🇳🇮 The 'Nicaraguan Nagelsmann' prepares for his biggest test
Real Esteli's manager is 24 but has long been a student of the game
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Try to find Real Esteli’s top 24-year-old prospect tonight in the Concacaf Champions League against Columbus Crew SC and you’ll probably start up top, look through the midfield, maybe even eye the goalkeeper? Give up? It’s the manager.
Holver Flores has been leading the top club in Nicaragua for more than a year, winning three consecutive titles and getting the club back into the Concacaf Champions League for the first time since 2016-17.
Determined from a young age to become a coach, Flores went to Costa Rica and then Spain, working through various programs and earning his UEFA A license before returning home to Estelí to work with the Nicaraguan club’s impressive youth setup. As he achieved good results and the first team fell into a rough patch, the club promoted him to interim manager in fall of 2019. He won the title that year and has done it twice more, giving the club little reason to look for a more experienced tactician.
“They’ve always tell me I’m a young manager, but I always say that’s just a number,” he told me in a Zoom call Saturday. “I think you when you implement your strategy in a training session, the players start to see that you’re going to make them work and that’s how you get respect, with that work, showing that to the players.”
The trophies don’t hurt either. While Esteli is one of the big-budget teams in Nicaragua, Flores hasn’t been content to simply ride the size of the club to success. He’s a voracious student of the game, reading books by all the top managers: Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp, a tome on leadership and culture by Diego Simeone, plus watching videos from others including fellow young gun Julian Nagelsmann.
“I like to read a lot of books, but I’m not the typical manager who is going to get married to the tiki-taka Guardiola played,” Flores said. “You might have 70% of the ball for 70 minutes and then they hit you. When he was at Bayern, you see in the (Marti Perarnau) book The Metamorphosis that he realized it was very important to combine the short game with the long game, and that’s where they also suggested ideas like the third man and those things, but he tried to globalize.”
That’s the same approach Flores tries to take with his Central American superclub.
While he loves the possession game and generally can put an imitation of Guardiola’s Barca or Bayern on the field in the domestic league, he sometimes will notice a team has conceded possession the last four or five matches. That’s when he challenges his players to let the other team play more with the ball, only for Esteli to pounce on mistakes when players not used to having the ball at their feet put passes in the wrong places.
The modifications may come into play as well against the Crew.
“I’m a bit ‘mixed’. I always try to adapt to the team or adapt to the situation,” Flores says of his style. “I really like ball possession and having it and using it to build, and if at some time you don’t have that build-up play that it’s to the benefit of the team, so the team can get three points. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to sit back or just be defending the whole time for no reason. We’re always going to look to create scoring chances.”
In his debut international match, a Concacaf League game with Herediano, Flores said he noted a specific behavior “El Team” liked to do when coming out of the back that resulted in the forward slipping deeper to look for the ball. He countered it by tweaking his formation and ended up with a 1-0 win. Esteli lost to eventual champion Alajuelense in the next round and got a bit of good fortune to win the playoff match against Motagua, with the Honduran side’s goalkeeper toying too long with the ball at his feet and Esteli able to capitalize, force a penalty shootout and win that shootout.
Now Flores has been preparing for a tactical showdown with Caleb Porter, saying he’s noticed a few patterns the Crew like to repeat during a deep study of the MLS Cup champions.
“We’re going to try to find the way to attack that, to destabilize them and defensively there are some features they have, they’re a very fast team, they always like the counter-attack,” Flores said. “They try to build. I don’t think they’re very rigid in the idea they have, but they are organized.”
His understanding of the game shows maturity beyond his years, and Flores says he also can utilize his youth to his advantage in other scenarios. While other managers may struggle to connect with the modern player, Flores, his coaching staff and some friends in Spain tailor individual film clips to players in each position, then send them by WhatsApp or email - whatever a player’s preference - reaching them where they’re at.
“When we get to the field, I talk to one or two guys and ask what they thought of the video and after that I take that analysis and make it general so everyone pays attention and puts importance on it,” he said. “I don’t want to spend 45 minutes talking to every position group. Then, I’m just talking and hurting the training session.
