A Perpetual Cycle of Mediocrity

A Perpetual Cycle of Mediocrity

By Antonios Theodosis

I am starting to sound like a broken record in that it seems like every six months to a year I find myself agitated, sat scratching my head, and just embarrassed at what is going on with this team. Around this time last year I wrote my first ever blog for HellasFooty highlighting the fall of a once powerful giant in Greek football. Shortly after that, by only a few months I wrote about the lackluster playoff campaign that saw the club taste some heavy defeats from rivals Olympiakos and AEK.

 

Last year though I was looking at things from a more glass half full perspective, I was upset with the treatment of Giorgos Donis, but I opted to highlight some of the positives that we were expecting to see with a brand new coach and overhauled squad. The new season came and with it the positive expectations I had quickly faltered as it was evidently clear that the newly appointed coach was in way over his head. To make matters even worse it appeared that the signings brought in the summer were not as good as what I had anticipated them to be either. It seemed as if the season was already lost in the first five games of the season with the way the team was playing, lacking an identity, and seemingly having no purpose out there on the pitch.

 

The club brought in a new coach after quickly sacking the last one only a handful of games into the season, they brought in Laszlo Boloni who came with a decent resume, lots of experience, and could help stabilize this slowly sinking ship. In the first few months it appeared that this appointment was working out great as slowly the team without an identity began to gain some traction after finding itself by adopting a playstyle which heavily emphasized playing as one solid defensive unit.

 

That all seemed great in those first few months as stated, the team went on a nice win streak to start the new year which included a big win against eternal rivals Olympiakos, but after that match the ship started to hit a stormy sea and lose its stability. The team went on to lose to Pas Giannina not once, not twice, but three times getting outplayed in each and every one of those matches. They also got completely embarrassed by a Panaitolikos side who have struggled immensely throughout the season. Since the start of the playoffs they have given up leads in four matches against Asteras Tripolis, Olympiakos, Aris this past weekend, and most recently today against AEK. In all four of these matches Panathinaikos struck first to take the lead and in all four matches they gave up the lead to either draw or lose. Some of the blame can be put on the players, but it also has to fall on the coach as well. To sit back and play this defensive style against Giannina, Panaitolikos, Asteras Tripolis, and even Aris, and AEK whose defensive lines aren't the strongest leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

 

This is Panathinaikos, this is one of the best teams in the history of Greek football and yet PAS Giannina and Asteras Tripolis who have budgets that are much smaller than Panathinaikos’ are stringing in performances that are more entertaining and daring. It is ok to play a strong defensive style in a big derby match, but to play like this against every team in the league is just not acceptable. The appointment of Boloni is looking more like a stop-leak type of fix and now the water has finally broken through the temporary fix and the ship is sinking deeper and deeper.

 

Which leads me to what will most likely happen yet again. Boloni will likely be sacked either tomorrow or at the end of the playoffs, the club will then start from square one for what will essentially be the fifth or sixth time in less than a decade, and we will likely be here again this time next year.

 

There is no sense of solid direction at the club. The president has done his job in lowering the debt, I completely tip my hat to him for that, but he needs to either stop making the footballing decisions himself, or appoint someone who cares for the club and knows how the game works. I don't see the infatuation with hiring foreign technical directors and coaches at every given opportunity, especially when it comes to the budget the club has, which usually won't attract good quality in these positions. Why not promote people like Basinas, Karagounis, or even the “ninja” in these sporting director positions who were around during some of the club’s best years, and played the game themselves. They know the ins and outs of Greek football already and know what the club represents.

 

And this leads me to yet another point, there is no sense of a culture with the current set up of the club. With the fans there surely is a culture, but in terms of the club having an established identity in terms of playstyle and what it aims for there is nothing there. You look at clubs like Athletic Bilbao who have an established culture in how they run their footballing operations in regards to the players they sign, the formation they use, and the style of play they go with week in and week out. At Panathinaikos there isn’t any of that. Every year it is as if we are in a new project and are told to have patience because “this is the model that will finally get us back right?” Not really.

 

Every single season we sit here with our hands in our pockets and complain and shout about what has gone wrong which may seem like an overreaction, but when you have been witnessing the perpetual state of mediocrity for over ten years now no rival fan can truly understand or see the problems we as Panathinaikos fans have been seeing for so long. I won't be writing some positive piece going into the new season this year. I have had enough. The saying goes fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me, well at this point I have been fooled about four, five, maybe six times?

 

I will just keep my expectations realistic. We will likely miss European qualification and you know what? We don't even deserve it after what happened with Donis last year. Nor do we deserve it with the way we have been playing after the Olympiakos derby in February. The new flavor of the month coach will be appointed and we will have a new hot trend of signing players from Belgium or Holland this summer after the Spanish and French models failed this season.

 

My question is why not have a Greek model? It has worked historically for the club even up to modern times in 2014, which saw several Greek players from the academy have a stab at the starting eleven along with a Greek coach and that was the best Panathinaikos side I have seen in the last ten years. Ever since then it has been a revolving door of new hot projects from Italy, to Spain, to France, to Portugal each one resulting in the same failures.

 

I love the club and will forever support it through these troubling times, but it truly is upsetting that year after year it is the same end result, we wind up back at square one because we never learn from our mistakes. I just want a team that is passionate and competitive. I want to see my team fight week in and week out for the league title, cup, and in Europe, but it's looking like that wont happen for a very long time.

 

To my fellow Panathinaikos fans, only you can truly understand what I mean. I pray that I am absolutely wrong, but history tells me that nothing will change for us until we move to a new stadium and eventually have a new owner or more competent people at the current one’s side who can help guide him in the right direction for the club’s sake.

Hellas Football 

Follow @antoniostheo on Instagram