Rafa Benitez firing won't solve the real problem with Real Madrid
New year, same Florentino Perez.
On the first workday of 2016, Real Madrid's despotic president fired the manager he had appointed just seven months and a day ago.
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In spite of sitting a mere four points out of first place in La Liga – wherein Real beat Rayo Vallecano 10-2 just two weeks earlier – and sweeping through the Champions League group stage without a single loss, Rafa Benitez became the 11th manager to leave perhaps the toughest job in club soccer in Perez's 12-odd years in charge.
And none of that was unexpected.
Perez had dismissed Carlo Ancelotti in the spring, even though the Italian veteran had finally delivered the club's 10th European title, actually managed to appease an ever-roiling locker room and forged a real collective out of an unwieldy band of stars. He'd been able to compensate for the sale of Xabi Alonso and Angel Di Maria, on whom the team depended heavily, and integrate mega-signings Toni Kroos and James Rodriguez, whom the club didn't need.
Why? Because Perez wanted a manager who would accommodate his whims. Who would do as he was told. That wasn't Ancelotti, who was popular with the entire team – an accomplishment once thought impossible – and fielded his players as he saw fit.
So off went Ancelotti and in came Benitez, who hadn't known any significant success since the decade prior and whose only other job offer had come from West Ham United. Real Madrid was his dream job, and he happily and knowingly downed the contents of the poisoned chalice.
It was business as usual at Real. Perez, the typically scowling billionaire, took power at the club after the 1999-2000 season in which Real had just won its second Champions League title in three years under then-president Lorenzo Sanz – ending a drought dating back to 1966.
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Perez's impact was immediate, with the signing of Luis Figo from mortal enemies Barcelona. He followed that up with the arrival of more "galacticos" like Zinedine Zidane (who is said to be succeeding Benitez, by the way), Ronaldo and David Beckham, while he cleared much of the club's towering debts.
He dubbed his policy "Zidanes y Pavones," referring to Francisco Pavon, a forgettable center back who had emerged from the club's academy. Superstars and academy players, in other words.
But the blind pursuit of the game's biggest names created balance issues from the jump that have pretty much persisted ever since. At Real, players around whom the attack was built elsewhere are shoehorned into supporting roles, or shunted off to a flank just to ensure that there are enough room, touches and attention for seemingly incompatible pieces.
Not surprisingly, this created problems for managers on the field and sowed perpetual discontent in the locker room. After Vicente Del Bosque – the manager Perez had inherited and a master at massaging egos and enabling stars to coexist – led the club to another Champions League title in 2001-02, the president let him go.
Perez appointed five more managers in the remainder of his first spell in charge, which ended in February 2006. Only one of them lasted an entire season, and none of them won anything bigger than the meaningless Supercopa. (Del Bosque had won La Liga twice and the Champions League twice, in addition to a small collection of assorted super cups.)
None of which stopped Perez from returning to the club on June 1, 2009, firing then-manager Juande Ramos on the same day and happily pursing the exact same policy that had failed before. (Not to mention consolidating power by amending club rules to make it just about impossible to displace him.) Manuel Pellegrini failed as manager and won nothing despite the world-record signings of Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaka – the latter of whom would fall well short of expectations, as Michael Owen, another galactico, once had. Jose Mourinho won one league title and one cup in three seasons. And then came Ancelotti, who was saddled with Gareth Bale, always a poor fit whose success Perez deemed non-negotiable.
Perez wants his biggest signings to shine. This is understandable to an extent. Any money man wants his investments to pay a healthy dividend. But the way Perez goes about it becomes destructive, forcing managers to play in a way that doesn't get the most of the core of his players. Bale simply got in the way of his equally expensive peers, jamming sticks into the cogs of the entire machinery.
It seemed inevitable that Benitez would be blamed. Especially when he was expected to fight a proxy war in the locker room on behalf of his president, who is seemingly always hunkered down in some standoff with a star. Longtime captain Iker Casillas was shipped off to FC Porto. Defensive stalwart Sergio Ramos was unhappy, and so was Ronaldo – never Perez's guy, despite quickly becoming the club's all-time leading scorer, because his signing was apparently consummated under Sanz.
Clearly a puppet for the regime, Benitez apparently never won the trust of his players, who mourned the departure of his predecessor, Ancelotti. It didn't help that his ideas on soccer appeared a tad dated, or that he seemed prone to over-coaching superstars. Consequently, the soccer mostly wasn't very memorable. And nor were the results, with three losses and four draws in the season's first 18 league games.
Benitez, the eager fool who bought into a stacked deck, was dealt an impossible hand. And now he's crapped out, a day after Real surrendered two leads in a 2-2 away tie with Valencia. Perhaps he was sacrificed as a gesture to the squad. Or maybe to suggest that the problem is something other than Perez's endless meddling, as a decoy for his deeply flawed approach to running the club.
The pattern, however, is obvious. For some time now, the problem hasn't been the manager but the president. And no amount of managerial firings will change that.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
