Red smoke filled the air around the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires. Flares lit up portions of the stadium; fireworks shot off in every direction. A crowd of 72,000 fans sang in unison as the players jogged onto the pitch.
Scenes like these are common at the start of football matches in South America. But this night last October was a little different. The game itself — River Plate vs Rosario Central — was just a sideshow. River’s supporters were there to mark the end of the Marcelo Gallardo era — eight and half glorious years that may never be rivalled by another manager.
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The atmosphere intensified when the stoic Gallardo appeared from the tunnel and walked towards the home dugout. Fans, players and his assistants wept. Gallardo held his emotions in check as he consoled a teary-eyed ball boy.
The capacity crowd chanted, “Muneco! Muneco! Muneco!” — a reference to Gallardo’s nickname, The Doll. He first starred for River Plate as a baby-faced playmaker in the late 1990s, before returning for two subsequent spells later in his career.
It was as a coach, though, that Gallardo cemented his status as an unassailable River icon. Between 2014 and 2022, he completely transformed the club, guiding them to 14 titles — including two Copa Libertadores trophies (the South American equivalent of Europe’s Champions League). He is the most successful manager in River’s 122-year history.
Little wonder there is now a giant statue of him outside the Monumental. “He is sort of a saint for everyone who follows the club,” says one local journalist.
If anything, that might be understating it.
Gallardo has plenty of admirers outside Argentina, too. Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, for instance, is a longstanding fan. “What he has done with River is incredible,” Guardiola said in 2020. “Every year three coaches are named as the best in the world, and he’s never among them. I can’t understand it. It’s as if there’s nothing else in the world apart from Europe.”
Now, though, the secret appears to be out.
Since leaving River six months ago, Gallardo has been linked to several high-profile clubs, including Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, Real Madrid and Leeds United. There will be plenty more speculation between now and the summer. A first European venture of his managerial career appears to be beckoning.
Not that Gallardo himself is in any rush. He has spent his time since October with family, enjoying some of the simpler things in life. He is beginning to think about football again, but — as he explains in his first interview since leaving River — he will be selective about his next job.
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“I am visualising what the next step in my career might be,” Gallardo tells The Athletic. “It has to relate to a feeling. You have to find the right connection, the place where you can transmit your ideas. I’m not the kind of person who will just join any old club because I want to coach in Europe. That’s not my way of operating.
“I need to find a place that makes me feel something. I need a sense of identification. If I don’t get that, I have no problem continuing with what I’m doing now.”
Feelings, ideas, identification: these are some of the building blocks of the Gallardo universe. He is, as you would expect of a coach with his CV, a cogent thinker about the game and its nuances. He is also fantastic company: he talks engagingly from his Buenos Aires home for the best part of two hours, discussing his philosophy, his man-management skills — something of a trademark — and what it takes to keep moving forward with a project, season after season.
Oh, and what golf can teach us about the human condition.
“Protagonismo” and managing moments
Gallardo is not wedded to a specific system. At River Plate, the team’s shape changed to match the available personnel. “He used a back three, a back four… two midfield pivots, two playmakers… one, two or even three strikers,” says Ariel Cristofalo, who covers River for the Buenos Aires-based daily newspaper Olé.
What is non-negotiable is the overall idea. Gallardo uses the word “protagonismo”. Broadly speaking, it is the commitment to go and shape a match rather than just let it happen around you.
“There are different ways to compete and they’re all valid,” Gallardo says. “Some teams prefer to sit back and attack space because they have the tools to do so. There are teams who seek the initiative. And then there are many teams who just wait.
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“I don’t like to wait, because it becomes something that I can’t control. There’s an impatience associated with waiting to see what the opponent is going to do. That exasperates me. I go with what I connect with, which is taking the initiative.
“I feel most comfortable being the protagonist. True protagonism: that’s what I identify with.
“You can have a way of playing, an idea. Executing that idea is something else entirely because there’s an opponent in front of you, trying to impede you. But that desire to be the protagonist is the foundation, and very much related to the way I feel about the game.
