Ecuador's World Cup Manager Sebastián Beccacece: A Cult Hero

Didier Deschamps patrols his technical area with the watchful pride of an outer-arrondissement charcutier. Luis de la Fuente is a veteran wealth manager at Banco Santander. Japan’s Hajime Moriyasu is about to go postal at his dreary office job in a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film. Socceroos coach Tony Popovic looks like he’s on his way to MC a wedding at Sydney’s King Tomislav Croatian Club. And Carlo Ancelotti is … well, he’s just Carlo Ancelotti, a man with Champions League-winning eyebrows whose fierce allegiance to his three-piece suit, even through the worst of a North American summer, suggests he’s somehow in command of his own climate.

But one man has stood hair and shoulders above the rest. On the field, through victory and defeat, Ecuador have been exactly what everyone imagined they would be before the tournament began: a team with an elite defensive and midfield spine that lacks any real punch up front. But on the sidelines and in the press conferences, they have absolutely dominated, and that’s all down to the gaucho Fabio they have leading their team. With his streaks of dirty blond hair, chinstrap of stubble, and Boeing 747 nose, Sebastián Beccacece looks like the kind of manager who should do well at the World Cup, regardless of results on the pitch. He’s 45 years old, leading a country other than his native Argentina, and arrives at this tournament boasting a fairly modest coaching record, having worked as an assistant under Jorge Sampaoli with Chile and managed the Spanish club side Elche to no great success.

The look, the journeyman résumé, and the responsibility for a team widely seen as a tournament dark horse: the raw ingredients were all there, before this World Cup began, for Beccacece to break out as a cult managerial hero. In previous World Cups it’s been the duty of middle-aged Frenchmen – exiles and vagabonds like Bruno Metsu, Philippe Troussier, and Hervé Renard, the crisp white shirt who never lets Africa down – to carry the cultural burden of being the tournament’s eccentrics-in-chief; could an Argentinian ease the weight of French responsibility? Things did not start well. In the wake of Ecuador’s first two matches at this tournament, Beccacece was on the brink. A last-minute defeat to a young and talented Côte d’Ivoire side was perhaps forgivable, but after La Tri suffered the humiliation of a scoreless draw against tiny Curaçao, everything about Beccacece’s management – his tactics, his selections, his communication style, even his choice of dress, which saw him take to the field for the opening matches in a knitted gray-and-black top that looked like a mistake purchase off Vestiaire Collective – came in for criticism.

Facing elimination from the tournament in their final group match against Germany, Ecuador quickly went behind to a controversial goal from Leroy Sané. But then Becaccece got to work. Following review of the Germans’ opener on the sideline monitor, he immediately launched into an animated protest that rolled through several gestural classics of the “enraged manager” canon: he pointed at his watch, he sideskipped out of his technical area and got in the third official’s face, he shrugged and held his palms to the heavens, he made the sign of a telephone for some reason. Here, at last, was what the Ecuadorian team had been looking for: a sign that their manager was a genuine lunatic who would do anything to help them win. An equalizer quickly followed. Then, in the 77th minute, following a series of bold substitutions, as Beccacece cajoled his charges forward with the life-or-death intensity of a boiling frog, Gonzalo Plata stuck a leg out to score the goal that sent Ecuador into the round of 32, and a nation into raptures.

At full time, the celebrations from Beccacece were appropriately heavy metal: he launched himself into the stands to embrace his wife and family, then climbed atop various staff members to whip the yellow-shirted crowd into still-greater frenzies of ecstasy. Pogoing on the shoulders of the team physios and assistant coaches in his cream knitted top, he looked a little like a career menswear model who’d just landed a runway contract with Armani. Progression to the last-32 here is just the second time that Ecuador have ever made it to the knockouts of a World Cup; already the victory over Germany has been hailed as the finest achievement in the nation’s footballing history.

Ecuador face Mexico at the Azteca on Tuesday night – a daunting assignment in which failure would bring no shame. But whatever happens on the field, Beccacece’s legend is already written. The footage of Jürgen Klopp at this tournament, working for German TV and pretending to find Thomas Müller funny and encouraging us all to book with Trivago and smiling his dazzling iceberg smile, has offered a mournful reminder of how sorely football needs big personalities. Club competition is increasingly the roost of guarded, technocratic types, all those Artetas and Marescas in careful control of the on- and off-field script. But international management remains a place for dreamers and madmen, and the World Cup – which still flickers with the power to inspire and uplift, despite all of Fifa’s best efforts – is all the more entertaining for it. No manager has brought more joy to this tournament than Ecuador’s flaxen dugout guru – a man whose every flail, every strop, seems to channel the anxiety, fury, and elation felt by each one of his team’s supporters.

Addressing the press after the victory over Germany, Beccacece embraced the grandeur of the moment fully, invoking Argentinian rock music, his own educational road trips across the Andean highlands, and the spirit of Simón Bolívar in a plea to all Ecuadorians to get behind their national team. He summoned the memory of 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, that unity seen when he met with San Martín. Unity is key.” And then he waxed even more exquisitely poetic. “We came to life to feel,” Beccacece reflected. “Sometimes we feel the pain of defeat but sometimes also the satisfaction of a victory. What is important is to strike a balance. This will not change my life. It will not. But we must indulge ourselves in this joy.”