Al-Ahli: When the Man Who Hired Coach Pušić Is No Longer There

At the pre-match press conference ahead of Round 7 of the Roshn Saudi Pro League, Al-Ahli coach Marino Pušić did not talk about Al-Hazem. He talked about instability. For someone who has watched football for more than fifty years, as I have, that is the first thing worth writing down. Coaches rarely volunteer talk of internal fractures. When they do, the sound lands more like preparation than a plea for help.

Three defeats in the opening six rounds is something no amount of prose can excuse. But the more telling detail sits in a shadowed corner few noticed: the sporting director, the man who signed Pušić, was dismissed. His patron no longer sits in that building.

Al-Ahli are not facing a financial crisis. They are facing a power crisis — and in modern football, power is what decides a coach's survival.

At a club backed by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), money was never the issue. What erodes here is the corridor, the meeting room, the decisions that never arrive on time. Dismissing a sporting director is not a financial signal. It is a strategic one. And the first to feel the aftershock is always the coach — the man hired by the old machine, standing on ground someone else poured.

This is a story about a club that has lost its leadership bearings, rather than one that has run out of money. In that situation, Pušić's position is fragile in a way no contract can protect against.

On results, the picture is not pretty. Three defeats in six matches is a 50% loss rate. To be fair, the fixture list was not entirely kind: Al-Ahli fell to Al-Hilal, one of the league's leading powers, and also to Al-Qadsiah and Al-Khaleej. But it is those latter two names that worry me most. In a league where resources are intensely concentrated, dropping points against lower-rated opponents is the fastest way for a coach to lose his chair.

What I always watch when following Al-Ahli this season is the gap between what they produce and what the scoreboard records. Pušić says "the numbers don't reflect" the team's away displays. He may be right. But when a coach starts arguing with data rather than results, it usually signals that the underlying metrics — xG, xGA — are not on his side.

The problem is that the article supplies no process data. No xG. No PPDA. No possession share. And no concrete tactical detail either: no formation, no pressing scheme, no build-up pattern. The attacking-but-balanced philosophy he cites is a universal value, not a describable system. That is the language of a media manager, not a tactician revealing his hand.

His emphasis on two away wins in the King's Cup is worth a second look. Cup football is a different competitive and rotation context from league play. Using cup results to prove away competence, while your league away form sits inside a run of three defeats, is a familiar selective-evidence move. It shows the speaker picking the most flattering slice of the data.

I once wrote that the ball does not remember who shot it, only the emotions around it. At Al-Ahli right now, the emotion is split in two: on one side, the fragile trust of the board; on the other, the slowly draining patience of the stands. Between them stands Pušić, alone. And perhaps he knows that better than anyone.

Here is the counter-intuitive point I want to linger on. People usually read a statement like "the board trusts me" as a sign of safety. In football, public declarations of support tend to run inverse to real security. When a coach has to say loudly that he is trusted, it is often because that trust is in question. And when he himself admits the club is "unstable," he has seized the narrative — so that if results sour, people know it was the storm, not the driver.

Six matches is too small a sample to conclude anything. Without process data, any prediction of revival or collapse is speculation. But one thing is certain: the Round 7 meeting with Al-Hazem has stepped beyond the frame of an ordinary fixture. It is a pressure valve. A positive result will temporarily shore up Pušić's position. A defeat will turn the conversation about his future into a public debate that cannot be reversed.

This story reminds me of something I learned after many years standing in stadium tunnels: a coach's fate is rarely decided by tactics. It is decided by who still stands behind him. Pušić has lost that man. What remains for him is to win it back through results — the loneliest job in football.

If I could send one word to those running Al-Ahli, it would be this: a club is not built from big contracts, but from consistent decisions made in silence. Dismissing a sporting director may be a single line in the meeting minutes. For the man on the touchline, it is an entire long winter. The Pušić story will not end at Al-Hazem. It has only just begun to be written.