Not only technical director of football but also an intellectual and philosopher of baseball, embraced by bohemia and with a left-wing discourse thanks to his militancy in the Communist Party, César Luis Menotti was above all the reimburser of the Argentine team, the coach who In the 1978 Argentina World Cup he led the Albiceleste to the first of his three stars. Celebrated as an inspiring teacher by footballers and coaches, but also looked upon specifically as a rhetorician and a sophist of the ball, Flaco died in Buenos Aires this Sunday at the age of 85. In 2019 he had taken over as national team director, a kind of honorary award from the Argentine Football Association (AFA).

After having reformed his country’s team between 1974 and 1982, a period in which they laid the organizational foundations that the “Albiceleste” lacked, Menotti began a long pilgrimage in the 1980s – and with much less success – to other clubs and national teams. He managed Barcelona and Atlético de Madrid in Spain, Boca and River in Argentina, and the Mexican national team, among other experiences. He always carried with him his proclamation of offensive football, good play and succession of touches, but the triumphs had already abandoned him: he did not win titles in the last 25 years of his career, between 1983 and 2007, when he had his final experience, in the Tecos. . from Mexico. Perhaps he was already more of a preacher than a technical director.

Born in 1938, Menotti came to professional football by chance, at the age of 22, an advanced age for the start of a career in high performance. In reality he was already a player, but in a rural, farming league, that of Carcarañá (45 kilometers from his native Rosario), where he earned money that allowed him to help a family economy in crisis after the death of his father, Antonio, in 1955, a victim of lung cancer due to his addiction to cigarettes.

In the summer of 1960, more to please his friends than out of personal interest, Menotti joined the friendly match of a youth team from Rosario Central, the club of which he was also a supporter. A manager noticed his talent and invited him to the Reserve team, the category prior to the professional team. He barely played six games, he stood out again, and completed a meteoric jump to the First Division: on July 3 of that year he made his debut in the highest category, against Boca, with a win and a goal. The progress had been so rapid that he always distinguished that afternoon as his greatest joy, even more than the world championship as a coach.

Asked what kind of modern player he resembled, Menotti answered – not without megalomania – “Juan Román Riquelme”, in reference to an offensive and elegant midfielder who played and made people play. “Flaco” – a natural nickname for his tall, thin and somewhat lanky physique – learned the collective meaning of football with teachers of his time, among them a Central teammate, “Gitano” Miguel Juárez, who reproached him in a match. that he had not accompanied him when he tried to tear down a wall between them: “You don’t leave friends alone,” Juárez shouted at him. Sometimes, however, he only exercised that solidarity in an offensive capacity: “The only thing missing is that I have to run, you run,” he responded to a leader from Boca, Antonio Rattín, his later club, when he told him He asked for more. defensive commitment. He would not last long in the “Xeneize”.

In addition to passing through Central and Boca, the soccer player Menotti added a third team in Argentina, Racing, before ending up in one of the first bizarre attempts by the United States to get closer to soccer (he played for the New York Generals), and closed his trajectory. in Brazil. In 1968 he arrived at Santos and was a teammate of Pelé, of whom he always said that he was the best footballer he saw in his life (even more than his compatriots Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi), and in 1970 he retired in the Youth. Previously, between 1962 and 1963, he had played seven games for the national team, but no one would assume that he would find his place in history as a coach.

In 1970, returning to Rosario, Menotti established himself as a coach alongside Gitano Juárez at Newell’s, Central’s historic rival. Although football was less violent, many could have accused of treason: both were former “rogue” players. But, Flaco would later explain, “I’m too much from Rosario. For me, Rosario is like a giant neighborhood in the north of the country.” In fact, it was almost time for Menotti to take the Rosario flag to the top: in the last 50 years, from 1974 to the present, six of the 14 “Albiceleste” coaches born in that city (Menotti himself, Marcelo Bielsa , Gerardo Martino and Edgardo Bauza) and its surroundings (Lionel Scaloni, from Pujato, and Jorge Sampaoli, from Casilda).

Menotti was a young man of 35 years when, in mid-1974, he took charge of the national team. In his brief resume, a great Huracán stood out, Argentine champion in 1973, a happy and long-haired soccer team, in tune with the beat aesthetic of players with deep sideburns and oxford pants. Getting to the national team was a reward but also a challenge. That “Albiceleste” specialized in expelling coaches: 10 different ones had paraded between 1960 and 1974.

With the designation of the 1978 World Cup already designated for Argentina, “Flaco” began a job in which he reimbursed the team: he gave it a structure that had been missing until then and planned long-term objectives, a seed that his successors would repeat. . Menotti achieved that leap to modernity, furthermore, with a seductive idea of ​​​​the game and a no less effective rhetoric: the return to the roots of Argentine football, a style patriotically called “La Nuestra” that referred to the skill that his compatriots . attributed to the beginning of the 20th century to emancipate themselves from the English in the pastures of Buenos Aires – and that Menotti would later live in the streets of Rosario.

