Top five challenges for Sergio Lobera at East Bengal

The Spanish Maestro is all set to take charge at East Bengal next season.

Former Mumbai City manager Sergio Lobera is poised to be announced as the next head coach for East Bengal. The Spaniard is all set to make a stunning record to the Indian Super League (ISL) after leaving India in 2021.

While the Red & Gold Brigade are yet to announce the deal, Lobera is expected to have struck an agreement to take over from next season onwards. He’ll take over from Stephen Constantine, who failed to impress in the 2022-23 ISL season.

Sergio Lobera was renowned as one of the best managers in Indian football before he left India a few years ago. He initially attained success with FC Goa, helping them win the 2019-20 Indian Super League Winners’ Shield. He went onto manage Mumbai City, helping them win both the ISL league stages as well as the playoffs title in the 2020-21 campaign.

He earned a stark reputation for encouraging an exciting, attacking brand of football that made both his sides among the best in India. A lot of expectations will be on Lobera to ‘fix’ East Bengal and get them challenging for the top honours in Indian football. He’ll however, face a number of daunting challenges on his road to doing that. Here we’ll look at the top challenges Sergio Lobera will face at East Bengal.

5. Helping Indian Players Find Their Best Form

Over the last few seasons, East Bengal have struggled with a relatively underwhelming domestic core. Last season, Naorem Mahesh Singh and Lalchungnunga were the only two prominent Indian players to excel. Sergio Lobera earned a reputation for giving a platform to many Indian players during his time with FC Goa and Mumbai City. Indeed, he helped the Indian stars find their best form under him. The likes of Bipin Singh, Brandon Fernandes, Seriton Fernandes, Mandar Rao Dessai and Mohammad Nawaz are some promising domestic talents that soared under him.

With only four foreign players eligible to play in ISL games, Lobera has to immensely improve the domestic core at East Bengal. He needs to help his players discover their best qualities and feel special in his squad. Considering that East Bengal can only buy a limited number of new Indian players, he’ll need to use his managerial skills to help improve some raw, underwhelming talents in the squad too! If able to do that, Lobera can help East Bengal be more consistent and dangerous than they’ve been in recent seasons.

4.  Improving the defensive sloppiness

East Bengal have struggled to manage with the intensity of the ISL since being promoted to the league. In the last few seasons, they’ve maintained some of the worst defensive records for any team. In the previous ISL campaign, they conceded 38 goals in 20 games – almost averaging two goals conceded per game and only kept three clean sheets. East Bengal’s backline has been their Achilles heel in recent years and cost them points time and again. Sergio Lobera has a major task at hand in improving that defensive record.

Considering that the current defenders at the club just aren’t sturdy enough to go through an entire campaign with a strong defensive record, he’ll need new faces. Even if he gets that, Lobera needs to train them to quickly adapt to his philosophy. After seeing how ATK Mohun Bagan won the ISL title last season due to their defensive sturdiness, East Bengal need to take a page out of their rivals’ books. Lobera will need to work hard to improve the overall toughness in his backline and train them to churn out regular clean sheets and work as one tight defensive unit to concede fewer cheap goals.

3.  Creating a strong foreign-player core

Another major issue to have haunted East Bengal in recent seasons is their inconsistency when signing foreign players. Last season, captain Cleiton Silva was in amazing form – but had little backing up. Eliandro, Jordan O’Doherty and Ivan Gonzalez all failed to impress. Alex Lima was too injury-prone to make any significant impact. This forced the Red & Gold Brigade to often depend on their relatively inexperienced domestic core to grind out results. Any major ISL side is dependent on their foreign players playing an influential role in their success.

As a result, Sergio Lobera has to ensure that the foreigners in his squad are all able to operate at a high level. That involves cutting out the underperforming talent and signing quality, impactful new foreign players. Lobera has to really push to make that happen and use his scouting skills to buy the ideal players for his squad. But if able to bolster the strength of the East Bengal side with high-quality foreign players, he can help them compete at a higher level next season.

2. Fixing the goal-scoring issues

As the saying goes in football – goals win matches. Even though it might sound cliché and obvious, a team needs to regularly score goals to win enough matches to compete for championships. This can be directed towards East Bengal as well. The Red & Gold Brigade only scored 22 goals last season in the ISL, the third-lowest for any side. That included just 10 goals in 20 home games! Cleiton Silva contributed to the majority of those, scoring 12 goals all by himself. Unfortunately for the Brazilian, he had no support at all.

Sergio Lobera has a major challenge of fixing this goal drought issue that has plagued East Bengal since they arrived in the ISL. While he’ll be blessed with the presence of Cleiton next season, he needs to find more players who can support him with regular goals.

East Bengal need at least 3-4 consistent scorers to at least challenge for a playoffs title and get out of the bottom places. How they find those individuals will be dependent on Lobera, who’ll need to recruit smart, clinical forwards and vastly improve the quality of players who stay on from last term to bolster his side’s chances of winning more matches next season.

1. Implementing the 'Sergio Lobera' style

The biggest problem for East Bengal in recent seasons is how clueless they’ve looked for the majority of games. They’ve lacked any proper philosophy or genuine playing style to which the team has stuck to. In most occasions, it’s the average trope of sit back, defend and hope to hit the opposition on counter-attacks or set-pieces. Last season, they were mostly to have a defensive style and hope Cleiton bailed them out on the other side. During his time in India, Sergio Lobera showed a willingness with implementing his vision into the clubs he managed impressively.

That involved obsessively training his players to get in line with his playing style, or get out. Lobera will probably have to work extremely hard to implement his particular philosophy in East Bengal. Getting the players to adapt to this possession-heavy, quick-passing-based style and ‘Tiki Taka’ inspired attacking moves can be a major challenge. But Lobera’s work with FC Goa and Mumbai City proved he can even inspire inexperienced stars to buy into his playing style and produce positive results in flourishing colours.