By Jamie Ralph
There is a particular kind of dread that settles over a football club when the season has gone wrong before February is out. Newell’s fans know it well. They have lived through enough false dawns and administrative mishaps to recognise the sensation. That sinking feeling when the results, the performances and the decisions from the boardroom all seem to be conspiring against them at once. This Apertura has been no different. But as autumn arrives in Rosario, something is slowly stirring.
The architect of the rojinegro revival is Frank Darío Kudelka, a man who does not deal in dramatics or press-conference theatrics. He is, in the most reassuring sense of the phrase, a football man: pragmatic, methodical, and entirely unbothered by the noise around him. He took charge of the squad at its lowest moment, after a calamitous start by the Orsi-Gómez partnership, and just days before a home Clásico against Rosario Central that Newell’s duly lost.
The ship was not merely listing. It was going under.
Rock Bottom in Lanús
There have been bad days in the history of this football club, and then there was the evening of 17th March, in the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires. Lanús, Kudelka’s former club, put five goals past a shellshocked Newell’s side at the Estadio Ciudad de Lanús, with Dylan Aquino helping himself to a hat-trick and Eduardo Salvio adding a fifth. The scoreline read 5-0, and at that moment Newell’s sat with a record of zero wins, three draws and seven losses. It was, by any measure, a humiliation.
What followed was either the turning point or a coincidence of good fortune. Either way, Newell’s have not lost since.
After going ten games without a win, Kudelka’s side gathered themselves and put together back-to-back victories over Gimnasia de Mendoza and Central Córdoba, then drew 0-0 with San Lorenzo; seven points from a possible nine in the league. The home win against Gimnasia de Mendoza started the recovery; a composed away performance in Santiago del Estero against Central Córdoba followed; and then, on a Friday evening in Santa Fe, came arguably the best result of the entire campaign, a victory away at Unión that confirmed the revival was no mirage. That 3-2 win against Unión rounded off an unbeaten run across four matches — three wins and a draw — leaving Newell’s with 13 points from 14 games, still in the lower reaches of Group A but no longer in freefall.
The Academy as Foundation
What has changed? Part of the answer lies not in tactics but in trust, specifically, Kudelka’s willingness to trust the young players whom the club has spent years developing at Bella Vista and whom have always been a hallmark of the great Lepra teams.
Jerónimo Russo has been the standout performer for Newell’s in league play this season with a rating of 7.34 (FotMob), while Facundo Guch has also impressed, contributing both goals and assists. At 19 years old, Guch possesses the kind of direct, electric energy that cannot be coached, it can only be set free. Russo, meanwhile, has brought a discipline and creativity to the defence that belies his youth, his deliveries from wide areas consistently causing problems for opposition defences. Alongside them, Luca Regiardo has continued to demonstrate why those who have watched him through the lower age groups have spoken of him with such confidence.
But perhaps the most significant personnel decision of Kudelka’s short second tenure has been the promotion of goalkeeper Josué Reinatti. His bet on the 22-year-old Reinatti, after removing Williams Barlasina following the humiliating Copa Argentina exit against Acassuso, proved to be a masterstroke. The young keeper’s composure and personality between the sticks, despite his age, has transmitted security to the entire back line around him.
It is the solving of a problem that has gnawed at this club for some time. The long-term injury to the experienced Gabriel Arias left a vacuum in goal, and Barlasina, a capable goalkeeper, though prone to erratic moments at the worst possible times, could not fully command the position. Reinatti’s emergence has provided something Newell’s have been lacking all season: a reliable last line of defence.
A Career Built Without Fanfare
To understand why Kudelka’s return inspires calm rather than mere cautious optimism, it helps to understand the man’s track record. He is, in the best possible sense, an overachiever: a coach who has consistently done more with less throughout a long career in Argentine football.
Born in Freyre, a Córdoba town of around 7,000 inhabitants, Kudelka trained as a physical education teacher before carving out his path into professional management. His rise was built on merit alone. No shortcuts, no connections, no playing career at the highest level to trade on.
