Scaloni was emotional again. It doesn’t take much to get him going. We’ve become accustomed to seeing him break down in tears, though the flip side often goes viral too: the pent-up emotion when he sips water and stares into the distance, or continues giving tactical instructions as shirts wave wildly around him, never mind the goals he doesn’t celebrate. But immediately following Tuesday’s match against Egypt, in the heat of the moment and with a microphone thrust into his face pinning him against a corner, the Argentine coach couldn’t look the assembled reporters in the eye. (Much like the recently fired manager of Uruguay, Marcelo Bielsa, though for the opposite reasons.) He spoke and wept, unable to say much, before finally walking away. Argentina is through to the quarterfinals and his noble tenure has become an unending offering of feats and memories that defy Argentine pessimism, that second nature of ours. When will this all end? What is this endless tally of epic matches, trophies, and comeback stories of aging players like Di María or Messi? How are things actually going right in the country of eternal crisis? Those are the questions.
In the Round of 32, against Cabo Verde, a little-known but audacious team, Argentina suffered but ultimately won and advanced. Scaloni’s tenure includes an unbeaten streak of 36 matches, an 80% win rate and four international titles: the 2021 and 2024 Copa América, the 2022 Finalissima, and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The game against Cabo Verde was his 100th match with the Argentine national team, his first head coaching job, which he was given after the failure of the 2018 World Cup. Not bad for a coach who jumped straight to the major leagues. Still, the manner in which he achieved these milestones is what stands out most. Who exactly is Scaloni? Or rather, what makes the Argentine coach?
Whenever he’s asked about his ascendancy, Scaloni evades the question and avoids picking any particular teacher. There is no clear reference or clue that helps untangle the mystery of his tactical preferences. Perhaps César Menotti, the champion of ‘78 who federalized and professionalized the Selección; Carlos Bilardo, the 1986 World Cup winner who updated the doctrine with near-obsessive competitive standards; or Marcelo Bielsa? None—or better yet: all of them. In his own way, Scaloni jumped over that crack splitting Argentina in half, dodging it altogether. He chose a third position, a “catch all.” Everyone makes it in. José Pekerman—his personal favorite—and Jorge Sampaoli, too. Scaloni is nobody’s son: he’s a blend that picks and chooses the grapes that suit him best. As he does with his teams. A medley of styles, but with a clear horizon.
All football management in an intensely politicized country—and ever since Menotti and his political commitments—is always itself a little important, political even. The manager’s name elbows itself into public debates, swings back and forth as politics stick their claws in, as some state-owned corporation buys some advertising, converses with the power du jour—the presidential salute, official invitations, etcetera—and maintains a complex code of gestures. He is expected to speak on subjects important and trivial, or take pictures with some social figure and so on. At the very least: every manager must administer his relationship with the president of AFA who, non-negotiably, has a seat inside Argentine political power. Julio Grondona, starting in 1979 and until his death in 2014, and Tapia, his eventual successor.
Menotti was world champion in 1978, under the dictatorship that began in 1976 and ended in 1986. This haunted him greatly, because the left could find in his participation a form of “collaborationism.” Menotti was, paradoxically, an organic man of the serpentine Argentine Communist Party, which maintained a special relationship with that anti-Peronist, anti-communist dictatorship that sold wheat to the USSR. There are “looser” biographical data points that Menotti disseminated: discretely, and without resigning anything, he signed an open letter advocating for the disappeared in 1980.
The writer Esteban Schmidt found in Menotti an exceptional immunity granted by a left that spent four decades exhuming the military’s so-called “Process,” and presented it in his unbeatable newsletter: “The press, intellectuals, the twenty blocks around Marcelo T. [the University of Buenos Aires’ Faculty of Social Sciences], built a fence to protect him from the World Cup’s cutting shrapnel.” Schmidt calls Menotti “the permissible collaborationist.” Perhaps Menotti’s character carried the antivirus that made it possible: partly his lyricism, for his team, Huracán, for ‘73, when he made them champions for the first time, for the neighborhood, for the porteño cigarette of the endless talker sitting at football writer Roberto Fontanarrosa’s table, because he looked straight out of an unbearable Eliseo Subiela film, because he knew who the poet Mario Benedetti was.
Bilardo, who was less lyrical, at a distance from lettered culture and in the throes of a nascent democracy, became, for a period, an almost declared opponent of then-president Alfonsín (who wanted him removed from the job). It was an impossible job, to manage a national team obsessed with success in a democracy without successes. In his opinions on public matters, he was certainly to Menotti’s right.
