Translated material
Fabiophobia
I will say right away that I have been a fan of Real Madrid for a long time and am writing this text primarily as a fan.
So, the management of Real Madrid fired the Italian Fabio Capello from the post of head coach. This happened after a season in which one of the richest and most commercially successful clubs in the world, after a long break, monstrous personnel and game changes, crazy management hesitations, and a change of president, managed to win the national championship. But what is fundamentally important is not so much the dismissal itself - after all, Don Fabio won so many club titles and built so many different teams that he no longer has to prove anything to anyone for a long time - but the motivation of the leaders of the Royal Club.
Real Madrid President Ramon Calderon and sporting director Predrag Mijatovic motivated this personnel decision with the desire to make the club not only win titles, but also show spectacular, meaningful play. And for this, they say, we need a young specialist who will build a new team. In addition, Real Madrid bosses recalled that the fans demanded the coach’s resignation.
All these motives are lies or, at most, half-truths. First. The game of the “cream” last season can be called whatever you want - crazy, unstable, reckless, but there was no more entertaining team in the Spanish Primera. Against the backdrop of puzzling plots that arose in almost every Real Madrid match, even perhaps the most “entertaining” and enchanting of the grandees of world club football, Barcelona, looked like a tired hippie of the 60s against the backdrop of a young, incendiary punk. Second. Fabio Capello was building a fundamentally new team, significantly rejuvenating the squad and starting to play offensively. That is, he did exactly what, according to the club’s management, a “young specialist” should do. At the end of the season, Real played in attack no less interesting and varied than Barcelona. Third. I don’t think that the demands for Don Fabio’s resignation among the fans, which naturally sounded in the middle of the championship after several deadly home defeats and an early exit from the Champions League, sounded as actively after the club finally won the national championship.
But the strangest thing about this decision is the choice of a successor. Yes, compared to the 61-year-old Capello, the 47-year-old German coach Bernd Schuster is a young specialist. But no matter how spectacular and bright a player he was, he did not create anything spectacular and bright as a coach. Until now, Shuster's lot has been to work with mediocre clubs, from which he tried to squeeze the maximum possible through hard play and high game discipline. It didn't work out very well with Levante. It's a little better with Getafe. This does not mean that Schuster is not capable of coaching Real Madrid, it only means that in terms of creativity he is definitely not superior to Capello and in this sense is not a younger specialist.
Again, in the logic of the management of the Madrid club, there is a clear desire to repeat the path that Barcelona took with Frank Rijkaard (by the way, in many ways a student of Capello, in whose Milan the Dutchman spent his best years as a player). But for this, the “real” authorities need to have great patience, which they have not had in recent years. Nothing worked out for Rijkaard at Barça for quite a long time, but they let him work, didn’t demand maximum results, and now sometimes they even call him the best coach in the history of the club.
The question is, will they let Shuster work for at least two seasons if he doesn’t win anything in the first? And if it doesn’t succeed, will the president and general director of the club publicly admit the error of such a personnel decision?
The people who allowed David Beckham and Roberto Carlos to retire honorably, who replaced the talented coach after he won the championship in the most difficult conditions, are fundamentally setting themselves up. If they are ready to share with Bernd Schuster the joy of victory and the bitterness of defeat, then their decision can still not be explained, but justified. It is true, both in Russian club football and in European football, we are increasingly seeing managers and club owners who behave as if the coaches are responsible for everything, and they themselves are responsible for nothing. Even for the selection of these coaches...