Jorge Valdano, a legend with Real Madrid and Argentina, has launched a scathing attack directed at Liverpool’s Rafael Benitez and Chelsea’s Jose Mourinho, who are “ruining” soccer in his opinion. In a column appearing in the Madrid daily La Marca, the former World Cup winner accuses both managers of mistrusting talent because of their own failures as players; he says the precedent they’ve set is bad for the game.
“If Didier Drogba was the best player in the first match, it was purely because he was the one who ran the fastest, jumped the highest and crashed into people the hardest,” he said of the first leg of their UEFA Champions League series. “If soccer is going the way Chelsea and Liverpool are taking it, we had better be ready to wave goodbye to any expression of the cleverness and talent we have enjoyed for a century.”
Why? Because Mourinho and Benitez were lousy players, he says. As a result, their vision of success is results-oriented and boring, as evidenced by the Champions League semifinal between their clubs. It’s an interesting argument to be sure, but tacticians would argue that soccer is a results-oriented game, and while the CL semi may have been a defensive affair, many would say it was equally as gripping as the match between Man United and Milan. It’s not as if Chelsea and Liverpool don’t play a watchable brand of soccer, either — they just don’t play like Barcelona and Real Madrid.