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César Luis Menotti, who died on Sunday at the age of 85, was one of the most important coaches in the history of Argentine football. He was able to influence generations of coaches in his country and was the inspiration for a particular way of understanding football, later defined as “menottismo”, in which the search for results is accompanied by that of an aesthetically pleasing game that is more focused on the attacking phase than on the defensive one. When he was not yet 40, Menotti was the coach of the Argentine national team that won the 1978 World Cup, an edition that went down in history as the “World Cup of shame”, because it was played in Argentina during the military dictatorship led by General Jorge Videla .
Menotti was a sympathizer of left-wing movements, he was a member of the Communist Party but in those years he became an instrument of regime propaganda, which used that World Cup to legitimize itself and which implemented a ferocious repression of dissent, with kidnappings, torture and killings, even while the competition it was underway.
Menotti’s role has been much debated, as has that of the players who won that World Cup. Menotti himself spoke about it several times, admitting that he “had been used” but never completely denying his decision to remain in office as coach, despite the military dictatorship. He said he had not been fully aware of the «craziness» (madness) of those years and the scale of the repression: it is estimated that between 1976 and 1983 the military junta killed over two thousand people and made another thirty thousand disappear (these are still known today by the name “missing”).
During the 1978 World Cup some of Argentina’s matches were played less than a kilometer from a military school in Buenos Aires used as a detention and torture centre, while the popular celebrations for the victories took place simultaneously with the demonstrations of the mothers of the missingwho asked for news of their missing children.
Precisely Menotti’s political conscience and his role as a “philosopher” coach, capable of profound analyzes and effective phrases remained widely cited, made his role more problematic in those years. Menotti limited himself to carrying out his work as a coach, according to some testimonies he was privately critical of the junta but publicly did not denounce what was happening for years, despite having become a very important figure in Argentina. Only in 1980 did he sign a petition in the Argentine newspaper Clarion for the lists to be published missing (the only athlete to do so).
He led the Argentine national team until 1982, when he left after an early elimination in the World Cup in Spain.
César Luis Menotti, in Mexico in 2007 (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias, File)
Menotti was born in Rosario in 1938, lost his father when he was 18 and was a professional player, in the role of attacking midfielder, also playing as a reserve for a season in the Brazilian team Santos, Pelé’s team. He was nicknamed “The skinny” (the skinny one), due to his build, always wore long hair and always smoked a lot of cigarettes. He became a coach early, at 32 years old. In 1973 he won a historic championship with Huracan, a team that he had last won in 1928 and which he never won again after that. That team showed an innovative and spectacular game, similar to that of the “Dutch” school of those years, becoming an example to follow (the Dutch school invented the so-called “total football” with Rinus Michels and Johan Cruijff, in which the whole team participated to attacking play).
In 1974 the president of the Argentine football federation David Bracuto called him to coach the national team. Bracuto had been president of Huracan and was a doctor of the national metallurgical workers’ union: shortly after the military coup he was removed from office because he was considered too left-wing.
The military junta took power in 1976, taking advantage of the precariousness of the Argentine democratic system. In government was Isabelita Perón, last wife of Juan Perón, who had died in 1974: she was deposed on March 24, in the following days the military junta was established which suspended the Constitution, closed parliament and outlawed all political parties and trade unions. When the coup occurred, the national team was in Poland to play a friendly match: the head of the team’s delegation received orders from Buenos Aires to play, to send a message of “normality”. Some players wanted to return home, but the decision was put to a vote and the team chose to play: it has never been said whether Menotti voted and how.
In those days communications were reduced and normal radio broadcasts in Argentina were suspended: classical music was played, which was interrupted only for the radio commentary of the match.
The 1978 World Cup was seen by the military junta as a great opportunity for international public legitimation of its power, as well as an economic opportunity. A notable organizational and propaganda effort was therefore implemented, also favored by a certain connivance of the majority of the international media, which mostly treated the World Cup solely as a sporting event without dedicating too much space to its political implications.
The stand that hosted the authorities on match days was always full of soldiers and the highest exponents of the junta, who showed themselves to be very close to the team.
Argentina reached the last match of the last group before the final in a complex situation: to win the group and overtake Brazil they needed to beat Peru with at least 4 goals. He won 6-0, in one of the most discussed matches in the history of the World Cup, about which many doubts were later raised. General Videla had been present at Peru training the day before the match, and in the following months the Argentine government made donations to the Peruvian one and some players reported pressure. Menotti always denied these reconstructions.
President Jorge Rafael Videla during the 1978 awards ceremony (AP PHOTO/stf/Ducklau)
Argentina beat the Netherlands 3-1 in the final, winning the first World Cup in its history, which was celebrated for days in Buenos Aires and throughout the country. On the pitch Menotti and the team received the cup from General Videla, who shook hands with all the team members and appeared in many of the celebratory photos.
– Read also: The “World Cup of Shame” of 1978
In a 2008 interview with Corriere della Sera Menotti said: «I was used, it’s clear: the power that takes advantage of sport is something as old as humanity. I wouldn’t do it again, even if it’s easy to say so now.” In other interviews in Argentina he added: «I had a good political education, I wasn’t a fool who could be easily made fun of. I knew that the Armed Forces historically are the armed group that defends the interests of the oligarchy and economic power.” He said that he imagined that a repression of dissent was underway, as had already happened in the past in Argentina, but not “that in those same hours corpses were being thrown into the ocean, that horrors of such great dimensions were taking place.”
Jorge Valdano, former Argentine player and then manager of Real Madrid, considered a sort of football “intellectual”, said he heard the speech that Menotti gave to the players before the match and reported part of it in an interview for the book César Luis Menotti, let the ball run and vice versa: «We represent the only legitimate thing in this country: football. We don’t play for the official stands full of soldiers, but for the people. We do not defend dictatorship, but freedom.”
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, opponent of the regime and later Nobel Peace Prize winner (1980), said instead that the political prisoners, the tortured, the persecuted and the families of the disappeared expected a word or gesture of public solidarity from Menotti: «I don’t he did it. He too was playing politics with his silence.”
With Diego Armando Maradona in Uruguay in 1980 (dpa/dpa-Bildfunk)
A year later, in 1979, Menotti won the Under 20 World Youth Championship in Japan with Argentina, another event much celebrated by the junta. That team played Diego Armando Maradona, who Menotti had excluded from the 1978 World Cup: he was 17 years old, but had already made his debut for the national team. That decision was also much discussed. Menotti said he wanted to “preserve a very young boy” and then built a very solid bond with Maradona: he also coached him at Barcelona, in his first experience in a European team.
Maradona then won the World Cup in 1986 coached by Carlos Bilardo, a coach with a very different style of play from that of Menotti, based on defense and counterattacks. Menottismo e Billiards for decades they were two strongly opposed football “schools of thought” in Argentine football and the two coaches were the protagonists of numerous controversies, mostly at a distance, also favored by very different political positions: «I don’t argue with someone because they play with libero or with the stopper – said Menotti –. It’s a ridiculous thing invented by journalists: if you go and see, our enmity was born from completely different things.”
Menotti with the Argentine national team in 2019 (EPA/Juan Ignacio Roncoroni)
After the national team, Menotti coached many club teams in Argentina, Spain and Mexico, until 2007: he was also coach of Sampdoria, in 1997, for eight matchdays, before being sacked. But he always remained a central figure in Argentine football and in 2019 he was appointed director of the Argentine national teams, a role halfway between managerial and technical, a sort of supervisor. While he held that position, the Argentine national team won the 2021 Copa America and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.