Benito Floro is the Schrödinger’s cat of Canadian soccer — he simultaneously is and is not the manager of the men’s national team.
While that famous thought experiment is about multiple, paradoxical realities, there’s only one reality of significance to Canadian soccer fans at the moment: The team will not reach the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
The status of its erstwhile manager, however, remains somewhat in limbo. There has been no official word from the Canadian Soccer Association about the Spaniard’s situation, though Floro did give some insight during an interview last month.
“My contract is until, mathematically, there is no option to continue to go ahead to [the] Hexagonal, or Russia [2018],” he said at the time.
On Tuesday night, when no mathematical option for advancement remained, Floro was twice asked about his status with the team, but declined to clarify.
“This is not the moment to talk about that,” he said at the post-game press conference.
While the possibility remains that Floro could be offered a new contract, the safer bet might be to assume that the radioactive decay of the team’s qualifying campaign has, in fact, killed his cat — or rather, his job. (This analogy would be even more perfect had Mark Geiger officiated Canada’s final game, but oh well.)
If so, then it’s time to take a look at Floro’s three-plus years in charge, and what it’s meant for the Canadian program.
Now, it’s hardly controversial to suggest that when it comes to the most visible elements of a manager’s role — roster selections, tactical choices and in-game substitutions — Floro’s decisions could be baffling.
On more than one occasion, when Canada was in dire need of a goal, Floro’s final kick at the substitution can was a defensive player. While quirkily counterintuitive in isolation, the moves were symbolic of the most frequent criticism leveled at the 64-year-old: that his defensively minded tactics were too rigid and didn’t give the team the best chance at winning.
The fact that the team was often boring to watch didn’t help much either.
It helped foster a perception that Floro was old-fashioned and stubborn. That perception was further fueled by his year-long exclusion of Whitecaps midfielder Russell Teibert for vaguely defined off-field matters, and his similar year-long exclusion of Toronto FC midfielder Jonathan Osorio for, ostensibly, tactical reasons.
The odd exclusion of Will Johnson for these last two qualifiers was the final straw for many. While each situation was unique, the three together painted a picture of a manager who was letting his ego get in the way of the team’s World Cup chances.
For what it’s worth, none of those three players have publicly spoken ill of Floro. Among those who have shared thoughts, however, a running theme has emerged.
“He’s amazing. He’s taught me so many things,” youngster Jordan Hamiltonsaid in 2014.
“He has us believing in ourselves as well, and believing in him,” long-time veteran Julian de Guzman said earlier this year.
“He’s showed me a side of the game that I’d never really seen before. He’s a special guy,” Tosaint Rickettssaid just a few weeks ago.
Yes, it’s expected that professional athletes will speak fondly of their manager when interacting with the media. But if Floro was indeed the obstinate taskmaster he was made out to be, if his methods were so out-of-date, if Canada’s chances under his direction were so slim — why did new players keep jumping on board?
Why did Junior Hoilett, after a decade, suddenly decide to pick up the phone from Canada? Why did Scott Arfield, a Premier Leaguer who hadn’t even been to Canada before arriving for a World Cup qualifier this year, go through the process of declaring for this country?
(The answer on Arfield comes down, at least partially, to ex-Burnley teammate David Edgar, who raved about the national-team setup. Why would Edgar do that, if things were so bad?)
How about Tesho Akindele, and Steven Vitoria, and Fraser Aird, all of whom (like the two listed above) became cap-tied to Canada during Floro’s tenure?
It’d be disingenuous to suggest Floro’s presence was the only factor behind those developments. It’d be equally disingenuous to suggest they all happened, within an 18-month span, completely in spite of the manager.
Whatever becomes of Floro, the introduction of those players — as well as youngsters like Michael Petrasso, Sam Adekugbe and Manjrekar James — will continue to pay dividends for the team in the years to come.
And whatever becomes of Floro, the door has now been reopened for Canadians to look beyond these shores to find a national-team manager.
That’s not to say that the next manager must (or even should) be from abroad. But the only responsible move for a federation looking to have top-level success is to name the person most qualified for the job, not simply a person whose “time has come.”
Whoever that person ends up being, they’ll need to deal with the same impediments faced by Floro and his predecessors: A shallow player pool in which national-team starters routinely find themselves out of club, and a soccer culture just now finding its firm footing after years of internal squabbling and external neglect.
Floro wasn’t blameless in the team’s outcome in this campaign. But the blame doesn’t entirely fall at his feet, either.
After all, he isn’t the one who let player development efforts stagnate for a generation due to parochial concerns. He isn’t the one who left the country without a domestic professional league. And he isn’t the one who missed multiple goal-scoring opportunities right in front of the net.
Ultimately, however, the results on the field are the main metric by which a manager’s tenure can be evaluated. If this is the end of the road for Floro, it should come as little surprise.
So sure, shout “fire Floro!” from the rooftops, if it makes you feel good. But if that level of passion doesn’t translate into fixing the underlying problems that have hamstrung national-team managers for decades, it should also come as little surprise if, four years from now, we’re having this exact same discussion about whoever takes Floro’s place.
