César Luis Menotti obituary
Football manager who nurtured a free-flowing style of play and led Argentina to their first World Cup title in 1978
The football manager César Luis Menotti, who has died aged 85, led Argentina to their first ever World Cup trophy in 1978, a 3-1 victory on home territory against the Netherlands in the deafening noise of the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires on a pitch strewn with ticker tape. It was a joyful occasion, but one that for many – including Menotti himself – was soured by the fact that the country was led by a brutal military junta, for whom the win was valuable propaganda.
Long-haired, intellectual and left-leaning, Menotti was, as Esquire magazine once said, “the embodiment of everything the junta opposed”. But there was a symbiotic relationship between the two parties, for Menotti’s job as manager was reliant on the patronage of the dictator Jorge Rafaél Videla, who had come to power in a coup two years earlier, and Videla was wise enough to recognise that Menotti represented Argentina’s best chance of glory.
