Spare a thought for Rafa Benitez.
In the middle of the week his Newcastle United were relegated from the Premier League, a fall he can hardly be held responsible for, having taken over as a mid-March rescuer and for the first time in many years not acted as the canny fixer he has an admired reputation for.
A week earlier, the club with who he began 2016 as head coach reached the Uefa Champions League final.
That was Real Madrid. Benitez's last three home matches in charge of Madrid, who fired him in January, featured three victories and 21 goals for the home team.
But he was discharged because, in spite of those thumpings of all-comers, he was being booed by the crowd at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, had lost the most important fixture in any new Madrid coach's lifespan, the visit of Barcelona, and the club sat third in the table.
A little over four months on from his departure, Madrid still trail Barca, but they are a spot higher in La Liga and, Saturday, the last day of the campaign, still in with a chance of claiming the title.
• Read more: Diego Forlan – Luis Suarez deserves the Pichichi but dreams of more titles at Barcelona
• Also see: Friday football, Barcelona and Real Madrid jostling for the title – Five games to watch
How much of a chance Zinedine Zidane, Benitez’s replacement, a novice coach who has guided his team to the summit of European club competition, has of pulling off an ambush nobody would have anticipated six weeks ago, is doubtful.
But Madrid have a menace about them. Eight matches on the calendar ago, Barcelona held a 12 point lead over a Madrid who remained stuck in the same third place where Benitez had left them.
Ahead of Madrid’s visit to Deportivo La Coruna, and Barcelona’s trip to Granada, the gap is a single point.
Zidane has enjoyed some blessings Benitez did not have. The support of madridistas for a start. He also recorded a victory against Barcelona, the 2-1 away win Madrid achieved at Camp Nou in April, a feather in the French coach's cap and one in a sequence of startling Barcelona defeats, three on the trot, that have turned what looked like an amble to the defence of the title by the Catalan club into something more gripping.
Atletico Madrid also dropped out of contention, with their loss at Levante last weekend. They had tailgated Barcelona at the top more tightly than Real Madrid until six days ago.
But there is more to the Zidane effect that good luck and the goodwill of fans and dressing-room, two things Benitez ceased to enjoy from quite early in his troubled reign, a stint that only lasted half a year.
The stalking of Barcelona over the last has had plenty of gumption about it. Three games ago, Madrid came back from 2-0 adown at Rayo Vallecano to eke out three points there.
Another 3-2 win, against Valencia, kept them in the shout for the title last weekend. In between, three points were snatched at Real Sociedad thanks to an 80th minute winner from Gareth Bale.
All this will be in Barcelona’s rear-view mirror on Saturday, as simultaneously, the two contenders for the title each play out a potentially very tense 90 minutes in corners of Iberia far from their own cities.
Neither Granada nor Depor have a great deal at stake, but nonetheless Barcelona are wary.
“Let’s hope Granada don’t leave the grass on the pitch long and dry,” said Luis Suarez, the Barcelona striker, attentive to the sort of detail that might, with luck against them, disrupt the smooth running of Barca’s pass-and-move.
Suarez, who has 37 goals in the league this season, has his own reasons for glancing at events in La Coruna even if Barcelona gain a win.
Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo, who has scored 33 La Liga goals, could conceivably catch him up, if Ronaldo has one of his surreally prolific days, the sort that come around two or three times a season.
Or indeed if Madrid have one of the sorts of days Suarez’s Barca have been enjoying lately. They have scored 21 times in the last four league outings.
It would take a spectacular slip-up for them not be champions by Saturday evening.
Player to watch: Antonio Di Natale
Serie A prepares to say farewell to some distinguished veterans on its last day of the league calendar. Luca Toni, once briefly of the Arabian Gulf league, will hang up his boots after the latest of his many clubs Verona, already doomed for the drop, play-relegation threatened Palermo. Meanwhile, at Udinese, where Carpi bid to avoid demotion, Antonio Di Natale prepares his arrivedercis, and a decision on his future, with an adventure in the UAE a possibility:
Evergreen
Di Natale will turn 39 in October, and this weekend comes to the end of his 12th season with Udinese. That he has remained so long at a relatively unfashionable club, a selling club, too, is its own remarkable story. There have been many more glamorous clubs who, since 2004, have wanted to recruit one of the game’s most reliable goalscorers.
Captain braveheart
That he has sustained his top-flight career so long is also a story of some heroism. For much of his 30s, he has battled chronic injuries, the latest of which, a muscular problem kept him out of action in the last few weeks of Udinese’s successful battle to survive in Serie A. He hopes to take some part in the finale, however.
Ovations prepared
If and when he does take the field, he will be applauded warmly. Di Natale has scored 190 goals for the club in Italy’s top division, goals of all sorts because his area of expertise has never been limited to simply poaching. In nine of his Udinese seasons he has reached double figures for the league campaign and in 2009/10, already almost a veteran, he scored 29 league goals, more than half his club’s total for the season.
Top hotshot
In that year he finished as Capocannoniere, Serie A's leading marksman; he was top of that ranking again the next season. His goals helped guide Udinese into their sole appearance in the Champions League group phase, a full decade ago. Though a Neapolitan by birth, he made the north-east of Italy his long term home, at the cost of more chances at winning major trophies and greater involvement in elite European competitions.
Late starter
Di Natale's international career was a late bloomer, perhaps because he played at an unheralded club. Although he was first picked by Italy in 2002, his first competitive selection by the Azzurri only came in 2006, and he went to the Euro 2008 tournament as a regular. There, Italy stumbled. It was the same as the 2010 World Cup. His highlight would be Euro 2012, where he picked up a silver medal, and was the only man to score a goal against winners Spain in the tournament.
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