For coaches, salary does not equal success

England’s Roy Hodgson, seen here during one of his team’s matches, is this World Cup’s second-highest paid coach.

DPA/Rio de Janerio

If national football teams were run like corporations, there would be plenty of heads rolling in the boardrooms.

After three intense weeks of goals, emotion and controversy, only eight of the 32 teams that made it to the Brazilian World Cup remain in contention.

It is time to review the performances of the men in charge.

One thing is immediately clear: an auditor would be less than impressed by the return on investment from some federations’ appointment of coaches.

The tournament’s three highest-paid all failed to steer their teams through the group stages.

The most emblematic case concerns Russia’s Italian coach. With an estimated annual salary of well in excess of 11 million dollars, according to Russian and international media reports, Fabio Capello was by far the biggest earner of the tournament. And yet, Russia failed to qualify from a group that included Belgium, South Korea and Algeria.

Despite having faced a barrage of criticism from Russian media and fans alike, Capello has no intention of giving up his lucrative contract, which runs out in 2018. The Russian federation is also unlikely to fire him, since their stated goal is to have Capello prepare the team for the next World Cup, which will take place on home soil for the first time.

“Capello helped us reach the final stages [of the tournament]. I am not sure that we would have reached that goal with another coach,” Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko was quoted as saying following calls for Capello to reimburse Russian taxpayers.

Like Capello, the World Cup’s second-highest paid coach, England’s Roy Hodgson, has no intention of resigning. Despite his team having also failed to secure qualification from Group D, the so-called Group of Death, Hodgson has received plenty of praise for his bold decision to introduce young talent into the squad.

“Roy worked his socks off with the group,” Queen Park Rangers manager Harry Redknapp told the BBC after England’s exit.

“The atmosphere seemed good and he picked the same group of players that we would all have picked. We keep going through good managers but for some reason at England we don’t get results,” Redknapp added.

By contrast, Italy coach Cesare Prandelli immediately stepped down in the aftermath of the Azzurri’s 1-0 defeat against Uruguay, which followed another ignominious 1-0 defeat against Costa Rica.

In announcing his resignation, Prandelli cited public outrage over his gross annual salary of around 4 million dollars (Hodgson’s salary has been estimated by the Daily Mail at 6 million dollars).

“After my contract was renewed they treated me like a thief. But I have never stolen money from the taxpayers, I have always paid my taxes and I leave with my head held high,” Prandelli said in Natal.

With the head of the Italian federation having also quit, no decision on a replacement is expected to be made before August.

The problem for Italy is that the best candidates, Roberto Mancini and Luciano Spalletti, earned at least three times more than Prandelli at their former clubs, Galatasaray and Zenit St Petersburg.

The future is rather nebulous in Spain, where it is unclear whether Vicente Del Bosque - annual salary estimated at 3.3 million dollars - will remain in charge.

Having steered the national team to an unprecedented World Cup and European Championship double, Spain flopped in Brazil, losing 5-1 to the Netherlands and 2-0 to Chile.

 After their elimination, polls in Spain estimated that around 60 per cent of Spaniards wanted the ageing Del Bosque to leave.

The man has said little about whether he plans to honour his contract, which runs until 2016. And one problem for Spain is that there are no obvious successors in sight.

While many of the big earners have flopped - a clear exception is Brazil’s Luiz Felipe Scolari, whose team is still in contention for the ultimate prize - auditors may well be impressed with the investments made by the Mexican and Costa Rican football federations.

Mexico’s Miguel Herrera and Costa Rica’s Jorge Luis Pinto are among the lowest-paid managers to have made the trip to Brazil, earning a fraction of their European counterparts. And yet, their teams have impressed the world as Mexico reached the round of 16 and Luis Pinto has gone one step further, leading Costa Rica to an unprecedented quarter-final berth.

In all, four of the 32 coaches have already resigned, while the future of at least 14 others - among them Germany’s Joachim Loew - remains unclear.

Only a few are virtually certain of their future, including Didier Deschamps, who has restored France’s image after the team’s disastrous 2012 campaign in South Africa, and the Netherlands’ Louis Van Gaal, who has already signed a contract with Manchester United.

And Switzerland coach Ottmar Hitzfeld had previously announced his intention to retire at the end of the tournament.