Helenio Herrera: Football's Original Master of the Dark Arts | Richard Fitzpatrick | OFF THE BALL BREAKFAST
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Football on Off the Ball. I think man management is far more nuanced nowadays as you're suggesting because the dressing rooms have changed. You've got players from different faiths, different cultures, different communities and you've got to reflect all that. These are player whisperers as well as player shouters.
Join in the obsession.
Subscribe now at offtheball.com forward slash join. Okay, so we're very lucky that Richard Fitzpatrick is in studio with us as opposed to down the line. You're in Dublin today because the official launch, or the Irish launch anyway, of Helene Herrera, Football's Original Master of the Dark Arts is out. The book arrived in and Arthur went, oh my God, that's beautiful.
It is beautiful. It's an amazing cover design. Love it, yeah, kind of brutalist.
Appropriately so, yeah. Very much so. how they stole him from Barcelona is the mythology around that. And then you work down through the period of time and you end up at the late 60s and the British team's starting to get good. And in the meantime, HH's two teams go, his team goes back to back for two of them. And I suspect that most of us and our generation knew very little about him beyond he's a storied name at the birth of football's greatest competition. And
What is the significance of Helenio Herrera in football history?
When did you start realizing or understanding that there was way more to him worth finding out about?
Yeah, very similar. He was just in my consciousness as the godfather of Catenaccio, but I didn't know much about him. I moved to Barcelona in 2010 and I started more or less immediately writing a book on the classical rivalry there. and discovered more about him. He loomed large in the history of Barcelona. They have a cult of the manager at Barca and he was the first great manager at the club in the late 1950s. He took on that Di Stefano's Real Madrid that you just mentioned. And he had their number domestically over those years. He was there in 58 to 60. But he's not really known outside of Spain and Italy in the same regard as he is in those countries. So I was fascinated with him essentially because he was such an entertaining character.
He obviously had great success with winning back-to-back league titles with Atletico as well in Spain. as well as with Barca and then moving on to Le Grand Inter in Italy in the 60s but he was an absolutely outrageous character and there was rumours about him to do with doping and match fixing but I didn't think much of it beyond that until a few years later around 2015 or that I discovered that he was involved in the first alleged doping death in football, what's called the first white death in football. Two years after Tommy Simpson, the Tour de France cyclist died, one of his players died from alleged doping at Roma in 69. So I was there, woo, wow, there's a story here. Like I'd always been interested in doping and sport, basically because of the Lance Armstrong story, watching you guys like cover with, of course, obviously Paul Kimmich and
David Walsh led the charge in bringing Lance Armstrong down. So to have a story in football about doping was, and he ended up in court charged with manslaughter. There's some story here. So that was the spur to dive into it.
It helps that he's also like an outrageous larger than life character who was charming but had no friends is one of the lines that stuck out.
Yeah, he was a very enigmatic character. Like, huge, huge charm. Like, he could, you know... He had an amazing man-management style. Like, was brilliant at motivating players, getting inside their heads and driving them on to great things. Like, he was diabolical as one of his former players. Joaquin Pero said he was dropped at one stage. He played with him for Inter and Spain and at AS Roma and he was dropped and then suddenly HH needed him for a game. He was arm around the shoulder for the week, cajoling him, getting him motivated for the game and then he would come alive in the match and he said it was diabolical in his words that he was able to do this. But he was a lonely character then, he wouldn't let people into his inner circle, they hadn't any close friends in the game.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:30
2
What is the significance of Helenio Herrera in football history?
1:30–9:12
3
How did Helenio Herrera's management style influence modern football?
9:12–17:54
4
What controversies surrounded Helenio Herrera during his career?
17:54–27:26
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from OTB Football
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