Hiring a coach in 24 hours!

I have been following Iranian football for most of my life and I still can’t figure out who finds the characters that “manage” our sports.

The head of Iran’s National Organization of Physical Education oversees all the sports matters in the country including football. Mohammad Aliabadi, the character that has had the job under the fearless presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided that he wants to toss his name in the hat for the vacant top football job in the country, never mind that he actually supervises all the chiefs of all the sports federations in the country!

Aliabadi, who is most likely to be “elected” to fill the position, claimed a few months ago that he could manage IRI Football Federation with only 20% of his time. In another interview he claimed to have managed hundreds (He actually said over 7000, but I assume that was a typo!) of large scale projects in one year and fixing Iran’s football problems was just another project. No one dared to ask him to name only 10 of those projects, but I would be curious to hear why if he is such a capable manager, Iran’s sports have remained in such shamble under his leadership for the last two years.

The other day he told reporters that if he were elected as the IRIFF chief, he would fill the vacant head coaching job of the national team in less than 24 hours!

Hey, maybe I’ve got it all wrong and this guy is the superman of the management world. Better yet, maybe he is Winston “the Wolf” Wolfe, the character portrayed by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction who after getting an address on the phone famously said,” That’s thirty minutes away. I’ll be there in ten.” And he made it too!!!