Villar puts off naming Del Bosque’s successor
Ángel María Villar is in no rush to name the new Spain coach. He’s got other things on his mind, as he made clear yesterday. He’s tied up, between UEFA and the Federation’s own elections, which have been postponed for quite some time for one reason or another. On the one hand he’s looking to drum up support for the UEFA job; on the other, he’s weighing up the pros and cons of who, if he finally decides to take the leap, is the candidate he prefers as his successor - out of a couple of regional presidents (one from Castilla-León another from Murcia) and AFE president Luis Rubiales, who is turning into into some kind of favourite son. A mutual phobia of Javier Tebas unites them.
Tebas, meanwhile, has fabricated an alternative candidate - Jorge Pérez, extracted from the very same Federation just like God took Adam’s rib bone to make Eve. Between so much conspiracy, it’s difficult to find time for the small matter of electing a new national team coach. We’ll start to see that in August. Just around the corner are the World Cup qualifiers, in which we cross paths once again with Italy, who we meet at the start of October. And to advance directly, you have to finish as top of the group. The teams who finish second in their group (apart from the side with the worst figures of the nine) will go into the Play-Offs.
Del Bosque said that he would be leaving the job almost a year ago. So why then, has Villar not got around to looking for a successor? For sheer laziness more than anything else, and added to that, his futile attempts to persuade Del Bosque to continue – something which the coach considered doing at one point. And now he’s in a confusing situation because he claims he has retired, ‘from everything that doesn’t concern Spanish football’, which is has been his only activity during his entire life. I don’t think that one or the other is thinking about a spinning out a prolongation, because that wouldn’t make sense.