INQUISITR.COM / Sports

Rafael Benitez Faces An Uncertain Future After Real Madrid

By Sean Donnelly
Published on: 21:31 PST, Jan 4, 2016

It is testament to the uniquely bizarre political climate characteristic of Real Madrid that, with the team positioned four points off first place in La Liga after having topped their Champions League group ahead of Paris Saint Germain, the club’s president, Florentino Perez, yesterday dismissed Rafael Benitez – the only manager in history to have won the UEFA Cup, UEFA Champions League, and FIFA Club World Cup – in order to appoint Zinadine Zidane, someone with no senior-level managerial experience, as first-team coach.

The decision, of course, was not surprising.

From the moment of his appointment to the Madrid dugout seven months ago, Benitez never felt like a comfortable fit at the Bernabeu. The Spaniard’s instinctive tactical conservativism always seemed to jar with Real’s expansive, attacking tradition and it never appeared possible that a coach who craves autonomy could work comfortably alongside a meddling president such as Perez.

Indeed, it seems safe to suggest that, so long as Perez remains in charge of Madrid, the club will never achieve managerial stability; the count-down to Zidane’s dismissal has already begun.

But while Real Madrid’s future under Perez seems predictable, the same cannot be said for that of Benitez’s managerial career. For although the 55-year-old’s reputation is unlikely to be damaged as a result of his brief spell at the Bernabeu, it is difficult to see from where his next top-level appointment might come.

Since shooting to international prominence off the back of his double La Liga and UEFA Cup winning spell at Valencia between 2001 and 2004, Benitez has worked at Liverpool (2004-10), Inter Milan (2010), Chelsea (2012-13) and Napoli (2013-15), winning FA Cup, Champions League, Supercoppa Italiana, Europa League and Coppa Italia trophies. But while this career path still leaves the German Bundesliga and France’s Ligue 1 unexplored, there is really only one club in either league which one could realistically envisage Benitez wanting to take over: Bayern Munich or PSG.

Neither of these options seem viable in the short-term.

Bayern have already appointed Benitez’s predecessor at Real Madrid, Carlo Ancelotti, to replace outgoing manager, Pep Guardiola, in the summer while the recently sacked Chelsea coach, Jose Mourinho, has long been tipped to succeed Laurent Blanc in the PSG dugout. Benitez’s infamously poor relationship with the Chelsea fans, meanwhile, makes a return to Stamford Bridge seem impossible, and the coach’s Liverpool connection makes any mooted move to replace under-fire Louis van Gaal at Manchester United a non-starter.

The reality is that Benitez has not done much since winning the Champions League with Liverpool in 2005 to suggest that he would be capable of leading a super-club to elite-level success. While there can be little doubt that clubs such as Olympique Marseilles, Olympique Lyonnais, FC Schalke or Wolfsburg would jump at the chance to appoint a coach of Benitez’s pedigree, it is unclear whether he would consider stepping down to a second-tier European club having just managed Madrid.

After all, the Spaniard took more than two years out of the game after being sacked by Inter, rejecting numerous job offers from high-profile, non-Champions League clubs out of a stubborn belief that he belonged at the top-level. It was a somewhat fortuitous, if fraught, interim appointment at Chelsea in November, 2012, which allowed him to rehabilitate his reputation as a big-club manager, but even then only Napoli came calling when his contract in London expired; a club that has not won Serie A since Diego Maradona led the line in the 1989-90 season.

But whatever Benitez thinks his true level is, his chances of walking into a title-winning club as his next job seem limited and he may well have to focus on rebuilding his reputation at a Europa League or (at best) lower-level Champions League side over the next two to three seasons.

This is not necessarily a bad thing for the Madrid native.

Benitez has done his best work at Valencia, Liverpool and Napoli, clubs that lie just outside of the European elite. Indeed, the 55-year-old’s failure to win-over star-studded dressing-rooms at Inter and Real suggest that his notoriously impersonal, systems-driven management style perhaps works best at clubs populated by young, hungry players still eager to prove themselves at the top-level.

Last week the West Ham chairman, David Sullivan, revealed that Benitez had come within two hours of replacing Sam Allardyce as manager before Real Madrid hijacked the deal. The subsequent course of the Hammers’ season under Slaven Bilic suggests that the Spaniard might have been better committing to Sullivan’s ambitious project in east London rather than sipping from Perez’s poisoned chalice in Madrid.

[Photo by Denis Doyle/Getty Images]

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