This Monday Marcelino García Total became Villarreal’s new coach. The Asturian, who returns to the Castellón club after seven years, will be the third coach to sit on the bench this season, after Quique Setién and José Rojo Martín “Pacheta”. The fourth if Miguel Ángel Tena, who was in charge as interim this weekend in the match against Atlético de Madrid, is included in the roster.
Marcelino, who has signed for two and a half years, began the season on the bench of Olympique de Marseille, a team that finished the fifth day after a serious crisis that confronted the French club’s board of directors with its most ultra fans.
His first time at Villarreal, from 2013 to 2016, was four seasons in which he achieved promotion to First Division and led his team to play in European competitions. In his first year, the coach took the reins of the team in January, finishing seventh in the Second Division, and raised it to second position in the table, achieving direct promotion.
Already in First Division, Marcelino managed to ensure that the club never feared permanence, something unusual in newly promoted teams. Villarreal finished sixth in the first two seasons back in the Spanish elite and qualified directly for the Europa League on both occasions. The last year was the most successful for the coach at the head of the yellow entity, finishing the season in fourth position in the league, with access to the previous rounds of the Champions League, and falling in the semifinals of the Europa League against Liverpool by Jurgen Klopp.
Even with these good results, Marcelino was dismissed in August 2016. His strict and overvigilant methodology had caused significant wear and tear within the locker room. Furthermore, his desire to have more and more control over some extra-football aspects of the entity caused a cooling in his relationship with Fernando Roig, owner and president of the club. The latter would end up marking his departure.
The coach, who has become less obsessive with details, returns to Villarreal at a stage of greater professional maturity, after having gone through other La Liga clubs such as Valencia and Athletic Bilbao, teams with which he won a Cup. del Rey and a Spanish Super Cup, respectively.
Villarreal had already approached Marcelino before the club signed Quique Setién, but the Asturian coach was then in a stage in which he was not very clear about where he wanted to take his future. His name also came to be heard as one of the candidates to lead the national team at the time, but that project did not come to fruition.
Villarreal announced the coach’s return through a video published on social networks, which highlighted that Marcelino came to the team in “one of the worst moments” for the entity. The club is once again going through a complicated situation, located fourteenth in the league, and the Asturian once again establishes himself as the solution to his problems. In this way, Villarreal wins a coach who has proven to be a guarantee wherever he has been and Marcelino returns to an environment where he was happy.
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