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 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.
