The Dream of the Fox, part 1

Before Pep Guardiola started managing, he sought the advice of three Argentinians – César Luis Menotti, Marcelo Bielsa and the far less well-known Ricardo La Volpe...

Argentina was once the land of la nuestra, of skilful forwards who subsisted on chicken casserole and red wine and found the ministrations of coaches vaguely ridiculous but, once that era came to an end with the 6-1 defeat against Czechoslovakia at the 1958 World Cup, it has been a land that has revered caches almost like no other. Brazil may have provided the winners of the last six Copa Libertadores (and four of the defeated finalists) but that is a matter of economics. Seven of the ten Conmebol nations have Argentinian coaches; theirs is the culture than dominates the continent and beyond.

It’s a country of theory and argument, of romance and cynicism, a country that has produced so many revolutionaries that to reject the mainstream almost becomes a mainstream act. Marcelo Bielsa may be the best known of the idiosyncratic rebels in Europe, but he was far from the only one. There’s also, for example, his near-contemporary Ricardo La Volpe, an idealist who pursued his vision with a furious intensity. Like Bielsa and César Luis Menotti, the self-styled philosopher prince of la nuestra revivalism who won the World Cup in 1978, he was visited by Pep Guardiola as he travelled the world in 2008 testing his ideas against key thinkers before accepting the Barcelona job.

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La Volpe was a goalkeeper for Banfield and San Lorenzo and was part of the squad that won the 1978 World Cup. After the tournament, he moved to Mexico with Atlante and then Oaxtepec and it was there, in 1983, that he began his career as a coach. “When I accepted the responsibility of becoming a manager, it was firstly because I like football and couldn’t bear to think of being away from football,” he said. “I wanted to keep walking onto the pitch, into the dressing room, travelling.