Cosmin Olăroiu

Aurelian Cosmin Olăroiu (born 10 June 1969 in Bucharest) is a Romanian football manager and former player. He is the head coach of UAE club Al Ahli. He is considered one of the greatest managers in the Arabian Peninsula, having led the most decorated clubs of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates (Al Hilal, Al Sadd, Al Ain and Al Ahli) to new trophies.

Olăroiu also managed some other impressive results in his very short coaching career before arriving in the region, in his country Romania. During the 2001–02 season, Naţional Bucureşti under his managership became a challenger for the national championship title. However, they lost the leader position in the last game of the season, against Universitatea Craiova, and the title went to Dinamo Bucharest. He won the Romanian League and the Supercupa României with Steaua Bucureşti, both in 2006, and qualified the team in the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup in the same year.

He was chosen Romanian Coach of the Year in 2006.

Club career

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia (ⁱ/ˌsɔːdiː əˈreɪbiə/, ⁱ/ˌsaʊ-/), officially known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is an Arab state in Western Asia constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. With a land area of approximately 2,150,000 km² (830,000 sq mi), Saudi Arabia is geographically the second-largest state in the Arab world after Algeria. Saudi Arabia is bordered by Jordan and Iraq to the north, Kuwait to the northeast, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to the east, Oman to the southeast, and Yemen to the south. It is the only nation with both a Red Sea coast and a Persian Gulf coast, and most of its terrain consists of arid inhospitable desert or barren landforms.

The area of modern-day Saudi Arabia formerly consisted of four distinct regions: Hejaz, Najd, and parts of Eastern Arabia (Al-Ahsa) and Southern Arabia ('Asir). The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Ibn Saud. He united the four regions into a single state through a series of conquests beginning in 1902 with the capture of Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family, the House of Saud. The country has since been an absolute monarchy, effectively a hereditary dictatorship governed along Islamic lines. The ultra-conservative Wahhabism religious movement within Sunni Islam has been called "the predominant feature of Saudi culture", with its global spreading largely financed by the oil and gas trade. Saudi Arabia is sometimes called "the Land of the Two Holy Mosques" in reference to Al-Masjid al-Haram (in Mecca), and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (in Medina), the two holiest places in Islam. The Kingdom has a total population of 28.7 million, of which 20 million are Saudi nationals and 8 million are foreigners.