River Plate and Coudet's failure: seventy million with no team to show for it

A shipping container as a locker room, a squad of more than thirty players, and a penalty shootout elimination in which even the goalkeeper stepped up to take a kick and missed. If anyone needed an image to sum up River Plate's current state, there it is. What's striking is that none of these scenes has anything to do with the level of competition at stake. River isn't fighting relegation, but the club is going through a crisis that, in its own way, feels as troubling as that afternoon against Belgrano back in 2011. The difference is that this time there's unprecedented spending behind it for Argentine soccer, and even so, the team is nowhere to be found.

The blame doesn't fall on club leadership alone. Eduardo Coudet had a squad loaded with talent at his disposal and never managed to turn it into a recognizable team. That was his biggest failure, beyond any single loss. The elimination against Independiente Santa Fe in the round of 16 of the Copa Sudamericana wasn't an isolated accident. It confirmed a problem that had already been building across every competition.

The numbers make it clear. Since his arrival in March 2026, Coudet has coached 27 matches, with 13 wins, six draws and eight losses. Early results masked the doubts, but once the win rate dropped and the pressure rose, there was no real structure to fall back on.

Seventy million dollars with no team to show for it

River carried out the most expensive transfer window in Argentine soccer history, spending $68.45 million on nine signings, among them Nicolas Otamendi, Mauro Arambarri, Lucas Beltran, Rafael Santos Borre, Angel Correa and Thiago Almada. The pedigree of those names strips away any excuse tied to a lack of individual quality. The problem was never the raw material, it was the inability to organize it.

All that depth, far from being an advantage, ended up working against the team. Correa, Almada, Sebastian Driussi, Borre and Beltran were all competing for a handful of spots up front, and something similar was happening in midfield. Every lineup left out important players, and every change reopened a debate Coudet never settled. It didn't help that several signings arrived far from their best form either: Otamendi joined at 38, Borre returned at 30 after an inconsistent stretch, and Beltran still hasn't scored since coming back.

Constant rotation, no clear pecking order

A coach doesn't just pick eleven names, he defines roles, establishes a pecking order and sets clear rules for making the team. Coudet changed his starting lineup in 24 of his first 26 matches and at one point went 21 games without repeating the same eleven. After the break, he averaged more than four changes from one lineup to the next. Injuries and new signings explain part of that, but not all of it.

So much experimentation brought its own problems: defenders who never played alongside the same partners twice, midfielders adjusting to different setups, forwards with no chemistry. River could field a lineup packed with star names and still, almost every match, the team seemed to be starting from scratch.

That's where the container episode comes in. Club leadership decided that up to 14 players would stop training with the first team and move to the Cantilo training complex, where they had to use a shipping container as a locker room because the facilities weren't finished. The idea was to ease the wage bill and clear space for the new arrivals. The club later admitted the way it handled things was wrong, though it stood by the underlying decision.

Coudet didn't make that call, but he didn't question it publicly either. And when it comes to running a squad, silence is its own kind of endorsement. The case of German Pezzella, a World Cup champion who came up through River's youth ranks, generated the most backlash: if a player with that history could be pushed aside like that, anyone could picture themselves in his place. That kind of fear doesn't need to explode into open protest to damage a group's trust.

No identity, no answers from the bench

The best teams Coudet has coached in his career were built around intensity and a high press. At River, those traits only showed up in flashes. There was never a clearly defined style of play: no coordinated pressing, no control through possession, no recognizable pattern in transition. Against teams that sat back, the ball movement became predictable and the forwards kept receiving the ball far from goal.

The bench wasn't a solution either. Over the last 11 matches, Coudet made 44 substitutions. In 63.6 percent of the cases following those changes, the result got worse or stayed unfavorable. Add in the draws that were never turned around, and that figure climbs to 79.55 percent.

The elimination against Santa Fe summed it all up: Driussi returned to the starting lineup, scored to make it 1-0, and came off shortly after, clearly not fully fit. River lost its footing, conceded the equalizer, and fell in the penalty shootout, with Borre missing a crucial kick and goalkeeper Beltran, who had saved three penalties, missing his own attempt. It was an almost unintentional summary of the chaos of the last few months.

River is out of the Copa Sudamericana and has no clear direction in the domestic league either. The message to the fans is simple: something has to change, and it has to happen soon.