Rafa Benitez, sacked on Monday as Real Madrid manager after less than half a Liga season in the job, will remain a madridista at heart, although it may be a while before he is seen waving a club scarf and reminiscing as eagerly as he was last summer about his childhood as a supporter of the club, his apprenticeship there as a would-be player, his education in the Madrid academy as a young coach.
He may well remain puzzled, too, by the way the club he devoted a lot of his time at press conferences to saying he knew and understood, given his past there, took against him so rapidly. Benitez has always been the sort of coach who can rattle off statistics, and cold rationales to measure the see-saw of success and setback, His legacy is not so bad: He left a team he had guided to top of their Champions League group – one with with Paris Saint Germain in it – and to within two points in La Liga of a masterly Barcelona, at the point at which his president, Florentino Perez, decided he was no longer the man to manage them.
Only two matchdays ago, Benitez oversaw the biggest margin of victory in a Liga match for half a century, the 10-2 win over Rayo Vallecano. His Madrid are the highest scoring team in La Liga. But they are his Madrid no longer, and they are third in the table, beneath their local rivals, Atletico Madrid, who are top, and below their fiercest enemies, Barcelona, who, since Perez began his second tenure as president, in 2009, have done most things more effectively than Madrid have. Benitez had shown insufficient evidence he could reverse that pattern, and that fact, above all, has cost him his position.
Put bluntly, every Madrid coach of the last six years has the task of bettering Barca as a priority -- of making Madrid more appreciated than Barca to a global audience, whose interest is measured in television rights sales, pre-season friendly tours and merchandising revenues. And the brutal truth is, mostly, the Barcelona of Lionel Messi have been more attractive and more admired than the Real Madrid of Cristiano Ronaldo since 2009. Very good coaches have briefly interrupted the spell Barca cast over the sport – Jose Mourinho won a league with Madrid in 2012, Carlos Ancelotti won a Champions League in 2014 – but Perez’s project has been filled with too many silver medals.
Coaches pay the price for that, more than players. Benitez had not shown he could make Gareth Bale, the costliest player in the sport’s history, a better buy than Barcelona’s Neymar; he had not coaxed enough brilliance out of James Rodriguez, with whom Benitez had a fractious relationship, to stand comparison with Barcelona’s Luis Suarez. The crowd at the Santiago Bernabeu turned against Benitez well before the 4-0 beating that Barcelona inflicted in November, but since then the shrill disapproval of a coach they considered instinctively conservative, and not charismatic enough, has been a feature of all home games, even the 10-2 win.
So has the vocal lack of confidence in Perez. The Madrid president needed a gesture: sacking Benitez was the straightforward one. He had heard senior players like Marcelo and Sergio Ramos voice publicly their indifference to whether Benitez stayed or left after Sunday night’s 2-2 draw at Valencia.
“Sometimes a new coach makes a difference, sometime the old coach can,” said Marcelo, sensing the way wind was blowing.
“We support the coach whoever it is,” said Ramos, the captain, revealing far less influence than he actually exerts in the dressing-room – before president Perez leaned towards a long-held view that his alibi from a decade and more ago, Zinedine Zidane, would galvanise supporters.
“The word ‘impossible’ does not exist for you,” Perez said to Zidane in the stagey unveiling of the former France international as Madrid's new head coach on Monday evening. Nearly in the same breath as Benitez having been thanked, fired and ushered in the direction of another job, which, given his distinguished resumé he will be offered soon enough.
Zidane, Perez reminded his audience, “is without doubt one of the greatest figures in the history of football. He knows the players in the squad, and he knows how hard it is to be on the bench at this club.”
All true, but a risk for Madrid, and a mild risk for Zidane. Taking over any club in the middle of a season deprives a coach of input on strategy, on recruitment, and of the time to formulate in detail tactical ideas that are normally cultivated in pre-season. And Zidane has no experience as a senior coach in the top division of any league. He has been in charge of Madrid’s feeder team, Castilla, in the Spanish third division for 18 months, with mixed success.
Perez preferred to stress the experience Zidane, a superb player for Madrid from 2001 to 2006, had gained “as assistant coach when we won the Champions League.” He did indeed act as Carlo Ancelotti’s deputy in 2014, very much the learner, the would-be coach, although players such as Karim Benzema and Jese, the young striker in the squad, say that detailed technical sessions with Zidane have improved their games.
Sometimes, the elevating of a club icon, suddenly, to the role of head coach really does work. The best example, the precedent Perez would only privately acknowledge, was when Barcelona, in a period of Real Madrid supremacy, made the novice Pep Guardiola their main man in 2009. Guardiola won everything, straight away, and put Barca on a prolonged summit that has hurt Madrid ever since. Zidane will be measured by that standard, and it is a towering one.
But at least Zidane is starting out with a winning mentality:
"It’s a very important day for me. What I can tell you is that I will give everything or this club. We have the best fans in the world and the best club in the world and I’ll do everything to win.”
Time will tell if he can live up to the expectations.
