Almeida is exactly what AEK is not used to

A coach far from the trivialities of recent years, a man with a personality that demands respect – and demands. The one he himself generously offers to anyone as long as they don’t realize that strange conspiracies are emerging around them. Matias Almeida is certainly not the coach that the “AEK organization” is used to. He won’t do what other people tell him, and that’s not just to do with the purely footballing aspect.

He came to Greece after many studies. It’s his first time coaching in Europe and he hasn’t come here to fail or stubbornly rack his brains. I mention this because a lot of people already think they are taking a big risk with the layout they choose.

Maybe yes, maybe some method will turn out to be ineffective, which will cost him in the future. However, it is selected by him through an approximation of dozens of dates, not compogianically or epistemologically. Not because he’s the guy who came over to “show me how”.

He sees her, hears her, weighs her, is informed about everything. He knows what is said and written, he does not live in a microcosm, on the contrary, he seeks to find out what is being discussed about his work.

Because as a human he is perfectly balanced and this situation is not strong enough to confuse him. He wants to know, he cares about the atmosphere around him, he makes sure people know why he’s doing what he’s doing.

At one of the most introverted clubs, like AEK in recent years, Almeida came to turn things around. To open the training courses for reporters and to seek contact with them so that they can observe his work and also discuss it with him before jumping to conclusions.

Exceptional personality

Some things may seem obvious to our eyes, but they may not be. He tells us: “Here I am, look and ask me”. I take it as an attempt on his part not to leave anything up in the air, which causes irritation in the team. Because he controls it himself, it doesn’t apply to everyone and especially the much more affected players.

Nobody in the past had dared to take such a step. Either because they didn’t have the guts to ask something like this from the team, or because they didn’t have the personality to “pass it through” when the mood was negative. Here Almeida overcomes these outdated and entrenched situations and makes decisions without requiring special permission.

He’s got the personality to push it through and he’s doing it because he thinks he’ll be helped that way too, but primarily AEK. He wants eyes that understand and don’t speculate.

After all, previous statements of his choosing to “break into” the Spata Shrine – even once a week at first, although he would like to do it longer, maybe not in the future – showed a different route than his predecessors of the position they had taken.

He did not hide that he experienced an unprecedented and difficult situation with many people around the President when he was used to daily direct contact with the owners of the previous teams with whom he had worked. Someone else would keep it inside. Not Almeida…

I take all of that to conclude: AEK has a coach who is trying to manage two different situations at the same time: creating a team that is competing for the championship while at the same time struggling with his job between sadness and utter obsolescence balancing as a weapon and the perfect interpretation of his decisions whether they take place or not. Difficult things for Greece, but of rare interest to those who follow him closely.