Michele Bon

Michele Bon has spent more than twenty years learning the game in places where results arrive quickly or you don't stay. That is exactly why he leads our first team.

He holds the UEFA Pro Licence — the highest coaching qualification in European football — and is a graduate of Coverciano, the Italian federation's technical centre often called the university of football. He speaks Italian, English, Spanish and Romanian, which matters in a dressing room built from six or seven nationalities.

His route to Dubai reads like a map of modern football: Udinese's youth setup, a formative decade in Romania (including Unirea Urziceni's Liga I title run), Wisla Krakow, Al-Nasr's U23 side in Dubai, Al-Muharraq in Bahrain, technical director at South China in Hong Kong, Hungary, and head coach of Zimbru Chisinau in Moldova.

He has been a fitness coach, an assistant, a technical director and a number one. He understands every chair in the building — which makes him unusually good at running a staff, not just a team.