César Luis Menotti: the cultured man who talked about football all the time

César Luis Menotti was a strange guy. Jorge Luis Borges told him, stunned: “How strange! “A man so cultured that he talks about football all the time.”. The phrase, revived among the hundreds of anecdotes that followed the hours after the death of the remembered coach – the first to give a World Cup to Argentina and one of the most revolutionary in the history of sport – was said the same afternoon in which they met. “You must be famous. When I said I was coming, this house was revolutionized. The employee told me that she couldn’t leave without an autograph. And I reproached him that they had never asked me for one”: he recalled The skinny in one of the last interviews he gave in life.

For Borges, football was popular because, in his words, “stupidity is popular.”. And Menotti shared it. Not because the game seemed stupid to him, quite the opposite, but because it seemed to him an expression of the idiosyncrasy of the people. “I am of this race, a race of soccer players,” he defined himself.as did one of his most loyal accomplices, Ángel Cappa: “He trained on a neighborhood field and created, also there, his conviction not to betray the heritage of our football.” The skinny He defined football as the art of deception. A “must be” lost in time: “Football is three things: time, space and deception. It’s the only place where I like to be fooled. Today there is no time, spaces are not sought and they never deceive me anymore. “I get so bored that I have the feeling that what they call football is something else.”

The words, and the meaning of the game, mattered. After his death, Pep Guardiola, one of his admirers and one of those who admired him, said it: “He made the word his poetry and was always faithful to his convictions. Style is non-negotiable, he always said. “He was the greatest seducer of Argentine football.”

“Thinking” was the central axis of his football heritage. This is how Jorge Valdano, another of his close friends, defined it in the posthumous column he wrote in “El País” in honor of the deceased strategist.. He remembered that one day Menotti told him an anecdote about Francisco Maturana: “On one occasion ‘Pacho’ told him, worried, that Valderrama sometimes stopped in the middle of the game, to which The skinny He replied: ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be thinking.’”

According to Valdano, “his talks had an intellectual air that elevated him above his field and that he mixed with street turns that brought him back to the football community. He never knew which of the two characteristics contributed more to his seductive quality. But due to the strength of his charisma, the clarity of his speech and the conviction with which he defended his ideas, he caused a miracle of communication: listening to him made me want to play football.” That’s where the phrase must have come from, also said by the Argentine, that “Menotti convinced by seduction; Bilardo, by insistence.”

The two, world champions with Argentina, engaged in one of the most iconic ideological rivalries in the history of football. Menotti defended beautiful football, well played, Carlos Salvador Bilardo, on the other hand, one of results. However, The skinny, without ignoring that they could not see each other, said that it was more of a press version: “It mattered for those who got into that fight without any respect for ideas. It was a personal dispute. I would never fight with a guy because he plays libero and stopper. “It was magnified because each one won a World Cup, but it was a debate that wasn’t worth a nickel.”

It was also magnified because Menotti never betrayed himself. It was his mantra. He grew up “sick of soccer,” following Rosario Central when his parents took him to the field. However, when he became a soccer player, his disappointment was huge: “I was caught in the worst period of Argentine soccer, when teams that fought became fashionable, shitty soccer, it was brave to overcome.” For this reason, when he became a coach, he defended “to the death” the football that was played with thought. He first led Huracán, the team that, he said, “saved Argentine soccer.” Later he was champion with the Pasarella, Villa and Kempes team, among many others. He was in Barcelona and is remembered as the founder of the ideology that would later be attributed to Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff, that of total football. “The first one who tried to play like Guardiola at Barcelona was called Menotti. And he cost me my life. “They whistled at us for making too many passes!” the Argentine recalled in a famous interview with Luis Martín.

The defense of his ideas, the football that he liked, he recognized as an ideological struggle. He said it in the same interview, it was a battle against his political pessimism: “They stole our music, our parks, our squares and even our football. I am a fierce pessimist. After what I experienced, I feel like a hormonal Marxist, without any further ideological explanation. For 70 years I have seen the disaster that capitalism has made in everything around me, including football.”

That is why the questions about his great summit always hurt him: the 1978 World Cup. In the midst of the military dictatorship, it is said that Jorge Videla bribed referees so that Argentina became world champion. But, it is also true that Menotti himself was a political target due to his open affiliation with the Communist Party, due to his criticism of the disappearances and deaths of his own people.

However, the lack of knowledge of the game, with which he defeated one of the best Netherlands in history, hurt more. “Carlos Monzón was a world boxing champion and Guillermo Vilas won at tennis, but no one judged them,” he once stated. And another, more in his tone: “I still do not accept that that victory is questioned. “You have to be a very son of a bitch to say that some Peruvian player let himself win.”

Their albiceleste, today, is remembered as one of the best in history, so much so that it was the essence that founded the entire ideology of Argentine football, the idea of ​​the pasture, which they call “ours.” The essence of neighborhood football, the one that Menotti loved and defended. The one he sought to recover when, in one of his final acts, he built Lionel Scaloni’s project. That deep-rooted philosophy that many call “Menottism”, which seemed to him to be truly stupid: “There is Marxism, capitalism, Peronism, and Menottism seems nonsense to me as a football metaphor, nonsense.”