CF Montreal have dismissed head coach Marco Donadel after just seven games of the 2025 MLS season, a tenure that ended with the club sitting second from bottom in the Eastern Conference. The decision came one day after a home defeat to the Philadelphia Union — a side that had yet to record a single victory before that encounter — leaving Montreal with one win from their opening seven outings. It is the second managerial dismissal the club has made in the span of a single year.
A Cycle That Refuses to Break
Donadel's exit follows an almost identical script to the one written just months earlier. His predecessor, Laurent Courtois, was removed in early 2025 after beginning the season with no wins in four outings and a single draw. Donadel had initially stepped in on an interim basis in March of that year before being confirmed in the permanent role last October — a decision the club has now reversed within six months.
The pattern stretches further back than one calendar year. Since CF Montreal's founding in 2012, the club has cycled through eleven permanent head coaches, none of whom has reached one hundred appearances in the role. Not one has survived into a third full season. That kind of organisational instability is rarely coincidental. It points to structural pressures — whether in recruitment strategy, squad investment, or the expectations set at executive level — that outlast any individual appointment.
Donadel's Background and the Weight of Familiarity
Donadel arrived in the role with genuine ties to the club. He represented Montreal from 2015 to 2018, having previously built a professional profile across Italy with Fiorentina in Serie A. His appointment as permanent head coach carried the logic of institutional familiarity — a figure who understood the culture and could provide continuity. That familiarity, it turns out, was not enough to translate into results on the field of play.
Philippe Eullaffroy has now been named as the interim replacement, with assistant coaches Jacopo Falanga and Lorenzo Pinzauti also departing the club. The announcement was made by Managing Director of Recruitment and Sporting Methodology Luca Saputo, who will now oversee the search for what will be Montreal's twelfth permanent head coach in thirteen years of existence.
What the Search for a Twelfth Coach Signals
For a franchise that has reached the postseason twice in the last four years — including a wild card appearance in the most recent campaign — Montreal are not without competitive pedigree. The club has shown it can assemble a functional, results-producing group. The question is why that capability has never cohered around a stable long-term managerial identity.
Frequent leadership changes at the technical level create a specific kind of organisational drag. New appointments inherit squads built under different philosophies. Tactical systems take time to embed. Player confidence in an institution's direction can erode when the personnel delivering that direction keeps changing. Recruiting a twelfth head coach does not solve that underlying dynamic — it restarts it.
Montreal's immediate calendar offers little breathing room for Eullaffroy. The club hosts the New York Red Bulls on Saturday before welcoming NYCFC to town on April 25. Both fixtures arrive in front of home supporters at a moment when confidence within the group will require careful management. How the club performs across those two appearances may well shape the profile of candidate Saputo decides to pursue — and how urgently that process moves.
