AAn underrated treat for spectators at every World Cup is watching the managers. While club football, an increasingly regimented field of set-pieces and systems, is all about structure, international football is much more a matter of style – and at this tournament the theatrics of the players on the touchline were rich in emotion and imaginative power.
Didier Deschamps patrols his technical area with the watchful pride of the outer district. butcher. Luis de la Fuente is an experienced asset manager at Banco Santander. Japanese man Hajime Moriyasu is about to head to the post office from his dreary office job in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film. Socceroos coach Tony Popovic looks like he’s on his way to officiate a wedding at Sydney’s Croatian club King Tomislav. And Carlo Ancelotti… well, he’s just Carlo Ancelotti, the man with the Champions League-winning eyebrows, whose fierce devotion to his three-piece suit, even in the worst North American summer, suggests he somehow controls his own climate.
But one man stands head and shoulders above the rest. On the pitch, through wins and losses, Ecuador have turned out to be exactly what everyone thought they would be before the tournament began: a team with an elite defense and a midfield that lacks real forward punch. But on the sidelines and at press conferences they absolutely dominated, and it was all thanks to gaucho Fabio they lead their team. With locks of dirty blond hair, stubble on his chin and a nose like a Boeing 747, Sebastian Beccacece looks like a manager who must to succeed at the World Cup, regardless of results on the field. He is 45 years old, in charge of a country other than his native Argentina, and comes to this tournament with a relatively modest coaching record: he worked as an assistant under Jorge Sampaoli in Chile and managed Spanish club Elche without much success.
Looks, a professional resume and responsibility for a team widely considered a tournament dark horse: even before the World Cup began, all the ingredients were in place for Beccacece to become a cult hero manager. At previous World Cups, the duty of middle-aged Frenchmen – exiles and vagabonds such as Bruno Metsu, Philippe Troussier and Hervé Renard, the white shirt who never lets Africa down – was to bear the cultural burden of being the tournament’s chief eccentrics; Can an Argentine ease France’s burden of responsibility? Things didn’t start out very well. After Ecuador’s first two matches in this tournament, Beccaceche found himself on the brink. The last-minute defeat to a young and talented Ivory Coast team was perhaps forgivable, but after Three Having suffered the humiliation of a goalless draw with tiny Curacao, everything about Beccacece’s management – his tactics, his decisions, his communication style, even his choice of clothing, which saw him take to the pitch for the first matches in a knitted grey-and-black top that looked like a mistake bought from the Vestiaire Collective – came under criticism.
Facing elimination from the tournament in their final group match against Germany, Ecuador quickly fell behind to a controversial Leroy Sane goal. But then Becaccece got to work. After watching the first performance of the Germans on the side monitor, he immediately burst into a lively protest, flowing into several classic gestures of the “angry manager” canon: he pointed at his watch, jumped out of the technical area and hit the third referee in the face, shrugged his shoulders and raised his palms to the sky, and for some reason showed a telephone sign. This is finally what the Ecuadorian team was looking for: a sign that their manager is a real madman who will do anything to help them win. An equalizer soon followed. Then, in the 77th minute, after a series of bold substitutions, with Beccacece coaxing his players forward with life-or-death intensity like a boiling frog, Gonzalo Plata stuck out his foot and scored the goal that sent Ecuador into the last 16 and the nation into raptures.
Sebastian Beccacece celebrates Ecuador’s victory over Germany with fans and his family. Photograph: Mark Atkins/Getty Images
For the most part, Beccacece’s celebration was a heavy metal affair, with him rushing into the stands to hug his wife and family, then climbing on top of various staff members to whip the yellow-shirted crowd into an even greater frenzy of ecstasy. Sitting on the shoulders of the team’s physiotherapists and assistant coaches in his cream knit top, he looked a little like a professional men’s wear model who had just landed a runway contract with Armani. Reaching the round of 16 here is only the second time Ecuador has reached the knockout stages of a World Cup; The victory over Germany has already been called the best achievement in the history of national football.
Ecuador will face Mexico at Estadio Azteca on Tuesday night. This is not an easy task, the failure of which will not be disgraceful. But no matter what happens on the field, Beccacece’s legend has already been written. The images of Jurgen Klopp at this tournament, working for German television and pretending to find Thomas Müller funny and urging us all to book tickets with Trivago and smiling his dazzling iceberg smile, were a mournful reminder of how badly football needs big personalities. Club competitions are increasingly becoming home to cautious, technocratic types, all those Artetas and Marescas, carefully controlling the scenario on and off the field. But international management remains a place for dreamers and madmen, and a World Cup that still exudes the power to inspire and uplift despite FIFA’s best efforts is all the more interesting for it. No coach has brought more joy to this tournament than Ecuador’s flaxen dugout guru – a man whose every flail, every step, seems to convey the anxiety, rage and delight felt by each of his team’s fans.
Addressing the press after the victory over Germany, Beccacece fully captured the majesty of the moment, citing Argentine rock music, his own educational trips in the Andean highlands and the spirit of Simon Bolivar in calling on all Ecuadorians to support their national team. He recalled the Guayaquil Conference, the 1822 meeting between the two great liberators of South America, Bolívar and José de San Martín: “I call on all of Ecuador to unite – just as Bolívar dreamed of, the unity he saw when he met with San Martín. Unity is the key.” And then he became even more exquisitely poetic. “We come alive to feel,” Beccacece reflected. “Sometimes we feel the pain of defeat, but sometimes we also feel the satisfaction of winning. It’s important to find a balance. It won’t change my life. It won’t. But we have to indulge in that joy.”
The unity that was observed when Bolivar met San Martin; we must indulge in this joy. What’s the point, after all, of running the greatest show in sports if not to spew beautiful nonsense like this? If you’re coaching a World Cup team and you don’t race across the grass at the first sign of foul, don’t jump into the stands after every goal, don’t slide onto the field at the full whistle of every victory, and don’t use every press conference to reflect on loss, memories, history, fate, struggle, joy: what are you even doing? Let’s cherish this man for as long as we can before he disappears mid-career after being sacked after three defeats at the helm of Peru or a solid stint at club level with Paphos. In years to come, when we look back on this World Cup, perhaps we will remember it not for the goals of Mbappe, Haaland and Messi, but for the Argentine master in a knitted T-shirt, with a half-Lincoln on his chin and the spirit of Bolivarian liberation in his heart.