The Rudi Garcia era in Rome has ended, with AS Roma firing the French manager after two and a half seasons in charge. He looked like a perfect hire, but his team that was once so ruthlessly effective has drawn or lost six of their last seven Serie A games. After such a poor run of results, with Roma winning just once in the league since November and barely advancing in the Champions League, this move was inevitable.
Rudi Garcia failed Roma, but Roma failed Rudi Garcia too
The French manager didn’t help himself much, but Roma’s win-now attitude cost the club dearly.
Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images
More from our team sites
Before recent struggles, though, Roma were a joy to behold. In Garcia’s first season in charge, the giallorossi were a ruthless wrecking crew in Serie A, playing high-flying, attacking football that the team took to like a fish to water, handling many of their toughest opponents in Italy with ease. They opened the season with a 10-game winning streak, and at one point in the spring, they won nine matches in a row, dominating all comers and rarely looking as though they were in any danger of losing. Garcia had his team humming along, and it seemed as though the sky was the limit for Roma under his guidance.
Roma only finished second that season -- Juventus won their third straight scudetto with ease because they're Juventus -- but the mood was high in Italy's capital. Roma's fans believed they could be an elite team again. With a few smart-looking transfers and a return to the Champions League, we were about to enter an era of giallorossi dominance the likes of which Serie A had never seen. After years of rapid manager turnover and constant struggle for decency, Roma were great again, and it was only the beginning -- or so we thought.
They started out the 2014-15 season similarly dominant to the season before, with another long winning streak. But in October, everything changed -- after a close-fought draw with Manchester City in the Champions League, Roma lost a match to Juventus in brutal fashion, then two weeks later were absolutely torn to shreds by Bayern Munich in a 7-1 battering. But it wasn’t clearly something to worry about -- a lot of good teams get wrecked by Bayern.
What didn't happen, though, was a real recovery. Roma started dropping points with much greater frequency than we'd gotten used to seeing under Garcia -- a scoreless draw with Sampdoria and a loss to Napoli closely followed that crushing Bayern loss, then over the next couple of months came draws with Sassuolo, AC Milan, Lazio, Palermo, Fiorentina and Empoli -- all decent-to-good sides, but all ones that Roma were expected to beat. This was Roma after all, and Garcia was supposed to have built them into an incredible contender that could compete with the best of Europe.
But something changed. The summer transfer loss of Mehdi Benatia had destabilized Roma's back line, and the long-term injury loss of Kevin Strootman along with Daniele De Rossi losing a step of pace he couldn't afford to lose left Roma's midfield badly unbalanced. Radja Nainggolan and Seydou Keita were doing yeoman's work in midfield, but couldn't really replace what Strootman and De Rossi brought to that group. Add in a few disastrously ineffective signings like Juan Iturbe, Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa and January addition Seydou Doumbia, and a once-mighty Roma side had clearly taken a step back from where they had been the year before.
You could see the cost of those personnel issues in how Roma played on the pitch. Where Garcia had been playing his team in a quick-moving attacking setup that left teams struggling to keep up, Roma became a much slower-paced team that focused on working to keep possession as much as they were on attacking. At times they became outright defensive, playing to score on the counter and not concede goals instead of taking the game to their opponents like they once did. At times the changes were forced by injuries -- and there were many at the Stadio Olimpico -- but at others it seemed more like Garcia and Roma were too worried about making mistakes to play with the freedom they’d had before.
Roma still finished second that season, though, thanks largely to Serie A as a whole being shaky enough that the giallorossi could still pick enough points off struggling teams to assure their place. Still, there was a clear drop in quality just looking at their results -- Roma had finished with 85 points in Garcia’s first season, but only managed 70 in his second, piling up six more draws and another loss compared to the season before.
