IF the troika handling bailouts of distressed eurozone countries was a football team, it would probably be looking for a new manager after a track record of one win, one loss and a draw.

The uneasy trio of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank was assembled in haste in March 2010 after Greece's public debt and deficit exploded and it was about to lose access to market funding.

The IMF's recent "mea culpa" report about the failures of the Greek program blew the lid off the fiction that the three institutions saw eye-to-eye on rescue packages they are enforcing in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus.

Behind closed doors, they clashed over whether Greece should restructure its debt, forcing investors to take losses, and whether Ireland should make bondholders in its shattered banks share the cost of a financial rescue.

They still differ over whether European governments should write off some loans to Athens to make its debt sustainable in the long term, a politically explosive idea ahead of a German general election in September.

Airing of differences

The public airing of such differences raises the question of whether the troika has reached the end of the road.

The IMF says it lowered its standards to support a flawed program for Greece; the European Commission says it "fundamentally disagrees" with the IMF's view that Greek debt should have been written off sooner; and the ECB says the IMF is applying misleading hindsight.

The Europeans contend that in the market panic of 2010, before the eurozone had begun to build a financial firewall, letting Greece default or making it restructure its debt could have swept away the single European currency.

"It would have been Europe's Lehman moment," EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said, referring to the 2008 collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers that sparked a global financial crisis.

"I don't recall the IMF's managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn proposing early debt restructuring, but I do recall that Christine Lagarde was opposed to it."

Lagarde, French finance minister at the time, replaced Strauss-Kahn as IMF head in 2011.

The most damaging suspicion raised by the IMF study of the Greek program is that the troika made over-optimistic growth forecasts and massaged the debt numbers because eurozone political leaders exerted undue influence on the process.

IMF experts say European leaders made Greece's economic crisis worse by delaying an inevitable debt write-off, buying time for their own banks to cut losses at taxpayers' expense.

Ousmene Mandeng, a former IMF official, said: "Decisions were perceived to be taken in Berlin and Brussels rather than by the IMF board."

Mandeng added: "The IMF should never again be a junior partner in this way."

ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet initially opposed bringing the global lender into the eurozone, arguing that Europe should be able to sort out its own problems. He also rejected debt restructuring or making bank bondholders share losses, saying it would ruin the euro area's standing in financial markets.

Germany and its north European allies insisted on IMF involvement because they feared the commission would be too soft on indebted member states and too willing to commit taxpayers' money.

While the IMF never felt in command, EU officials felt it held a de facto veto on the bailout program.

But the IMF is not the only body to harbor misgivings.

Some ECB stakeholders, notably in Germany, are worried about potential conflicts of interest if the central bank stays in the troika while it is backstopping eurozone government debt at the same time with its OMT bond-buying program and is soon to take charge of supervising banks that lend to troubled sovereigns.

Forecasts questioned

ECB executive board member Joerg Asmussen told the European Parliament that once the current crisis is over, the troika should be replaced by the eurozone rescue fund and the European Commission. But not now.

Many independent economic experts argued from the outset that Greece would never be able to repay its debt mountain and questioned the troika's rosy forecasts for the Greek economy.

The initial Greek program projected that gross domestic product would contract by just 3.5 percent between 2009 and 2013. In fact, it crashed by 22 percent.

Officials in the troika repeatedly increased the amount Greece was supposed to raise by privatizing state assets, even as its economy crumbled and investors fled.

Growth forecasts for Portugal, where the outcome of a EU/IMF adjustment programme remains uncertain, were also over-optimistic, though not by the same order of magnitude.

The biggest errors occurred in predicting unemployment - a key measure of economic damage.

In Greece, the troika originally foresaw a peak jobless level of 14.8 percent this year. The real figure is 27 percent.

Even in Ireland, the one "success" which returned to growth and expects to get back to market funding this year, the troika underestimated job losses and related social damage.

Now non-European IMF members in Latin America and Asia are loath to pour more money into one of the world's richest regions.

"Operationally and financially, the IMF has become much more involved in Europe than its global shareholders deem sustainable," said Jean Pisani-Ferry, outgoing director of the Bruegel economic think-tank in Brussels.

An IMF source said the real problem with the troika was no one was in charge. "It's more like a soccer team with no manager and no clear definition of who plays where on the field," he said.