Fully expected, at yesterday's meeting of the Executive Committee of the Bulgarian Football Union (BFU), the coach of the Bulgarian national team, Mladen Krstajić, was released from his post. Krstajić has failed to record a single win in charge of the Lions since the start of the year, and with tough games against Hungary and Serbia to come, it will come as no surprise that 2023 will be the worst year in the national team's history.
Although after the weak matches and results of the management of the BFU (in the figure of the technical director Georgi Ivanov - "Gonzo") it was regularly pointed out that Krstajić lays the foundations for future successes and it was for this purpose that he was appointed, yesterday Ivanov and the vice-president of the BFU Emil Kostadinov in practice admitted that the appointment of the Serb was a failure. "As soon as a foreigner has failed, we cannot think of appointing a foreigner and we have settled on Bulgarians," Gonzo stated, and Kostadinov added: "We find mistakes in us by appointing such coaches."
But wasn't this a foretold failure, a doomed experiment? First of all, the qualities of the coach should be taken into account. The biggest achievement on Krstajić's business card is that he led Serbia to the finals of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, where he also recorded a victory over Costa Rica. What is the reality? Krstajić took over Serbia in October 2017, when previous coach Slavoljub Muslin had already qualified the team for the World Cup. Krstajić failed to lead Serbia out of their group at the World Cup, good results in the Nations League followed, but after a poor start to the Euro 2020 qualifiers, the manager was let go.
His other two coaching appointments have been completely unremarkable - brief stints in charge of Hungary's TSC and Israel's Maccabi Tel Aviv before he got the chance to lead Bulgaria. The results show that in no case can it be said that Krstajić is a high-class coach. Then what is the purpose of his coming here? The practice is to appoint a foreign coach with a high reputation and class to head a strong team that lacks a little something to achieve serious success. In our national team, the task is completely different.
There is no way a foreign coach, who will spend one, at best two years in office, can be expected to build a team for future success. "We bring in foreign blood because we are looking for a way to somehow raise them, the desire, the motivation, although it is not serious when you come to the national team that you need someone to motivate you additionally," said BFS president Borislav Mihailov shortly after Krstajić's appointment. In fact, the bigger problem was Krstajić's motivation. After all the poor results, he never once seemed particularly disappointed, never once took personal responsibility and insisted that the results would come in years. Until the end, he did not even hint that he was thinking of resigning despite a streak of nine consecutive games without a win, of which six were lost.
Krstajić was expected to instill self-confidence in the Bulgarian football players, but he rather showed arrogance, and in the end even attacked the Bulgarian clubs and the native championship. This is the behavior of a man who knows he doesn't have long left in office, and how can such a man be expected to lay the foundations for future success?
The problems in Bulgarian football are serious and deep, and the coach of the national team is far from the biggest culprits. But the period of Krstajić at the head of Bulgaria was a lost time, and there are probably not many people surprised by this fact.
The hope now is that Bulgaria's next coach will actually get support and a broad horizon to build a good national team. If Ilian Iliev is indeed appointed, he has proven that when he gets time, he achieves results. He took over Black Sea at the end of 2017 and after nearly six years, the "sailors" are now in first place in the First League standings. If Iliev becomes Bulgaria's coach, no one will doubt that he is fully committed to the cause and will work with all his might - something that was missing from Mladen Krstajić. /BGNES
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Radoslav Petkashev, BGNES Sports Department
The doomed experiment with Mladen Krstajić at the helm of the Bulgarian national football team
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