Does that matter? Who knows. No government—whether democratic or military-run—has been able to truly prolong the festive effects of footballing accomplishments. In 1979, the Interamerican Court of Human Rights visited Argentina and the CGT, its largest and most powerful umbrella trade union federation, called for a general strike. In 1987, Alfonsín lost his elections against the peronists. But Menotti and Bilardo were both fundamental leaders in shifting the meaning of the Selección and its eternal romance with Argentinians. Scaloni occupies a role shaped by both men. Before Menotti, does anyone remember who managed the national team? After Bilardo, there was no more poetry.
“We are betting on our sense of belonging, there’s nothing above the Argentine Selección,” Scaloni said years ago. He himself was part of the managerial team that failed in the 2018 World Cup, when Argentina was humiliatingly eliminated in the Round of 16 and players mutinied against manager Sampaoli, leaving the staff—Scaloni included—caught in the fallout. He arrived at the Seleccion for the 2018 U20s World Cup in L’Alculdia, Spain, just as the president of the Argentine FA, Claudio “Chiqui” Tapia, was looking for an extinguisher to put out that fire after Russia. When he took over as interim manager, he was called a ladder climber and rumors circulated that he’d hidden out in the forests of Ezeiza—where the Selección has its training camp—as Sampaoli, Beccacece (who recently resigned as Ecuador’s coach) and company left the AFA campus.
It’s been said that Scaloni’s role during Sampaoli’s cycle was as a “player’s coach.” That stigma might suit him: playerist. It suggests that, in prioritizing relations with the players, there is sometimes a loss of tactical management. Scaloni chose to stay on the inside. The Sampaoli era was forgettable. They also forgot to pull Scaloni out of Ezeiza, thank God. His low-key profile, friendly with the players, a disciple of many managers at once, did not aspire to be redundant or particularly sanctimonious about the “philosophy of national football.” Intuition, practice, team spirit, and to Caesar what is Caesar’s.
When Scaloni was appointed, Diego Maradona, our stock phrase pileup man and panelist concerning anything that happened in our country said: “he can’t even direct traffic.” The fact is that Scaloni stood firm. As his assistants, he first called in ex-player Pablo Aimar (who said, “yes, but you’re crazy!”) and ex-player Walter Samuel. Both were Pekerman boys, with whom he’d played in the 2006 World Cup, and both had Bielsan heritage. Soon after, César Menotti took over as Director of National Teams, reaffirming and consolidating the process. He gave Scaloni the strong, necessary backing that allowed him to survive crass, hostile press operations. No manager of the Selección had so little in his favor and much against him in the media.
He took hold quickly. Setting up shop with his team, he continued as he had before, but now as the head of the group: he built bridges with the players and built human relations with everyone else. The rest (tactics) would arrive on its own.
At the 2019 Copa América, Argentina lost to Brazil in the semifinals, but by then something had changed. Following the match, Messi began to display a more spirited kind of leadership, especially facing the press. At the following Copa, a belle époque emerged: a golden era, a winning era, likely the greatest in Argentine history. Trophies, finals, World Cups—it all came together. And a footballing identity was sculpted, learned, adapted. It was a style of play distinct from what Scaloni had initially imagined. That is where his merit lies. In having deciphered what was best for his team. In adapting to the circumstances.
Once again, it comes down to Scaloni and human resources: He is, ultimately, a leader in charge of human capital. He negotiated his own tactical gambits and shifted from a vertical and aggressive team to a relational one that grows by linking up passes, through associative play. And the Argentine national team shone. As Bielsa once praised him: in your first experience, you built an auteur team. That is his added value. His is a signature team embodying various layers, including not simply a style of play, but a communal spirit: naides es más que naides (no one is more than anyone else) as proclaimed in the Argentine bible, José Hernández’s 19th-century epic “Martín Fierro.”
In the Scaloneta, as we call the team, the values of the group mirror the value he instilled in the squad: the collective above the individual. Even Messi understands this. He celebrates every goal—and every goal is a milestone—much more collectively than the monarchical choreography of Cristiano Ronaldo or even the blessed Mbappé. Messi looks to the sky, opens his arms, and seeks the embrace of his teammates. He distances himself from his own idolatry, from political use, from bear hugs off the pitch, from the “noble causes” that try to cast him as a figurehead—from all the mud beyond the pitch itself. Borges, who loathed soccer despite its English origins (“Eleven against eleven chasing a ball…”), may well have imbued Messi’s spirit with a metaphysical touch: a sense of reticence. Scaloni figured out how to navigate Messi’s elusive path to success: by relieving him of pressure. Let the squad bear that cross and let Messi be free. Free of the Maradonian myths of redemption and downfall. Part of Scaloni’s “authorship” also lies in this very detail, of an introverted idol whose cerebral game unfolds without interruption. And God is in the details.