Moscow “Torpedo” has announced the appointment of a new head coach. They became Pep Clotet – a Spanish specialist with experience in leading European championships. He has a difficult task ahead: Torpedo is firmly in last place in the RPL and is in danger of falling in the class in the near future.

The main question is: can you trust the new coach of “black and white”? Pep has skeletons in his closet!

Didn’t play professionally

Josep Clotet Ruiz was born on April 28, 1977 in Igualada, a small town near Barcelona. The football aura of Catalonia attracted him from an early age, but Pep did not become a professional player, limiting himself to playing for the amateur Igualada. At the age of 20, Clotet was injured, after which he changed his T-shirt for a jacket and began to train children. Gradually switched to working with adults and at the age of 26 received the appropriate license.

For a long time, Josep was out of sight of cool clubs. With all due respect to Cornelius, Figueres, Viking, Malmö and Halmstad, work in them cannot be called a mega success. Unless Espanyol can be considered a good option, but even there the coach was not in the first roles, mainly responsible for the youth.

Castling as a betrayal

Clotet’s career took a dramatic turn in 2013 when he left for Wales and joined the Swansea coaching staff. There he quickly found a common language with the then mentor of the Swans, Harry Monk. The fans hoped that the coaching duo would lead Swansea to high places, and their expectations were even justified: at the end of the 2014/2015 season, the Welsh became eighth in the Premier League. Excellent result!

Harry Monk and Pep Clotet / Photo: © Mike Egerton – EMPICS / Contributor / PA Images / Gettyimages.ru

However, the relationship between Monk and Clotet cracked – though not at Swansea, but already at Birmingham, where the tandem worked in 2018-2019. Harry was sacked due to disagreements with management over the club’s “football philosophy” and went to Sheffield Wednesday. And Pep took, in fact, the “living” place of his teacher. Against this background, a scandal occurred. Before the head-to-head meeting of the coaches in the Championship, Monk erupted into an angry tirade in the press. Harry, it seems, quite reasonably considered the coaching reshuffle at Birmingham as a betrayal on the part of his protégé.

– This is a personal situation with a person in whom I invested a hell of a lot of emotions and time and considered my friend. But he decided to do things differently, and in the worst possible way. This hurts deeply. I’m not going to pretend or invent something – it’s not for me. If you don’t respect me, why should I respect you? That’s why I didn’t shake his hand,” Birmingham Live quoted Monk as saying.

Before the game, Monk refused to shake Clotet’s hand, defiantly turning his back on the Spaniard. Pep himself tried to speak conciliatoryly after the match.

– That’s his right. He asked him why he said that, and held out his hand to him. What I like about English football is that manners are observed in spite of everything: rivalry, problems in the game … We are coaches, and when I extend my hand, I extend it not only on my own behalf, but also on behalf of Birmingham, ”quotes the words Clotet Wales Online.

The meeting ended with the score 1:1.

Pep Clotet and Harry Monk / Photo: © George Wood / Stringer / Getty Images Sport / Gettyimages.ru

Left Brescia twice

However, Clotet did not last long in England. After leaving the club in 2020, he went to Italy, where he worked at Brescia and SPAL. Pep did not achieve much success, but there were enough curiosities. For example, Brescia fired him in December 2022, returned him back three weeks later (!) and dismissed him again at the end of February 2023. Leaving the same club twice in a short time is a must!

And now Torpedo has appeared on the coach’s track record – a clear outsider of the RPL. It is not yet clear how Clotet will help Muscovites. There is very little time to correct the situation. The track record of the specialist is not impressive, and the story with Monk does not look pretty at all. Russian football has often dealt with unreliable foreigners lately. So why take the risk again?

***

Watch live broadcasts of RPL matches on the Match TV channel and the thematic channels of the holding, as well as on matchtv.ru and sportbox.ru websites.

Dmitry Panov