MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti correspondent Ivan Dmitriyenko) - The resignation of Lokomotiv Moscow head coach Slavoljub Muslin was perhaps the most sensational news item of this year's Russian fall soccer season.
Was his job as coach a fair price to pay for the result of one match? Somehow or other, the club decided the Serb had outlived his usefulness.
What are the reasons for such an attitude toward team trainers? Soccer today means big money; sponsors play a decisive role in every club, and he who pays calls the tune...
Despite its pluses, this system also has its minuses. At a time when head coaches are no more than "hired personnel" responsible for results, a sort of natural selection has become the rule: the survival of the fittest. There is no talk of providing "favorable conditions for serious and scrupulous coaching": if you slip up at a decisive moment in the championship race or lose 0-2 to amateurs, showing weakness, you are let go. A new term has been coined, "head coach confidence credit," which refers to either something abstract or a definite number of tournament points lost. Earlier, the situation was the exact opposite: the coach was afforded the most comfortable conditions and was told to build up a strong and balanced team with good playing habits in two to three years. Now the score rules the roost; it is rare for a coach to be given a sympathetic hearing when he talks about plans for the years ahead and tries to cultivate the team's own playing style while disregarding current performance.
Artur Jorge of Portugal and Nevio Scala of Italy, who came to Russia with this in mind and worked for less than a year at CSKA and Spartak, respectively, were not understood. That is why we have a wandering group of well-known coaches such as Vitaly Shevchenko, Boris Ignatyev and Sergei Pavlov going from team to team. Fans joke: "In the off season the club signed two halfbacks, one forward and three head coaches..." These are the results of the "monetary system."
The system's other drawback is that it puts business people with no knowledge of sports in charge of soccer clubs. It is easy to guess that the club under their management will gain more notoriety than sporting laurels. It is these businessmen who claim that the coach and only the coach should answer for the team's showing. They have also formulated a recipe for winning championships: sign a few foreign names and add a coach with an unblemished reputation and something to show for his past. If he has a few setbacks during the season, fire him and hire someone else, because there is no success without a positive record.
This view is all wrong. Serious results require serious efforts and, above all, cultivation of the club as an intricate whole, not only in the selection of players. Trying to achieve immediate results has no place here...
Unfortunately, this philosophy is seldom seen in soccer. On the contrary, examples of the opposite are accumulating by leaps and bounds. At Dynamo Moscow, a rapid succession of coaches is now part of the club's image. And this club is not an exception. Now, you won't find a guy lucky enough to be guaranteed his job until the end of the season. Coaches are, of course, unhappy about this situation. No one wants to face a shaky future and the volatile position of a timeserver.
Now is the time to mention the phenomenon of the "new coach." Replacing the trainer is sometimes beneficial for a team with a mixed tournament record: there is a shakedown, the team's spirits soar and they achieve the set aim. A good example is the performance of Amkar Perm this season: with a new "helmsman" in the person of Rashid Rakhimov, Perm scored three victories in their first four games and secured membership in the Premier League. Another remarkable instance is Spartak's 4-1 victory over Zenit last spring after Vladimir Fedotov replaced Alexander Starkov. One could also recall the 2004 European Cup, which our national team qualified for not least thanks to Georgy Yartsev.
Our national team deserves special mention. Nearly all of our soccer professionals have served as its head coach in the few years of its existence. But none of them has stayed long enough or quit "at the peak of glory." The problem is not that the Russian Soccer Union is pursuing a short-sighted policy; there seems to be simply no Russian coach able to cater to the team's ambitions, and it has long been a foregone conclusion that a venerable foreigner of Hiddink's caliber will be invited instead.
