José Manuel Llaneza, a key man at Villarreal CF for the last thirty years and vice president of the club, died this Thursday at the age of 74, after leukemia that kept him hospitalized for several weeks in 2022, club sources reported.
Llaneza was born in Puçol (Valencia) in 1948 and came to the entity in 1993 to later enable the incorporation of the businessman Fernando Roig who has chaired Villarreal since then and of whom he has been the right-hand man throughout this time.
Since the arrival of Llaneza, the club has established itself in the First Division of Spanish football, has had top-level national and international footballers and experienced successes such as the Europa League won in 2021.
His body will be in the Puçol funeral home this Thursday from 6:00 p.m. and on Friday morning from 9:00 a.m. The funeral will take place at 5:00 p.m. Villarreal plays a League match against Barcelona tonight at the Camp Nou.
With Llaneza, one of the most emblematic figures in the history of the La Plana entity is leaving, since together with the president, Fernando Roig, he has been the architect of what is now the Castellón club, where he has been one of the key pieces of the entity and of Spanish football for its imprint, both in the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) and in LaLiga.
His relationship with the world of football came from his father, who was a director of Valencia CF, and to which he later added his status as president of Puçol in his hometown when he was still young.
After dedicating himself to the family businesses, Llaneza arrived at Villarreal under the guidance of Pascual Font de Mora in 1994. His family's friendship with the club's president at that time opened the door for him to become club manager in 1995.
At that stage, the goal of a Villarreal in the Second Division was to avoid relegation as it were. It was a period of many difficulties, despite the fact that after a lifetime in lower categories the yellow team played in no less than Second Division.
The illness suffered by Font de Mora opened the door to the entry of new owners, which became a decisive moment in the history of Villarreal, since Llaneza convinced the Valencian businessman Fernando Roig to join a viable project, which which became the first step of what is now the "yellow submarine".
Llaneza immediately became the right hand and trusted man to make the ambitious project that Roig had in mind a reality. They formed a perfect symbiosis. Roig put the ambition and investment, Llaneza the experience accumulated over many years of football.
After a miraculous promotion to First Division at the first chance, Villarreal begins to point out a clear club idea: investment in infrastructures (field and sports city), level signings (Martín Palermo, Juan Román Riquelme, Diego Forlán...) and a clear quarry project to get closer to Europe and consolidate itself as a consistent club.
After winning the Intertoto, Villarreal de Roig y Llaneza signs up for the European adventure, which led them to participate in five semifinals and one final, the one won in 2021 in Gdansk (Poland), which became the award for the project that both had in mind the first day that, twenty-five years ago, Roig had as president.
A lover of the quarry, Llaneza was a fixture in almost all the matches of the club's lower teams, because he was clear, in a non-negotiable way, that the home footballers were the ones called to be the pillars of the entity.
Recently, he received the gold medal from the city of Vila-real. With a strong character and clear ideas, a friend of his friends and a great believer in him, he combined his passionate character with his great heart. Villarreal has lost a great reference, the man who believed from the beginning that what Villarreal is today was possible. The death of his wife in September was a particularly hard blow for him.
