“I’ve actually always been a coach”: Mário Zagallo crowned an illustrious professional career with two more World Cup titles as a coach. With him, Brazil’s football loses a figure who combined the beautiful game with efficiency. Obituary for a man of eternity.
Anyone who wants to understand the importance of Mário Jorge Lobo Zagallo can look to the statistics that circulated in Brazil on Saturday and raise him above all those who are part of world football history. There is no country in the world that has won the World Cup more times than him. Zagallo won the Jules Rimet Trophy twice as a player – in Sweden in 1958 and in Chile in 1962 – and again, in Mexico in 1970, as a coach. And when Brazil ended a 24-year drought in the United States in 1994 and won their fourth of five titles, he was on the bench alongside Carlos Alberto Parreira as Seleção coordinator. “Zagallo eterno”, “eternal Zagallo”, is a pair of words that had already become established in Brazil during his lifetime. On Saturday, when it was announced that Zagallo had died in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 92, it sounded with bitter and sad finality.