by Mário Zagallo, who has died at the age of 92, was the most successful footballer in the history of the World Cup. Many more talented players and more tactically astute managers have won the competition, but none can equal Brazil’s record of four victories: two as a player, in 1958 and 1962, one as a manager, in 1970, and another as an assistant. manager, in 1994. He looked destined to win a fifth World Cup in 1998, again as Brazil manager, before his team’s star Ronaldo suffered a seizure on the morning of the final, disrupting team morale.
Zagallo was also the first of three men (he was followed by Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer and France’s Didier Deschamps) to win the competition as a player and manager; and he won with both teams, 1958 and 1970, which are widely regarded as the best to have won the trophy. But in his native country he did not receive the full recognition that his achievements deserved. Perhaps his fierce temper and brutal, regimented air at a time when the country was run by a military dictatorship had something to do with that, as did his public persona in later years, when he became a cranky person, almost comical. Many Brazilians know him more for the famous riposte to his critics – “you have to put up with me” – than his sporting achievements.
Zagallo’s success as a player was built on hard work and perseverance rather than the skill and free spirit that Brazilian football fans admired. It was these qualities that earned him a place in the 1958 team. As a youth player, for the Rio de Janeiro América club, he played a central role at No. 10, the main attacking role, but when he realized that he would never succeed because of the many talented starters that Brazil produced, he switched positions and moved to the left wing, where there would be less competing for a place in the national side.
He was given a nickname Formiguinhathe little ant, because of his great stamina, and he developed a new style, which he called “double function” – playing as a traditional wire when the team attacked and falling back to defend when they lost possession, which created an extra man. in the middle of a field.
Whether Zagallo’s double function is the original blueprint for the modern midfielder, as he has sometimes claimed, remains to be seen, but he certainly helped Brazil win the World Cup for the first time. The 1958 team was embarrassed by the brilliant mercurial players, including Garrincha, Didí, Vavá and the 17-year-old Pelé, but the hard-working left-winger was tactically just as important: in the final he cleaned up the ball. off his own line to prevent the hosts, Sweden, from taking a 2-0 lead, and scored one of Brazil’s goals in a thrilling 5-2 win.
In 1962, Brazil successfully retained the trophy in Chile, beating Czechoslovakia 3-1 in the final. Zagallo was again in every game of the competition, in his relentless role on the left; if anything, he played even deeper than in 1958. Zagallo’s disciplined game was the perfect complement to Garrincha on the right wing, a highly talented, free-spirited footballer unfettered by team tactics, who became the winner in Brazil after Pelé was injured in the match. second game.
Zagallo was born in the city of Maceió on the northeast coast of Brazil to Maria Antonieta Lobo and Haroldo Zagallo. The family moved to Rio when he was a child. He spent his senior playing career with two of the biggest clubs in Rio: Flamengo, from 1950 to 1958, and then Botafogo until he retired as a player in 1965, having won the last of his 33 international caps . A year later he became manager of Botafago and was an immediate success, winning two state titles and one national title with the club in the late 1960s.
However, his call to manage the national team in 1970 was sudden and unexpected. Just three months before the tournament began in Mexico, João Saldanha, the maverick manager who had guided Brazil through the qualifying stages, was sacked after a series of rash, paranoid outbursts.
Zagallo was the third choice to replace Saldanha but, once installed, he imposed his authority on the squad and imposed steel and tactical discipline. He was sensible enough not to hinder the attacking instincts of the team’s excellent attacking talent: Pelé, who had played with the young manager in two previous World Cups and was now a veteran, along with Gérson, Tostão, Rivellino and Jairzinho. .
They won the 1970 tournament with friends, swagger and joie de vivre. In 2013, Zagallo told me that this success was the highlight of his career. For a moment, the usual seriousness disappeared from his face as he beamed with pride: “To lead my country to victory in the World Cup, and to play the football we did… It was such an honour, such a privilege .”
Four years later, in West Germany, Zagallo was still in charge, but the team was a shadow of its 1970 incarnation. He begged Pelé, now 33, to join him for just one more tournament. the player told him that he could make much more money as a football ambassador for Pepsi than he could from the game itself; other players had retired or were injured and, although Rivellino and Jairzinho were still playing, Brazil were not singularly cynical. In what was effectively a semi-final match, they were outclassed by Holland. However, Brazil finished the tournament in fourth place.
For the next 16 years Zagallo bounced back and forth between managing clubs in Rio, including three more spells with Botafogo, and lucrative jobs in the Middle East, managing Saudi club Al-Hilal and the Kuwaiti national teams, the Saudi Arabia. and the UAE. He led the UAE to World Cup qualification for the only time in the country’s history, but resigned before the 1990 finals in Italy due to a contractual dispute, and became assistant manager of Brazil a year later about his friend and former apprentice Carlos Alberto Parreira. After a 24-year wait, the pair led their country to World Cup victory in 1994, albeit in a more defensive, workmanlike fashion than the Brazilian champions.
When Parreira stepped down after the tournament, Zagallo took charge of Brazil for a second time and guided the team, led by the seemingly unstoppable Ronaldo, to the final of the 1998 World Cup against the hosts, France. Brazil favored him, but on the morning of the final Ronaldo suffered a mystery seizure, was sent to hospital for tests, and was left out of the starting 11 – only to show up at the stadium just before kick-off, demanding to play.
Zagallo was put in the impossible position of deciding whether Ronaldo should appear or not. If there was any other player, the decision would have been simple, but Ronaldo was the player of the tournament that Brazil had their eyes on. So Zagallo chose him. However, Ronaldo, indeed the entire team, was so traumatized by the day’s events that the final was one of the most one-sided in history, with France winning 3-0.
Parreira and Zagallo reunited as Brazil’s manager and assistant for the 2006 World Cup in Germany, but it was an unhappy reunion and France eliminated the aging team in the quarter-finals. That was Zagallo’s seventh World Cup in half a century, and the only one he did not reach, at least, the last four of the competition.
In the run-up to the 2014 tournament, the first time it was held in Brazil in 64 years, Fifa named Zagallo as an ambassador for the World Cup. “I was a soldier [on duty] at the 1950 World Cup and today I was promoted to ambassador. It’s a big jump,” he said, despite being in hospital with a spinal infection two weeks before the competition.
In 1955 he married Alcina de Castro. They had two sons and two daughters, and she died in 2012.
• Mário Jorge Lobo Zagallo, football player and manager, born 9 August 1931; died 5 January 2024
