Andre Villas-Boas closes in on return to football with Marseille Andre Villas-Boas is close to making a return to football as the coach of Marseille. Talks are understood to have taken place with the French club’s director of football Andoni Zubizarreta who is looking for a successor to Rudi Garcia. It was announced earlier this week that Garcia will step down as Marseille coach at the end of the season after failing to qualify for European competition. The goal for last season’s Europa League finalists was to make the Champions League. Villas-Boas, who has been linked to the manager’s job at Celtic, has been out of work since leaving the Chinese club Shanghai SIPG in Nov 2017 after which he announced he was taking an extended break from football. The former Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur manager, still just 41, even took part in the Dakar Rally soon after – indulging his passion for motorsport – but his participation was cut short by a back injury. Villas-Boas has previously been offered the chance to return to English football but is not keen to coach again in this country after his experiences at Chelsea, where he lasted less than a season in 2011-12 and Tottenham where he was sacked in Dec 2013.
From there the Portuguese, who started his career working as a scout for Jose Mourinho first at Porto and then with him during his first spell at Chelsea before also moving to Inter Milan, coached the Russian club, Zenit St Petersburg.
As with his career as coach of Porto, where he won the Europa League and a domestic clean sweep, he enjoyed success at Zenit where he won the title.
Speaking at the Bilbao International Football Summit he said: “I was already in contact with Marseille in 2013 before I went to Zenit. It’s one of the biggest clubs in Europe with lots of prestige and a European Cup winner. It’s obviously something that interests me but they’ve just made the decision regarding Rudi Garcia. The club is well led by Andoni Zubizarreta. If they come around we will of course meet with them and it could be a possibility.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2019/05/24/andre-villas-boas-closes-return-football-marseille/ [ 此帖被羅力亞在2019-05-29 05:04重新編輯 ]