“I prefer a 15-minute chat when the whole team gets some ideas but before that I give them individual ideas and specific things about their position.”
That’s not to say Flores is a technology wizard. Typically getting an interview with a manager involves going through a media relations person or finding someone who knows someone who knows the coach. Flores has his cell phone number listed on Instagram, something he confesses he did by mistake when the app asked him to verify his account.
Nevertheless, he’s left it up and says he receives overwhelmingly positive messages and is yet to get hate mail from fans of Walter Ferretti or any other rivals (I know my newsletter readers are too kind to take advantage of this information and change that). “Culturally, we’re not like that here,” he says.
He may need to change numbers if he ends up coaching in a less friendly league, but Flores realizes his map for the future may be slightly skewed by the early success he’s enjoyed.
On the bus back from finishing runner-up at a Central American club U-17 tournament in Honduras in 2019, Flores vowed to himself to get a job in the first division in the next five years.
“When a week goes by after that, and the club says, ‘Holver, you’re the intern manager of Real Esteli!’? It surprised me,” he said. “I really like being at Esteli, I think the confidence the directors give me is very important.”
One day he’d love to be a national team manager, and of course making his way back to Spain also would be ideal. Until then, he’s hoping to keep driving “El Tren del Norte” to more championships.
We have to talk about this…
When I asked for feedback last month, one thing that many of you wrote is that you appreciate that I treat the region with respect. I found that to be high praise. People like Holver Flores or Cuco Martina or the members of the Puerto Rico Islanders deserve the same sort of coverage their Europe-based counterparts get.
I think most of us also cherish how unique our region can be. The newsletter name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to some of the things that seem to happen only in our region. This apparently yellow-card tackle in the dying moments of the Philadelphia Union’s win over Saprissa was one of them.
I wondered if Ismael Cornejo was typically slow to go to the cards, and…it does not appear he is.
It is worth remembering we’re not the only region with crunching tackles and puzzling officiating, but that said, this clip likely received the most attention of anything that has or will happen in the Concacaf Champions League Round of 16. And look at the replies. Whoa, that’s Rex Chapman! Sorry, focus. Soccer fans see this and are like, “Yep, that’s Concacaf.”
In Alajuelense-Atlanta United on Tuesday night, Brad Guzan’s red card and the penalty decision (face? hand?) generally overshadowed discussion of a pretty interesting tactical battle.
What can Concacaf do to get the standard of officiating higher? First of all, while its implementation hardly has been seamless around the world, the addition of VAR in competitions beginning this summer will give referees more tools to be able to see exactly what happened and to hear from colleagues where they may have screwed up.
The confederation was slow to put the technology in place (compared to other confederations) since the majority of domestic leagues in Concacaf don’t utilize VAR, meaning most referees would see it for the first time in international play. After schooling the elite refs on the program, it’s go time.
Another thing can be transparency. I had an opportunity to go to what I jokingly called Concacaf Ref Summer Camp in 2019, the referee base at the Gold Cup. Seeing how seriously the officials take their craft, how harsh they are on themselves and others when they make mistakes and the commitment to be better changed my perspective.
Brian Hall, a former MLS ref who now is the Director of Officiating at Concacaf, is open and honest about where things can improve, and he and his teams have worked hard to get the standard up. There always will be incidents. In the past week I can think of two totally blown calls in UEFA, where we generally feel the standard is much higher. As much as Concacaf’s issue is with training up officials, it’s also with coming out and saying, “Hey, we got this wrong.”
MLS has seen success with being less secretive about officiating, and it’s something that would help the confederation both truly improve and boost its image in an area where it has plenty of work to do.
The Caribbean has incredible potential but there's lots to do still. FAs fighting with players, teams not traveling due to logistical issues, whatever is happening in Trinidad. The Caribbean could be a force but there's stuff to do first
CONCACAF has always been a very lenient refereeing confederation, but with the general world-wide leniency trend that started with WC2014, it has gotten worse. You have the feeling the cards and especially RCs are practically outlawed. The most obvious example was the last Gold Cup final.