MOSCOW — Two wins from becoming the first foreign coach to win a World Cup, Roberto Martinez always will be known as Frankie to his former boss.
“He reminded me of those wonderful what I call zoot-suited American vocalists, like Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon, Frankie Valli,” said Bill Kenwright, the chairman of Everton, an English Premier League team in Liverpool that hired Martinez as coach. “And I christened him Frankie from the first day I met him.”
Now balding, the Spaniard has led Belgium to a World Cup semifinal Tuesday against France, three days before his 45th birthday. All 20 previous Cup-winning coaches were born in the nation they led.
“He’s a genius tactically,” said U.S. goalie Tim Howard, who spent three years with Martinez at Everton. “He always finds a weakness in the opponent. He prepares teams to break down the opponent. No game is the same; he changes tactics every game.”
Belgium beat Brazil 2-1 in the quarterfinals when Martinez switched to a new formation – a 4-3-3 with star forward Romelu Lukaku on the right wing. If Belgium gets past the French, it would play England or Croatia on Sunday with the chance to win a first World Cup title.
Englishman George Raynor’s Sweden team advanced to the 1958 final at home but lost to Brazil, and Ernst Happel of Austria led the Netherlands to the 1978 final, an extra-time defeat to host Argentina. Martinez hopes to succeed where they failed by using a two-year process to ensure “this is a team, not a group of individuals.”
“There’s more feeling of trust in each other,” midfielder Kevin De Bryune said.
Martinez is known in the U.S. from his work for ESPN as an analyst at the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, the last two European Championships and the 2013 Confederations Cup. He had the network install a screen that showed the overheard tactical camera.
“Roberto only wanted to watch that,” said Amy Rosenfeld, ESPN’s senior coordinating producer for soccer. “We had a setup where everybody else could see the main feed, and Roberto had a separate monitor to watch the entire game from his high end zone. That’s how he could consume the match, interpret the match, look at shape, look at formation, look at vulnerabilities, passing lanes.”
Martinez impressed colleagues with his focus, especially after the ESPN set in Paris was flooded two years ago.
“Rats that I think were living in the Jurassic era emerged and we couldn’t get rid of them … they were enormous,” Rosenfeld said. “The rats are running past Roberto – he doesn’t miss a beat. He’s doing analysis, one take usually, it may have even been live. There was a rat chewing on Roberto’s laces.”
In Britain, he remains somewhat of a mystery, at least his name. While he pronounces it Mar-TEE-nez, English media often stress the first syllable and say MAR-tin-ez.
He grew up in the Catalonia city of Balaguer and left his hometown club at 16 to join Zaragoza. He played for a series of small clubs, then became known for his move to third-tier Wigan in England for the 1995-96 season with Jesus Seba and Isidro Diaz, dubbed the “Three Amigos.”
Martinez quit as a player at 33 when Swansea offered the manager’s job in February 2007, and in his first full season earned the club a promotion to the second tier for the first time since 1983-84. Martinez moved up to the Premier League with Wigan in June 2009 and after a bizarre 2012-13 season, when Wigan was relegated while winning its first FA Cup, he switched to the more prestigious and ambitious Everton, where he coached Lukaku and Marouane Fellaini, who have combined for five of Belgium’s 14 World Cup goals.
Martinez wasn’t thought of as a tactician at the club level. He was fired with one match left in his third season at Everton following fan protests as the Toffees headed to their second straight 11th-place finish. The Royal Belgian Football Association, which fired Marc Wilmots after a 3-1 loss to Wales in the 2016 Euro quarterfinals, hired him three months later.
Players were booed in Martinez’s first game, a 2-0 loss to Spain, but Belgium is unbeaten in 24 matches since (19 wins). A month before the World Cup, he was rewarded with a new two-year contract running through the 2020 European Championship.
He speaks English and Spanish. His work rate is impressive. Kenwright praises Martinez for being “an extraordinarily good man” admired by club employees from top to bottom.
“He can name whatever job he wants,” Howard said. “Maybe the U.S. soccer job?”
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