'Tata' Martino admits his year on the Barcelona bench was a "failure"

Argentina manager and former Barcelona boss Gerardo ‘Tata’ Martino has confessed in an interview with the magazine ‘Panenka’ that his season at Camp Nou was a “complete failure”, not just for not winning a top level title, but for the way the team played. 

“My spell at Barça was a complete failure,” Tata admitted. “Normally a failure means not winning, but my vision is different. If Barça would have had a different profile, even though we wouldn’t have won the the title, it would not have been a failure. But we didn’t win it and on top of that we did not play well. That Liga would have a been a title that would not have brought anything to the club.” 

In addition, the Argentine manager revealed that his departure from Barça was decided months before the end of the 2013-14 season. “My decision to leave would not have changed, either. It wasn’t necessary to prolong something which had been dead for a while,” he added. 

In this sense, Martino says that the leap into the Barça job was too big. “If you don’t win and on top of that you’re foreign, you can’t hope to not receive any criticism. Even more so if you have no past with the club. I should have looked for my place in Europe in somewhere else. If a manager asked me for advice in a similar situation, I would tell them to pass through other clubs first,” he said. 

On Lionel Messi, Martino explains that he is the best in the world “because he does everything naturally, when he plays and when he trains,” both for the national team and for Barça. “At Barça he was the same, a quiet guy, who would only speak when necessary, but when he did speak, you took notice."

Comparing Messi and Diego Maradona, he continued: “They both win when it comes to dribbling, also in terms of vision, dead balls… as for leadership, maybe Diego had more of a role in the dressing room. It’s not that Messi doesn’t have that skill, but it doesn’t interest him. He wants to play football.”

Finally, Tata also admitted that if Argentina don’t qualify for the World Cup he “would have to commit suicide. It would be a failure, but what’s more, we have to win a title.”