The Argentine Football Association announced the death of former tango coach Cesar Luis Menotti, champion of the 1978 World Cup, yesterday, Sunday.
On Sunday, the local Football Association said in a post on the “AX” website that Cesar Menotti, the former Argentine national team coach who led his country to its first world title in 1978, died at the age of 85.
In its post on X, the Football Association said, “The Argentine Football Association regrets to announce with deep sadness the death of Luis Cesar Menotti, director of the national teams and former World Cup-winning coach.”
Menotti led the Argentine national team between 1974 and 1983 and was the architect of the victory in the first World Cup title in 1978 at the expense of the Netherlands when he was thirty-nine years old, before the Tango national team added two more titles in 1986 and 2022 thanks to the late legends Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi respectively, according to Agence France-Presse.
Menotti, who was a heavy smoker, coached 11 clubs during a career that spanned 37 years, some of them more than once, and two national teams, Argentina and Mexico (1991-1992).
But his leadership of Argentina to the 1978 World Cup title on its soil at a time when the country was under the rule of a repressive military junta remains his most notable achievement of all.
In the final match, Argentina defeated the Netherlands 3-1 after extra time, as Mario Kempes, the best player in the tournament, scored two goals against the Orange team, which in the finals was missing its star “The Bird” Johan Cruyff, who refused to play in the Argentine World Cup.
In those finals, Menotti decided not to call up Maradona, who was seventeen years old, even though he had made his debut in his country’s colors a year earlier.
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