Late July in San Sebastian, the bay at its most picturesque, filled with holidaymakers. Up in the hills of Zubieta, a pair of septuagenarians make their way as usual to watch Real Sociedad’s morning training. Alejandro Sanz and Jose Mari Erchande have been following their team for more than 50 years, they say, and await the season with long-forgotten sensations.

For the first time in four decades, la Real will be starting it outside Spain’s top division. Sanz and Erchande reckon it may take longer than nine months to return, but they have been encouraged by what they have seen over the past fortnight. “I’ve never seen the team prepare with so much training with the ball,” says Sanz. And he’s seen a lot: La Liga titles in the 1980s, Sociedad in the Champions League as recently as 2003, and a succession of head coaches from various parts. He and Erchande like the look of the new man, for all that he’s conspicuously young for the task and has not yet mastered Spanish, let alone Basque.

The language, says Chris Coleman, 37, is the principal frustration of his new job – and there have been a few. He has very little money with which to strengthen a Sociedad squad that had been sliding gradually towards Spain’s second division. They dropped with many of the squad carrying top-flight salaries, some low morale and with the baggage peculiar to the major clubs of this region in Spain’s northeast. Sociedad are a Basque institution and obliged to reflect that identity far beyond having signposts around the place in the Euskara language or Basque flags waved in grandstands. They must play football in Basque, too. Only in the late 1980s did they drop the idea that only Basque footballers should wear their colours. Only this century did they recruit nonBasque Spaniards.

Coleman has bought into that culture. “I felt it as soon as I walked through the door. I’m an outsider myself but I understand it.” Being Welsh helped, he added. “We’re a small country and so there’s definitely a connection: we have the Welsh against the English, a stubbornness if you like. And if you look at this club, the really successful Sociedad teams have been mainly Basque players, with maybe four or five outside influences who understand the culture of the region, understand what’s needed and fit in with that culture, not the other way around. Too many outsiders have come in expecting the local boys to fit in with them and it doesn’t work. They’ve strayed from the formula. The relegation was coming from a long way off, and finally it happened. Maybe it’s a kick-start we needed.”

The challenge excites him. “This is a big club, but relegated and with no money. We’ve got to sell players, the budget is tight, but then that’s not so different from what I’m used to.” For Sociedad, read Fulham, whom Coleman preserved – and often much more – for the best part of four seasons in a Premier League where they were among the poorest tenants.

Coleman was sacked by Fulham in April, and when Sociedad contacted him in May, they got an instant “yes”. “I was in the car one morning, bored out of my mind. The season had finished. Two years ago they had also inquired and I was happy then in the Premiership. Now I thought, ‘I’ve always said I’d like to sample it in another country’.” Naturally, he had had approaches within England, and provisional offers of the sort where chairmen had told him that, should their club start next season badly, he’d be first in line to replace whoever was struggling.

“I don’t really like the idea of waiting in the shadows with a big cloak on. I’m not that sort of man.” As a manager, Coleman has always had to be his own man, quite fiercely. At Fulham, being a freshman in the job, only 32 when he began it – a car accident having curtailed his career as an imposing centre-half – he recalls the several petitions from the chairman Mohamed al-Fayed’s board that he should take on a wiser guru if he needed experience.

His answer would always be “no”: “I’d say, ‘If you want someone else, get someone else’; at Fulham I got the sack for whatever reason but at least I did things my own way.” At Sociedad, at least in the eyes of men like the old Senors Sanz and Erchande, he will need to define himself as his own man quickly. Coleman knows his appointment owes a great deal to the recommendations of another Welshman, John Toshack, whose footprint in these parts is huge. Toshack first came to coach la Real in the mid1980s and did so well he was offered the Real Madrid job. Sociedad missed him so much they took him back. And again, for a third time in 2001. Toshack, now manager of Wales, suggested Coleman and that, for many Sociedad board members, was enough.

Coleman acknowledges Toshack casts a shadow, that comparisons will be made. For a Swansea boy, who remembers being on the terraces as an eight-year-old at the Vetch watching Toshack score goals and take Swansea City to a series of promotions, it’s a comparison he can more than bear. But make him San Sebastian’s Tosh the Second, and Coleman will resist: “The minute I start trying to be like him will be the minute it will fall down for me. I don’t try to be like anybody. I would never try to be like John and I won’t be. People forget about the titles he’s won. Don’t forget: When he was 40 he was manager of Real Madrid.” In the Segunda Division, Sociedad will not be going anywhere near Real Madrid, nor Barça, nor even Basque derbies against Athletic Bilbao.

Coleman senses they will be the division’s “team to beat”. He will certainly get to know Spain’s extreme corners. There are two trips to the Canary Islands, six to Andalucia. The board has stressed the need to travel by bus to save money. Coleman took issue with the prospect of “10hour coach journeys”.

Still, the young manager came here.

British managers in Spain

Many Spanish clubs were founded by British ex-pats but it is only fairly recently that British coaches have had an impact in La Liga

Terry Venables Barcelona 1984-87 1 Liga title

John Toshack Real Sociedad 1985-89 1 Copa del Rey Real Madrid 1989-90 1 Liga title Real Sociedad 1990-94 Deportivo la Coruna 1995-97 Real Madrid 1999 Real Sociedad 2001-02 Real Murcia 2004

Jock Wallace Sevilla 1986-87

Howard Kendall Athletic Bilbao 1987-89

Ron Atkinson Atletico Madrid 1988

Colin Addison Atletico Madrid 1988-89 Cadiz 1989-90

Bobby Robson Barcelona 1996-97 1 Cup-Winners’ Cup, 1 Copa del Rey

Chris Coleman Real Sociedad 2007-