“Pedro Martinez was the most successful coach in the history of Olympiakos, his departure completely disrupted the club,” says every journalist who covers this team. Antonis Oikonomidis, a senior Greek journalist, describes the constant situation at the club in the simplest possible way: “At Olympiakos, we live and die by the results. If we win, then the coach is perfect, the staff is perfect. If we don’t win, then everyone is bad and the coach leaves because in the middle of the season no one will replace all the players, so the one who pays the price is always the one on the lines.”
Indeed, since 2022 Olympiakos has been in a spiral from which it has not yet been able to get out. The Portuguese Pedro Martines, who was on the lines of the club from 2018, closed four full years in the position, during which he won the championship three times, once in the cup and amazingly became the coach with the highest number of games in the history of the magnificent club from Greece – 221 games.
He had 143 wins and a 64.7% success rate overall, with during his time the club reaching the last 32 of the Europa League once, the group stage of the Champions League twice, the round of 16 of the Europa League once, and the Europa League playoffs once more ( The new stage from which you advance to the eighth if you win, you are kicked out of the Champions League).
The success in Europe, the control of Greek football and the interesting style of the Portuguese were not enough for him at the beginning of the 2022/23 season and at the end of July of 2022 the first twist came courtesy of Barak Becher. The coach of Maccabi Haifa led her to the historic display against the Greeks in the Champions League qualifiers, the Portuguese went home and not long after found himself on the way to a very fat contract in Qatar. While the Qatari money well poured heaps of money into Martins, Olympiakos ran into a broken trough. A year and a half after he left, the club from Piraeus counts six different coaches on the lines.
It started with the Spanish Carlos Corbran who lasted 11 games and was fired, continued with Mitchell who returned for another term in Greece, but the veteran coach lasted only six months and was fired as well. The Frenchman Jose Año took the reins until the end of the season and did not justify the attempt. This summer Olympiakos appointed the Spanish Diego Martínez and after five months brought in his place the Portuguese Carlos Carvalel. The match that started at the beginning of December came to an end on February 12, when the Spanish Jose Luis Mandilivar replaced him on the lines.
Among all the coaches there is a recurring motif. “Spaniards”, some of them are really Spanish, the French Ennio was actually the sporting director of the team for a certain period and before that he coached small clubs in Greece, then three coaches from Spanish football came again when the Portuguese Carvalhal came after almost being relegated with Celta Vigo. His failure at Olympiakos was a big one and here we will just note in a small way that his name was on the lists of Maccabi Tel Aviv several times in the past and she was probably saved from an appointment that could have entered into her wave of bad appointments.
But this recurring motif, coaches coming from Spain, has haunted Olympiakos since 2022 and the choice of these coaches is puzzling. All of them arrived at the point of decline in their careers, Diego Martínez after he failed miserably at Espanyol, Carvalel as mentioned after he was almost relegated with Celta Vigo, Mendilivar did indeed win the Europa League with Sevilla, but started this season in a terrible way and relegated the magnificent club to the bottom of the table, let alone About Corbran even earlier and of course Mitchell who was already on the fringes of Spanish football and even in the second division districts.
This model is also familiar to us. Maccabi Tel Aviv has visited the Spanish first and second league quite a bit in recent years, looking to bring its coaches from there, the appointment of Aitor Karanka is the most similar to the appointments mentioned here in terms of Olympiakos. A coach on the decline, literally after being relegated and even fired while in the second league in Spain, a coach who plays In a style that does not suit a team that wants to take a championship and temple at any cost the desire to bring someone from a “big league”.
“The coaches are the easiest victims. The situation at Olympiakos is clear and simple. If we win, great. If not, then we say goodbye,” continues Antonis. This wave of Spanish coaches was almost interrupted by an Israeli. Olympiakos wanted Barak Becher, Krambo, who serves as a consultant to the owners, also spoke out on the matter and said that he wanted the Israeli after he left Maccabi Haifa, but the journalists in Greece claim that Becher’s salary demands were such that they did not want to meet them and that they felt that he would in any case prefer to go to Kochav Red Belgrade.
“Krambo said he likes Becher, they could have chosen him, he probably asked too much money for a coach who left his country for the first time in his career and it seems that this is the reason they gave up on him,” says Antonis, who does not rule out an appeal to Becher this summer. “Mandelivar has an option for another season and so far – everything is working, but what I told you before is the permanent situation. If there are good results he will continue, if the results suddenly stop being good – he will leave. You can’t estimate anything in this team. Where logic ends, there Olympiakos begins to take place.”
In Greece, they agree that this broken trough began against Maccabi Haifa, therefore the upcoming match against Maccabi Tel Aviv undoubtedly creates great pressure in the club and puts them on maximum alertness. “Pedro Martinesch was the greatest coach here, but he reached the limit, he should have left even before the 2022 season started and it didn’t happen, so the loss to Maccabi Haifa only accelerated a process that was supposed to happen before,” they say in Greece. “This relationship had to end, everyone agreed that the end was imminent and Maccabi Haifa simply gave the last knife in this closet.”