“At River, we fluctuated so much over the years: we changed and expressed ourselves tactically in different ways. But the idea and that determination never changed. The execution of the idea may have been better or worse, but the goal remained the same.”
On the pitch, that usually translated into a few main features. Under Gallardo, River Plate were aggressive and intense. They often pressed high and did so quickly. He favoured smart, technical players who could keep the ball, but he also wanted them to be competitive — and to have a feel for the rhythms of a match.
“It’s about managing moments,” he says. “Look at Argentina at the World Cup (last year). They understood how to manage the different stages of a game. At times (in the round of 16), Argentina gave Australia the ball and the initiative. Argentina sat and waited and then kept possession after taking the lead. Managing those moments is a fundamental part of the game. The better you manage them, the better team you’ll be.
“You need players with the intelligence to recognise those moments and make the most of them. Waiting requires high levels of concentration. Attacking involves creativity. It becomes very difficult if you don’t have players who understand how to sit but can also win the ball and transition into creative play in order to hurt an opponent. It’s essential to find that balance.”
Napoleon
As well as Muneco (The Doll), Gallardo had another nickname as River coach. People — journalists, in the main — called him Napoleon, the idea being that he had this natural ability to inspire and convince his players, even in trying circumstances.
His man-management skills became the stuff of legend. There were no major scandals or crises within the dressing room during his eight years in charge — a remarkable achievement in itself given the amount of melodrama baked into Argentine football. Training was usually intense and although he never shied away from dropping big-name players, dissent was rare.
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The sense was of a whole club pulling in the same direction.
“He is a great leader of groups,” says Diego Borinsky, the author of two books on Gallardo. “He asks a lot of his players but is very human at the same time. He takes care of problems and is loved by players, even though he pushes them hard.”
Gallardo puts a lot of his success down to a single word: respect. “That is the one thing that must be there,” he says. “If you start with respect, you can unlock so many things. We put a lot of emphasis on that, both in victory and defeat.
“You’re euphoric when you win. And when you lose, your miseries and bad behaviour tend to manifest themselves. We won and lost throughout those years but we did so with respect. That was fundamental.”
“Then, after establishing that respect, there were freedoms. I demanded a lot from the players but I also wanted them to feel comfortable. That’s how it always worked — ‘I’ll give you this setting and we’ll create this space, but I’m going to demand a lot from you’. That became normal. When that’s understood, everything else flows naturally.”
Right from the outset of his journey as a manager — he took his coaching diploma in 2010 while still playing for his final club, Uruguay’s Nacional — Gallardo was interested in psychology. He sees connecting with his players as half the battle.
“I don’t consider myself to be a friend of the players,” Gallardo says, “but I don’t consider myself to be an authoritarian manager either. Today, a coach has to have a bit of everything. You have to have a bit of paternalism, a bit of distance, a bit of psychology. After that, you have to be able to coach — tactics and strategy — and communicate your message so that it’s clear.
“The fundamental thing is understanding people. You have to understand the person in order to get the best out of them as a footballer. I want people to understand me as well. Otherwise, it’s very difficult.”
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“Understand” is a word he uses a lot. Exactly 50 times during the course of our interview, in fact. Perhaps that inquisitiveness should not come as a surprise: Gallardo, after all, famously befriended a neuroscientist before taking the River job in June 2014 and later added her to his backroom staff.
“Football is played on the pitch, but you can’t ignore what a person is feeling,” he says. “That aspect and its applications are what interested me in coaching, beyond the strategies and tactics that are part of the sport. It’s about the human process.”
The encyclopaedia
Some footballers become managers and want a clear break from what went before. Not Gallardo. His entire approach is informed by the experiences he had in his playing days, a career that also included spells with Monaco, Paris Saint-Germain and DC United, and saw him win 44 caps for Argentina.
For one thing, part of the hold he is said to have over players derives from the idea that he — to use a slightly clunky idiom — “understands the game”. Gallardo was a skilful footballer but he was small and fragile. To survive, he had to be clever, mastering the game’s delicate interplay of space and time.
