On Friday evening one of the most remarkable eras in world football came to an end. The Uruguayan association AUF announced in five dry sentences that Óscar Washington Tabarez, 74, had been sacked as national coach. “This difficult decision was made in view of the current circumstances,” wrote the association, alluding to four consecutive defeats in the World Cup qualifying. That left the question of whether the awkward lines were just an expression that the officials didn’t know what to say or that they lacked size.
Tabarez was national coach in two different phases, first at the World Cup in 1990, then again from 2006. As far as the length of time in office was concerned, Joachim Löw, who also resigned this year, could take on Tabarez. Tabarez was more than just a national coach. He was a maestro, in many ways. In the literal sense of the word, because after his football career ended due to an injury at the end of the 1970s, he worked as a primary school teacher – and a teacher in Uruguay maestros mean. And also in a broader sense, because since March 2006 he turned out to be a people’s pedagogue.
Tabárez led the proud country, which has fewer inhabitants than Berlin and yet has won two soccer world championships (and two Olympic tournaments), to a South American championship (2011) and three world championships. He came back from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa with players like Diego Forlán, Sebastián “El Loco” Abreu, Diego Godín, Luis Suárez and Diego Lugano in fourth place. Despite the defeat in the game for third place against Joachim Löw’s team, Tabarez and the team were celebrated by tens of thousands.
Football educator: national coach Óscar Washington Tabárez swears his team to their next task at the 2010 World Cup.
(Photo: Brian Synder / Reuters)
“Let’s not just look at the results to evaluate what is being achieved. Success is not just results. Success is the difficulties one overcomes to get results,” he shouted to the crowd. “The way is the reward,” said Tabárez. And thus coined a sentence that went down in the folk culture of the country.
Part of his legacy is the structuring of the youth work, which in his eyes should not only serve the mere, profitable breeding of footballer’s legs. The fact that the young talent also had to “study and prepare for life’s challenges” was not just a matter of fact for him – and a remarkable approach in a continent that is committed to exporting footballers worth millions.
Because they let him go for a long time, Tabárez found the ideal habitat as national coach after numerous, sometimes successful engagements with well-known clubs such as Peñarol Montevideo, Boca Juniors (Buenos Aires), AC Milan and Real Oviedo. No coach in the world has managed so many international matches for a single national team as he (225). And only the Englishman Walter Winterbottom and the German Helmut Schön were, like Tabárez, with their respective home countries as coaches at four world championships.
“Tabárez marked a before and an after in the history of Uruguayan football,” says Diego Forlán
In Russia 2018, the pictures went around the world that showed him with a walking aid on the sidelines, he has been suffering from Guillain-Barré syndrome, a serious neurological disease, for years. After that World Cup, a central square in Montevideo was to be named after Tabárez, and a man-high statue was to be erected. The project failed because the laws in Uruguay state that this is only possible ten years after the recipient’s death. For this, his students now shouted homage after him.
“Tabárez marked a before and after in the history of Uruguayan football,” said former world-class striker Diego Forlán. “Thank you, and thank you a thousand times,” wrote Luis Suárez. He had one of his most important advocates in Tabárez – after the red card in the quarter-finals of South Africa and after the bite in the shoulder of Giorgio Chiellini in the World Cup game against Brazil in 2014. “This is a soccer World Cup, not a World Cup of cheap morals” , said Tabárez at the time, but basically it was against his nature.
“Footballers have temperament, and let’s not fool ourselves: border crossings are almost part of nature in football. But that must not lead to forgetting why you are on a football field. You must not lose control,” said Tabárez im June to the SZ. “To lose with dignity and to win without strangeness – that’s what it’s all about.”
He believed he would have made up fourth place in South America’s World Cup qualifying group in the four remaining games, but after Wednesday’s 3-0 win in Bolivia, Uruguay’s association “Basta” said. The Uruguayan media dream of Argentinian Marcelo Gallardo as his successor, but he earns an insane salary at River Plate. What remains of Tabárez is a remarkable professional life. “Perhaps life consists of leaving lessons behind and building bridges,” he said another time, and one can attest to the fact that he has achieved that without question.