was not enough to live on,” he admitted. “But I’ve always been prepared to take a risk. People told me that I was crazy giving up a proper job to play semi-professional football, yet it wasn’t ordinary.

“We’d be playing in the Club World Cup in Japan, for instance.

“I could keep travelling, play more Champions League and ended up playing three years at Auckland City from the age of 28.”

Having thrived for part-timers Auckland, Riera was incredibly handed the opportunity to turn professional aged 29.

‘I THOUGHT IT WOULD GO NOWHERE’

He revealed: “My intention was to go back to Spain, but in one pre-season we played against Wellington Phoenix, one of the two professional teams in New Zealand.

“Their coach, a Scot called Ernie Merrick, asked me to come on trial for one week. Again, I thought it would go nowhere, I’d never played professional football.

“But on the first day after only one session Ernie said they wanted to offer me a one-year deal. To be honest, I felt fine at the level that day.”

During his time in the A-League he was called up to their All-Star team, which enabled him the opportunity to play against Juventus – swapping shirts with legendary Italian midfielder Andrea Pirlo.

Following three years with Wellington, Riera decided that the brutal travel schedule had become too much for him – and opted to rejoin Auckland.

After hanging up his boots in 2021, by this point a New Zealand citizen, Riera became manager of Auckland.

Having won three OFC Champions Leagues as a player, he has since added two more as a coach.

This week he has taken his side to Abu Dhabi, where they will face Asian champions Al-Ain in the first round of the Club World Cup on Sunday.

The match will see him pit his managerial wits against former Chelsea striker Hernan Crespo, who has been coaching the Emirati side for just under a year.

Last year they fell 3-0 at this stage to Saudi outfit Al-Ittihad, who boasted the likes of Karim Benzema, N’Golo Kante and Fabinho among their ranks.

On this year’s task, Riera said: “We’re realistic, but I’ll tell my players to compete as well as we can.

“I remember Crespo as a player, one of the great Argentina strikers. He was a busy No9 running behind all the time, full of energy. I’m happy for my team to be playing his.”

On the dreams that could lie ahead, Riera said: “It’s way harder now, but we’re only three games away from playing Real Madrid to become world champions. You never know in football!”