03 | THE TEACHER

“On the feet of the first Creole virtuosos, el toque, the touch, was born: the ball was strummed as if it were a guitar, a source of music.” — Eduardo Galeano, Football in Sun and Shadow

Galeano had a gift for describing football as something that belonged as much to the imagination as to the physical world, and his description of el toque captures an idea that has always interested Santi Bentancur: that the game is a craft, something learned through repetition and observation until technique becomes instinct and instinct becomes understanding. A pass is never simply a pass. It is a decision about space, timing and the movement of another person; the weight of the ball, the angle of the body and the moment of release all contain information. To teach football is to help a player recognise that information, and eventually to make use of it without having to think through every detail.

For Santi, that responsibility begins with a simple belief: a coach is there to teach. It sounds obvious, perhaps, but he has never understood why the job should be reduced to selecting a team, organising training sessions and deciding who plays on Saturday. Those things matter, and the higher he climbs in the game, the more complicated they will become, but they are not the purpose of the work. The purpose is to help players become better at football, to give them the knowledge and tools to solve problems, and to create an environment in which improvement remains possible long after a particular coach has moved on.

His own education in sports science had given him a language for thinking about development. Physical preparation, psychology, technical repetition and tactical understanding could be studied, measured and organised; training did not need to be a collection of inherited routines simply because that was how a previous generation had done things. He was interested in why certain interventions worked, why others failed, and why two players exposed to the same exercise could emerge with entirely different lessons. The attraction of science was not that it promised certainty, but that it offered a way to ask better questions.

Coaching children in Lisbon taught him the limits of that approach. A training programme could be carefully designed, an explanation delivered clearly, an exercise repeated until it appeared to have been understood, and still a player might struggle to put the lesson into practice. Another might arrive at the answer through a route nobody had anticipated. Progress was rarely linear, and the neatness of a plan did not guarantee the neatness of its results. He learned that a coach could prepare the conditions for learning without being able to dictate what happened inside another person’s head.

This was where his interest in the early history of Uruguayan football began to intersect with his coaching philosophy. The country’s footballing reputation is often filtered through the language of garra, but the accounts of its early international sides tell a richer story. Contemporary descriptions of Uruguay’s play at the 1924 Olympic tournament emphasised technique, rapid movement and quick passing, while reports of River Plate football spoke of dribbling and combinations on the ground. The image Galeano later evoked, of players who seemed to play chess with a ball, suggests a footballing intelligence that cannot be separated from technical ability. Even José Nasazzi (right), remembered as a formidable defensive captain, belonged to a side whose success depended on more than physical authority. Determination mattered, but so did the ability to understand what the game required.

For Santi, that is the relationship between garra and el toque: commitment gives the collective its resolve, while understanding gives that resolve direction. Neither can be supplied by a coach through instructions alone. They have to be developed, tested and reinforced until players can recognise their responsibilities in the moment, including the moments when the original plan no longer offers an answer.

There is, of course, a limit to what teaching can achieve. A coach can study a player, build a relationship, explain an idea and provide the right conditions for development, but he cannot guarantee that the lesson will take hold. Some players will surpass expectations; others will struggle despite every effort made on their behalf. Santi has no intention of mistaking that uncertainty for a reason to stop trying. His responsibility is to keep asking what can be improved, what has been misunderstood and what might work better next time, without assuming that every failure is evidence of a failure to teach.

At thirty-four, he is still learning the profession himself. Atlético will test his ideas against the practical demands of senior football, where patience has consequences and a good explanation does not necessarily produce a good result. He cannot promise that every player will become what he hopes, any more than he can promise that every match will unfold according to the plan. What he can offer is a framework, an explanation of why it matters, and a willingness to keep working with the people expected to make it function.

The teacher’s task is not to make himself indispensable. It is to help others become capable of seeing what he sees, questioning what he believes and eventually finding answers he might never have considered. If Santi can do that, the team will possess something more durable than a set of instructions: a shared understanding of the game, and the intelligence to keep learning when the game changes.