The former Spartak coach has grown to the national team – Newspaper Kommersant No. 19 (7464) dated 02/02/2023

The new head coach of the Belgian national team will be the German coach Domenico Tedesco, well known in Russia for his work with Spartak. A young specialist whose short track record looks rather ambiguous and combines ups and downs, will have to accept the Belgian team in a difficult period of imminent generational change.

The fact that Domenico Tedesco will be officially appointed as head coach of the Belgian national team in the coming days has been reported by a number of sources, such as BildRTL, La Gazzetta dello Sport, The Brussels Times, Het Nieuwsblad. The latter claims that Tedesco’s competitors in the competition were his compatriot Joachim Löw, who led the German national team for a long time, as well as the famous French forward Thierry Henry in the past. Henry worked as an assistant to former Belgian coach Roberto Martinez, who retired after the end of the World Cup in Qatar in December and had already managed to become the coach of the Portuguese national team.

Martinez took charge of the Belgian national team in 2016, and in 2018, for the first time in its history, it climbed to the top spot in the International Football Federation (FIFA) ranking and kept it for quite a long time, demonstrating exceptional stability. However, having at his disposal a group of high-class players, who are commonly referred to as the “golden generation” of Belgian football – Kevin De Bruyne, Thibaut Courtois, Eden Hazard, Romelu Lukaku, Jan Vertonghen, Dries Mertens – Roberto Martinez never won a single one significant title. At the top tournaments, the Belgian team stumbled all the time on the outskirts of the final. And on the neighbors – only once, when at the 2018 World Cup in Russia she lost in the semifinals to the French, after which she took bronze, defeating the British. The next two top competitions were much worse for the Belgians. At the European Championships in 2021, they retired in the quarterfinals after a collision with the Italians, and in 2022 at the world championship in Qatar, they generally suffered a crushing failure. The aged “golden generation” was unable to overcome even the group round. On it, the Belgian team somehow, largely thanks to luck, managed only with Canadian outsiders, after which they were defeated by the Moroccans and then tied with the Croats, without scoring goals in these matches.

The Belgian Football Association (RBFA), looking for a successor to Roberto Martinez, has made a rather curious choice.

The young (he is only 37 years old) Domenico Tedesco has a very ambiguous track record. The national teams did not yet trust him, and there were only three high-level clubs in the German’s career, and one of them was Spartak Moscow. Tedesco accepted this team during another crisis in the fall of 2019, quickly won the love of fans with emotional behavior and openness, coupled with good results, and in the spring of 2021 he finished second in the Russian Championship, which was regarded as a great success. However, immediately after him, the German “Spartak” left, warning in advancethat during the coronavirus pandemic with its travel restrictions, he wants to return to his family in his homeland.

Before Spartak, Domenico Tedesco worked at Schalke 04. As a debutant in the elite echelon, he surprised everyone by immediately reaching the silver of the German championship in 2018. But already in March 2019, Tedesco was fired amid a massive downturn. Schalke could not win an official match for several weeks, and the patience of its managers snapped after losing a terrible 0-7 to Manchester City in the Champions League play-off.

After Spartak, history repeated itself in Leipzig. Domenico Tedesco, concluding a contract with him in December 2021, started well, winning the German Cup and reaching the semi-finals of the Europa League, but the continuation of the rise did not happen. On the contrary, the start of the next season at Leipzig came out disgusting, and already in September Tedesco was fired.

In the Belgian national team, meanwhile, he will have to solve a difficult task. The fact is that the position of her mentor went to him at the moment when large-scale personnel changes were ripe in the team.

The lion’s share of the Belgian participants in the World Cup are players over the age of 30 or under 30. Moreover, the careers of some former leaders – Eden Hazard, Jan Vertonghen, Toby Alderweireld, Romelu Lukaku, Dries Mertens – have clearly reached a sunset segment. The new “golden generation” in Belgium does not seem to have matured.

Alexey Dospekhov