Roger deal and Arboleda exit see allies press Massis for football chief | OneFootball

As soon as São Paulo lost to Vitória at Barradão last Saturday (11) in the Brazilian Championship, the messaging apps of President Harry Massis Júnior’s allies started buzzing. More than just dissatisfaction with the team’s drop in form under coach Roger Machado (just one win in the last five matches in the country’s main competition), there have been suggestions to the club president on how to reverse the fans’ frustration. And the main one is political.

As AVANTE MEU TRICOLOR has learned, Massis’ support base believes the president should abandon his conviction of leaving Rui Costa as the only strong man at Barra Funda. The assessment is that the time has come to choose a statutory director to share the responsibility.

According to messages obtained by the report, the view among people close to Massis is that, although executive Rui Costa deserves praise for his work in negotiations (for three transfer windows now, Tricolor have practically signed players without spending on transfer fees), in some situations there has been a lack of understanding of how the fans think and of an effort to improve dialogue with São Paulo supporters.

“How can you expect a professional who isn’t a São Paulo supporter to understand what the fans are thinking? What we have today are decisions guided exclusively by rationality. But football is also passion,” said an influential board member in a message read by Massis.

Two episodes are used as examples: Hernán Crespo’s dismissal to make way for Roger Machado, and Arboleda’s turbulent departure, when he left the club unhappy over losing space. Board members from the president’s base, while having supported the decision in the first case and believing the club was blameless in the second, feel the processes were poorly handled and caused wear and tear in the relationship between the football department and the stands.

“No one is unhappy with Rui’s work. But it’s clear there was a lack of a dissenting opinion, someone to at least suggest an internal debate over whether changing coaches was really plausible,” said one board member.

If things are civil in virtual spaces, the tone at the social club has risen considerably. Both Massis’ allies and his critics refer to Costa as the ‘Little King of the Training Center’ and complain that São Paulo’s flagship department is being run without the presence of a statutory official.

In both cases, however, there is one certainty: if there had been a figure like Carlos Belmonte, who served as statutory director for five years under Julio Casares, Crespo would hardly have been fired and Arboleda would not have left the club. “The professional is cold and calculating. Sometimes these things need a little heart to be resolved,” a source from the upper leadership told AVANTE MEU TRICOLOR.

Meetings with Massis on this matter are expected to begin next week. And there are two strong arguments to convince the president. The first, obviously, is that the idea of leaving professional football in the hands of a professional executive came from Casares. If there has been a break with the names closest to the former president, who resigned in January, why continue with his plan?

The other is a political argument. With the political groundwork for the succession in the elections at the end of the year already defined, what better way to raise the profile of the future candidate for the presidency than by giving her a role in football?

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇧🇷 here.