Barcelona has hired Argentine Gerardo Martino to replace Tito Vilanova as coach, the Spanish champions said on Tuesday.
The 50-year-old Martino, a Rosario agreed to a two-year contract, his new club said on their website.
Vilanova, 44, stepped down last week to continue treatment for throat cancer after leading Barca to the La Liga title in his first season after taking over from Pep Guardiola.
Barca vice president Javier Faus, who held a news conference to explain the club’s financial matters, explained that former coach Tito Vilanova was still a club employee despite leaving his job to continue cancer treatment.
“We are happy, that is for sure. We also wish Tito the best, people are the most important thing in the end. Apart from that I would like you to wait till the new coach is here and ask Josep Maria Bartomeu,” he said.
“The only thing I can say is that it is an unexpected expense because Tito Vilanova is still a member of our staff though he is not our coach anymore. And therefore, this is obviously an extra expense. But that is life. We are very sad because it is due to our coach’s disease, but we have to face it naturally,” he added.
Known as “Tata” (granddad), the silver-haired Martino burnished his reputation after steering Messi’s old club Newell’s Old Boys to Argentina’s “Final” championship last month and to the semi-finals of this season’s Libertadores Cup.
He made his name as a coach when he took Paraguay to the last eight of the 2010 World Cup, where
they lost 1-0 to eventual champions Spain, and after quitting in 2011, turned down a lucrative offer from Colombia.
Martino elected instead to return to Newell’s, the club where he played 509 matches as a midfielder under compatriot Marcelo Bielsa, from whom he is said to have inherited many of his coaching ideas.
Club officials have also said they want to buy another centre back to partner Spain’s Gerard Pique and that Paris St Germain’s Brazil captain Thiago Silva was their primary target.
Barca launched their bid for a fifth La Liga title in six years at home to Levante on the first weekend of August.Any source
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