Managerial positions in the game of soccer are incredibly unstable, often thankless jobs. If you are a manager, one moment you are held as a prophet sent by the gods of soccer to guide your team along a path of victory, and the next those same fans are paying for billboards that call for your head - or at the very least your resignation.
Usually, when everything is right in the world, which of those two moments a manager is living in is decided by whether or not they are winning or losing. If you win, you are hailed. If you lose, you are damned. Fair or not, sports are the ultimate results-based business, and it has always been that simple.
This is why the case of Antonio Mohamed being released by Club America is so strange, dishonest, and quite frankly wrong. Mohamed’s past 48 hours have encompassed managerial experiences that normally span at least a year: he won the Apertura title on Sunday, and was out of a job on Monday.
Compounding all of this was Mohamed’s awareness of the circumstances he was coaching under Sunday night. Club America had come to the conclusion that it would be moving on from Mohamed for some time, but never mentioned it explicitly to Mohamed. When he found out, he was understandably frustrated and insulted.
“I have dignity, and when there’s talk of another coach, I’ll gather my things and I’ll go home,” he told the press prior to the championship match. In the wake of such a betrayal, Mohamed acted with class. He took the high road, and put what he could not control behind him in order to focus on the job at hand. He was not wanted, but he won the championship anyway. “I am departing because my dignity is more important than anything.”
Photo: @AztecaDeportes | Twitter
These are the word and actions of someone with outstanding character, and the fact that Club America management is letting him go is clueless and classless. There have been arguments saying that they are letting go of Mohamed because he is “too boring,” and looking back at the previous America manager, it is easy to see where such thoughts come from.
Mohamed coaches a style of soccer that is very similar to the one coached by the man he replaced, Miguel Herrera. Similar, but not quite as open. Combine that with the fact that Herrera is about as close to a human firecracker as you can get without blowing up the technical area, and you can start to see that Herrera made soccer a spectacle in more ways than one.
Gustavo Matosas, the man America is hiring to replace Mohamed, supposedly will cater more to those who crave the beautiful part of the beautiful game. It will be very interesting to see what happens if Matosas is successful in turning America into a more fluid side, but does not reach the same level of success reached by Mohamed. Will America value aesthetic more than utility, or will Matosas be reacquainted with how results-based sports can be?
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