“If you want to know about football, crack open Gallardo’s head,” former Argentina coach Alejandro Sabella once said. “You’ll find an illustrated football encyclopaedia.”
Today, that manifests as a level of intuition that might otherwise be taken for witchcraft. “He just a has a feeling for what needs to be done in a game, whether that’s before kick-off, at half-time or whenever,” says Borinsky. But the ties to the past run deeper. In part, Gallardo is rebelling against what he experienced: namely, coaches who were not always willing to engage with his curiosity.
“I considered myself to be a talented player with physical flaws,” he says. “I wanted to see if I could overcome those limitations by acquiring knowledge — by listening, observing.
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“It started when I began to ask why. It’s similar to what children do. ‘But why? Why? Why are we doing this?’. I wanted to understand things from another vantage point, beyond the innocence that I had as a footballer. That happened when I was 27, 28 years old. I just wanted to learn. But I felt that some of my managers frowned upon it. It was like some sort of threat.”
It is probably not surprising, then, that he has no overarching role model. Two coaches from earlier in his career did shape his thinking, however.
One is Sabella, a paternal figure who challenged the 15-year-old Gallardo to start thinking more deeply about the game. The other is Marcelo Bielsa, who managed him in the Argentina national team from 1998 to 2003.
“At the start, it was very hard to understand him,” Gallardo says of Bielsa. “He was very well prepared, very capable, but at the same time it was quite a complex message to grasp in the (few) days you get with a national team.
“But in time, I realised that there were few particularities in the message, in the way he tried to capture your interest to help you improve. Marcelo created this opening for me to learn and understand why certain things happen in the game. You can agree or disagree with the way certain teams play, but that’s another matter. I’m talking about the way someone opens your mind, or sparks something in you. It was magnificent, spectacular. I always say that he chose me.”
Gallardo the coach is thrilled whenever a player — young or experienced — asks him why he is running a particular training drill in a certain way.
“I love that,” he says. “I love the ‘whys?’ because it shows that individual wants to understand. There’s nothing better for a coach than to be able to have that type of dialogue, that positive commitment to deeper understanding. It also becomes a tremendous tool.
“It’s an absolute pleasure for me when that interest is sparked in a player. I don’t have to go searching for it.”
Reinventing River
To fully grasp the esteem in which Gallardo is held by the River Plate fans, you have to understand what the club looked like when he was appointed.
Three years earlier, River had been relegated to the second division for the first time in their history. Behind the scenes, the club were a reflection of their history rather than a modern football organisation. The facilities were outdated, the finances precarious. The pitch at the Monumental, one of Argentina’s most historic stadiums, was choppy and worn.
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A new president, Rodolfo D’Onofrio, knew something had to change. He and sporting director Enzo Francescoli — another who had been a River idol as a player — wanted a figurehead to lead a long-term project. Gallardo, who had been out of work for two years after winning the Uruguayan title with Nacional in his first season in management, struck many as a left-field pick.
Did he imagine then that he would last so long? “No,” he says. “I was hoping for the best. But after two months in the job, we had already established a level of empathy among the core group of players, the sporting director and especially with the president. This happened before we started getting results. Rodolfo D’Onofrio told me, ‘I want you to be here for the duration of my administration’.
“We had barely begun, so I understood that I was not just tied to results. If that’s the approach, I believe that good things can happen. You need time to work. We had yet to understand where we were headed, but there was enthusiasm and determination to build something that would make us happy.
“I had dreamt about my arrival at River. I didn’t think it would happen so quickly. But everything else came naturally.”
In Gallardo’s first season, River won the Copa Sudamericana (South America’s equivalent of the Europa League) — their first international trophy for 17 years. A year later, they went one better and won the Libertadores. D’Onofrio told reporters that he wanted Gallardo to become “the Alex Ferguson of River”.
Easier said than done in South America, where short-term thinking and instability abound.
