Other than leading Argentina to World Cup glory as coach in 1978, César Luis Menotti led FC Barcelona during the 1983-1984 season, and several other top clubs throughout his career, including River Plate, Boca Juniors and Santos FC. Menotti recently sat with El País to talk about the beauty of Guardiola’s game, Argentina’s aggression toward Messi and the sea of Mourinhos in the modern game. Read on for a truly epic interview.

The following is a translation from an article from El País. The original article can be found here.

Born in Rosario in 1938, El Flaco “Skinny,” is one of the great oracles of football. Here he talks about the Copa América, his national team’s current game plan and the style of Guardiola’s Barça and Madrid under Mourinho.

The meeting place is in his office in downtown Buenos Aires. It’s cold in the streets and inside the house. Cesar Luis Menotti apologizes: “This morning the furnace broke. I was going to buy one because I’m freezing,” he explains. Under the glass on the desk are several photos of his children. Above, piles of stacked books. To their left, My City and My People, by Eladia Blázquez, La Aznaridad, by Vázquez Montalbán, and Poor State of Blood, by Tejeda … To the right of the old lounge chair, a clean ashtray recalls a time not long ago when the conversation would have been surrounded by smoke.

P. How have you been since quitting smoking?

R. Bad. They told me, “The first month is very hard, but after …” No, every month I have even more cravings! Doctors insist on making life longer and less enjoyable. Make our life bitter is what they do, and surgeons are even worse! Now they have a little machine, like a Game Boy, pim pim, and you’ve been operated on. There is no more slow, methodical medicating, not even blood in the operating room.

P. How have you been since the operation?

R. It was nothing; I was in the hospital for three days. It was a little thing; it was not clear to me if I even had to remove it, so I told the doctor, “It’s your call. I know football, not lungs.” Then he told me not to smoke, but that I could lead a normal life—normal life for whom? My normal life is not like your normal life. To an addict, a cigarette is an incredible partner, a friend. I feel like a friend has gone, has died and is no more. I miss tobacco when I am lonely and when I write, a lot. I am grateful when I get smoke blown into my face. I seek it in the doors of restaurants. Yesterday, a man pulled out a cigar in the door of the bar and said, “I’m going outside.” “No, come as close as possible,” I said to him.

P. Are you also quitting football?

R. You get some reward in the merciless struggle against the football that betrays one’s sense of belonging. As Huracán saved Argentine soccer, Spain reconciled me with football; it gave me back my passion for the game. Watching them play with the little ones was a small comfort. Football is the only place I like to be fooled. Football is three things: time, space and deception. But there is no time, spaces are not found and it doesn’t deceive me ever. I get bored in a way that I get the feeling that which they call football is something else. I say that 99.9% of the coaches live envying the Barcelona game. Everyone would like to be Guardiola. But most do not know how.

P. They say that with great players …

R. No, a moron will buy that answer, not me. This is not a man who stands on the line and says, “Pass, pass, pass,” and just because they’re good, they can pull it off. Guardiola’s strategy is much more complex than that. It is the product of training, clear ideas, getting his players to understand and win over the fans … Guardiola has demonstrated that he is more important than his players. He says the opposite, of course …What is he going to say? I am the best? He does not believe that either. But let’s think about who Piqué was before Guardiola, who Pedro was, who Busquets was. They didn’t even discuss starting Iniesta. Now they are phenomena. The truth is that there was a little luck involved.

P. In what way?

R. Sure, they had a path carved out for them by [Frank] Rijkaard. Sometimes, the outgoing coach leaves a tremendous mess. Rijkaard, in that sense, left something accomplished. But above all, the conviction is there. I always say that a great director can make a great orchestra with great musicians, and with normal musicians, he’ll be able to get them in tune and sounding nice.

P. So, about the players …

R. It’s a lie that Guardiola is Guardiola because of the players he has. It’s a lie. He had Eto’o. He had Henry. He had Ibra. Now he has Villa … And at left back, four or five players have passed through that position. He used Mascherano as a center back … Guardiola’s men are serious and it provokes a tremendous envy in me too. Nor do I agree with another thing …

P. With what?

R. That Cruyff was also the first who started [Barcelona’s style]. The first person who tried to play like Guardiola’s Barcelona was named Cesar Menotti. And it killed me. They would whistle at us for playing too many passes! I don’t know if there was another before, but I played with Maradona in the 9 role, similar now to Messi, Carrasco and Marcos in the fold, Schuster as Xavi plays … And the rest went into the locker room tied at zero with the players in good humor! “We can’t keep playing this way,” they said, because every time Schuster gave the ball to Alexanco they would whistle at us. If they were up 3-0 then they’d say, “Olé, olé!” It weighed on us a lot. When I left, Migueli said that if a coach were to be hired after me who would tell them to play “mark the man,” he would play no more, because he was tired of sticking with the forwards. Sometimes they did not even exist. He would have to go looking for a 9 to mark and he wouldn’t play. And he liked to play touch ball because he was Andalusian and he played well, but since he was tall and strong, he was very good with his feet. They were like a beast’s.

