When Uruguay appointed Marcelo Bielsa as coach in May, they joined a growing club. Lionel Scaloni led Argentina to glory at the World Cup. Chile are managed by Eduardo Berizzo. Paraguay are managed by Guillermo Barros Schelotto. Bolivia are managed by Gustavo Costas. Colombia are managed by Néstor Lorenzo. Venezuela are managed by Fernando Batista.
Seven of the 10 Conmebol nations have Argentinian coaches and although Peru have a Peruvian and Ecuador a Spaniard, both succeeded Argentinians. Argentinian coaches are everywhere in South America; only Brazil stands aloof.
Which raises the obvious question of why? That Brazil, the only Portuguese-speaking member of Conmebol, should not want a coach from their great rival is unsurprising, but beyond the fact they speak Spanish, what is it about coaches from Argentina that makes them so sought after?
It’s not just in South America: Argentinians are a common feature of technical areas in Europe’s big five leagues – Diego Simeone, Mauricio Pochettino, Jorge Sampaoli, Tata Martino, Bielsa – in a way that simply isn’t the case for coaches from other continents. Even in Brazil, Flamengo have an Argentinian in Sampaoli and until last week, when Eduardo Coudet walked out after a dispute over transfers, so did Atlético Mineiro.
In part, it is simply that Argentinian football is so tough, something Ricardo Gareca reflected on after he returned from a successful eight-year stint with Peru to Vélez Sarsfield, where he had spent much of his playing career, only to be sacked in December after 12 games in charge. That environment, the former national team defender Roberto Perfumo believes, generates a toughness, resilience and adaptability.
“The Argentinian,” he said, “is a cockroach. The cockroach is antediluvian but survived everything. The Argentinian is the same. He overcomes all adversities: he plays in the snow, in the mountains, at altitude, in the heat, without understanding the language, at any time …”
From the moment in 1924 that Enrico Marone, the head of Cinzano, signed the Newell’s Old Boys forward Julio Libonatti for Torino, the club of which he was president, Argentinians have been used to travel. The oriundi, Argentinians “returning” to the homeland of their forefathers, were such a feature of Italian football in the 30s there were three Argentina-born players in the Italy side that won the World Cup in 1934. One of them, Luis Monti, had captained Argentina in the 1930 final. The economic problems since the default in 2001 have made Argentinians more likely to seek money and stability abroad.
But it’s not just a matter of economic necessity and linguistic convenience; it’s also about culture. Only the Dutch rival the Argentinians for their love of discussing football from the point of view of tactics and style. “They look for us because we are lovers of tactics,” said Gustavo Alfaro, the Argentinian who led Ecuador at the World Cup. “We have different ideological schools that have nurtured and forged us.”
From the mid-60s onwards, put crudely, the question was whether you believed football was a matter of style and individual talent or about organisation, discipline and cynicism, doctrines that by the 80s had been bracketed under the terms menottismo and bilardismo. Then a third way was found: bielsismo. Bielsa dragged Argentinian thinking into the pressing age, but by around 2010 there were those who wondered whether the focus on speed and intensity among his followers took some of the artistry from football.
There was a revision perhaps best expressed by the football of Marcelo Gallardo, who won two Libertadores titles with River Plate and reached another final but has been unable to find a job in Europe: gallardismo may never gain universal recognition, but it’s probably the best way of describing the modern style.
But the specifics are less important than the terms existing at all; that Argentina has a football culture constantly discussing and honing those definitions. This is a world where football and the best way to play it, morally and practically, is constantly being debated. Those who come from that world have a depth of knowledge and accrued experience on which to draw.
Then there is the Argentinian Football Association. Argentina won five of the seven Under-20 World Cups between 1995 and 2007, first under José Pékerman and then under his former assistant, Hugo Tocalli. Internal politics intervened, particularly after Pékerman and Tocalli were deemed to have failed when the senior team went out of the World Cup on penalties in the 2006 quarter-finals. But, as the flow of talent dried up, there was an attempt to restore the youth levels to primacy by bringing in Pablo Aimar and later Diego Placente, both of them members of the side that won the Under-20 World Cup under Pékerman in 1997.
Scaloni was also a member of that team. Although his appointment as senior national coach in 2018 proved a masterstroke, a link back to the Pékerman years just as the final three players to have won the Under-20 World Cup under Tocalli – Lionel Messi, Ángel Di María and Papu Gómez – neared the end, it was made of expediency; he was an inexpensive assistant who could step up when Sampaoli was dismissed after the shambles at the World Cup in Russia.
Scaloni embodies the values of the new Argentinian coach: pragmatic, unattached to dogma, serious, hard-working and comfortable working with both players and data analysts. Restoring Pékerman’s spirit, if not his precise vision, was a necessary step.
The contrast with Brazil, whose coaches rarely find work in Europe or elsewhere in South America, is obvious. Tite, who stood down as Brazil national coach after the World Cup, was an exception in his willingness to travel to broaden his education; although Brazilian clubs continue to dominate the Copa Libertadores, that is more to do with economics than tactical sophistication.
In Argentina, necessity has combined with a culture rooted in debate and discussion to produce a generation of flexible coaches willing to adapt themselves and capable of doing so to a range of situations. It may not be the metaphor anybody would choose, but Perfumo’s cockroach analogy feels apt.
