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There was a wildcard in the ranks when new boss Julen Lopetegui named his Wolverhampton Wanderers backroom team.

There was Pablo Sanz, his long-time training-ground lieutenant, and experienced coach Juan Peinado. Fitness guru Oscar Caro and first-team coach Edu Rubio added experience of the English game and Daniel Lopetegui, Julen’s son, was among those included too.

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All of the appointments were, on the surface at least, logical — apart from one: Fran Garagarza.

Most of his experience had come as a technical director at Eibar. He did not appear to have a natural role at Molineux. But Lopetegui wanted his knowledge and experience around the club.

Given Garagarza’s stunning success in Spain, it is easy to see why.

Garagarza effectively fell into the role that made his name.

As assistant manager at tiny SD Eibar in the early 2000s, he found himself without a position when a new boss arrived and brought in his own No 2. The club were keen to keep him, though, so they created a job for him — sporting director.

But it was not a sporting director role that many would recognise because Eibar had almost nothing to direct. The club were a semi-professional outfit playing in Segunda B, the third tier of the Spanish game, with almost no structure to speak of below the first team.

It was raw, basic, almost amateurish.

With effectively no club to manage, Garagarza set about building one. He was hugely successful.

By 2014, the little club from the town of 27,000 inhabitants, which had existed in the shadow of Basque giants Real Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao, were playing in Primera, La Liga’s top tier, alongside Barcelona, Real Madrid et al.

Garagarza had overseen the Miracle of Eibar.

“For me he is one of the most important men in the history of Eibar,” said Jon Errasti, the Eibar-born midfielder who signed for his hometown club in 2012 after being persuaded by Garagarza.

“In the last 10 or 12 years he managed every moment of the team — the transfers, the coaches and the sporting decisions. We’re talking about a club from a very small town. If we compare it with San Sebastian, Bilbao or Vitoria, it’s a very little town in the region.

“It has a little stadium and Fran is a man who built a very important project around a club and a city.”

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Garagarza’s success was based on building structures that made Eibar more robust.

From the lowly youth setup he had previously coached in, he oversaw the creation of an academy whose youth teams now compete on a level footing with their bigger Basque neighbours.

He professionalised the operation behind the scenes. But his most visible successes came in the transfer market.

In 2014-15 — Eibar’s first season in Primera — their budget for player wages was €8,906,000 ($9,260,515), the largest, by a distance, of Garagarza’s career at that stage.

It was dwarfed by La Liga’s heavyweights with Real Madrid and Barcelona reportedly spending €210,000,000 and €205,000,000 respectively. Yet Eibar survived, albeit despite finishing third from bottom and being saved by Elche’s demotion due to financial issues.

Yet they went on to spend seven consecutive seasons in the top tier with Garagarza building his recruitment strategy on loans, free agents and shrewd deals to sign players with points to prove and careers to build or rejuvenate.

It resulted in comparisons with the work of Monchi, the acclaimed sporting director of Sevilla, who worked successfully with Lopetegui in his last job.

“He was always described as the ‘Basque Monchi’,” says Euan McTear, the author of Eibar the Brave, which charts the club’s remarkable rise. “But the ‘Budget Monchi’ was probably a better description.

“He was doing great things, making great deals and doing things on a budget, uncovering talents and selling them on for a good price. So it was a lot like Monchi did but on a much, much smaller scale and that’s the thing to emphasise.”

Former colleagues point to Garagarza’s tireless work ethic as key to his success, but also to his skill for trusting in and delegating to members of his team. He built an army of scouts and contacts around the Basque country and the wider Spanish market, looking for the next unpolished gem.

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Even in their Primera days, Eibar rarely signed players from fellow top-tier clubs. Their budget would not allow it. So Garagarza’s net was often cast across the lower echelons of the Spanish game.

He demanded intensive levels of detail from his scouts on potential targets, even encouraging them to arrive early to watch players warm up, analyse their body language while chatting to team-mates and coaches, study their reactions to setbacks and watch their demeanour as they departed the field at the final whistle.

Garagarza wanted more than just technical analysis.

And there was extensive research about a player’s home life and personality. Eibar did not have the money to make mistakes by signing troublesome characters.

“In the lower levels it was about a lot of local scouting, whether it was going around the Basque country or further afield in Spain,” says McTear. “When it was in La Liga, the structure changed and they had to widen their field but the key for him was the relationships he built with agents and other clubs.

“He got presented with a lot of opportunities because he had such good relationships with agents and clubs, especially Athletic and Real Sociedad — the two biggest clubs in the Basque country — even to the point where Barcelona loaned him Marc Cucurella, who took some of his important first steps at Eibar.”

Garagarza built his success without the ability to wave a proverbial cheque book. Crowds at Eibar’s 8,000-seater stadium rose from a typical 1,000-2,000 to closer to capacity in the top tier, but their spending power was still nothing compared to their rivals.

“He could not buy the players with money,” says Errasti. “He had to buy the players with a project.

“We can talk about Takashi Inui, Gonzalo Escalante, Borja Baston, Adrian Gonzalez, Pedro Leon — they were players at very important points in their careers. Fran detected this situation and said ‘OK, you’re not playing at the moment and I am going to try to get you to Eibar and sell you a good project for you’.

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“In this moment, if he was working for Eibar, he would have a list of 50, 60, 70 players who could maybe make a difference at Eibar next season. He knew that Eibar had little money so he had to work in another way — better and faster.”

Garagarza left Eibar in 2021 following relegation and had been lecturing on the Spanish FA’s sports directors course before receiving the call from Lopetegui, his fellow Basque.

His arrival raised questions about his role, especially when news emerged of Scott Sellars’ impending departure from Molineux, which was finally confirmed last week. Yet Garagarza was not considered as a candidate for Sellars’ job, which went to long-serving Wolves recruitment chief Matt Hobbs.

Executive chairman Jeff Shi wanted a club appointment — a figure committed to the wider, long-term interests of Wolves. Garagarza is Lopetegui’s man.

Instead, Garagarza and Daniel Lopetegui will be Lopetegui Senior’s voice at the recruitment table, submitting names of potential signings to Hobbs and Shi and offering feedback from the coaching team on candidates identified by Wolves’ head of scouting Ben Wrigglesworth and his team.

And, while Wolves fans might have been seduced by the prospect of Garagarza — who is taking English lessons — filling Sellars’ shoes, McTear points out that his current role is more aligned with his CV.

“If you look at what he did at Eibar and level he worked at, taking a job on Lopetegui’s staff is closer to his level than taking a Premier League sporting director job,” says McTear.

“He was working with not much of a budget. It was the kind of recruitment that would be very different to Wolves. It would be a big step up for him in a different league or different country.

“For him to be the guy who the coach can bounce ideas off is very much more similar to what he was doing at Eibar. As well as being the guy who brought in the players, he was an ear for the coach and somebody to bounce ideas off.

“He has a bright football brain but is also a really personable guy who really understands players and their needs off the pitch.”

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