TATA Martino- 7 things you should know
1) A move to Barcelona wouldn't be Tata's first spell in Europe and, indeed, his brief adventure on that very continent as a player included a trip to the Camp Nou. Way back on the 2 March, 1991, Tata was handed his Tenerife debut on Barcelona soil and, in a strange coincidence, at the other end of the pitch in the FCB goal was Andoni Zubizarreta, the very man who will now hire him as Barcelona coach. The game wasn't a classic, ending 1-0 to Barca thanks to a penalty from Bulgarian star Hristo Stoichkov.
2) Tata's Barcelona links don't stop there. The last team the Argentine played for in his career was Barcelona, but not the Catalan one. In 1996 he played briefly for Barcelona de Guayaquil in Ecuador, before retiring from the game.
3) Several of the Barca players will remember Tata well from his spell as a Paraguay boss. The coach led the South American side in an unlikely run to the 2010 World Cup quarter-finals, before they were defeated 1-0 by Spain in Johannesburg. The game was fiercely contested and Paraguay had a chance to score before Spain, seeing a penalty saved by Iker Casillas, before David Villa eventually settled the clash with the only goal of the game in the 83rd minute.
4) Tata is a 'pupil' of Marcelo Bielsa, who most recently spent time at Athletic Bilbao, leading them to Copa del Rey and Europa League finals in 2012. Martino was a key payer in Bielsa's Newell's side of the early 1990s and his own style is said to have taken much from his former master. That is particularly appropriate, as the contemporary Barcelona side also owes much to Bielsa's methods. Pep Guardiola famously made a trip to Argentina to learn from Bielsa prior to his first steps as a manager, and it is El Loco's frantic pressing game that Guardiola used to revolutionise Barcelona's football.
5) In an excellent article on Tata from 2012, Euan Marshall looked at the manager's style at Newell's. Clear similarities between his methods and those that have worked well at Barcelona in recent years jump out from the page. Notably, the concept of 'attacking as one, defending as one' that was enforced by Pep Guardiola is also shared by Tata, while Verticalidad, literally verticalness in English, or the idea of moving the ball quickly from back to front, was a key pillar of Tito Vilanova's league-winning FCB outfit. The idea of always having three passing options for the player in possession is also hugely important to Barca's football.
6) Martino has eulogised Barcelona in the past, saying he "identifies" with their style, and that they have an "ability to keep the ball in tight spaces that few teams can match". He also noted that he didn't like the "unjustified" criticisms of the team in recent years, so by the sounds of things, he ticks all the right boxes for getting the Barca supporters on side.
7) As for how the man himself defines his football, Tata has noted in the past that he expects his teams to be "protagonists, who don't wait [around], who are aggressive in recovering the ball and getting it forward well. There isn't room for speculation." It's easy to see how that would fit well at the Camp Nou.
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