Credit: Paolo Bruno/Getty Images
This season has been more of the same, only with some of the problems exaggerated and turned up to 11. This last summer was supposed to be the transfer season that Roma needed to kick things into high gear and become an elite team. Edin Dzeko, Wojciech Szczesny and Mohamed Salah were brought in as high-profile, big-money signings, in terms of all of up-front loan fees, transfer fees to be paid once certain conditions were met, and their wages. Dzeko and Salah have already met their purchase triggers, and they're far from the only expensive signings that Roma made.
While there were a few younger, high-upside signings made -- players like Antonio Rüdiger and Lucas Digne were signed on loan with options to buy, and Leandro Paredes was brought in as a bid for the future -- players like that pricey trio of Dzeko, Salah and Szczesny along with well-paid veterans like William Vainqueur and Iago Falque were the norm, costing Roma a whole lot of money -- and so far for precious little return.
The problem is that none of Dzeko or Salah or Vainqueur or many of Roma's other signings from the year before seemed to fit Rudi Garcia's system very well. The Frenchman uses tactics that aim to get the ball around quickly between players confident in possession. They don't work well with high-volume, low-accuracy shooters who move the ball poorly like Salah, Iturbe, Doumbia and Victor Ibarbo. Or target men like Dzeko. Or slow-footed, limited-passing midfielders and defenders like Vainqueur, current-era Ashley Cole, and Yanga-Mbiwa.
It's as though Roma's executives made all their transfers without once talking to Garcia or letting him go over scouting reports to make sure that the players his bosses wanted to sign could actually work for him and justify the money spent. Making matters worse is that Roma spent a lot of time dumping high-upside younger talent who did fit Garcia's system -- players like Alessio Romagnoli, Andrea Bertolacci, Adem Ljajic and Mattia Destro. That took a lot of talent and options off Garcia's bench, further hamstringing a manager who was already showing signs of struggling with his roster last season.
Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in Roma struggling this season. Badly. Halfway through the season, they’re on pace for fewer wins and more draws than last season, and their big signings are, to a man, having issues adapting to their new team. Making matters worse is Garcia’s near-stubborn refusal to change -- he keeps trying to play Dzeko as though he’s Francesco Totti, Vainqueur as though he’s De Rossi, Salah as though he’s more of a passer than a speedster. None of those players are suited what he’s trying to make them do, and Roma’s quality of play has struggled for it. With Serie A much stronger as a whole this season, they couldn’t afford that.
Now Garcia is gone, both through his own inability to truly adapt and the same inability of his bosses to adapt. Maybe it’s ego, maybe it’s ineptitude, who knows. What is clear, though, is that it wasn’t working any more, and it was high time to move on -- perhaps even long past time, if you ask Roma fans. Now the men in charge of i Lupi have a choice to make: Who’s the best choice to replace Garcia?
Luciano Spalletti is the name most frequently linked to the job, and it’s easy to see why -- he was the last Roma manager to find success before the years of struggle that preceded Garcia, winning consecutive Coppa Italia titles in 2007 and 2008. He also did very well with Zenit St. Petersburg, twice winning the Russian Premier League and getting solid-if-unspectacular results in European competition. But is he the right man for the job? That’s not so clear.
Roma need a manager who doesn’t have one fixed set of tactics, who’s willing to mix and match with what his management gives him to find the best-working setup for his current players. That can be Spalletti, but he certainly has his preferences for what kind of player is brought in, and that might not mesh with the “oh look a shiny thing” mindset that Roma’s leadership occasionally seems to have. They also need someone who can keep his players motivated and willing to fight -- something that Garcia frequently struggled with, and something that Spalletti has had problems with in his career as well.
Maybe Spalletti is the right man to move forward with, maybe he’s not. Many Roma fans certainly seem to want him, and that’s almost certainly worth something to the club’s executives. No matter who they wind up with, it’ll only work out if Roma’s manager has learned something important from this debacle: Listen to your manager. Work with him. Make sure he’s getting what he actually needs, not just what you think he does. If you don’t, bad results will fallow. Rudi Garcia might have deserved to get fired, but Roma’s front office certainly didn’t help him as much as they thought they did.
See More:
