The Maccabi Tel Aviv football club surprised the Israeli football community again and reached an agreement with Donis and his team on leaving the club after the “event” in Teddy where Maccabi and Betar Jerusalem parted ways 0-0.
To put it mildly, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, and everyone for whom the team is dear, were not saddened when they read this announcement. But is Donis really the source of the problem at the club, and is his departure the cure for the disease? Maybe there is no illness at all, but just a bad start to the league alongside an impressive achievement in the Europa League as well as in the early stages of the European Champions League.
In my opinion, what we see here in the purest form is the superficiality in examining issues according to the test of the result only. Since Ben Mansford left the team, Maccabi has relied on Ivica’s outstanding achievements in the Israeli Premier League, and has suddenly neglected the club building that he has been so proud of since the arrival of Jordi Cruyff in Israel. Although Ben Mansford is not considered a sports director or sports manager at the club, there is no doubt that he came to fulfill at least some of the functions that Jordi Cruyff performed at Maccabi until he was appointed as coach in his last season at the club.
It is also true that the official version of the club is that Barak Yitzhaki and Patrick Van Leven share the professional management powers of the club last summer, but we are never told what the unknown powers are that the two share, who is responsible for what, and what is the new arrangement at the club.
Under Ivica and his phenomenal success in the Premier League, these questions did not occupy the fans, but to my surprise also served the decision makers at the club (“Canada” in the words of acting club general manager Sharon Tamam, with Canada being a combination of Anglidis and Mitch Goldhaar) leaving the ambiguity Honestly, and the assumption that even after Ivica will be enough to prepare the Israeli staff, and when a coach arrives, he will be the one to choose the foreigners he needs, and will be the one to take care of them. From everything we hear about Ivica as a coach, he was a very focused person. Professional at the club, from the medical staff, through the selection of foreigners to the smallest details of the club’s training. Probably alongside Ivica it was difficult to find a professional manager who would come and settle for crumbs left by the coach, and there were those who leaned on a broken barrel and hoped, Shavich will stay another season at the club.
After it became clear late that Ivica would not stay, someone at the club, we were never told who, but most of those who follow the club assume that it is Anglidis, chose Donis as the next coach of Maccabi Tel Aviv. Donis arrived about a month after the start of training, and was required not only to coach in the qualifying stages, but also to select the foreigners they would bring to the club. He embarked on an almost impossible mission. Few coaches come after an almost historic tenure of a previous coach, and succeed with a club. Take Tom Thibodeau in the Chicago Bulls who came after Phil Jackson, take Moyes, who replaced Ferguson, and there are so many more examples in history, for example Pep Guardiola’s replacements in Barcelona.
As in many other cases, when replacing an icon, you usually bring someone in a contrasting extreme style, assuming correctly that it will be difficult to continue in the same style. While Ivica demanded and received iron discipline, and when he encountered internal noises at the start of his second season at the club, he made sure to get rid of Eliran Atar for example, Donis arrived as a sort of pressure valve. Everything is lighter, less meticulous, assuming the players will need some air, but as in many cases, that air has become chaos.
Do not take from Donis his successes in Europe, but it is clear that he had a hard time dealing with the crisis that arose, and it is doubtful if there was a coach who would come after Ivica to a club tailored around his unique style, and would have managed to deal with a crisis. At the end of the day, Donis arrived at a club that did not have a professional backbone. There is no point in talking about the timing of the players’ signings, the decisions made on the subject, the controversial decision to bring in Ben Bitton and give up Geralds. These are all symptoms of the real problem in the club.
Just as Canada did not only look at what was happening at the club this year through test results, and decided to give up Donis’ services despite an impressive home stage in the Europa League, so Canada failed when it relied on the Ivica score test, remaining in the same dilapidated structure that actually contained only Vladan Ivica as dictator Almighty in the club.
The hope is, and frankly also the feeling is, that Canada or at least the important component in Canada, ie Mitch Goldhaar, saw reality without emotional involvement, and realized that the club could not continue to operate remotely with an unclear division of powers. Without professional management, Maccabi will look like it did in the years before Jordi Cruyff arrived. Maccabi will not look like a football team, but a collection of players who connected by chance, as it seems in the “event” in Teddy.
I do not know Mitch Goldhaar in depth, but there is a common denominator for successful business people – their ability to recognize failure sharply, and cut the investment quickly. In this case I think Mitch has seen, understood, and will return to the path that Jordi Cruyff instilled in the club, a rebuilding of true professional management so that the next permanent coach can work in a setting that provides a reasonable chance of success, and the coach’s failure leads to another coach. This is the really important news in the drastic step the club has taken. Mitch Goldhaar still takes Maccabi very seriously, this is super critical news for the club’s fans.