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Reports: Real eyes Valdano as coach
Posted: Monday December 06, 1999 11:07 AM
MADRID, Spain (AP) -- The revolving door at the Real Madrid coaching office is turning again, with management looking to hire Jorge Valdano to turn around a disastrous season, newspapers said Monday. On Sunday team president Lorenzo Sanz contacted Valdano, who coached Real Madrid in the 1994-95 and 1995-96 seasons, to arrange talks on his coming back for the rest of this year as coach, then staying on for to more as general manager with broad powers to hire and fire, El Pais said. After this season Sanz wants Spanish national coach Jose Antonio Camacho to take over, the paper said. Camacho's contract runs out in June of next year. A return by Valdano, who has dual Spanish-Argentine nationality, would mark the eighth coaching change at Real Madrid since Sanz took over as president in 1995. With the team dropping steadily in the standings, Sanz fired John Toshack as coach last month, apparently because he refused to stop criticizing his players in public. Assistant coach Vicente del Bosque took over in an interim capacity, but the team is playing so dismally that Sanz wants to accelerate plans for new leadership. The statistics are indeed ugly: Real Madrid is in 17th place out of 20 teams after 14 games, its worst start ever; it has won only one of its last 12 matches; only one other team has allowed more goals, and none has allowed more at home. To make matters worse, its top acquisition of the year, Frenchman Nicolas Anelka, has turned out to be an embarrassment. Anelka, whose transfer from Arsenal cost US$35 million, has yet to score a goal.
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