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 I think a lot of football fans were shocked last season when, after carrying them to their first piece of silverware since 2003, Fabio Capello was sacked by Real Madrid just 11 days after capturing the La Liga crown from bitter rivals Barcelona. Capello, who has previously managed AC Milan, Roma and Juventus, maintained his incredible record of winning a league title with every single club he has managed, but apparently this was not enough for the board at the Bernabeu. Real president Ramon Calderon told the Marca newspaper shortly after: "We've laid the foundations, but we need to find a more enthusiastic way of playing."
This is a very interesting choice of words, but one which anyone familiar with Real’s history, or even Spanish top flight football in general, will immediately understand. Capello was successful at Real by making them difficult to beat, by crowding the midfield, and by bringing in defensive players such as Emerson, Diarra and Cannavaro, rather than the flair signings they were used to. Crucially, he also openly said that results are much more important than playing beautifully, adding that “those days (were) over.” For a support who had been blessed with the likes of Hagi, Laudrup, Zidane, Figo and Ronaldo in recent memory, playing sublime football had become the only way acceptable; winning without style was not winning at all for the Madrid faithful. Even Real’s own fans seemed to feel that they didn’t deserve to take the league title last season over Barce, who for 4 years had essentially the greatest club squad ever assembled, and consistently performed with such incredible “guapa,” to use the Spanish terminology. The fans wanted their Real to outplay the likes of Barca, not just beat them, whereas for Capello it was the victory alone that mattered.
Five months later and we find almost the same situation at Chelsea, with Jose Mourinho handed his pink slip by an increasingly frustrated board at Stamford Bridge. 5Live’s corrsepondant Jonathan Legard summed it up nicely: “(Roman Abramovich and the board) wanted stylish football, they wanted football which appealed to the world and they weren’t getting it.” Two league titles, two league cups and an FA Cup in three years were not enough. They coveted the Champions League title, but more importantly they wanted all football fans around the world to talk about Chelsea as one of the great teams, like the Milans and Madrids and even the Liverpools of the past. For the neutral, there can be no denying the uninspiring, workmanlike approach of Chelsea under Mourinho, rarely free-scoring even against the weakest teams, and lacking the slick teamwork that have made Manchester United and Arsenal so entertaining over the last decade or so.
And this is the key point: entertainment. Yes, there has been rising animosity between Mourinho and Abramovich, and yes, the forced signings of Ballack and Shevchenko didn’t help matters, but at the end of the day the Owner wanted entertaining football and the manager just wanted to win. It is this dichotomy which currently separates a lot of fans from the players in this country. Winning has become so important, mainly because of the attached monetary rewards, that seemingly anything goes these days; teams base their entire game-plan about simply stopping the opposition playing, and diving, or ‘simulation’, is just good gamesmanship if it comes off. Is a string of bruising 1-0 victories really satisfying for a fan to watch? Is it really worth the extortionate ticket price to watch a Premier League game where they is literally no more skill on display than your average Sunday league game? Sure the players are fitter, and the game’s faster, but as a fan, you don’t care about this; you want to see exciting attacking play, tricks, nutmegs and most importantly, goals.
Looking at the English game, I think Mourinho saw this and was astute enough to realize that to be successful in the Premier League, 9/10ths of the struggle was competing physically with the opposition. Flair players such as Robben, Cole and Wright-Phillips were never played in their preferred positions, but sandwiched into a 5 man midfield that simply smothered opposing teams. Capello was perhaps also guilty of this, but what the two share, and what makes them great managers, is this ability to adapt their team’s playing style to the conditions and find a way to win. Mourinho’s Porto were a fantastic side to watch, free-flowing and pouring forward in swarms, but week in week out, would that style of play at Chelsea still earned him 3 points away from home at say Sunderland, in the rain, on a freezing Tuesday night in December? Almost certainly not. Similarly for Capello, could he expect his Real to throw half the team forward in an attack while the likes of Deco, Ronaldinho and Messi are left unmarked because his wingers don’t like tracking back? Again, no. He nullified their threat, and then worried about this own team’s offence, however un-Real-like that appeared to the fans.
So is it possible to still win major competitions with this “enthusiastic way of playing?” Of course it is, but it takes players of the absolute highest quality. Five World Cup wins for Brazil prove that. An undefeated season for Arsenal in the Premier League in 2004 similarly shows that it’s possible even for a whole season. And Champions League? Well, I think that’s the clincher. Just looking back at the last ten winners, every single one of them has been arguably the most exciting team in the competition at the time. Chelsea have the players, and with Barcelona dumped out of last year’s competition fairly unceremoniously early on, surely they must’ve thought that was their chance. They lost to Liverpool, who had an inferior squad on paper, because of their lack of ambition and their lack of passion. You could see how much it meant to every single Liverpool player and over the two legs, they took the fight to Chelsea, showed no fear, and tried to simply out-score the opposition. Mourinho’s downfall was that he got stuck in the rut of grinding out every result, never opening up his team and just saying go out and win the game. I can guarantee that’s pretty much all Frank Rijkaard has to say to his Barcelona, and the players do the rest.
When he's feeling a bit less serious, Gavin Finney publishes the blog Sniffing the Touchline.
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