In a move that has stunned all of football, the Spanish FA has fired its manager just days before they take the field in the World Cup. This astonishing news was released today along with a statement that brings enormous credit to their national governing body.
The backstory to this started with Zidane resigning after his team had won the Champions League Final.
The Spanish national coach, Julen Lopetegui, was quickly identified as the Madrid board’s candidate, and on Tuesday he accepted the job. Madrid were not supposed to announce the deal until after the competition, but they jumped early.
The Spanish FA only found out that he’d accepted the job five minutes before Madrid’s announcement, and they realised at once the trouble it would cause. The head of their FA is actually former Hamilton defender Luis Rubiales; I don’t know where he learned his ideas about the integrity of the national team, but it wasn’t in Scotland.
“We have decided to fire the National Coach,” Rubiales said. “The Spanish national team is the team of all the Spaniards … it belongs to everyone and we have to send a clear message to all employees at the federation that there is a way of behaving, that there are ethics.”
So what did he mean when he said that the national teams “is the team of all the Spaniards”?
It meant – as was confirmed later – that Spain cannot afford the negativity that comes from having a Real Madrid boss in charge going into a major competition.
It splits the support in two.
It divides the country going into the tournament.
Had it been kept quiet – had Madrid respected that wish – the situation could have been resolved afterwards … but that wasn’t to be.
The simplicity, and the beauty, of the concept looks alien to us here.
Spain is roiled in political conflict right now, and I wholly understand the sentiment behind the sacking and the statement released in the aftermath.
A national team should command the respect of all fans, and the national coach should reflect the wishes of the entire country, not one strand of opinion.
Hierro, who’s standing in to replace him, was a former Madrid captain … but he is a respected former international and he has already made it plain that he is the public face for the entire country. The players and the fans will get behind him.
Part of what infuriated the Spanish FA was the contempt Madrid themselves showed for the idea of national unity.
The same contempt was revealed at Ibrox when the SFA allowed them to take Walter Smith.
In Scotland, when we had a decision to make recently, we could have gone with a candidate who brought the country together.
Instead, we appointed Alex McLeish.
No other person – except for Walter Smith himself, who they allegedly offered it to and who turned it down – would have so completely shattered any sense of unity fans felt with the national side.
And I hear people saying “Gordon Strachan” already; bollocks.
He was the outstanding candidate and one nobody could argue with.
Alex McLeish’s only real period of success, in his whole career, was at Ibrox during a period of cheating.
He himself is the recipient of an EBT, and I am certain he knew that other players were being paid through the side contracts.
He freely admitted that he could not have won trophies without the Ibrox tax scam, and only last week video footage was put online of him at a Sevco supporters’ event laughing and joking about how he and his club scammed the whole game.
Nobody will convince me that he was an outstanding candidate for the job.
No-one will convince me that he deserved it, especially not after he walked out of it once before.
It was a sham appointment, a disgrace, and it has been compounded since by his insistence that Celtic’s dominance over the game here is somehow unhealthy and that “the playing field is not level” – a scandalous comment tantamount to accusing us of cheating.
The SFA did not do due diligence in his case, but then they didn’t have to.
He had been out of football for two years.
He flopped in his last four jobs, the clubs all sacked him.
There was nothing whatsoever to credit the decision to appoint him. There was no search for another candidate, it was like someone at the SFA went through a shortlist of who they knew was out of work and called and offered him the job in an instant.
And that person, and the board which supported him, did not give a damn how it looked or who cared about it. Those who appointed McLeish knew it would stick in a lot of people’s throats and they took a wilful decision to give us the two fingered salute.
The SFA could not have been clearer on their contempt for half of the country. They gave no thought to the unity of the national team. They didn’t care that it would be seen as a nod and a wink towards an era of lies and deceit for which many hold them partly accountable.
You could not have a better example of the utter lack of respect that these people have for even the most basic responsibilities of their job, to appoint a national coach for the whole country, to run their association for the good of the whole sport and to promote stability and unity through football. There are people at Hampden who don’t know the meaning of the word “integrity.”
That association better learn fast, but it’s too late for the Scotland team itself.
And Sevco has gone out of its way to damage the CEO.
This is the game here.
Boundless ego and self-interest have their claws deep in it, and some things might improve but Scottish football has a long way to go before anyone can say it belongs to all of us.