The season of managerial merry-go-rounds and renaissance.
The 2009/10 season has been a remarkable one for managerial 'come-backs'. It may not be the most favourable term, football after all is full of ebbs and flows and ups and downs. However it is difficult to ignore how this past season several of Western Europe's major leagues have witnessed a revival in fortunes for some recently maligned managers.
The glaringly obvious example is former England manager Steve McClaren. The Eredivisie doesn't get much media coverage in England, where it is over-shadowed by La Liga and Serie A when it comes to foreign leagues. It has been interesting to note how little recognition McClaren has got in the British press over the last two seasons he has spent at FC Twente (except for at 90minutesonline). It seemed McClaren was still being punished for his failures in the England job.
Blanket coverage came only once his team clinched it's first ever Eredivisie title at the beginning of May. A deserved amount of praise was now bestowed, but ask football fans and the sporting press in the Netherlands and especially Enschede where Twente are based, and they'll reiterate that McClaren was a popular success and a 'gentleman' almost from the get-go.
During McClaren's tenure at FC Twente his team lost 16 matches in all competitions, out of 101 played. Add to that an impressive 63.37% winning ratio and it's little wonder that the club are very grateful but sad as they see him go.
Next season will be a new chapter and challenge as he has since been appointed manager of Wolfsburg, the recently deposed Bundesliga holders. Time will tell if he continues to emulate the late, great Sir Bobby Robson- as far as club football goes anyway.
Next, there is the continuing re-emergence of Lois van Gaal as one of the world's leading club managers. Last season he began by securing the Eredivisie with AZ Alkmaar, like McClaren it was a much-heralded success with a team that had not previously scaled such heights.
This led to him being offered the Bayern Munich post last summer. The season did not start well though, the first three Bundesliga matches yielded two draws and a loss. The pressure immediately and rather ridiculously started to mount already, not helped by a Bayer Leverkusen side that surprisingly held the top spot for much of the first half of the season.
Observers should have noticed that the Eredivisie title win with AZ had also started with two defeats in the opening two fixtures. Clearly van Gaal's teams start slow before blossoming. With Bayern it has been exactly the same case, the team consequently went on a 13 match winning streak from November to February. The sequence firmly re-established them domestically and in the Champions League, where there had been a danger of a group stage exit.
From that date on there have been four more losses to this point. The Bundesliga was comfortably wrapped up by five points and last weekend Bayern added the DFB Pokal (German cup) to their bounty, after a comprehensive 4-0 dismissal of the preceding holders Werder Bremen.
This Saturday Bayern Munich will line up for the Champions League final, this is perhaps van Gaal's most impressive achievement with Bayern, making the German powerhouse a European force once again. José Mourinho and Inter Milan will stand in their way and will be intent on stopping them and achieving their own piece of history. Either way one of these clubs will match Manchester United's treble-winning feat of 1999.
Finally, we turn to Ligue 1 and the triumphant campaign of Olympique de Marseille under the stewardship of Didier Deschamps. The newly crowned French champions secured their first league title in 18 years, and a first since the match-fixing scandal that saw them stripped of the 1992/93 championship.
Last season's title winners Bordeaux found the going a lot tougher this season and eventually faded to a sixth place finish. Thus opening the door for their coach Laurent Blanc to be made the strongly rumoured France manager in waiting, for after the impending World Cup.
Bordeaux did manage to reach the final of the Coupe de la Ligue (French cup) however, but like a changing of the guard they were also to be defeated by Marseille. Their clinical 3-1 victory represents the club's first French cup in its current format, as it has been since 1994.
The managerial journey of Didier Deschamps has perhaps been the most perplexing, his CV contains no real failure. After starting at Monaco in 2001 he went on to lead the club to their own Coupe de la Ligue success in the 2002/03 season. The next campaign he famously took the club all the way to the Champions League final after dispatching Chelsea in the semi-finals, only to lose to Mourinho and Porto.
Little did Deschamps realise at the time that his semi-final win and final loss precipitated the managerial manoeuvrings of Chelsea later that summer. Such is the managerial merry-go-round, as Claudio Ranieri was moved out of Stamford Bridge in order for the start of the Chelsea/ Mourinho era.
The World Cup winning French captain then took on the unenviable task of guiding Juventus back to Serie A in the 2006/07 season, following the match-fixing scandals and enforced relegation suffered by 'The Old Lady'. He ultimately achieved his remit but resigned at the end of the campaign after citing clashes with the board.
Yet despite Deschamps notable track record as a manager, he was left out of work until the opportunity as Marseille raised it's head last summer. After the immense achievement of a domestic double in his first campaign, you could wonder if the French FA are picking the wrong talented young manager to take over from the buffoon-like Raymond Domenech.
Serie A almost saw a managerial Lazarus of their own during 2009/10. The aforementioned Claudio Ranieri has often been portrayed as the managerial equivalent of a neutral’s favourite, and maintaining the merry-go-round he succeeded Deschamps at Juventus in 2007.
After two seasons at the helm Ranieri ultimately lost his job at the end of last season for failing to overturn Mourinho's Inter Milan, despite finishing second. The wait for a new position was answered relatively swiftly when he was moved into Roma early last September, as a replacement for Luciano Spalletti.
Since then Roma have had a dramatic rise in their fortunes, the club have lost only four league games under 'the Tinkerman' and made a thrilling push to snatch the Serie A title from under Inter Milan's noses. In the end it wasn't quite to be as they finished runners-up by just two points.
Further heartache came in the Coppa Italia (Italian cup), with Roma losing the final again to Inter Milan 1-0. For Ranieri this past season has been a case of so very near and yet so far. On the plus side he has proven, just like Roy Hodgson with Fulham, that reputation and success is not always about the winning but about how you get there.
