talkSPORT presenter Georgie Bingham believes former Newcastle United manager Rafael Benitez didn’t get the calibre of job offers he was expecting this summer.
The Spaniard left the Magpies this summer after failing to agree a new contract, and is now in charge of Chinese club Dalian Yifang. Bingham thinks she knows why.
“I think he didn’t get the offers he wanted from other clubs,” she told talkSPORT [07/07; 08:17]. “He’s quite a niche manager, Rafael Benitez. He doesn’t play the prettiest football.
“We were looking back at Newcastle’s season and they had some really good afternoons out, but generally, it’s not the most wonderful football. I wonder whether he just thinks a club of a [certain] calibre would come in for him and they didn’t, because they don’t need a manager this year.”
OPINION
The first response when reading Bingham’s theory is to say ‘duh’. Of course Benitez is managing in China because he didn’t get a good enough offer to remain in European football. We all know he’s a world class manager, but the Spaniard knows it as well. He won’t have been willing to take a sub-par post just to stay in Europe. If he wasn’t going to stay at Newcastle, and if he didn’t get the sort of offers he was hoping for, then of course he’s going to pick the highest paid job he could get and move to China. That seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Perhaps Benitez expected to receive more admiration from other clubs for what he achieved at Mike Ashley’s Magpies. However, when it came down to it, he wasn’t being linked with the high profile jobs at the likes of Juventus and Chelsea this summer. So, instead, he has ended up lining his pockets in China, and who can blame him for that?
