The Uefa Champions League re-enters the calendar on Tuesday with a stronger claim than ever to be the global summit of the club game.
Over the next 48 hours, eight clubs from the five wealthiest domestic leagues will contest the first legs of the last-16 stage, their hopes invested in players drawn from across the world.
Nothing new in that. Yet it is the variety of coaching expertise that stands out.
Only one of the tacticians involved the next two nights comes from the same country as the club who employ him. That is Laurent Blanc, the Frenchman in charge of free-spending Paris Saint-Germain, a squad of such varied resources that Blanc could easily field his best XI without using a French player. His opposite number? A Finn, Sami Hyypia, manager of the German Bundesliga’s Bayer Leverkusen.
Blanc’s compatriot, Arsene Wenger, in his 18th year overseeing England’s Arsenal, meets a Spaniard, Pep Guardiola, who is in his first season with the reigning Bundesliga champions, Bayern Munich.
In the other matches, the coaches share something unusual. All four managers involved in Manchester City-Barcelona and AC Milan-Atletico Madrid were born in South America.
In the case of Clarence Seedorf, who takes charge of his first European fixture as Milan coach, that might be considered a minor, accidental detail.
Seedorf is a Dutchman, by nationality, having emigrated to the Netherlands as a child from his native Suriname, the former Dutch colony on the Caribbean shoulder of South America.
However, it is a detail that bookends the very worldly CV which encouraged Milan to think Seedorf, at age 37, had the range of experience necessary to begin the managerial phase of his career so young, at such a prominent club.
He was playing football in Brazil, after 18 years of success in Holland, Spain and Italy, when Milan called and asked him to take over.
Atletico’s Diego “Cholo” Simeone is Argentine, as is Barcelona’s Gerardo “Tata” Martino. City’s Manuel “The Engineer” Pellegrini is from Chile.
They bring not only the obligatory nicknames of Latino sporting culture to their European jobs, but also the mix of steel and flair associated with their continent’s football.
There is a strong chance the name of a non-European coach will go on the honours list of the game’s major club competition for the first time since the 1960s, when Helenio Herrera – born in Argentina, but a citizen of the world, given that his parents were Spanish and he grew up in Morocco – led Inter Milan to successive European Cups.
The leap from South American management to the elite European game can seem daunting. There is a different pace to the playing style and distinct economics.
Pellegrini initially was lured from the Argentine league, where he coached the prominent Buenos Aires club River Plate, to Spain’s Villarreal in 2004. When he left Malaga last summer, he remarked: “It is not at all easy for a South American coach to work for so many consecutive years in Europe.” He had logged nine, including a season at Real Madrid.
That countered the argument sometimes put forth by chairmen or presidents of big European clubs that, because South American dressing rooms are not inhabited by the range of millionaires you find in typical Champions League squads, the man-management skills of a coach straight from South America might not be sufficiently sharpened.
Yet Pellegrini has so far proved a more sensitive, calm presence at City than his predecessor, the Italian Roberto Mancini.
As for Martino, you don’t earn the sobriquet “Tata” – father – without giving off a certain sense of authority. He has handled Barca’s squad well and may have been helped for arriving there, direct from Newell’s Old Boys, by his close family ties with Lionel Messi, who, like Martino, is from the city of Rosario.
Simeone has a different background, having played most of his football in Spain – including with Atletico, where he was popular – and Italy.
His encounter with Seedorf will revive memories of midfield head-to-heads as players in Serie A. Like Martino, Simeone made his name in Argentina’s top flight and, like Pellegrini, found success at River Plate, the springboard to Europe.
Simeone already has trophies on this side of the Atlantic, having led Atletico to the 2012 Europa League and the 2013 Copa del Rey.
Europe’s top leagues should expect more South American-branded silverware in the months ahead: Pellegrini’s City meet the Sunderland of the Uruguayan Gus Poyet in next month’s final of the English League Cup. Also, Martino’s Barca are in the final of April’s Copa del Rey. As for the biggest prize, at least one South American coach is guaranteed a berth in the Champions League quarter-final.
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