In his weekly look back at the latest round of La Liga fixtures, Spanish football writer Phil Ball shares his thoughts on Karim Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo, as well as Valencia and Sevilla’s victories.
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Apart from Neymar’s rather wonderful goal against Villarreal, it’s been an interesting week largely from the human-relations point of view of football. The beautiful game is a business, and as such it responds to business principles, in theory anyway. The basic idea is that if you want your multi-million pound corporation to function as efficiently as possible (and thus make ever more lovely money) you have to keep an eye on the emotional well-being of your employees, whether they’re Cristiano Ronaldo or some anonymous chap playing in the Second Division ‘B’ in Spain. It’s not just a matter of keeping them fit, restricting their intake of chips, and giving them an occasional massage. We know this now. It’s about helping them to develop and then function as human beings, in a high-pressure and slightly weird sort of world. The trouble is, there is no easy manual to give out (and anyway, lots of footballers only read the PlayStation version), and most professional footballers succeed in the game precisely because they decided, at some point in their youth, to give up the education thing. It makes this business-principle notion a tricky one to apply to football – a world unto itself.
Take the most obvious problem to have come out of the week’s events. Karim Benzema is in potentially big trouble, allegedly involved in the blackmail case surrounding his French colleague Mathieu Valbuena. If found guilty, Benzema could face up to five years in the slammer, which would certainly put paid to his career (he’s 27) and considerably damage the corporate interests of his employers, Real Madrid. Perhaps that’s why Cristiano wants out (more of that later). This is one of Benzema’s best seasons so far. When Benzema plays, Madrid have scored 2.6 goals this season per game, but when he’s absent, it drops to 1.6. In the 8 games he’s figured in this season, Madrid have scored 21 times. It’s not an insignificant statistic. Without him (6 games) they’ve scored only 10. Benzema, once dubbed the ‘hunting cat’ by José Mourinho (Mou meant that Benzema was a kitten, as opposed to an aggressive salivating dog), has also proved his worth to Ronaldo. The Portuguese forward has scored 13 this season whilst accompanied by Benzema in his 8 matches, and only three goals in the 6 matches in which the French forward has been absent. With or without you, indeed.
Talking of Ronaldo, about whom, there is now a new docu-film entitled ‘Me, me, me!’ (imaginatively sub-titled ‘Ronaldo’), in which great man does himself something of a disservice by giving the distinct impression that he finally believes in all the hype. I’ve always reckoned Ronaldo was quite an interesting and ok guy – but it seems that his ego’s finally caught up with him, and that he’s now in the process of eating himself. The problem is, and here we come back to the idea of a business, is that others have to share office space with Ronaldo, day in day out. So all this ‘I am the greatest’ stuff must begin to grate, even for those colleagues who appreciate the amount of goals he scores. Ronaldo has what is known as a ‘strong personality’. There’s one in every team, and the others never challenge him. They learn that it just isn’t worth it, because he’ll sulk for days, or not pass the ball to them. And so the guy with the ‘caracter’, as they say in Spanish, never gets to learn, never gets to develop (as a person), because he thinks that everyone agrees with him. And then they start to act in a way that suggests they think they are untouchable, within the business enterprise. Ronaldo’s whispering into Laurent Blanc’s ear after the game against PSG in midweek has caused a thousand speculations to be launched. Apparently he told Blanc (presumably in English – their lingua franca) that he loved the way PSG played and that ‘I’d like to work with you’. The truth is that he actually said ‘I like that tie that you’re wearing. Where did you buy it?’
Ronaldo will be sulking now for the next two weeks of course, because he failed to score in the Sanchez Pizjuan and his team went down 3-2 to Sevilla, a team that have disappointed so far this season but who will usually give you a torrid time when you visit them – especially if you’re Real Madrid. Sergio Ramos opened the scoring with a fantastic ‘Chilena’ (bicycle kick) but injured himself in the process, on his old stomping ground. Sevilla came back, as you always felt they might, and even Fernando Llorente scored – the winner actually. They eventually outplayed Madrid – the former leader’s first defeat, and both Yevhen Konoplyanka and Grzergorz Krychowiak took over the game. The conclusion that one can draw from all this is that Sevilla might be improving, but their team is basically a phonetic nightmare for all foreign commentators.
Madrid, now three points behind Barcelona, have thus two weeks to prepare for the ‘clásico’, although seven of their players will be either involved in international friendlies or playing in South America’s preliminaries for the 2018 World Cup. Sevilla have done them no psychological favours, and their second was scored by Ever Banega, a player who, to continue this week’s theme, came out this week in defence of Unai Emery ( the manager who signed him), by saying that he was the best, that he worked incredibly hard, and that the players were all behind him. The last part is unlikely, since Emery is like Marmite – you love him or you hate him – but it was an interesting contrast to other similar cases this week.
Maybe it’s something about November, but the week has been all about player-manager casualties. If you want to read the best book about what footballers really think about their coaches, then read Eamon Dunphy’s ‘Only a Game?’, still the best book written about football and a much better insider view than ‘The Secret Footballer’, precisely because it is not ‘secret’. Dunphy tells it as it is, without fear of either reprimand or lawsuit. It would neatly frame the Valencia situation this week, in which under-fire manager Nuno Espirito Santo once again dropped star signing Alvaro Negredo from the squad for the visit to in-form Celta. Nuno probably had little to do with the original loan signing of Negredo, but that cannot explain his recent treatment of him. However, managers and players are not obliged to get on, and something has obviously happened there that threatens Nuno’s authority. Nuno doesn’t appear to be a difficult man on the surface, and is suffering the usual slings and arrows that any Valencia manager has to dodge, but the amazing 5-1 win at Celta would rather seem to endorse his position, certainly on Negredo. Anyway, his name means ‘Nuno Holy Spirit’, so he must be pretty useful. Valencia now lie seventh, which is hardly tragic, but their fans are habitually impossible to please. Celta meanwhile, must lick their wounds and try to find the defensive stability which would enable them to be serious challengers for a top-four spot, which was more or less the conclusion of this column last week.
Down at Granada, manager Jose Ramón Sandoval dropped star man Isaac Success for reasons unknown, but it was obviously some breach of discipline or the fact that his surname’s gone to his head. Granada lost to Rayo Vallecano and remain next to bottom of the league. And although it seemed to be happening as I was writing this piece on Sunday night, Real Sociedad’s coach David Moyes appeared to have been condemned by the committee meeting at the club the same afternoon, which was attended by several senior players, whose opinions on the situation were being sought after Real lost poorly, 2-0 to Las Palmas on Friday night, and Moyes flew home to England to attend his daughter’s birthday party.
Moyes has shown little emotional intelligence since his arrival a year ago, and zero intercultural awareness – a term used in sociology but a crucial consideration when a business seeks to employ people from abroad. If Moyes has indeed gone, then it will merely be the most high-profile example of an interesting business week.