At Manchester United, Ferguson only rarely had to worry much about other teams signing away his best players. Even at a club as huge as River, everything is temporary.
“Change is part of our football culture,” Gallardo says. “Our clubs produce talent for the world. That’s how it has always been and it will continue to be that way. We understand that we won’t have our best footballers for very long. Because our most talented players tend to leave quickly, you have to find replacements constantly.
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“We can’t do what the big clubs in Europe do. They can maintain the core of a team for four, five years. We can’t do that. We have to rearm, or reinvent ourselves, at all times.”
Reshaping a squad is one thing. There is also the task of maintaining motivation, keeping the motor running. It’s hard to win titles; it is doubly hard to keep winning them.
“After you win, there’s a natural slowdown,” Gallardo says. “When everyone is pushing each other, it requires so much preparation — mental, physical and technical. There’s always going to be a tendency to slow down after that. It’s normal. It happens to all of us, in all aspects of life.
“What you need is that continuous dynamic of culture — when everyone understands that if we let up even a bit, the structure will begin to wobble. It has to be nurtured at all times.”
Gallardo leaned heavily on senior players including Jonatan Maidana, Javier Pinola and Leonardo Ponzio. They would help youngsters and new signings adapt to the rhythms of life at River, ensuring a degree of cohesion even as star players — Exequiel Palacios, Julian Alvarez, Enzo Fernandez — departed for Europe.
“You have to always insist that the culture is strengthened and nurtured, that it doesn’t collapse,” says Gallardo. “When you accomplish that, as we were able to do, then you can truly say that there was a consolidated project in place. And it wasn’t just me. There was an entire team working together to make it happen. It’s not easy, but you have to try.”
The continuity paid dividends on the pitch, but also further afield.
Gallardo took an interest in every aspect of life at River, from the youth sides to the training facilities. There are tales of him fussing over tiny details, spending spare hours watching the women’s team and even River’s field-hockey team. He insisted that president D’Onofrio looked to the future by investing in new pitches, and new infrastructure.
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“The passion for football in South America is very short-lived,” Gallardo says. “The fans want to win on Sunday (the next match). That’s the only thing they care about. And that way of thinking gets passed on.
“We needed a different vision. We had to strengthen the club’s structure in line with what is needed for a club that develops players: more structure, more organisation. I don’t mean to say that those things didn’t already exist, but we had to improve things, give them a lift.
“Luckily, I found a group of executives who shared the same point of view. They trusted that we would create something that would make us stronger. But it doesn’t happen overnight. It can only happen if a coach stays at a club for a prolonged amount of time. It becomes very difficult if there is constant change — this guy comes in; that guy leaves.
“I knew that there were managerial objectives that had to be reached, but there had to be a sense of belonging as well. And in that sense, we all complemented each other very well. We were able to create that connection and sustain it for a long time.”
Conquering frustration and fear
Gallardo has not played football in years. He only turned 47 in January, but his body can no longer cash the cheques his mind writes. “My knees don’t allow it,” he says with a rueful smile. “There’s no way. I’ve put all of that away.”
Instead, he enjoys playing golf. Or perhaps just thinking about it.
“Golf makes me so frustrated,” he says. “There are moments when I want to toss my clubs away and never look at them again. But coexisting with that frustration forces you to confront it. Those who play sport understand that it’s like life: frustration is a daily part of life that all human beings live with. So often we want to be better citizens; to live in a better, safer country; to have a more harmonious, equal society.
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“So you take your clubs out again because you want to challenge yourself. There’s always the next hole, like in life. There’s always a chance to get up again after failure. Life offers you another opportunity. You have to stick your chest out and take it on.”
This is not the only time during our interview that Gallardo takes a relatively prosaic topic and turns it metaphysical. It is not hard to understand why his press conferences were appointment viewing in Argentina, or why some of his most famous phrases instantly wove themselves into River folklore.
There was the famous call to arms before their Copa Libertadores semi-final against Gremio of Brazil in October 2018 (“People should believe because they have something to believe in”), and the misty-eyed call for River fans to close their eyes for 30 seconds and soak up the joy of winning an all-Buenos Aires final against bitter rivals Boca Juniors a few weeks later.
