Messi Request Claims Increase Gallardo Buzz As Waters Muddied Over Valverde FC Barcelona Replacement – Forbes

In light of poor performances despite his team leading both La Liga and their Champions League Group F, speculation has increased in recent weeks that FC Barcelona coach Ernesto Valverde is likely to be replaced at the end of the 2019/2020 season.

Ronald Koeman, a club legend for scoring a UCL-winning free kick in 1992 as part of Johan Cruyff’s Dream Team, is a leading candidate. On the same weekend when they fell 3-1 at Levante, confessions were made that the 56-year-old has a ‘ Barça-only’ clause in his contract that will allow him to leave his post as Holland national team leader after Euro 2020 should Camp Nou top brass come calling.

There is also River Plate’s Marcelo Gallardo, however. On the verge of winning his third Libertadores crown for the Buenos Aires giants, buzz around his name as a potential successor to Valverde gained heat in Catalonia and Argentina yesterday while continuing into Thursday afternoon.

In September, it was revealed that Lionel Messi voted for El Muñeco (’The Doll’), as one of the top coaches in soccer. And this week, quotes picked up by Olé in their shared homeland have revebrerated around the world alongside suggestions that the Ballon d’Or hopeful has personally made a request for his compatriot to take the hot seat.

When Ricardo Caruso Lombardi, a Super Liga colleague currently leading San Martín Tucumán told the daily newspaper that Gallardo ‘could go to Barcelona in tranquility’, these comments were put together with those made by TV El Chiringuito presenter Josep Pedrerol – that Gallardo was the coach ‘most liked by Messi’ – to insist that the switch across the Atlantic was pretty much a done deal.

Doing its own detective work, though, one of Olé’s Catalan counterparts SPORT has stated since that ‘Barça has not contacted either Gallardo or anyone in his environment, because at the moment [the club] does not contemplate any alternative to the continuity of Ernesto Valverde.’

To TyC – a leading media outlet in the soccer-fanatic South American nation – River’s Sporting Director Enzo Francescoli, who is also a close personal friend of Gallardo’s, admitted that he was ‘glad that Barcelona is watching [Gallardo] because of the importance of that club’, yet insisted that ‘there is nothing about a possible hiring’.

‘I know what everyone is reading and I’m glad for the size of the club that is watching him, but nothing [of this] is true,’ Francescoli expanded. ‘Every year Gallardo makes an evaluation in December and then makes the decision to continue, but that is very personal of him and his work group. That’s why you have to let things happen [naturally],’ he demanded.

As for Messi’s supposed personal earmarking, SPORT also contacted those close to the number 10, who then denied that Messi has suggested any name at all to take over the reins. ‘As we’ve already said,’ it was written, ‘Leo has not asked for any coach, not even Tata Martino, which, as it turned out, was a hiring piloted personally by the then-president Sandro Rosell.’

If Valverde cannot steady the ship following the mentioned humbling defeat at Levante and a 0-0 stalemate against Slavia Prague on Tuesday, expect this speculation only to grow further in the coming weeks and, as SPORT indicates, the list of successors to be ‘thickened even more’ beyond Gallardo and Koeman.  

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