In the midst of the initial disorganization, Menotti threatened to resign. “Flaco, don’t go, Flaco, come, in ’78 you have to lead,” the fans supported him, precisely in Rosario, during a 10-1 victory over Venezuela in 1975, still Argentina’s biggest win today. Menotti resisted with the support of the AFA, which first at the beginning of 1976 and then in mid-1977 determined that no footballer on the national team’s radar could be sold abroad, a rule that contradicts any labor freedom but that at the time was justified so that Argentina arrived well prepared for the World Cup.

In the middle, in March 1976, the coup d’état that began the bloodiest dictatorship in the country disrupted life in Argentina, including football. A leftist and affiliated with the PC – which, in any case, had a tolerant position towards the dictatorship – Menotti believed that he would be fired, although he kept his position. The military took charge of the organization of the World Cup and also influenced the appointment of at least one player for the tournament: the entry of Norberto Alonso, the weakness of Carlos Lacoste, the vice admiral in charge of the World Cup and de facto president for 10 years. days in 1981. That decision would have been decisive for Maradona, then 17 years old, being left out of Argentina 1978, one of the decisions that would never stop haunting Menotti.

His proclamations of aesthetic and offensive football reached the pinnacle. With the goals of Mario Kempes, Argentina won its first World Cup and Menotti, at 39 years old, entered the podium of the youngest coaches to become world champions, only behind the 31 of the Uruguayan Alberto Supicci in Uruguay 1930 and the 38 of the Brazilian Mario Zagallo in Mexico 1970. But above all, Menotti gained fame as a football intellectual.

With an inevitable cigarette between his lips or fingers (he smoked between 40 and 60 a day), Menotti spoke of football as an art and a philosophy. His hypnotic speech – above average, with mentions of plays, musicians and writers – generated an identity that became known as “Menottism” and seduced most of the players he addressed. Many fans surrendered to his seductive message, “of football that people like.”

Menotti added Maradona for the 1979 Youth World Cup in Japan, he also won for Argentina, but then he would face failure in Spain 1982, which led to his departure from the national team. At the same time, with the return to democracy, in 1983, some voices would begin to point to Menotti – and the rest of the champion players in 1978 – for having won in a dictatorship, as if his success had collaborated with the Government. de facto. .

It is true that, as the military had taken the World Cup as its own, Menotti was once indirectly favored. On Radio Splendid, a station intervened by the dictatorship, “comments adverse to our team” were prohibited, but it was not a general censorship: there were also sports publications that criticized the coach. Although the coach was recorded in more than one photo with the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla – it is not easy to imagine that he could have refused that type of meeting – he was never complacent with the regime and, even during the dictatorship, signed his signatures demanding ” know the list and whereabouts of the missing.” Political prisoners would later express a certain disappointment because they expected Menotti to have more forceful gestures to make the violation of human rights visible but, at the same time, relatives of the disappeared recognized him and thanked him for his participation in the requests.

In 1983, Menotti made the leap to Europe and signed for Barcelona, ​​where he was reunited with Maradona. However, the adventure would end with a taste of stale bread: the Catalan team won three titles – Copa del Rey, Copa de la Liga and Spanish Super Cup – but was not crowned in either the League or Europe. While Argentina won its second World Cup, in Mexico 1986, led by a coach with an opposite style, Carlos Bilardo – more focused on order and defensive security -, Menotti uncovered his verbiage and remained at the center of permanent controversies. Between passion and arrogance, he more than once said “I never make mistakes in football,” although his altercations exceeded sport.

Bilardo himself accused him of being a “little radish, red on the outside and white on the inside” – in play with the colors of the radishes and Menotti’s supposed double discourse between his political militancy and his daily life – and Maradona joined in with a similar phrase: “I don’t like communists in Mercedes Benz.” In fact, the famous story by the Uruguayan narrator Víctor Hugo Morales about Maradona’s second goal against England in Mexico 1986, “Cosmic kite,” was born in Menotti’s criticism of Diego before that World Cup: he had treated him as a “kite” ( comet) because “as a guy he now makes curls and put on a little earring.”

When he composed in Boca in 1987, Menotti had 20 years of career left and 13 spells in different clubs and the Mexican national team, but he would never win a title again. In fact, his cycles (also directed in Italy to Sampdoria, in Uruguay to Peñarol and in Argentina to Independiente and its heart team, Rosario Central) would be short, sometimes because the results were not good but other times because the coach himself resigned. unexpected. When he arrived in Mexico, in November 1991, he spoke of the dream of winning a World Cup with El Tri, although it did not last more than 19 games, until the following year.

In his preaching of irrevocably offensive, perhaps romantic, football, Menotti also became a slave to his theoretical framework and became a rigid, conservative coach, often a character of himself. At the same time, he never stopped being a reference for coaches who seek effectiveness from aesthetics, to the point that Pep Guardiola visited him in Argentina in 2006, when the Spaniard trained to be a technical director. “There are many Mourinho, there is only one Guardiola,” the Argentine would praise him in the midst of the duels between Pep’s Barcelona and the Portuguese’s Real Madrid. “Guardiola is the Che Guevara of football,” he would later insist.

The last two clubs Menotti addressed were Mexican, Puebla (just two games, in 2006) and Tecos (13, in 2007). A few years later, in 2014, journalist Diego Borinsky asked El Grafico if he was already retired. “No, I never retire, only death can retire you,” he replied.

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