Kalezic’s journey to the Phoenix From war in Bosnia, to football in Saudi Arabia and everything in between. Darije Kalezic tells Liam Hyslop about his path to the Wellington Phoenix.
Seldom does an interview with a football coach touch on the topic of genocide. But that’s the unfortunate inevitability of asking new Wellington Phoenix manager Darije Kalezic about his journey to New Zealand’s capital.
It comes up after aligning the 47-yearold’s time at his first professional football club, FK Velez Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the start of the Yugoslav Wars in 1991.
Kalezic was born in Switzerland in 1969, but returned to Bosnia aged seven before embarking on a professional playing career in Mostar in 1987. The Bosnian War started in 1992, gripping Mostar over two separate sieges between April 1992 and April 1994. Thousands were killed and many of the perpetrators were later convicted of crimes against humanity.
While Kalezic had hoped to embark on a professional football career in western Europe at some point, the war forced him to move those ambitions ahead in time and, at the age of 21, he left his family to sign for Dutch club FC Den Bosch.
‘‘In that time it was really hard. It was war, I was at the epicentre of the war. It was a tough time. My family stayed and later they moved on also to Holland.
‘‘You see that only in the movies. I was not in a movie, I was in a war, so I cannot explain to you how that was.’’
That was where this anecdote ended, and rightly so. Detailing his experience 25 years after the fact would serve no real purpose, but it’s important to know where the man has come from as it shapes, in part, who he is today.
And today he is a mixture of stern, seriousness, with the odd hint of dry humour. When you’ve experienced some of the things he has as a football manager you either shrug your shoulders and move on, or look back and laugh.
Kalezic can do both, starting with reflecting on his first first-team gig at De Graafschap in Holland.
He finished his playing career there and worked his way through the coaching ranks to the top job on an interim basis for the final 13 games of the 2008-09 season, which ended in relegation from the top-flight Eredivisie.
He was given the top job for the following season and earned the team promotion in their first season back in the second division - a feat no De Graafschap team had managed in their 63-year history.
But the club was stuck in the purgatory of being too big for the second division and too small for the first. Kalezic said he had a plan to change all that.
‘‘I wrote the book at that time, 125 pages, where I explained how De Graafschap can be a strong premier league club with an excellent structure. I presented that to the board before my contract expired but at the end of the season De Graafschap decided to sign another coach. My vision and philosophy was different to the vision of the De Graafschap board.’’
Kalezic moved on quickly to Belgium first-division club S.V. Zulte Waregem, where the club were after a manager to implement a long-term plan. That excited Kalezic, but soon after his arrival he could see things weren’t going to plan.
‘‘Immediately, everything was going in the wrong direction, against agreements that were made.
‘‘If you tell me come here at 9am and I come at 12pm, then the next meeting you tell me to come at 11am and I come at 3pm, do you want to work with me? You cannot work in those circumstances.’’
After 15 points from 19 rounds, the club was close to the relegation zone and Kalezic was shown the door in December 2011, which he was more than happy to walk through.
That’s where his story takes an odd twist. Having set about developing himself as a coach, Kalezic spent time learning different coaching styles and football cultures during study visits to Malaga in Spain and FC Rostov in Russia before joining English non-league (fifth tier) club Stockport County in January 2013.
‘‘That was me doing a favour for my friend,’’ he said. ‘‘After two premier league clubs you don’t go to the fifth level in England. I was there only a couple of weeks to do a favour to my friend, one of the best strength and conditioning coaches in the world, Raymond Verheijen, so more than that I cannot tell you.’’
Ardent fans of English Premier League clubs might know Verheijen as the man who has made scathing criticisms of the training methods at Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs and Liverpool, to name just a few.
But that’s another tangent entirely. Kalezic’s career took a positive turn when he was appointed coach of Dutch giants PSV Eindhoven’s under-23 team for their inaugural season in the second division in 2013-14. He was to be was part of a fundamental change in philosophy at the club, which was going through its longest spell without a title of six years.
In came Phillip Cocu as first-team manager and a return to focusing on youth development.
Kalezic’s tasks weren’t restricted to the under-23 team. He was involved in first-team trainings, analysed their games and upcoming opposition and travelled with the team for their European midweek matches.
After two successful years - the first team ended their title drought in just the second year of the plan - he yearned for the challenge of management again and joined Roda JC, who had just returned to the Eredivisie after a season in the second division.
He took over from two interim coaches with the target of keeping the team up. He entered in the unusual situation, for a European club anyway, of not having a technical director or head of youth development to work with.
The club asked him to help appoint a technical director, which is where things started to unravel.
Ton Canaan came in after the season started and against Kalezic’s wishes. Caanen started at Roda as a youth coach, before a run of working at 11 clubs in 11 years across Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Ukraine, Malta and Holland (third division). People get sacked a bit in football, but that was quite a record of abject failure. His main claim to fame was working with Dutch legend Johann Cruyff’s son, Jordi.
‘‘They signed him on a three-anda-half year contract, immediately after my recommendation not to,’’ Kalezic said. ‘‘For me, that was the signal that I have to keep my energy to my team, my players and my assistants, to reach my target that my club gives me, which they made more difficult in the season.’’
Kalezic kept the club up in 14th and ended the season by likening Caanen to a used car salesman in a media interview. It was the epitome of an untenable working relationship and it was a classic ‘him or me’ situation, which saw Kalezic depart. The team only just staved off relegation last season in a playoff under Greek coach Yannis Anastasiou.
The final pre-Phoenix chapter came late last year in Saudi Arabia. He said the club, Al-Taawoun, told him they wouldn’t sell his best players in the preseason, before letting go the four players who scored 34 of the 50 goals in their previous campaign. He lasted five games before he was sacked in December.
He was the sixth manager from the 14 Saudi Professional League teams to be fired. From May 2016 to April 2017 the clubs went through 31 managers. Kalezic’s successor, Constantin Galca, lasted four months before he was let go.
It was a situation Kalezic said he was fully aware he was walking into, so he can look back on it with a wry smile and put it down to experience.
‘‘For me, it was not to be negative. It was a good experience, I’m not complaining, that’s the way I look back at it. The situation on the workfloor changed, so I had to change my vision.’’
He took a six-month break to spend time with his wife and two kids, aged nine and seven, who are looking forward to joining Kalezic in New Zealand. That means he has arrived refreshed in Wellington for the challenge of turning the Phoenix’s fortunes around.
The vision this time is close the gap on the big clubs in Australia, but without spending as much money as they do.
‘‘Financially, we cannot make the gap smaller. So I agree with that. I think if we have good organisation and settle down with a good professional work structure, which is going to give us a good professional environment, that will create no grey areas. Our players will benefit from it and it will help them to improve their development as humans and as football players. By achieving this we are going to make the difference between us and bigger A-League clubs smaller.’’
Kalezic despises broken promises, so the realistic approach from all involved means it’s highly unlikely he will fall out with the board and management at the Phoenix. Overspending will be replaced with good coaching and shrewd transfers to get the team back into the playoff hunt.
Whether it ends in success will only be known once the season gets underway in October.
But given what Kalezic has experienced in both life and football, including success at clubs that haven’t pulled the rug out from under him, this challenge is one he comes well prepared for.