FC Porto manager Martín Anselmi set to be sacked | OneFootball

Martín Anselmi’s brief spell as Porto manager is rapidly coming to a close following the disappointing group stage exit at the FIFA Club World Cup, the worst performance from a European team in the new format.

Anselmi met with André Villas-Boas on Wednesday with reports strongly suggesting the president had already made up his mind to fire the 39-year-old. The delay in making the decision official appears to be the costs associated with terminating the contract.

Villas-Boas clearly doesn’t want to pay out the Argentine and his coaching team, the contract that was signed in January this year lasting until June 2027. Anselmi, justifiably, wants to be paid in full.

The figures being reported are four million euros for the remaining two seasons, in addition to the 3.1 million euros recently paid to his previous club Cruz Azul.

Opinion

André Villas-Boas must have seen the writing on the wall before travelling to the Club World Cup. Porto suffered a humiliating 4-1 defeat against Benfica at Estádio do Dragão in early April, a result that supporters are unlikely to forget any time soon.

Anselmi wasn’t helped by the departures of Nico González and Wenderson Galeno shortly after his arrival, but anyone who regularly watched his team play would know that it was uninspiring and rarely confident football.

If it wasn’t for Rodrigo Mora flourishing in the final stages of the season and Braga’s capitulation, the Dragons would have finished fourth in the Primeira Liga, an unthinkable scenario for the 30-time Portuguese champions.

One sure fire way to know when a manager is on the way out is when his team are wide open in transition. This was the case almost all the way through Anselmi’s time in charge, none more so than the 4-4 draw against Al-Ahly which will be remembered as his final game in charge.

After the defeat, he said: “Conceding four goals? To suffer transitions, you need to lose the ball, and for the first goals we lost the ball and did not run to win it back.”

The manager is responsible for implementing systems to ensure his players recover in transition in order to stop the opposition marching towards their goal. When players don't run to win the ball back, the message from the manager is either not being understood or ignored.

Anselmi’s main excuse will be that the club didn’t reinforce the squad soon enough and he could have turned it around with more time at the helm. Those excuses will only be valuable when he goes for his next job interview.

Regardless, his tactics were naïve and he continually played players out of position, most notably Fábio Vieira. Aside from his failures from a technical point of view however, it’s probably his lack of authority that contributed to his demise.

As we saw with Daniel Sousa’s humiliating and rapid exits at Braga and Vitória de Guimarães, some managers may lack the personality and character required to lead a top level team.

Anselmi guided Independiente del Valle to two Copa Sudamericana titles, but stepping up to manage a club the size of Porto was tioo big a step. As he packs his bags and counts his cash, all the attention now turns to Villas-Boas and who he appoints next.

One would assume that Villas-Boas, a successful manager himself, would be a better judge of potential candidates than Rui Costa and Frederico Varandas. Varandas hit the jackpot with Ruben Amorim, followed by the disastrous João Pereira before getting it right with Rui Borges.

Villas-Boas is facing the most crucial decision in his short spell as Porto president. Another failure could be his last.