After a failure in the final of Euro 2012, 66-year-old Italian specialist Fabio Capello was appointed coach of the Russian national football team. His coaching record of 596 matches at the time of appointment is impressive. More than half - 339 games - his teams won, only 85 lost.
These numbers are not surprising when you consider which teams Capello has coached. Before the Russian national team, his career was associated with five clubs: Milan, Roma, Juventus, Real Madrid and England. This list clearly suggests that Capello is a super-elite coach, and the Russian team in this row looks like an exotic adventure that promises adrenaline.
Fabio Capello's playing career took place in Italy, in the same clubs that he subsequently coached. Moving to Roma in 1967, Capello remained in the elite of Serie A until the last match in 1980 and was at one time a solid player in the base of the Italian national team. With Juventus and Milan, he has won the Scudetto four times.
Capello played his first match as head coach with Milan, replacing in fire order the dismissed Swede Nils Lindholm. It was the end of the 1987 season, her last six matches. But the then president of Milan, Silvio Berlusconi, did not consider Capello's candidacy as head coach and invited Arrigo Sacchi to this post. Well, Fabio moved to work in the administrative apparatus of the club for four years.
His full-fledged and enchanting coaching career began in 1991, when, after the departure of Sakki, he was nevertheless appointed head coach, which was received with skepticism by many specialists. Capello beat the skeptics, winning four Italian championships and one Champions League in five seasons. Then, with Real Madrid, he won the 1997 Spanish Championship.
In the summer of 1999, Fabio Capello took over as head of Roma, with whom he won the Italian championship, which is only the third time in the club's history. The team won silver medals two more times.
In 2004 Capello moved to Juventus and led him to the championship for the next two seasons. Then he once again went to Madrid for a year, where he again won gold medals with Real Madrid.
After the failure of the England national team in the qualifying tournament for Euro 2008, the English football federation decided to invite Fabio Capello to lead the national team. In the last two qualifying rounds, England has easily qualified for the finals of the World and European Championships. But she did not win any special laurels there, dropping out at the very first stage of the playoffs.
Capello parted with the England national team out of principle - he did not like the decision of the federation to deprive the captain's armband of John Terry after the scandal around his personal life. Now he is in Russia, and TV viewers can contemplate the helmsman of the national team at the central games of the national championship that has just begun.