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Earlier this week, French sports daily L'Equipe reported that Mijatovic had recently been in the UK to talk to Queiroz about Cristiano. The Real Madrid sports director reportedly put 120 million euros on the table to make him the player to spearhead Real's assault on the Champions League. Queiroz is said to have retorted that "at that price, the striker will be with United next season", which, if the quote is accurate, suggests there is room for negotiation.
Of course, the fact that Cristiano Ronaldo has matured into the kind of player everybody wants must owe something to the way Alex Ferguson runs his Manchester United squads. The relative freedom from internal politics and his unchallenged status inside the club means that no player is more important than the squad and internal cliques and dissension are generally quashed before they can take hold. Whether he could have flourished in that way at Real Madrid is something we'll never know.
Ironically, it was Ferguson's intransigence in this regard that eventually led to media maelstrom David Beckham joining the rank of the galácticos at the same time as Queiroz. However, as Queiroz recalls, the seeds of destruction that resulted in three years without a trophy, including his one season at the club (the Spanish Supercup does not count) had already been sown. Real's president, Florentino Pérez, decided that "he knew something about football" and commanded that Makélélé be sold to Chelsea. This was "a criminal error, the president's worst decision. Makélélé wanted to stay. He told me and he told [Jorge] Valdano (then the club's general manager). But, in the president's mind, releasing Makélélé vacated a position in which David Beckham could play. He was worried that, with Makélélé in the team, Beckham would be blocked out. But of course we could have had both."
Queiroz also analyses Real's Zidanes y Pavones strategy: "the policy was to surround the galácticos with players from the academy, the cantera, as much as possible. It was a great idea and could have worked - except that the cantera could not deliver its requirements. The young players were not there. On top of that, the club had let some of the best go the year before - like Samuel Eto'o. He was a Real Madrid player before he went to Barcelona and emerged as world-class. When the season started, I gave an interview to Marca and said that, although it was true Real Madrid was a Ferrari, you could not win a race if the car had no wheels. Sad to say, I was proved right."
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
What might have been
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
Diarra doomed?
Almería's midfielders turned the tables on the Mali captain by putting intense pressure on him every time he had the ball, forcing him to give it away time and again. This, Phil Ball argues, is why he will eventually be let go in favour of someone like Gago, less able defensively, but much more comfortable with his passing skills.
I wonder how likely it is that history will repeat itself. The departure of Makélélé in 2003 coincided with a downturn in Real's galáctico fortunes, and they did not manage to win a trophy again until the league championship last year. Some have argued that the lack of an effective defensive midfielder, a "destructive" rather than a "constructive" player, was a major contributing factor, and that Real Madrid really did miss Makélélé.
Florentino Pérez's inelegant parting shot to a player who then went on to form a core part of Mourinho's Chelsea may have come back to haunt him: "He wasn't a header of the ball and he rarely passed the ball more than three metres. Younger players will arrive who will cause Makélélé to be forgotten.". There's a place in the squad for a player of Diarra's characteristics. Let's hope Schuster has the wisdom to see it.
Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Surviving a slogan
Three players from the cantera, the youth team, made their debuts that day: Raúl Bravo started in Roberto Carlos's left wing, Valdo came on for Geremi just before half time, and Pavón substituted Bravo himself on 71 minutes. The final score was 2-0 to Real Madrid with goals from Raúl and Solari (remember him?). The youngsters impressed both the coach and the faithful so much that both they and a number of their colleagues (Borja, Rubén, Miñambres, Portillo) made several appearances for the club in that Champions League-winning season. Florentino Pérez then coined the now-infamous term Zidanes y Pavones to describe the club's transfer policy.
Del Bosque was uniquely placed to take advantage of the "Pavones"; after all, he had been involved with the youth teams at Real Madrid for a number of years and had seen a lot of the players grow up and develop. When his contract was not renewed after he won the league in 2003, none of the canteranos, other than Pavón himself, made any kind of lasting impression on the first team. Subsequent managers overlooked them in favour of new galáctico signings.
As an aside, the Zidanes y Pavones policy began to show its flaws at that point: it did not give the squad strength in depth because not enough players were being bought or coming up through the ranks to "do the dirty work" that the starry galacticos couldn't or, in some cases, wouldn't. In his Guardian blog, Rob Smyth traces it all to the departure of Claude Makélélé to Chelsea and "replacing" him with David Beckham. It is perhaps not the only reason for the team's decline, but it's a compelling one nonetheless.
For Pavón, however, the departure of Florentino also meant the end of his playing days at Real Madrid. He did not play a single minute in the whole of the 2005-2006 league championship under Capello, and had only a couple of run-outs in the Cup. Capello preferred to use Cannavaro, the rehabilitated Helguera, Sergio Ramos, Miguel Torres, and even Raúl Bravo as central defenders. While not necessarily prejudiced against cantera players (after all, Torres was a starter for nearly half of the games last season), Pavón just did not cut the mustard with Capello.
His contract expired on June 30th and yesterday, Real Zaragoza announced that he had decided to join them as a free agent for the next four seasons. He will pair up in the centre of defence with Zaragoza's other recent surprise signing, Roberto Ayala, who left Valencia to join Villareal, and, 16 days later, bought out his contract and signed for Zaragoza.
Real Madrid has now left that fateful Zidanes y Pavones slogan behind. Let's hope that its less illustrious component can do the same and make a new name for himself. Good luck, Paco