At the same time, everyone also agrees today, in retrospect, that along with him Martinesch also took the stability of the club. Olympiakos entered a whirlwind that also included a change of professional managers and was not able to get on a stable road at any point. “She suffers from endless bumps in the road, there is no stability, there is no clear path. She will eventually find her way because this is a huge club, you cannot ignore or neglect a club like this and therefore she will return to dominate the Greek league again soon, but she is in a very difficult year and a half “.
The DNA of Olympiakos is to change all the time. This happened throughout the years. Good players sell fast. And in general, the train of foreigners arriving at the club is an unusual event. This is one of the reasons for the instability. This is also a constant pressure cooker. “A player who arrives and doesn’t play properly in his first game can find him out of the team within a month. There are expectations from a different world here. A new player who arrives here does not take part in a pleasant event. There is unusual pressure and whoever does not survive it, collapses,” say the journalists close to the club .
Bottom line, after the big shock with the dismissal of Martines, Olympiakos continued the model it adopted more than 15 years ago, which is to bring in Spanish or Portuguese coaches, with a clear preference for the past in the Spanish league. It started with the great Ernesto Valverde, continued with Leonardo Jardim, Mitchell, Vitor Ferreira, Marco Silva, Paulo Bento, and even Oscar Garcia X Maccabi Tel arrived there for two obviously unsuccessful months.
So why is she stuck on a model that doesn’t necessarily work? Since 2008, when this model began to run with Valverde, the club has won 10 championships, which is of course not a low number, but in this country every season that ends without a championship for Olympiakos is an unusual sensation. When you consider that 3 of those 10 championships were by Martinez, 3 by Valverde and 2 by Mitchell (in his first term), then it’s pretty clear that the Spanish-Portuguese model has had more disappointments and quick dismissals than long-term successes.
“Olympiacos loves the coaches from there, this market, and the thinking is simple – they think that the Spanish league is the best in the world after the English one and for them, bringing a coach from the bottom of the Spanish league is the best they can bring now. This is their logic. Bringing coaches of a higher caliber to Greece is It’s not as easy as it was maybe ten or so years ago. Mandilivar, for example, is in the end the current holder of the Europa League, is it possible to get better than that now?” Antonis claims. “They trust the Spanish and Portuguese market, for them this is the top they can bring. Valverde can no longer be brought here. Olympiakos was a permanent member of the Champions League, now that is not the case. The whole climate of Greek football has changed since then, it is much more difficult to attract such names” .
Indeed, in 2008 bringing in someone like Valverde was a very serious stretch. Mitchell was also at the peak of his career at the time, and the Portuguese coaches like Silva and Bento were also names of serious caliber. But the market has changed, senior coaches who once left Spain for teams like Olympiakos with a rich past and a place in the Champions League, now find themselves in teams from the bottom of the Premier League and they have no problem with that. This is how Olympiacos, a team that wants to play attacking, 4-3-3, dominant football, has already appointed five coaches in a row who play 4-4-2.
Now go adapt it to modern football and what will you get? Lots of cranks. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have experienced this first hand. Is Mandilivar like that? It’s too early to say and certainly in Seville he showed that, unlike the “Cranks”, he does know how to play 4-3-3 and he does know how to initiate when needed, and indeed the results are better with him The big question is whether this is a honeymoon period or something that will last. For sure, the first serious test from the Greeks point of view for Mandilivar is the meeting against Maccabi Tel Aviv. If another Israeli team knocks them out of Europe, the turnaround could be big and very significant again.
“I agree that it is strange that they bring in coaches from the bottom of the Spanish league,” notes Yanis Horianopoulos, another Greek journalist. “But, in Greece they like the mentality of coaches from La Liga. Whoever won nothing in Spain can be a champion in Greece, that’s how they look at it here. Diego Martínez and Carlos Carvalhal were bad decisions and are now dealing with them, but Mandilivar, despite his experience up to Seville, was in places Like Eibar and Alaves, he is still a big name because he won the Europa League and his teams were always tactically good and stable.”
Above all these matches and the names that come to the team, from Spain and elsewhere, hovers the good relationship between the club’s owners, Evangelos Marinakis, and the super agent Jorge Mendes. “He is undoubtedly one of the most prominent agents when it comes to players who come to the club. The relations there are very good. But in general, Olympiakos has good relations with all the major agents on the continent,” Horianopoulos continues.
The situation today is of course different from what it was in the past. One of the most famous stories about Olympiakos, who accompanied her for many years in the past, is her control even within the country’s borders. She knew when her biggest rivals were landing foreign players, and knew to wait for them at the airports with a representative of the club and a lawyer to sign them right there, on the field. “It happened in the past, today it’s not the case,” says John Georgiopoulos of SDNA. “There are stories like this in the 1960s and 1970s. Once upon a time, Olympiakos also lost players to Panathinaikos like that. It became a revenge campaign and chasing after the big names.”
Bottom line, Olympiakos is a club that lives in constant madness. But when it erupts positively, this is a team that can fly up and achieve great things. And when it’s not? It’s always a glorious crash. The question is which side of history will Maccabi Tel Aviv be on. The answers will come soon.
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