Three years and almost seven months after staying one step away from contesting the Europa League final, Celta de Vigo closes the LaLiga Santander classification after winning only one game in the first ten days.
The celestial ones did not occupy the last place of the league championship since August 27, 2016, when Atlético de Madrid thrashed in Balaídos (0-4 in the third match) to that team led by Eduardo Berizzo that months later would enter the history of the club with the dispute of the semifinal European against Manchester United.
The departure in summer of 2017 of the Argentine coach, due to disagreements with the board of directors chaired by Carlos Mouriño, turned Celta into a crusher of coaches, the last Óscar García Junyent, who left his position to Argentine Eduardo Coudet, who has gone in a few weeks from leading the Brazilian league with Internacional de Porto Alegre to closing LaLiga with Celta.
Juan Carlos Unzué, Antoni Mohamed, Miguel Cardoso, Fran Escribá and Óscar García Junyent went through the Balaídos bench without much success, and except for the first all of them had to live with the threat of descent. Because Celta has been with the rope around his neck for three years.
The Galician team has been prey to its instability on the bench, a terrible sporting planning and, above all, an obsession to sign players trained in A Madroa that has caused the squad to be totally unbalanced.
“I said I needed a right midfielder and they brought me a Ukrainian, a central midfielder and they brought me a Turk. In Celta the club signs, not the coach“Antonio Mohamed criticized after his departure.
The Argentine has been a scourge for the celestial directive since his cessation. The rest of the technicians, prisoners of the confidentiality clause that they had to sign after their dismissal, have barely raised their voices in public, although they shared Mohamed's line.
“We have not been able to win the battle against Antonio Chaves – Celta's general director, Carlos Mouriño's man of maximum confidence,” they lamented from the surroundings of Óscar García, who in his last weeks as Celta coach already showed his distance from the leaders: “We were carving out the Celta of a not too distant future but they didn't let us finish the project”.
In his last appearance before the media, in mid-August, Carlos Mouriño acknowledged that he He had promised four signings to the Catalan coach: an eight, a nine, a side and an extreme. Since then, only Colombian central defender Jeison Murillo, who had already played in Vigo the second round of the last championship on loan from Sampdoria, and Miguel Baeza, a promise of Real Madrid Castilla with good numbers in Second Division B.
The failure of the search for the nine that Óscar García demanded so much has a very significant connotation because since the departure of Maxi Gomez lThe responsibility for the goal has fallen entirely on Iago Aspas, despite the fact that Gabriel Toro Fernández, Santi Mina and Smolov were presented as incorporations that would enhance the celestial punch.
“Celta is a very structured club, for the coach it is very difficult to sign because never has the power of decision. In my time I asked to reinforce three positions and no one came ”, explains one of Berizzo's successors, who was able to impose his idea with two of his compatriots: Gustavo Cabral and Pedro Pablo“ Tucu ”Hernández.
The people of Vigo seem bent on consummating their return to the silver category. Two seasons ago they were saved by a stratospheric end of the season for Aspas, which forced their recovery to lift a team that was dead; A few months ago they avoided their fall into the “well” because Leganés was unable to defeat Real Madrid on the last day, after seven consecutive games without a win for the team led by Óscar García.
“It is almost impossible to do worse than last season”Said Carlos Mouriño in August. Three months later, the numbers say the opposite: Celta is bottom with seven points, It is the team with the most goals in the category – almost an average of two goals conceded per game – and it continues to have a serious problem with the goal – eight in ten games, five of them by Aspas-.
As if that were not enough, with the team threatened again by relegation, the board of directors broke the mystique that Celtism had generated with a campaign of subscribers that threatens with leave hundreds of followers on the way that they are not willing to “give” 50 euros to the club just to keep their subscription, as many supporters have already denounced.