Francis Cahigao / Photo: © FC Spartak
Let’s meet the new sporting director of the Red and Whites.
On Friday, Spartak announced the appointment of Francis Cahigao as the club’s new sporting director. The 55-year-old specialist is known for his work at Arsenal, and for the last year and a half he has held a leadership position at Galatasaray. With the arrival of the experienced Spaniard, we should expect serious personnel changes in the Moscow club.
Who is Cahigao?
The Spaniard with Japanese roots was born in London and studied at the Arsenal academy as a child. He failed to achieve great success as a player: at the age of 19 he ended up in the Barcelona youth team, then played a little for Racing, and after playing for semi-professional teams he decided to give up his football career due to a serious injury.
Francis quickly found himself in another field, becoming a scout for Arsenal, where he searched for players around the world for 23 years.
Cahigao’s successful deals include Cesc Fabregas, Mikel Arteta, Robin van Persie and many other famous players. Fabregas was transferred to London at the age of 16 with the direct participation of a novice scout. Under him, Andrei Arshavin also came to the team. True, according to the ex-Arsenal player himself, he did not meet with the Spaniard at the London club. The new sports director of Spartak has unique qualities as a negotiator, which is especially valuable in the current realities. Luring a star player to Russia has been extremely difficult lately.
Cahigao started at Arsenal from the very bottom, but very quickly gained the trust of Arsene Wenger and soon joined the club’s transfer council. The eminent French coach greatly valued the opinion of Francis, who has a special instinct for talent. Unlike richer Premier League clubs, Arsenal could not afford to waste money, so they had to act with surgical precision in transfer matters. As a result, Cahigao rose to the position of the club’s chief scout, which he left in the summer of 2020.
Next in the Spaniard’s career was the Chilean national team, in which he was already the sporting director. Cahigao worked in South America for about two years, after which he went to Turkey. At Galatasaray he received the position of head of the international relations and scouting department. Simply put, his responsibilities included searching for and negotiating with players from other championships. During the year and a half of work in Istanbul, he managed to bring many famous football players, including central defender Davinson Sanchez, who was actually intercepted from Spartak.
Galatasaray’s transfer budget over the past year and a half has been quite comparable to Spartak’s. The Turks spent 70 million euros during this period, Spartak – only six million less. In this sense, Cahigao will work in conditions already familiar to itself.
First tasks for a sports director
Spartak has changed sports directors too often in recent years. Cahigao’s predecessor also did not stay in his post: Tomas Amaral managed to work for less than a year. At the same time, the Portuguese was able to be remembered for two cool transfer hits: last winter he agreed with a European club on the transfer of Manfred Ugalde, and in the summer he made a lot of efforts to bring Ezequiel Barco from Argentina. The bar for Cahigao is set as high as possible after these cases.
Tomas Amaral / Photo: © Mikhail Zimin / Match TV
The first priority for the sports director will not even be the search for new stars, but clearing out the current roster. Spartak has accumulated too many players with good salaries that Stankovic does not need on its balance sheet. In the winter window, it will be necessary to find new teams for Willian Jose, Daniil Khlusevich, Anton Zinkovsky and several other players who are not included in the starting lineup. Getting rid of illiquid assets profitably is no less important a skill than signing new players.
Another problem for Cahigao could be the eternal Spartak story associated with the large number of bosses in the club. In a recent interview with Mais Futebol, Amaral directly pointed out the aspects that prevented him from working at Spartak:
“I felt resistance from outside people who tried to influence my decisions. There were difficulties that I could not control, but I had to respect the order of things at the club. I fought this as best I could. In the end, I had to choose: either resign or put up with the state of things,” Amaral noted.
His successor will likely face similar challenges. On the other hand, Cahigao worked for a year and a half in Turkish football, where the level of madness sometimes goes off scale.
You shouldn’t expect many transfers in winter
Dejan Stankovic / Photo: © RIA Novosti / Alexander Vilf
At the end of the first part of the season, Spartak achieved an impressive streak of six victories in a row. Stankovic managed to achieve a balance in the game, which the coach will need to maintain in the spring. In such a situation, the introduction of new players is a jeweler’s work, which Cahigao must remember. You shouldn’t expect an abundance of transfers in the winter: Spartak is doing well now even without them. There is no point in the club making more than one or two big transfers during the winter window.
“There shouldn’t be a strong rotation of the squad, but in the winter, of course, we will try to further strengthen the team,” said Spartak General Director Oleg Malyshev.
It is already possible to guess which positions Cahigao will look for reinforcements before the start of the spring part of the season. Spartak has no problems in the positions of goalkeeper (Maksimenko), central defenders (Duarte and Babich), defensive midfielder (Umyarov), attacking midfielder (Barko) and central striker (Ugalde). The main transfer target for the winter seems to be a high-quality flanker: Ryabchuk and Denisov clearly do not reach the top level. It would also be a good idea to strengthen the bench, and primarily the position of a reserve striker: now there is simply no high-quality alternative to Ugalda.
Cahigao’s ability to look for less obvious options and his authority in European football can bring a lot of benefits to Spartak. The main thing is that the club itself does not interfere with the work of the specialist whom the “red and whites” have been chasing for the last two months.