In the meantime, until we roll on to the World Cup and the starts of the next domestic seasons, football managers can take some heart. As long as you're good enough, you can never keep a good man down!
The glaringly obvious example is former England manager Steve McClaren. The Eredivisie doesn't get much media coverage in England, where it is over-shadowed by La Liga and Serie A when it comes to foreign leagues. It has been interesting to note how little recognition McClaren has got in the British press over the last two seasons he has spent at FC Twente (except for at 90minutesonline). It seemed McClaren was still being punished for his failures in the England job.
Blanket coverage came only once his team clinched it's first ever Eredivisie title at the beginning of May. A deserved amount of praise was now bestowed, but ask football fans and the sporting press in the Netherlands and especially Enschede where Twente are based, and they'll reiterate that McClaren was a popular success and a 'gentleman' almost from the get-go.
During McClaren's tenure at FC Twente his team lost 16 matches in all competitions, out of 101 played. Add to that an impressive 63.37% winning ratio and it's little wonder that the club are very grateful but sad as they see him go.
Next season will be a new chapter and challenge as he has since been appointed manager of Wolfsburg, the recently deposed Bundesliga holders. Time will tell if he continues to emulate the late, great Sir Bobby Robson- as far as club football goes anyway.
Next, there is the continuing re-emergence of Lois van Gaal as one of the world's leading club managers. Last season he began by securing the Eredivisie with AZ Alkmaar, like McClaren it was a much-heralded success with a team that had not previously scaled such heights.
This led to him being offered the Bayern Munich post last summer. The season did not start well though, the first three Bundesliga matches yielded two draws and a loss. The pressure immediately and rather ridiculously started to mount already, not helped by a Bayer Leverkusen side that surprisingly held the top spot for much of the first half of the season.
Observers should have noticed that the Eredivisie title win with AZ had also started with two defeats in the opening two fixtures. Clearly van Gaal's teams start slow before blossoming. With Bayern it has been exactly the same case, the team consequently went on a 13 match winning streak from November to February. The sequence firmly re-established them domestically and in the Champions League, where there had been a danger of a group stage exit.
From that date on there have been four more losses to this point. The Bundesliga was comfortably wrapped up by five points and last weekend Bayern added the DFB Pokal (German cup) to their bounty, after a comprehensive 4-0 dismissal of the preceding holders Werder Bremen.
This Saturday Bayern Munich will line up for the Champions League final, this is perhaps van Gaal's most impressive achievement with Bayern, making the German powerhouse a European force once again. José Mourinho and Inter Milan will stand in their way and will be intent on stopping them and achieving their own piece of history. Either way one of these clubs will match Manchester United's treble-winning feat of 1999.
Finally, we turn to Ligue 1 and the triumphant campaign of Olympique de Marseille under the stewardship of Didier Deschamps. The newly crowned French champions secured their first league title in 18 years, and a first since the match-fixing scandal that saw them stripped of the 1992/93 championship.
Last season's title winners Bordeaux found the going a lot tougher this season and eventually faded to a sixth place finish. Thus opening the door for their coach Laurent Blanc to be made the strongly rumoured France manager in waiting, for after the impending World Cup.
Bordeaux did manage to reach the final of the Coupe de la Ligue (French cup) however, but like a changing of the guard they were also to be defeated by Marseille. Their clinical 3-1 victory represents the club's first French cup in its current format, as it has been since 1994.
The managerial journey of Didier Deschamps has perhaps been the most perplexing, his CV contains no real failure. After starting at Monaco in 2001 he went on to lead the club to their own Coupe de la Ligue success in the 2002/03 season. The next campaign he famously took the club all the way to the Champions League final after dispatching Chelsea in the semi-finals, only to lose to Mourinho and Porto.
Little did Deschamps realise at the time that his semi-final win and final loss precipitated the managerial manoeuvrings of Chelsea later that summer. Such is the managerial merry-go-round, as Claudio Ranieri was moved out of Stamford Bridge in order for the start of the Chelsea/ Mourinho era.
The World Cup winning French captain then took on the unenviable task of guiding Juventus back to Serie A in the 2006/07 season, following the match-fixing scandals and enforced relegation suffered by 'The Old Lady'. He ultimately achieved his remit but resigned at the end of the campaign after citing clashes with the board.
Yet despite Deschamps notable track record as a manager, he was left out of work until the opportunity as Marseille raised it's head last summer. After the immense achievement of a domestic double in his first campaign, you could wonder if the French FA are picking the wrong talented young manager to take over from the buffoon-like Raymond Domenech.
Serie A almost saw a managerial Lazarus of their own during 2009/10. The aforementioned Claudio Ranieri has often been portrayed as the managerial equivalent of a neutral’s favourite, and maintaining the merry-go-round he succeeded Deschamps at Juventus in 2007.
After two seasons at the helm Ranieri ultimately lost his job at the end of last season for failing to overturn Mourinho's Inter Milan, despite finishing second. The wait for a new position was answered relatively swiftly when he was moved into Roma early last September, as a replacement for Luciano Spalletti.
Since then Roma have had a dramatic rise in their fortunes, the club have lost only four league games under 'the Tinkerman' and made a thrilling push to snatch the Serie A title from under Inter Milan's noses. In the end it wasn't quite to be as they finished runners-up by just two points.
Further heartache came in the Coppa Italia (Italian cup), with Roma losing the final again to Inter Milan 1-0. For Ranieri this past season has been a case of so very near and yet so far. On the plus side he has proven, just like Roy Hodgson with Fulham, that reputation and success is not always about the winning but about how you get there.
In the meantime, until we roll on to the World Cup and the starts of the next domestic seasons, football managers can take some heart. As long as you're good enough, you can never keep a good man down!
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