Some interesting managerial moves recently.

A few weeks ago, Ernesto Valverde left Espanyol to take over Olympiakos. In the immediate aftermath of that move, Michael Laudrup of Getafe was supposed to have agreed terms with Panathinaikos, only for the deal to break down at the last minute (purportedly over a clause that would have allowed Laudrup to take a job with any "big" club from Spain while under contract).

Today, news has broken that Luis Aragones is going to manage Fenerbahce next year (replacing Zico), and that Zdenek Zeman is taking over Crvena Zvezda (aka Red Star Belgrade).

Is this just the latest manifestation of the trend that saw Nevio Scala in Dontesk, Walter Zenga in Bucharest and Alberto Malesani at Panathinaikos? Or are we seeing evidence of locally dominant clubs that have struggled in Europe using their cash piles to buy managers instead of players?

Did Ten Cate taking the Pana' job get mentioned on here or missed with the Euro 2008 excitement?

I missed it, but Kyiv is not a hotbed for footie news (after spending a couple of days there I have real doubts about Euro 2012, no matter how much juice the Surkis have).

Two Romania-related ones are that the previous Panathanaikos coach Jose Peseiro has taken over at Rapid, while the man they were really going after, Laszlo Boloni, has gone to Standard Liege.

Ruud Krol has taken over at Orlando Pirates.

QUOTE:
after spending a couple of days there I have real doubts about Euro 2012, no matter how much juice the Surkis have

Any more details on this (either your own impressions or linked stories)?

The Guardian has Ten Cate still talking to Blackburn , despite having agreed his deal with Pana he hasn't apparently signed it yet.

The infrastructure isn't even on the drawing board.

Kyiv Airport is an organisational shambles; traffic is impossible (+90 minutes to the centre from the airport); hotels are outrageously expensive (I paid over USD 500 a night for a completely standard room, and some of the people I was meeting with paid over USD 850 a night) and very difficult to find; the railway network appears to have seen no investment since the fall of the USSR; the centre is dotted with gutted, but abandoned Soviet era office buildings; and the vast majority of the roads outside of the major population centres aren't paved.

The stadia will be ready (I am such an anorak that I was genuinely moved by the site of the famous floodlights) and the VIPs will get flown around, but it is going to be a disaster for travelling supporters unless they start building infrastructure now.

hmmm that's interesting. i've been to Kiev exactly a year ago and was under the same impression. the locals were of a totally opposite opinion, they were taking it easy said no problem we'd be ready.

one funny thing was when i asked them about tender procedures (not Elvis tender but the way you choose the best offer when public money is involved) that it'd take time all appeals etc it's the biggest problem in Poland where they finally started doing something (stadiums, roads etc). don't know maybe it was a language barrier but possibly not as our languages are quite similar but there seemed to be no such word as tender in ukrainian. when asked how they would do it they said governor of each province would come soviet style and say this and this must be fixed by then or else.

however been recently to Vienna for Austria v Poland i think that at least some polish cities would be ready pretty soon. speaking of road infrastructure: it took us about 2 hours from Czech-Austrian border to Vienna - it's sth like 70 kms. it was only one lane each side (a 2-lane motorway on the czech side from Brno) the road seemed to never go past small villages (beatiful i must admit) and the Vienna outskirts were so crowded it was unbelievable. oh and there were road works everywhere. it seemed like they didn't make it on time.

so all in all i'm not buying any stories about EURO 2012 being taken away from us after this trip.

I wouldn't worry about losing the tournament, bob: the fact that UEFA have chosen Scotland* as their stick-to-beat-the-Ukrainian-government-with means you're quite safe.

If the Ukrainians don't hold up their end of the bargain, would a Polska/Cesky co-hosting arrangement be feasible at all?

*see various threads passim about UEFA's dishonesty during the Euro 2008 bidding process.

blameless wrote:

QUOTE:
If the Ukrainians don't hold up their end of the bargain, would a Polska/Cesky co-hosting arrangement be feasible at all?

Not a hope in hell. The Czechs don't have the stadia.

Their national venue, the old Letna (now the AXA Arena), holds about 21,000. Slavia's ground has a similar capacity, while the ones in Teplice and Ostrava can take 18,000 and 17,000.

There's the vast Velky Strahovsky in Prague, which can seat 220,000, but that place is only used for Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones concerts these days.

I thought that they were proposing Germany as a co-host with Poland if the Ukraine weren't ready in time?

I haven't heard that one Ding Dong (and welcome to otf), but there are so many rumours floating about that anything is possible. It would certainly work geographically, though I can only imagine what the Polish tabloids would have to say about such an idea.

bob, I was also assured that everything would be ready, but short of mass conscription, I don't see how it is going to happen. One also has to keep in mind that the country is in a state of political deadlock, with everyone jockeying for position with respect to presidential elections that won't happen until 2010.

this is a pretty new one about Poland/Germany co-hosting. science fiction i tell you.

i'm pretty worried about our ukrainian friends too. not that worried about us like i said. they even opened sth like 30kms of (paid) motorway from Gdansk down south. woo hoo! they plan to connect north and south by motorway by 2011.

I have no worries about Poland, and significant concerns about Ukraine. Poland/Austria could work (the distances are much shorter than those between Western Poland and Eastern Ukraine), but I doubt that UEFA would be willing to go with non-contiguous countries.

UA: Oddly when I went to Kyiv a couple of years ago (posts written between Oct 6th and 11th here), I was pretty impressed with the infrastructure and the level of development of the city. The two and a half years of political stalemate must have seriously set the place back. (Plus of course we have different points of reference - I was mentally comparing it with Bucharest, you may have been comparing it with Milan)

A, thanks for pointing me to those posts, which I hadn't seen before.

I don't think that I was comparing Kyiv to Milan as much as I was thinking about how well it could serve as one of the major centres for the European Championships; I was also very much struck by the quality of the infrastructure outside of Kyiv (or its complete absence).

I also visited Kyiv in 1983 (when it was miles ahead of Bucharest), and didn't find that all that much had improved for the better (there is tons of new construction outside of the centre, and a new road to the Dnipro from the airport, but not a great deal else). I am also certain that traffic has gotten significantly worse since your visit, while the Metro does not seem to have been extended since the Soviet period (it doesn't go to the airport, for instance).

And FWIW, sex tourism doesn't seem to be as big an issue anymore. There are, however, a lot of "biznyesmen" of all kinds and their entourages running around the ridiculously expensive hotels and a general sense that a privileged few are making shedloads of money.