The Turkish Football Federation has sacked its national team coach, Vincenzo Montella. Well, that’s the newspapers’ word. The Federation’s word, reported by RMC Sport, is this one: “It has been decided not to continue with our head coach”. I copied it into my notebook, under the tab “sentences without a subject”.
Silly question, but who decided? “It has been decided.” Who is “it”? In basketball, when a coach is let go, there’s a chairman in the photo. I looked. Here, the phrasing does the deciding. I reread the sentence on the 7:32 train, three times. The subject never got on board.
And “not to continue”. They don’t say “stop”. They say “not to continue”, as if we had been walking together and at a crossroads the Federation had turned left. For context, which I noted under the next tab: Turkey lost their first four Nations League games, against France, Italy, Belgium and Italy again. Zero points. Montella had been in the job since September 2023, forty matches, twenty-one wins. His contract ran until mid-2028.
The best part is that Montella spoke too, and he had a subject: “We have a team that fought together. Our unity continues in the best possible way”. He said “continues”. The Federation said “not to continue”. Same verb, two senses. I’m told it’s always been like this, fine, but what does that mean?
“At my club, the chairman decides nothing in the passive. Nothing at all, actually. He decides in the conditional.”
The successor is not known. The Turkish press names Arda Turan, 39, coach of Shakhtar Donetsk, as favourite. I checked, and actually nobody knows. Two games remain, against Belgium in Izmir on 12 November, then in France on the 15th. I’ve opened an empty tab for the name. Anyway, I still have a lot to learn.
It’s true, we checked: RMC Sport.