With Talleres de Córdoba, he achieved something genuinely remarkable: first guiding them up from the Torneo Federal A to the Nacional B, and then winning the Nacional B unbeaten, a feat without precedent in that division. It is the sort of achievement that tends to be forgotten in the white noise of Argentine football, but which tells you everything about a coach’s methods when the resources are limited and the margins are thin.
At Unión de Santa Fe, he also secured promotion back to the Primera División, another club added to a list of institutions that are demonstrably better for his presence. He is not a manager who makes himself the story. He does not shout for the cameras or court controversy. But his teams compete, evolve, and grow. They are qualities that feel almost radical in a football culture addicted to urgent fixes and short-term noise.
His time at Huracán represents perhaps the most compelling chapter of all. Returning to the club for a third stint in March 2024, he guided the Globo all the way to the 2025 Torneo Apertura final, losing 1-0 to Platense in a run that few had anticipated from a club of Huracán’s means. Even the prior year, in 2024, he had Huracán in contention for the title on the final day, eventually finishing fourth. It was the football equivalent of a magician producing a rabbit from a hat, except Kudelka never makes it look like a trick. He makes it look like work.
His Huracán tenure ultimately ended in November 2025 amid a chaotic finale involving a volatile exchange with a referee and a failure to qualify for the Clausura playoffs. It was a disappointing conclusion to what had been, by any objective measure, a tremendous overall spell. In February 2026, he began his second cycle as Newell’s head coach.
The Weight of History at El Coloso
Kudelka knows this club. His first spell at Newell’s, between 2019 and 2021, represented one of the more solid management records the club has produced in the past decade, a period of relative stability in what has otherwise been a managerial carousel of startling proportions. He understands the culture, the weight of expectation that accompanies the red and black shirt, and the particular passion of a fanbase that demands not just results but a recognisable identity on the pitch.
That identity, built from the academy, demanding of young players, rooted in collective effort rather than expensive external stars, is precisely what Kudelka is constructing again. The presence of Guch, Russo, Regiardo and Reinatti is not incidental.
His move to sign former Huracán player Walter Mazzanti was a calculated bet that has paid off. He has arguably made more of an impact than any of the seven other new signings made whilst Orsi and Gómez were in post before Kudelka arrived.
Boero’s Gamble, and the Road to Redemption
None of this would be necessary, of course, had the decisions of the summer been different. When Ignacio Boero swept to the presidency in December 2025 on a wave of popular support, his first major move was the appointment of Favio Orsi and Sergio Gómez, the duo who had won the Apertura title with Platense, as joint managers. It was, in theory, a bold and ambitious statement of intent. In practice, it proved catastrophic. A winless run that stretched through the opening weeks of the season left Newell’s staring at the relegation zone, and the Orsi-Gómez partnership was dissolved before it had truly begun.
Boero, a man elected on a promise of ending a decade of decline, found himself having to reach for a familiar face and the irony is that the familiar face may yet save him. If Kudelka can shepherd this squad to a respectable finish in the Apertura, accumulating enough points to keep the club clear of danger and restore some semblance of pride to the Estadio Marcelo Bielsa, then the president’s chaotic start begins to look less like a disaster and more like a storm that was, ultimately, weathered.
There are still two games to play, this weekend at home to Instituto, and then a final away trip to the capital to play Vélez. Injuries to key players have forced Kudelka into constant reshuffling of his defensive and attacking line, a problem that will not simply disappear. And the gap in quality between Newell’s current squad and the playoff-chasing clubs above them remains significant.
But football, as Frank Kudelka has spent a lifetime demonstrating, is rarely about the gap in quality alone. He took charge of a club heading for the drain and began, one training session, one team selection, one trust-filled opportunity for a young keeper at a time, to plug the holes. The water is no longer rushing in as fast as it was.
At El Coloso, for the first time since January, that is reason enough for cautious, tentative, red-and-black optimism.
