Touchline men: From miracle makers to master tacticians, the World Cup belongs to the manager

Here he goes, wind in his wheat blond hair, arms outstretched, young Iggy Pop running to his family in the stands with a big grin on his face, crossing the stadium barriers. Sebastian Beccacece had committed a major robbery. Ecuador’s 45-year-old Argentinian manager had taken on a team on the brink of elimination in the first round, inspired them to a famous win over mighty Germany and carried them to the knockout stage.

“As long as we’re still alive, we have to look for that light,” Beccacece said after the win. “We’re talking about a whole country celebrating right now. Let them have fun, drink beer, and celebrate with their friends, their family members, their deceased loved ones. This Ecuadorian national team makes people fall in love with them, right?”

Ecuador is not a football giant, but they are moving towards it step by step. Their defense at the World Cup includes Arsenal’s Piero Hincapie, PSG’s Willian Pacho and AC Milan’s Pervis Estupinian. In front of them is Moises Caicedo from Chelsea. They would get into almost every senior squad. Ecuador stuttered in its first two group matches, losing to Ivory Coast and drawing with Curacao, the smallest nation playing in the World Cup. In the make-it-or-leave match against Germany, Beccacece’s boys finally showed the mettle to take flight in the South American qualifiers, finishing second behind Argentina.

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Born in Lionel Messi’s hometown of Rosario, Beccacece spent most of his career managing club teams in Argentina and Peru, and briefly served as assistant manager in Chile and Argentina. Now he is the main man who dreamed of Ecuador, taking his team to the knockout stage for the first time since 2006.

The World Cup is football’s biggest and most sacred stage; not only for the players, but also for the managers. While forming the team, they shoulder the burden of a nation’s expectations, become the target of overflowing love or intense hatred, and are the focus of national obsessions.
Take Japan’s coach Moriyasu Hajime. During his eight years in office, he transformed Japan from an Asian powerhouse into a truly global power. Under his watch, Japan stunned Spain and Germany at the 2022 World Cup to top the ‘Group of Death’, beat Brazil in a friendly and England in a pre-World Cup match at Wembley. Wearing a tailored three-piece suit, always writing in a notebook as he walks the touchline, Hajime looks like a dogged detective straight out of a Japanese police procedural. Hajime gave Japanese football an identity; A team that is both tenacious and hackneyed, heavily trained in positional play, with formations that can change fluidly as the game progresses.

Meanwhile, the Japanese team will face each other in the last 32 rounds and is looking for its own team.

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Brazil was once the symbol of the magic of football, the guardian of the beauty of the game. They have now lost both their beauty and power and are nothing more than a cog in the huge commercial machine of world football.

So who better to get them out of this hole than the great pragmatist Carlo Ancelotti?

The Italian became the first foreigner to rule Brazil in a hundred years. No foreign manager has ever won the World Cup, but if there’s one thing Ancelotti knows, it’s how to win. Few coaches have achieved the kind of success in football that Ancelotti has, and perhaps none have had such a comfortable and intimate knowledge of the reins of a team with the heritage and history of a library.

Whether it is AC Milan, Real Madrid or Brazil, Ancelotti knows how to bring together the greatest players and make them work towards one goal: winning by any means necessary. But so is Didier Deschamps. He won the World Cup with France as captain in 1998, as coach in 2018, and then led them to a second consecutive final in 2022; this meant 17 wins in 22 World Cup matches as coach of Les Bleus. And he does not violate the cosmic rule that does not allow foreign managers to win the Cup.

Cape Verdean coach Bubista, born Pedro Leitao Brito from the island of Boa Vista, may not be looking to win the World Cup, but he is already a legend with his miracle-working team reaching the knockout stages in their first game. Cape Verde, the third smallest country participating in the World Cup in terms of population, is now the smallest country to reach the knockout rounds. We expect every one of the half-million people living in the Atlantic archipelago to be glued to their televisions as Bubista’s men play Lionel Messi’s Argentina.

Bubista fell in love with football while watching the 1990 World Cup on the only television in his village. His mother made balls out of socks for him to play with. When asked about the opponents he will face in the group stage, Bubista said: “We want to play with the best teams in the World Cup. Spain, Uruguay… We are lucky to have won the Asian champion Saudi Arabia… We feel very relieved.” The prospect of playing for Argentina must have made him very happy.