Canada manager Benito Floro will battle a fellow Spaniard in his bid to qualify Canada for the 2016 Copa America, as El Salvador has appointed Albert Roca [spanish link] its new national team manager. The move signals more retooling by Concacaf's middle powers ahead of a busy calendar year -- in February, Panama named Colombian Hernan Dario Gomez to lead its national team.
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Where Panama opted for experience with Gomez, El Salvador hands Roca his first head coaching job. Such as his coaching chops are, the Spaniard earned them at the side of Dutch manager Frank Rijkaard -- through the successful Barcelona years as well as the not-successful Galatasaray and Saudi Arabia ones.
Maybe the directors of Salvadorean football wanted someone raw and eager. Or maybe they couldn't convince candidates with more experience to take the job. Soccer is at a low point in the Central American nation. A real mess. Over the past calendar year at least 15 high-profile players have been banned from the game for life in relation to match-fixing with the national team. Others received less harsh suspensions, but probes into fixing of Concacaf Champions League matches could result in further embarrassment.
El Salvador hasn't even played a match since losing 5-1 to the U.S. in the quarterfinals of the 2013 Gold Cup. It wasn't so long ago, well 2009, that El Salvador qualified for the Hex. So yes, Roca has his work cut out for him. In the short term, the focus will be on upcoming friendlies in June and the Copa Centroamericana in the U.S. this September.
And for those interested in how much he will earn from that work, the paper La Grafica Prensa has been reporting that the Salvadorean federation will receive up to $25,000 a month from the national government to help pay both Roca and his assistants. This is an unsurprisingly non-lucrative gig in the wider realm of international jobs.
Grant Surridge focuses much of his writing for CSN on the Spanish-speaking Concacaf world. You can follow him on twitter @SCGGrant