P. Why did you leave Barça?

R. My mom had died, democracy had returned to Argentina and I felt I should return too … I had lunch with Núñez and he put a blank check in front of me and asked me what players I wanted to get me to stay. And I told him I did not want any, that what I wanted was for them to get rid of the big players, the prestigious, amazing ones, and that I was stopping the rise of the youth. That was after winning the Copa del Rey, then nothing more than a little cup. Now Madrid wins it and acts like it won the Intercontinental. But what were we talking about?

P. We were talking about the importance of the coach.

R. That’s it. I wanted to make a deep analogy as to the value of the coach. He is like the professor. What influence have the teachers had? It depends. If they were great, 99 percent. If they were bad, then simply shit. I hated math because for three years, my life was made bitter because of three teachers, each more stupid than the last … But I fell in love with chemistry because the teacher came in on the first day, smoking, filled the blackboard with formulas and said, “You will have to learn this by Tuesday. But it’s impossible.” And he said, “This is so you know that life is like chemistry. You have to interpret it.”

P. I believe the professor is not given enough credit …

R. I don’t know about Spain. Here it’s been 50 years since disculturation. It’s worrisome. Marginality is now reaching the upper-middle class. There were those who killed themselves working eight hours per day and now people work 14 to survive and they don’t complain … That added to a, quote, unquote rich country allows horrible people to gain power. The first thing they have done is to rob people of their sense of belonging. It seems that everything is theirs, even football. When the government makes a street, it seems to have been paid for out of their own pockets. They stole our music, they steal the parks, the squares, and even football. And then are surprised that people are tired and camping in the plazas.

P. Do you think they understand?

P. Of course they understand. That’s bullshit. I don’t want to become a skeptic, but I am a fierce pessimist … Given what I’ve experienced, I am a hormonal Marxist without an ideological explanation. During 70 years of my life I have seen the mess that capitalism has made of everything around me, including football. This country makes no sense. You know what I said to a friend from Barcelona who came to study the shrimping industry?

 P. No, no I don’t…

R. As Argentina did not start the geopolitical revolution, do not believe in anyone. In 3,000 kilometers we gathered 600,000 people together, and in the neighborhood of Matanzas, alone, four million people live where there should be only 500,000. There is no way to live in a city of 14 million. It makes no sense. They’re merely votes that are used to control an entire country … Poverty is profitable for some. Do not believe in them. Don’t lie to me anymore while there is a child on the street. Do you remember what Cro-Magnon was?

P. Yeah, the fire in the Cro-Magnon discotheque.

R.  I was playing for Independiente. It was a scandal. Many youth died and they wanted to press charges against the club owners, a ridiculous idea. In the coming days, while coming back from practice, I decided to count how many [youths] there were [on the streets]. Nine at one stop light, eight at another. From the bridge to my house, I counted 120, all fewer than 15 years old, on their way to die just like the ones in Cro-Magnon, but instead, because of drugs, violence and injustice. And who’d be responsible for their deaths?

P. What do you think of this “football for all” stance that this government has taken?

R. Football was stolen from the people and doesn’t belong to them anymore. Therefore, the Argentine national team only has spectators. He who understands football, doesn’t go anymore. They don’t have a public, only spectators. What role does football occupy in a state? It’s a business, and as good as it is, it’s a big business that eats up time. Not good. And that’s where we are. Football is an educational passion, a place of expression. The state should have some oversight since they are non-profit societies. But it has looked somewhere else; to corporations, and now the historical clubs are gone. They’ve blown them away. Here we had groups of investors that sold clubs for 3 million euros and the club put in 300,000, the rest for them. The sport in this country, at an organized level, is a disaster. It has gotten to the point where they’ve made a secretariat of sport and tourism, as if one could be a tailor and a butcher! It’s crazy. The military would always put the dumbest things before sports, always.

P. Do you ever have the urge to return to coaching?

R. Yes, but not here. I see the field and am like a musician who sees a guitar, but not here, not for anything. Sometimes I watch Barça’s lower ranks on TV and I think to myself, “I could assemble a team of mediocre talent and win,” but the players would last me six months. The president would sell half the team by the time they’re 16 years old. It a shame.

P.  Are you of the camp that blames [Julio] Grondona?

R. No. Well, it’s Grondona’s fault, of course. By definition the fault is his before anyone else. But he’s not the only one. Where are the other projects? What is with the slack that Argentinian football has undergone with Grondona? Or it could be fear. He’s been doing what he feels like for 35 years. There is something serious happening here. Wonderful institutions have been destroyed; the railcar, Platense. Fine, this has also happened in Spain … Look at Tenerife in the Segunda B or the desperation of Cadiz. I loved Cadiz, I always liked them … I liked Betis a lot. El Loco de la Colina [an Argentine radio personality] suggested I should coach Betis. The dilemma was that I was coming from Atletico Madrid and signed for River [Plate], and he called me that week to go to Betis. I wanted to die. I always wanted to coach Betis.

Stay tuned for the conclusion of Menotti’s interview, where he continues discussing Guardiola’s Barcelona and the players making up his team.