Roger deal, Arboleda exit pile pressure on Massis for director | OneFootball

No sooner had São Paulo lost to Vitória at Barradão last Saturday (11), in the Brazilian Championship, than the messaging apps of allies of president Harry Massis Júnior began buzzing. More than dissatisfaction with the team’s drop in form under coach Roger Machado (just one win in the last five matches of the country’s main competition), there has been a stream of suggestions to the chairman on how to reverse the fans’ discontent. And the main one is political.

According to what AVANTE MEU TRICOLOR has learned, Massis’s support base believes the president should abandon the idea of leaving Rui Costa as the only strong man at Barra Funda. The view is that the time has come to appoint a statutory director to share the responsibility.

According to messages obtained by the report, the assessment among people close to Massis is that, although executive 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 a failure to improve dialogue with São Paulo supporters.

“How can you expect a professional who is not 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 councillor in a message read by Massis.

Two episodes are used as examples: the dismissal of Hernán Crespo to hire Roger Machado, and Arboleda’s turbulent departure after he left the club unhappy with his loss of playing time. Even though councillors from the president’s base supported the decision in the first case and believe the club was blameless in the second, they feel the processes were poorly handled and created friction in the relationship between the football department and the stands.

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

If things are civil in virtual spaces, the tone has risen considerably at the social club. Both Massis’s allies and rivals refer to Costa as the ‘Little King of the Training Ground’ 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 dismissed and Arboleda would not have left the club. “The professional is cold and calculating. Sometimes these matters need a little heart to be resolved,” a source from the top brass 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, logically, is that the idea of leaving professional football in the hands of a professional executive was Casares’s. 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 stitching for the succession in the end-of-year elections already defined, what better way to boost the name 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.