That final, of course, was as historic as they come, and not just because, for safety reasons, the second leg took place not at the Monumental but in Real Madrid’s Bernabeu Stadium — turned raucously South American for one night only. It was the first time River and Boca had ever met in the final of an international competition: the kind of winner-takes-all, loser-gets-laughed-at-forever showdown that can bring out the worst in Argentine football.
River won, 5-3 on aggregate with two goals in extra time. Gallardo made the most of the opportunity to get philosophical.
“Nobody wanted to play this match,” Gallardo said. “I saw fear on both sides, the fear of losing. But nobody thought about winning and what it could mean. Everyone was thinking about what was going to happen to whoever lost: that morbid feeling that we Argentines have about defeat — ‘We’re going to smash the loser to pieces’. (But) I always think positively, always hope for the best. I’ve never looked at it as, ‘Oh, shit, what if we lose?’ That seems so mediocre to me.”
The message struck many as revolutionary. “Gallardo is an educator,” says Cristofalo. “There is a lot of schadenfreude in Argentine football, but he saw beyond that. He taught people that the most important thing is to compete, that defeat is only another side of victory.”
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Gallardo, incidentally, stands by that diagnosis today. “A fear of losing paralyses us,” he explains. “I understand it in certain moments: sometimes can help you face up to challenges. But in Argentine football there have been times when the fear of losing was so strong that it held us back. It put the handbrake on us and we did not advance.
“We have to at least try to conquer the fear that paralyses us. We have to at least try to offer something more to the spectators.”
The next step
Gallardo’s ongoing affection for River is evident but he is certain he made the right decision when he stepped away six months ago. “I was completely immersed in it for eight and a half years,” he says. “I understood that it was time to get out.”
The break, he says, has allowed him to properly unwind for the first time in ages. “More than anything, I have been enjoying the chance to be away from football,” he says. “I have been enjoying my time, my space, my loved ones, my friends — the beautiful things in life. I have been able to relax without having my head buried in work. I’ve enjoyed it.”
Now, though, he is starting to consider returning to work.
He will not jump at the first opportunity. Speaking to him, it is clear his own vetting process will be just as rigorous as that of any club.
“I’d have to get to know the club’s model and culture,” he says. “You cannot ignore the history of the place where you’re going to work and live. That part is incredibly important.
“There has to be a feeling. I have to know what kind of journey I’m embarking on. After that, it comes down to results; no manager can escape that. However, in observing certain tendencies and how certain projects are being managed… if you don’t find something that you truly identify with, from the start, it will be very difficult.
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“The other things can be built. I am not ruling anything out, but I’m at a place in my life right now where I would (only) welcome something that checks those boxes. Otherwise, I’ll remain calm and continue to prepare myself, waiting for that moment to come.”
Gallardo has four sons. The eldest, Nahuel, came through River’s youth ranks and now plays for Once Caldas in Colombia’s top division. He is 24. Matias, 19, recently made his first-team debut for River. The youngest, Benjamin, was born four years ago and reconfigured his dad’s outlook on life.
“Becoming a father again at 44 changed absolutely everything for me,” Gallardo says. “He has made me reconsider a lot of things.”
Most obviously, it means that the next job has to suit his family as well as his ambitions. But Gallardo also just seems hugely contented — with his career, his life, his decisions. There is no palpable sense of restlessness. He will, after all, be plotting his next move from the privileged position of knowing his legacy is already established — in South America at least.
“It’s possible I won’t be a coach for the rest of my life,” he concludes. “Maybe I will coach for six, seven, eight years more and then try something else. That’s one vision I have for the years ahead. But I’m going to see how I feel at each moment and enjoy it.
“Just like I enjoyed my eight years at River. Just like I’m enjoying my life at the moment. Maybe tomorrow I will be enjoying something new that motivates me.”
(Main graphic — photos: Getty Images/design: Sean Reilly)