The classroom moment that bonds finalists De la Fuente & Scaloni foreverImage source, BBC SportPublished17 minutes agoThe teacher against the student.Spain manager Luis de la Fuente and Argentina boss Lionel Scaloni will contest the World Cup final having got to New Jersey by different means – but they will always have one thing that bonds them together.Back in 2017 in Scaloni’s post-playing limbo, he enrolled at the Spanish federation to study for his Uefa Pro Licence, the highest coaching qualification in European football. It was there that he first met De la Fuente, who was teaching the technique module and was, at the same time, still in charge of Spain’s Under-19s. Scaloni passed the course with one of the best marks in his year, and has mentioned since that De la Fuente gave him and his classmates “an enormous hand”.The bond between the two men has remained ever since.De la Fuente is the product of a system, Scaloni made in the particular dressing-room culture of Argentine football. But they have much more in common. Both became national coaches after periods when football seemed to have left them behind and both have built teams that function at their core like families, with values as close to sport as to the Catholicism they both practise.De la Fuente is bidding to become a World Cup winner and European champion at the same time, while Scaloni is 90 minute away from defending his world title.Not bad for two men who have not managed a top-flight club game between them.Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Neither Luis de la Fuente (left) nor Lionel Scaloni have managed at a top-flight clubThe phone call that kept De la Fuente in footballDe la Fuente grew up in Haro, in the wine region of La Rioja, home of the Batalla del Vino, the annual wine battle where thousands dress in white and drench each other in red wine. After retiring as a player in 1994, he spent 15 years in different roles with a succession of different clubs, including managing in the lower Spanish leagues, youth roles and assistant coach positions.He was sacked as manager of second-tier Deportivo Alaves – where he had ended his playing career – in 2011 and spent the next 18 months out of work and quickly drifting away from football.His story with the federation began with an act of faith as he saw a newspaper advertisement to be a youth coach with the Spanish federation.He rang the former Spain manager Inaki Saez, who told the FA De la Fuente was the ideal man. The contract was for three months, to take Spain’s Under-19s to the European Championship in Lithuania. He lost to France in the semi-finals but did enough to get a contract. Next he took Rodri, Unai Simon and Mikel Merino to the following Under-19s Euros and won it – and things kept going from there.De la Fuente arrived as Spain’s national team boss in 2022, having coached most of this squad since adolescence, through under-19, under-21 and Olympic level, winning titles along the way.He has known Dani Olmo, Martin Zubimendi, Pedri, Mikel Oyarzabal, and Marc Cucurella – and their families – for a decade. His method? Growing a culture of respect for their rivals, for the process and preaching patience and calmness.His work and life is built on sacrifice, humility and collective responsibility – sporting values that replicate religious ones. It is shown in the small gestures. Half an hour before the Euro 2024 final, with the stadium filling, he was on the phone checking his family had arrived safely.It showed again when, in this World Cup, De la Fuente, 65, pulled the federation’s photographer into a collective embrace with the squad after he had learned, mid-match, that the man’s mother had died. It showed too, more painfully, before the semi-final against France, when a question about his own brother – who died three years ago – visibly broke him in the pre-match news conference. Family, for De la Fuente, is the really important thing, the foundation of everything around him. His son, Alberto, is a member of Spain’s coaching staff.The barbecues and karaoke that make Scaloni’s ArgentinaIn contrast, Scaloni’s education happened not in federation classrooms but in Argentine dressing rooms with their own unwritten hierarchy and rules that are bigger than anybody, where senior players carry authority that coaches are expected to respect.He grew up in Pujato, the small town near Rosario where his family still farms maize, wheat and soy, and the football fields where his father Angel took him and his brother Mauro to train and play. Scaloni was part of Argentina’s Under-20 World Cup triumph in 1997 in Malaysia, alongside Walter Samuel and Pablo Aimar – now both next to him on the bench.He came back with the title and also with a fear of flying, born of a forced landing.On Deportivo La Coruna’s away trips around Spain he would travel out with his team-mates but come home separately by car with his father – 600km to Madrid, 1,000km to Barcelona. He made more than 200 appearances for Deportivo, helping them to the La Liga title, before playing for a series of clubs including a loan spell at West Ham United in 2006.Retirement, when it came in 2014-15, hit harder than he expected. He and his wife Elisa Montero had already settled in Mallorca, where she is from, with two young children, and Scaloni found the transition challenging. He took a group of 14-year-olds at Son Caliu, a small club 10 minutes from his house, freezing some mornings on the touchline, but happy for the first time since he had stopped playing. He has since mentioned every club should have a psychologist to prepare players for exactly that moment: the empty mornings. Scaloni’s coaching career is not packed full of clubs like De la Fuente’s.He became Sevilla assistant in 2016, under compatriot Jorge Sampaoli, and subsequently the duo were appointed by Argentina a year later.When Sampaoli was sacked in 2018 after failure at the World Cup in Russia, Scaloni was eventually named as his successor and – despite heavy criticism at the time about his lack of experience – has held the post ever since.His magic is not really tactics. His coaching staff now are mostly former players who understand instinctively what players at international level need, which is less tactical lectures and more shared stories. The barbecues, the karaoke nights, the deliberate mixing of stardom with ordinary moments are the essence of the Argentina changing room.Scaloni began seeing a psychologist himself after guiding Argentina to Copa America and World Cup wins.Once the adrenaline had gone and the scale of what had happened caught up with him, compounded, in his own account, by his parents’ illness at the time it was therapy and long bike rides that got him through it. Continuity over disruptionBoth coaches have built sides whose greatest strength is not any individual, but the trust that a well-managed group generates.Former Spanish Football Federation director Fernando Hierro’s description of De la Fuente – “an expert of the raw material there is in Spanish football who has built a family where they enjoy themselves” – could be transplanted almost word for word on to Scaloni’s Argentina.They are managers moved by the power of the collective. Both prefer continuity over disruption.De la Fuente kept faith with a generation he had coached since their teens; Scaloni kept faith with Messi’s supporting cast even after Argentina lost to Brazil in the 2019 Copa América semi-final, and it repaid him within two years in the Maracana, with Messi’s first title with the national team. And both, tellingly, describe the same feeling when asked what succeeding with the national team means. De la Fuente talks about the privilege of watching “the people of your country enjoy themselves again”. Scaloni keeps mentioning those in the stands, their efforts to follow the national team, and those back home.On Sunday, the student and the teacher meet again. And they will remember and possibly mention that losing is part of sport. But also that winning will make it even more improbable that two men who were once cast out of football have managed to write themselves back into its main book.Related topicsFootball
