Phil Neville on potentially managing big personalities at Inter Miami in 2023: "I back my ability to deal with any kind of player"
Inter Miami has been strongly linked with a move for temperamental striker Josef Martinez in recent weeks
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — There is no denying that Josef Martinez knows how to score goals in Major League Soccer. There is also no denying that he has had his share of run-ins with head coaches in the past.
Inter Miami is, per the Athletic, closing in on signing Martinez to a non-Designated Player deal, with the hope being that the Venezuelan striker can add a level of ruthlessness in the final third that is largely missing from the current roster. Star center forward Gonzalo Higuain retired at the end of last season, and head coach Phil Neville has talked more than once since then about the team’s need to replace the Argentine and his lethal goal-scoring abilities.
Enter the picture Martinez, the MLS Cup-winning center forward who is on the outs at Atlanta United after a 2022 campaign that saw him clash with Five Stripes manager Gonzalo Pineda on multiple occasions. One such incident led to Martinez being suspended for “conduct detrimental to the team.”
Martinez is, however, no stranger to confrontations with coaches. He previously had a public dispute with then-Venezuela manager Rafael Dudamel over an apparent lack of playing time, leading to the attacker’s temporary resignation from his national team. The 29-year-old Martinez also had issues with former Atlanta United coach Gabriel Heinze, who separated Martinez from team training for a period in 2021.
How exactly then could Martinez fit into an Inter Miami locker room that has been carefully and strategically crafted since last year, one that by most accounts has a familial feel to it?
Neville, while speaking in general terms about signing players with big personalities, said on Monday to leave it to him.
“I think I said at the start of last season we are not going to allow any kind of — excuse the language — dickheads in our dressing room,” said Neville after Inter Miami’s first 2023 preseason practice. “What I always say to people who always challenge me on that, ‘That person can do X, Y, Z. Leave the management of that player to me. That is my job. That is what I am paid to do.’
“I think what we have seen over the last two years is that we have had to manage a lot of big personalities. I think Gonzalo (Higuain) is a prime example of getting the best out of someone that probably was not going right and then finished on such a high note. I back my ability to deal with any kind of player.”
Neville may have been able to push all the right buttons with Higuain during the second half of 2022, but the Englishman struggled to squeeze all the juice out of the Argentine for much of the prior year-and-a-half. Other high-profile players who Neville has managed in his first foray as a head coach in the men’s game are Blaise Matuidi and Rodolfo Pizarro, neither of whom consistently delivered in Neville’s first season in charge in 2021 before being moved the following year.
Of course, all three of those players had never played in MLS prior to their Inter Miami arrivals. Martinez has, with 98 regular-season goals to his name since joining Atlanta United in 2017. Knee problems that started in 2020 have slowed him down a notable bit since then, but none of that stopped Neville from initially saying, ‘I like him. He has always scored goals against us,’ on Monday when asked about Martinez.
“Josef looks like someone that is a machine, that is hungry, that scores goals, that does not need many chances,” said Neville. “We are looking to strengthen (our roster) and for somebody to come into this football club and become a starter you have to be really good because I think we have got the nucleus of a really good starting group already.
“We are looking for quality players.”
If the mercurial Martinez can find a way to rediscover his pre-injury form, Inter Miami will have quite the weapon up top at its disposal. If he can do so without occupying a DP slot as is being reported, the move will be one of the biggest bargains of this MLS offseason. What’s more, Martinez would very likely become an Inter Miami fan favorite and marketable figure in an area that boasts its share of Venezuelans.
Of course, key to it all would have to be the relationship between coach and player, soldier and general, boss and subordinate.
“I think Gonzalo is a fantastic example of when people talk to me about what he was like, I always revert back to a couple of things that he wanted,” said Neville of Higuain. “He wanted the standards to be really high, and he wanted to win. For me, they are two really good starting points and I am sure it is no different with any other top players that could come in.
“If the standards are high and you have got the competition and challenge to win, then that player is going to be good in the locker room.”
Inter Miami has to hope so because the alternative could prove nightmarishly problematic.