Roberto Martinez rode into Everton on the back of a majestic white horse. He’d won the FA Cup with Wigan Athletic, an historically tiny team from a town that cared more about rugby. He did it while getting his team to play a passing style, not the hoof-and-chase commonly associated with small-budget clubs. In his first season, he exceeded expectations, guiding the Toffees to fifth place. He spent the following summer giving the most insightful analysis anyone has ever heard on television during the 2014 World Cup.
Roberto Martinez was Everton’s savior until he was an incompetent moron
Maybe Martinez was never great, and he was never awful. We just didn’t have enough information to evaluate him.
Stu Forster/Getty Images
Then his teams were very bad for two years, and now he’s unemployed.
This media and fan darling, branded as a young Arsene Wenger for a new era, appears to be an average manager. He looked like the perfect hire for an Everton team whose fan base was clamoring for something more stylish than what David Moyes offered, but with similar results. But now he’s failed, looking like an idiot in the process, and his downfall shows us how little we know about managers.
Following Martinez's big breakthrough season, the Toffees put together a summer that made it look like they were destined for big things. No important players left while loanees Romelu Lukaku and Gareth Barry signed up permanently. Breakthrough young World Cup star Muhamed Besic was signed. Samuel Eto'o looked like a great pickup on a free transfer. And then, through some combination of injuries, bad luck, Lukaku's poor form and the Europa League grind, they failed to put it together. Everton finished 11th, but Martinez got the benefit of the doubt.
The Toffees had another decent-looking transfer window this summer. Despite a long saga, heralded prospect John Stones stuck around. Tom Cleverley and Gerard Deulofeu signed. Oumar Niasse looked like a very solid pickup. But nothing changed; they were the same team as the year before. A fun attack, but a broken midfield, broken defense and poor goalkeeper play. Lukaku and Ross Barkley played better, but they're bottom half anyway.
How did this happen to a manager who was so universally regarded as a great hire?
Martinez arrived at Everton having not just guided Wigan to an improbable FA Cup victory, but having kept arguably the worst squad in the Premier League out of the drop zone for multiple seasons. Before that, he guided Swansea to promotion from the third to the second tier and laid the groundwork for them to become the Premier League club they are today.
Both of those teams played a style of soccer that was widely thought of as stylish despite having poor players relative to their competition, so he should be great when he got some real talent to work with at a club like Everton, the logic followed. But as it turns out, the market inefficiencies he exploited and strategies he used to keep Wigan up and win an FA Cup don’t make a lot of sense for Everton.
In the book The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong by Chris Anderson and David Sally, Martinez is praised for his unorthodox approach with Wigan. Instead of trying to create quality shots, he signed players who were great long shooters. This way, they could create scoring opportunities without players getting out of defensive position -- even if those are low-quality chances.
He had his team lie in wait for their opponents and then punish them on the counterattack. He employed sharpshooters, to let fly from distance, and snipers, to hit free kicks. His team was adaptable, unpredictable. With his neat sweaters and kind smile, Martínez looks a decent man. Underneath that veneer, though, beats the heart and mind of a natural insurgent, now headquartered at Goodison Park.
On multiple occasions, Martinez’s Wigan led the league in shots from outside the box while finishing last in goals from inside the box. During Martinez’s entire tenure with the Latics, Wigan had the fourth-highest percentage of shots from outside the box of all teams that played in the Premier League. Only one team had a lower percentage of shots from the Danger Zone, the close-range central part of the penalty area.
Wigan didn’t play “stylish” soccer at all, they just didn’t play like Tony Pulis’ widely hated Stoke City side and other small-budget teams. They minimized risk. Their high passing volume and passing percentage were defensive tactics, not attacking ones. This is a reasonable strategy when your goal is merely to stay in the Premier League, but not when you’re aspiring to be in the top half and make an occasional top-four challenge. If that’s the goal, keeping shape and letting rip from long range isn’t going to do you any good.
Martinez had to change his tactics to suit Everton's ambitions, and he didn't do it particularly well. His midfield and defense were regularly out of shape, and they leaked tons of goals.
And that brings us to another part of Martinez’s supposed modern philosophy. Here’s The Numbers Game again.
Before a match, [Martinez’s assistants] will examine at least five of the opposition’s previous games, compiling scouting reports and combining them with Prozone’s data. Using these data and video, they look at style, approach, strengths, weaknesses, positional organization, and the follies and foibles of their players. All of that is boiled down and presented to Martínez, who summarizes further and delivers the assessment to his squad.
This doesn't sound like the Martinez we watched on a weekly basis at all. Would the man described above repeatedly play Lukaku and Barkley in wide positions, despite all evidence that it didn't get the best out of them? Would that man play flimsy, wide-open midfields that gave no cover to his inexperienced defense, therefore exposing his [old/bad] goalkeeper [Tim Howard/Joel Robles]? Did he just not see Barry getting bypassed repeatedly, or did he see it but have no solution to the problem?
And as it turns out, it’s very easy for a manager to sound intelligent when everything’s going great, but much harder when their team is out of form. Once things started going south, he looked like a guy calmly telling everyone “This is fine” from a burning building.
Martinez’s greatest hits are something to behold. He’s called nine Everton players “phenomenal,” as well as the rapidly deteriorating Wayne Rooney. We’ll give him a pass for saying that Pep Guardiola is phenomenal, but not for saying that Stones put in a transfer request on accident.
Then there’s what he had to say about Cleverley, a notably average player whose teams appear to become more unsuccessful the more minutes he plays. “I think you do not have a better English player,” he said about the central midfielder. “Technically, he is as good as you get. The way he executes, how he reads the game, for me he is one of the most sensational you are going to see in Premier League history. I wouldn’t sell him for any money in the current market.”
All of this isn’t to pile on Martinez and show that he’s an idiot, but to make the point that there is no black and white with managers. Martinez did a lot of smart things at Swansea and Wigan, and then he did some smart things at Everton, but he did more bad things than good things over his final two seasons and deserved to get fired. He is not grossly incompetent, nor is he an infallible savior.
It’s highly unlikely that Martinez got progressively dumber over the past three years. It’s just that management gets really hard when results stop going your way. He’d never had to deal with reassuring supporters that his team could compete with the league’s elite, or keeping morale high in a locker room full of players that expected to challenge for Europe.
And all the stuff we read about video analysis? We didn’t know how he was actually analyzing the video. All the gushing about Wigan’s style of play? We didn’t give enough critical thought to how that would translate to Everton. And all the while, we never saw what he did in training. We don’t know how he gave team talks.
Roberto Martinez, this media darling who fans of bigger clubs wanted to be their manager, was bad at his job for two years. We don’t know exactly where it all went wrong, or if he was ever well-suited to be Everton manager in the first place. There’s just so much we don’t know, and can’t ever know. Maybe we should reconsider the hefty praise or blame we shower on managers?
See More:
