The Unbacked Chair: Pusic, Al-Ahli and the Limits of Six Matches

I have sat in empty press-conference rooms many times. Not empty of people — there were always reporters, always microphones, always someone raising a hand to ask about the upcoming match. Empty in another way: the chair next to the coach, where the sporting director usually sits, now has no one. In Jeddah these days, the story is unfolding at exactly that rhythm.

Marino Pusic, head coach of Al-Ahli, walked into the pre-match press conference ahead of the fixture against Al-Hazem. He spoke of the club's instability. He spoke of the board's trust in him. He spoke of numbers failing to reflect what happened on the pitch. No plea for sympathy, no anger. Just a carefully chosen sequence of sentences, slow, as if he were counting each breath before speaking. And in the silence between those sentences, I heard the thing that voices should have filled.

At Moscow that night, I learned that the final whistle is only a rest. Years later, I still believe that holds true for Saudi football this season. A coach does not have to be sacked to be considered gone. Sometimes it is enough that the person who signed him is no longer there.

Context: a league learning how to lose patience

The Saudi Pro League has changed its nature over the past few years. Once, people followed Arab football the way they followed a regional tournament, where big clubs lived on tradition and domestic signings. No longer. The Public Investment Fund took over four clubs — Al-Hilal, Al-Nassr, Al-Ittihad and Al-Ahli — turning them into state-backed entities with budgets and ambitions no lesser than any mid-tier European club.

Al-Ahli in Jeddah is one of those four names. Not Al-Ahly of Egypt, but Al-Ahli Saudi FC — one of the most storied clubs in Arab football. This identity confusion recurs in international reporting, and I myself, rereading the coverage of this fixture, had to pause twice to confirm which club was being discussed. It is a small detail, but it matters, because the pressure at Al-Ahli Jeddah is entirely different from the pressure at any other club of the same name.

The name most mentioned in the reporting is Al-Hazem. That is Al-Ahli's next opponent in round 7. The report calls it a decisive fixture for Pusic's future — one that, if won, would temporarily steady the coach, and if lost, would unravel things far faster than anyone could imagine.

But to understand why a round-7 fixture carries such weight, one must look at two things that happened before it.

First, Al-Ahli have lost 3 of 6 league matches. That statistic is one no coach at a PIF-tier club wants to see. Those defeats came against Al-Hilal — currently the strongest side in Saudi Arabia — against Al-Qadsiah, and against Al-Khaleej. Of those three names, Al-Hilal are on a different plane, but Al-Qadsiah and Al-Khaleej are not. And it is precisely dropped points against beatable opponents that kill a coach, not losses to giants.

Second, the club's sporting director — the man who signed Pusic — has been dismissed. This is a signal every European coach understands clearly, even if no one wants to say it aloud. When the person who brought you in is no longer there, your chair has already begun to wobble, whatever the results on the pitch.

Analysis: a man without a guarantor

In modern football, a coach is not judged only by what he does on the training pitch. He is judged by the network of relationships that brought him to his current position — the appointer, the protector, the partner in transfer decisions. When that network breaks, the coach loses what I call the "institutional shield." Without that shield, he is left with only results. And results, at 3 defeats in 6, are saying nothing good.

What is striking in this story is not that Pusic is under pressure, but that the pressure does not come from the table — it comes from the power structure inside the club. A coach with poor results but a guarantor can survive for months. A coach with poor results and no guarantor is usually counted in weeks.

Pusic himself likely understands this. That is why, at the press conference, he spoke of the club's instability rather than of tactics. He spoke of the board's faith in him rather than of missed goals. From a communications standpoint, this is a defensive move. It suggests that the problem is not what happens on the pitch but what happens in the boardroom.

The football philosophy Pusic presented is also worth dissecting. He spoke of the need to attack without forgetting to defend. On the surface, reasonable. But on closer examination, this is not a tactical philosophy — it is a universal principle anyone who has ever watched football knows. No formation. No pressing scheme. No build-up pattern. No specific role for any position. It is a statement of value, not a describable system.

This matters more than people think. A highly regarded coach can usually describe his tactical ideas in specifics: where his team presses, how high the defensive line sits, how the central midfielder moves when the ball is lost. A coach under pressure usually talks about feeling, about spirit, about numbers that fail to reflect reality. Pusic's language leans toward the latter.

And when a coach says "the numbers fail to reflect us," he is contesting data rather than results. This is a familiar move, sometimes correct, but always suspicious. Because if metrics like xG or xGA genuinely supported him, he would have produced them. The silence of data is often truth withheld. One thing I have learned over years of watching football: when a coach argues with data, it is usually because the data is saying something he does not want to hear.

In this specific case, another detail deserves a pause. Pusic cited two King's Cup away wins as evidence that his side performs well on the road. But cup football and league football are different contexts. In cups, big clubs rotate, opponents are weaker, and the psychological pressure differs. Using cup form to offset league form is a selective-evidence maneuver — emotionally valid, perhaps, but logically weak.

What is unfolding at Al-Ahli is a governance crisis, not a financial one. Distinguishing the two matters. With PIF backing, Al-Ahli do not lack money. They are not facing insolvency, not worrying about unpaid wages. What they lack is stability in leadership — people in, people out, people signing, people denying. And instability in the boardroom spreads faster than people think, from the meeting room to the dressing room, from transfer contracts to match-day psychology.

A dismissed sporting director is not merely a name struck from a personnel list. It is a signal about strategy. If that director signed Pusic, and if his successor — or interim replacement — holds a different view of the coach, then Pusic's position becomes structurally fragile even with a public vote of confidence. European football history is full of coaches given "full trust" one month and sacked the next.

One thing the original report does not mention but which I consider important: timing. The report says the sporting director was dismissed but not when. If the dismissal happened pre-season, it is a strategic restructure. If it happened a month into the campaign, it is a power struggle. If it happened right after the losing run, it is an effort to appease public opinion by sacrificing someone — and the next sacrifice is usually the coach. The silence on timing is a small detail but a telling one, because it shows the club is not controlling its own story well.

Tactically, Pusic's emphasis on defensive balance suggests his side is porous in transition. This is the classic profile of an attacking team that leaves gaps behind — a pattern common among sides whose coach is under pressure. When results do not come, a coach's natural instinct is to talk about defending better. It is a safe phrasing: it does not criticize individuals, does not admit a specific mistake, and does not close any door with the board.

But if the defensive problem is real, Al-Ahli face a larger challenge. In the Saudi Pro League this season, mid-tier sides are increasingly effective at defending and countering. Al-Qadsiah are an example — no longer an easy win, and they have beaten Al-Ahli. So have Al-Khaleej. This means the gap between the top and the middle is narrowing, and clubs like Al-Ahli, with title expectations, can no longer rely on nominal status to win matches.

There is another aspect I consider central to this story that the original report only touches indirectly: pressure of time. In Europe, a new coach is usually given at least a season to build. In the Saudi Pro League, despite far bigger budgets, time is shorter. Six league matches is far too few to judge anyone. Yet that is the window media and public opinion are using as the yardstick. And when media uses a short yardstick, clubs tend to be swept along.

A counterintuitive angle: perhaps we are reading the story wrong

What is interesting here is that most of the story's weight does not come from results but from how the story is told. The original report calls it a "bombshell" — a sensationalist headline, accompanied by related links about Cristiano Ronaldo and other click-optimized content. There is nothing wrong with media doing that; it is the job. But readers must distinguish between an event and a story constructed around that event.

That is why I want to raise another possibility: perhaps Pusic is not in as dangerous a position as people think. Six league matches is too small a sample. Three defeats in six sounds terrible, but look closely at the opponents and at least one defeat is to Al-Hilal — the strongest side in the league, a loss anyone could suffer. Another is to Al-Qadsiah, a club with growing ambition and recent heavy investment. Only the Al-Khaleej defeat is genuinely alarming.

And if we are talking about patience, what is worth considering is why a league that spends so much has so little patience. There is a paradox here: when you invest big, you build a machine with ambition. But ambition comes with short-term evaluation of results. A club without money is forced to be patient; a club with money can change people. Patience becomes a luxury that wealth itself has taken away.

I believe the real story at Al-Ahli is not whether Pusic will be sacked. The real story is that the club lacks a stable machine in which any coach could work. If the board cannot fill the sporting-director gap, the next person in Pusic's chair — if that happens — will face the same problem. And in such an environment, each new coach is a gamble, not a solution.

What remains after the whistle

I write this from a city more than four thousand miles from Jeddah, but there are things about football and about people that are the same everywhere. An empty chair still seats a person — we simply no longer hear their applause. And in Al-Ahli's case, that empty chair belongs to a sporting director, but the one who feels the emptiness most sharply is the coach at the press conference below.

The round-7 match against Al-Hazem will give us part of the answer. If Al-Ahli win, the pressure eases, at least for a few weeks. If they lose, everything moves faster. But regardless of the result, one thing I am certain will remain true: people will talk about Pusic in numbers, and Pusic will talk about numbers failing to reflect reality. And between the two ways of speaking, there is always a person trying to keep his chair from being pulled away.

Before becoming a name, everyone is just a stride. Before becoming a symbol of crisis, a coach is just a person trying to lead a group of people in a volatile environment. What I have learned in years of this work is this: if you want to understand a coach, do not look only at the table. Look at who is still sitting beside him on the leadership bench. When they leave, the real story begins.

A great match is never fully told; it only waits for someone quiet enough to hear. And sometimes a club's crisis is the same — it is not fully explained by big headlines. It waits for a reader patient enough to look into the gap between the numbers.