Real Attempts To Win With Style

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The New York Sun

Real Madrid President Florentino Perez has a thing about style. For that, he deserves praise because in modern sports the very notion of style has been squashed by the ruthless pursuit of victory. In 21st-century soccer, “It may not be pretty, but it is effective” is no longer a mumbled apology. It is a trumpeted boast.


Perez, evidently, wants something better. Somewhere in his consciousness lurks the old-fashioned, yet revolutionary idea that winning and style can be combined.


A commendably brave idea – but dammit, the way Perez sets about trying to prove the point is not too encouraging.


Early in 2003, right after Real had won the European Cup and was actually playing attractive, attacking soccer, Perez shocked everyone by suddenly firing his coach Vicente Del Bosque. This was a matter of coaching style: Del Bosque was seen as an old-fashioned, provincial figure, not at all the slick, cosmopolitan image that Perez wanted.


The move was a total flop. Replacement coach Carlos Queiroz was fired a year later after a disastrous season in which Real won nothing and looked anything but stylish. Queiroz’s replacement – former Spanish national team coach Jose Camacho – lasted only three games, to be replaced by Mariano Garcia Remon, a former club goalkeeper. Remon is still there, but is probably casting searching looks over his shoulder, for now comes news of another abrupt style-based move.


Perez wants to bring the Italian Arrigo Sacchi to Real, not as the coach, but as the overall technical director of soccer. It’s a hybrid sort of a role, one that would presumably give him a huge say in the sort of players that Real signs, and the style of soccer that they play.


At one time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sacchi was the most talked-of coach in the sport. A former salesman for his father’s shoe-making firm, Sacchi had no professional playing experience. Nonetheless, after a stretch coaching the second-division club Parma, he was hired by A.C. Milan in 1987.


The man behind the surprising move was the new Milan owner (and now prime minister of Italy), Silvio Berlusconi, who had seen something special in the way that Parma played. It was a brilliant, intuitive move. Milan won the Italian league in Sacchi’s first season, then dominated Italian and European soccer for the next four years.


Sacchi moved on to coach the Italian national team in the 1994 World Cup, but there was little coaching success for him after that. A return to Milan lasted less than a season. There followed a stint with Atletico Madrid, which ended with a tearful mid-season resignation and a vow that his coaching days were over.


Not quite. In 2001, after two years as a television pundit, Sacchi returned to coach Parma – and lasted all of three games. He gave up the job because of stress. Parma kept Sacchi on as Director of Soccer – a similar position to the one he has been offered at Real Madrid.


If Sacchi’s later coaching career was something of a letdown, it cannot overshadow his brilliant years with Milan, when his success had much to do with … style. In 1987 Italian soccer was still heavily under the influence of the traditional catenaccio – a system of play that emphasized methodical defending and relied on counter-attacks for goal-scoring.


Sacchi almost single-handedly changed all that. Where catenaccio employed close man-marking, Sacchi’s Milan used a much less rigid zonal defense. Where offense had been largely the responsibility of two or three players, Sacchi’s Milan swarmed to the attack con brio.


Sacchi did not want his players retreating to defensive positions every time opponents took possession of the ball; the idea was to get it back immediately, hence Milan’s full-field press, or il pressing, as the Italians called it. It was exhilarating soccer, and it was winning soccer. The revolution in style soon spread to other Italian clubs, and the Italian game began to emerge from its long love affair with the negativism of catenaccio.


Sacchi’s problems started with the 1994 World Cup. Every soccer-mad Italian believes that Italy should win every World Cup, and certainly Sacchi’s team that year had the potential to win it all. But in the final it played defensively and lost on penalty kicks to Brazil. Sacchi was deluged with criticism for his style, his tactics, and his player selection. He was never to coach successfully again.


Now he is being beckoned back to the limelight. Real Madrid, despite the millions spent on superstars – los galacticos – is once again looking like a rather ordinary team. Worse, eternal and bitter rivals Barcelona are leading the Spanish league with a team that is playing attacking and stylish soccer.


Perhaps not coincidentally, Barcelona is coached by Frank Rijkaard who – along with another Dutch midfielder, Ruud Gullit – was one of Sacchi’s stars at Milan.


It was this dynamic couple that enabled Milan to play a new, more open, less Italian, style. It was Sacchi’s particular genius to encourage the development of the change.


Will Sacchi be able to do for Real what he did for Milan? Not likely, I’d say. At Milan, Sacchi’s change of style took everyone by surprise; it fundamentally altered the Italian way of looking at the sport. But no such change can happen at Real. Perez can only be seeking a return to the traditional Real style of smooth, skilled, attacking, goal-scoring soccer.


Surely the players are there – in Zinedine Zidane and Luis Figo, Real has two midfielders every bit as good as Rijkaard and Gullit – but it is coherence that has been lacking. When Camacho quit as coach in September, he admitted that he had found the group of players at the club virtually unmanageable.


Sacchi, as the style mentor, will not be the Real coach. His presence, floating uneasily between Perez and Remon, seems more likely to be disruptive than constructive.


The New York Sun

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