Óscar Tabárez has lived long enough to see Uruguay rule the soccer-playing world. Well, to hear about it, at least. Commercial television had not yet reached the country in the summer of 1950, so his family was huddled around a radio at a local bar in Montevideo when the national team stunned Brazil in the World Cup final at the Maracanã.
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Times have changed since then. Footage of schoolkids in Tabárez’s home city watching Uruguay’s win over Egypt on a flatscreen TV—and then charging out into the courtyard to celebrate – provided one of the more charming viral hits of this summer so far. No doubt classes will be interrupted once more when La Celeste take on Portugal next in the last 16.
This is how school kids in Uruguay celebrated their team’s last minute goal in their first match at the #WorldCup. pic.twitter.com/Zw9HRLMuSP
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) June 20, 2018
The bookies make Uruguay favorites, but barely. Few people are yet discussing it as a contender to win the World Cup. Finishing top of your group does not carry so much weight when the only teams you had to beat were Saudi Arabia, Russia, and an Egypt side missing Mohamed Salah.
Not even Tabárez would presume that this team is ready for a deep run. “Let me put the brakes on,” was his reply when one journalist asked about Uruguay’s prospects of winning the tournament after Monday’s 3-0 win over Russia.
“We could have won by even more goals,” he added. “We did not manage to score on certain counterattacks that we should have. Sometimes the timing wasn’t perfect. We need to improve very quickly, because any match in the round of 16 will be extremely difficult.”
And yet, he knows how desperately his countrymen yearn to believe. Just three years old at the time of that win over Brazil in 1950, his memories of the day itself are as vague as you might expect. Clearer are the years that followed, the ever-present status of that team in his country’s collective consciousness.
Uruguay’s population was less than 2.25 million, yet this was the second time it had won the World Cup in as many attempts—having triumphed on home turf at the inaugural tournament in 1930 (they boycotted the 1934 and 1938 editions, and the next two were cancelled due to World War II). Before that, it took gold at the 1924 and 1928 Olympics.
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This little country had produced international soccer’s first great dynasty, not that it often gets remembered that way outside of Uruguay. Perhaps it is because so few people ever saw the games, but you rarely hear Uruguay’s era of global domination discussed in the same breath as the Pele-led Brazil sides of 1958 to 1972, or Spain’s tiki-tactical ascendancy around the turn of this decade.
Back home, though, they still remember. “Uruguay has one of the most important footballing cultures in the world,” said Tabárez in one interview before the 2014 World Cup. “By footballing culture, I mean countries where the national team is a part of the national identity.”
No individual has done more to restore pride in that identity than Tabárez. Appointed as manager in 2006, the team he inherited had just failed to qualify for the World Cup for the third time in four attempts. Once at the forefront of South American football, Uruguay had not lifted the Copa América since 1995.
The realities of modern football were taking hold. Measuring by population, Uruguay is only the 10th-largest country on the continent. Everyone is dwarfed by Brazil, but Tabárez has a drastically smaller talent pool to draw from even than Paraguay, Bolivia or Ecuador. From an outsider’s perspective, it would have been easy to shrug and say that a country of such modest size could not expect to compete among the best on the planet.
But Tabárez is not an outsider. Four years later, he led Uruguay to a World Cup semifinal. In 2012, his team eliminated England and Italy in the group stage. It won the Copa America in between.
Even ignoring group-stage results, there are valid reasons to consider Uruguay as a dark horse contender this summer. This is a team that finished second only to Brazil in the South American qualifying section, boasts two of the world’s best forwards in Luis Suárez and Edinson Cavani, and a center back pairing—Diego Godín and José Giménez—lifted directly from the most effective defensive unit in European club football at Atlético Madrid.
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You could say Tabárez got lucky. For such a small country to produce this many world-class talents at once certainly appears improbable. Yet how exactly did those individuals emerge? Suárez, for one, was not universally appreciated when he first started to break through at Nacional.
“Here, the youth coaches in the national set-up did not view him as a key player—he was borderline,” Tabárez told the Telegraph in 2014. “When he made his first appearances for Nacional, he went through a tough period, like a lot of young players. He missed goals, he lost the ball a lot. And he was booed by impatient fans.
“But I saw something in him. I told people that criticized him: ‘Did you not see what he just tried to do?’ I saw that, OK, he lost the ball a lot, but he always got in the face of his rival. He would always try to get past a defender one-on-one; to get in behind the opposition and get to goal.”
Those words relate to one individual, but they offer an insight into Tabárez’s broader approach. When he took the job in 2006, he did so with a keen awareness of how the global marketplace had warped Uruguay’s prospects, ensuring that bright talents were plucked away by wealthy European clubs as teens.
To foster a sense of identity and belonging, he would need to invest his energy into developing the national youth teams as a breeding ground for his senior squads. Tabárez ensured that players were coached not only in tactics and technique but also in their country’s sporting heritage.
For a man who previously worked as a primary school teacher, the idea of placing education at the center of a project came naturally. His players, emphatically, have bought in.
“We have an enormous love for the Maestro,” Godín told Gazzetta dello Sport this month. “His persona in Uruguay transcends what he is merely in sporting terms. He’s not just a coach, he’s a guide, an educator, a point of reference in any context.
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“He won the respect of a nation, and that’s difficult, because Uruguay lives for football and does it in a super-competitive manner, everyone has an opinion and maintaining yourself at that level for such a long time is almost impossible. He has been leading us for 12 years, and in South America those years count double.”
At 71 years old, Tabárez is the oldest manager at this summer’s World Cup. He has remained in charge continuously since 2006. His 179 games in charge—taking in a previous stint between 1988 and 1990—are an all-time record for any national team coach.
Many had expected him to stand down in 2016 after he was diagnosed with a neurological condition which impedes his ability to walk. At times Tabárez has led training sessions whilst seated on a mobility scooter.
(Alex Goodlett/LatinContent/Getty Images)
The only thing he refused to do was quit. Such defiance, in turn, has served to reinforce the impression that players have of him as a leader. Several have spoken of drawing inspiration from the way that he has faced down his own personal struggle.
As a team, Uruguay is an intriguing blend of old and new. Seven members of Tabárez’s squad were with him for the run to the semifinal in 2010, yet there are also a number of players who only emerged over the course of the qualifying campaign.
The 21-year-old Juventus midfielder Rodrigo Bentancur only made his international debut last October, but has started all three games at this World Cup. Tabárez’s introduction of 22-year-old Lucas Torreira, who only represented his country for the first time in March, as a deep-lying regista against Russia allowed Bentancur to take on an even more prominent role behind the attack.
It will be fascinating to see how Uruguay proceeds tactically from here. Tabárez also deployed Diego Laxalt at left back against Russia, offering his team greater dynamism and adventure on that flank than they get with Martín Cacéres.
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The manager, though, is a pragmatist as much as a dreamer. When Uruguay made its run in 2010, his favorite statistic was the one that showed his team had enjoyed less possession than almost all of their opponents, yet still had produced more shots on goal.
“For me the holy grail of football is the word ‘balance,’” he told reporters on Monday. “When we attack we need to be able to attack, but it doesn’t come from an abstract suggestion. Whenever there is an attack it is because ball possession has been recovered or we have defended well on an opponent’s attack. We work on balance all of the time.”
He models, it too, in his demeanor. Uruguay is only just through to the last-16, and its next opponent is led by one of the greatest players of all time. The Maestro will prepare for the occasion calmly. The same might not be said for every teacher in a classroom back home.
(Top photo: Mike Hewitt – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)