On Monday, Real Madrid fired its manager, Rafael Benitez.
Benitez had the job for seven months. Under his regime, Real lost three of 25 games in all competitions of the current season. The team progressed undefeated into the quarter-finals of the Champions League. No one doubts it's one of the four or five best sides in the world.
But Real was embarrassingly beaten by Barcelona two months ago. An administrative cock-up got them tossed from the Copa del Rey. They drew a game they should have won over the weekend. So Benitez is out. He'll be succeeded by former Real and France star Zinedine Zidane.
No foreign-born player of recent vintage is more loved there. How much he'll be loved a month from now depends entirely on whether or not he wins, beginning with Saturday's game against Deportivo. That is a must-win game, because every game at Real is must-win.
There's no adjustment period. Win. Win right now. Win at least one trophy every year. If you want to be safe, win two. If you can't, you're fired, your professional corpse is burned and the cycle of managerial life springs anew from its ashes. Zidane will be Real's 13th manager in 13 years. Only two of them have lasted more than 12 months.
That's why Real is so predictably good, and why so many North American teams that claim similar ambitions are so predictably bad. It's the difference between saying you won't accept failure and not accepting it. It's the reason soccer has superclubs and North America has occasional dynasties riding the boom-bust cycle. They don't waste a bunch of time talking about building cultures. They have only one culture – winning. They don't need executive retreats and brainstorming sessions to figure out how it looks. They have the standings for that.
Like anything else, it's a little more complicated. Real has unlimited resources and no real cap on how it uses them. The best players in the world will do anything to join the team. They play in a league without parity. They start every year with a virtual lock on second place.
But at the highest levels of world soccer, there is no coasting. There are no exceptions made for poor luck or bad years. That's the foundation of any superclub's success.
Over here, sports teams think differently. Winning is nice, but not necessary. As a result, they are failure-oriented.
Most of their time is spent trying to explain why they haven't succeeded yet, and how that might still happen in some perfect future.
Rather than imagine themselves as the team lifting the trophy, organizations would prefer to measure themselves against the 29 teams that don't. It won't stop them from talking a whole bunch of nonsense about "commitment" to winning, but it makes things less stressful for everyone.
As soon as a big-name coach/general manager is hired, he gets a year to evaluate the organization. This evaluation could be done in as long as it takes to say this sentence: "We're not good enough at [insert sport here] and must become better."
But since we've all been infected by MBA doublespeak and the numbers cult, we've agreed that it makes sense to let the professional fixer spend months gathering information before he starts fixing anything.
Picture a plumber coming by for a dozen consultations on your basement flooding issue before he turns off the main water valve.
The players understand that there's no rush or real expectation of results. This is an extended audition. Their job is maximizing their own value, either as members of the new, as-yet-unestablished regime or as trade bait.
By year two, the coach/GM has assumed responsibility for how the team does. His next goal is slipping that responsibility. The GM makes a few deals. The coach starts calling out individual players. If things go well, everyone gets fat. If things go wrong, the GM talks about "the process," the coach talks about "buying in," the players talk about "personal learning curves" and no one who watches the team is sure who to blame.
A few more pieces are moved from one side of the locker room to the other and the team finishes eight games out of the playoffs. So (relatively) close! "We feel very well positioned for next year" – a "next year" that will never actually arrive.
Year three – now it's time to get serious about winning (insert sport here) games. Any small run of success, regardless of how meaningless it is to the team's final position, is proof that "the process is working." The goal here is inventing goals that obscure the only real goal of any professional sports franchise – securing a championship.
Hey, we went from 18th in (obscure team statistic X) to fifth! (Disappointing sophomore Y) showed real improvement! We have created a lot of depth and value at (meaningless position Z)! We are headed in the right direction.
If you apply the logic of sports teams to your own life, a road trip to B.C. is a success if your car breaks down in Saskatchewan and you spend two weeks waiting for a tow truck. Since you were headed in the right direction.
By year four, people are beginning to suspect "the process" is synonymous with "an endless stairway to nowhere." This is the moment to panic. Trade someone. Anyone. Trade a few someones. Spend erratically. If you're the GM, think about firing the coach.
If you're the coach, think about going postal during a news conference. Even though you're in the midst of ruining whatever useful groundwork you'd laid through four dud years, odds are you'll still make it through one more season. Mainly because of inertia.
Year five – you're getting fired. Everyone knows it. Spend most of your time talking up your legacy and settling scores. The team is still average-to-terrible, but it's too late to bother with that at this point.
Put your feet up. Ruminate publicly. If only you'd done X, Y, Z, Za, Zb), the Earth would have begun to spin counterclockwise and so on. It all seems so clear now.
No need to worry. You'll get it right in your next job. This time you won't ruin the process by getting so worked up about results.
Cathal Kelly