04 | ONDINO VIERA AND ÓSCAR TABÁREZ

There are coaches who leave behind a collection of results, and others who leave behind ideas that continue to travel long after they have gone. Ondino Viera belongs to the latter category. Across a career that took him from Uruguay to Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and beyond, he treated football as something to be examined and improved rather than a tradition to be preserved unchanged. Óscar Tabárez, by contrast, offers a different kind of inheritance: the conviction that coaching is education, and that the development of a footballer cannot be separated entirely from the development of the person. For Santiago Bentancur, the two men represent complementary ambitions. One encourages him to keep asking how the game might be played; the other reminds him what a coach is there to do.

Viera was born in Cerro Largo in 1901 and began coaching in 1928. His career would span several decades and footballing cultures, but it was his time in Brazil, particularly with Fluminense and Vasco da Gama, that helped establish his reputation as an innovator. At Fluminense, he was associated with an unusually systematic approach to coaching, incorporating psychological and medical knowledge into his work at a time when such ideas were far from universal. At Vasco, he became associated with the development of the 4-2-4 and the celebrated Expresso da Vitória, before returning to Uruguay and winning three consecutive league championships with Nacional between 1955 and 1957.

What interests Santi is not the formation itself. He has no particular desire to reproduce Viera’s 4-2-4 at Atlético simply because it carries the weight of history, nor does he believe that a tactical arrangement can be separated from the players, circumstances and problems that produced it. The significance lies in the willingness to reconsider established assumptions. Viera’s career suggests that innovation is not the exclusive property of one country or footballing tradition; ideas move, encounter different conditions and acquire new forms. A coach who wants to understand the game must be willing to look beyond the boundaries of his own experience.

One recollection attributed to Viera captures the practical intelligence behind that approach. When Juan Carlos Espárrago remembered his instructions, he recalled a coach telling a player with the ball to move into midfield so that the team could create numerical superiority. It is a simple instruction, but the principle beneath it is more revealing: the movement of one player changes the possibilities available to everyone else. Football becomes a problem of relationships, space and timing, rather than a sequence of isolated actions. The shape matters because of what it allows the players to do, not because the shape is inherently correct.

Santi recognises something of his own thinking in that distinction. He wants a clear framework, but he wants players who understand the reasons behind it; he wants to rehearse solutions without making the team incapable of finding new ones. Viera offers a historical example of the curiosity required to develop those solutions. His career does not provide Santi with a ready-made system, but it reinforces the belief that tactical understanding begins with questions, and that the coach’s responsibility is to keep asking them.

Tabárez gives that responsibility a wider purpose. Born in Montevideo in 1947, he trained and worked as a primary-school teacher before becoming a full-time football coach, earning the nickname El Maestro from a profession he had already practised beyond the pitch. His career took him through club football in Uruguay, Colombia, Argentina, Italy and Spain, including a Copa Libertadores victory with Peñarol in 1987. Yet it was his return to the Uruguay national team in 2006, and the developmental project that followed, that made him such an important influence on Santi’s understanding of the profession.

The Proceso was built around continuity. Uruguay’s youth national teams and senior side were brought into a more coherent developmental structure, connecting age groups through shared principles rather than treating each team as a separate undertaking. The ambition extended beyond producing technically capable footballers. Education, respect and personal responsibility were integral to the work, reflecting Tabárez’s conviction that a coach is an educator. Players arrived with different abilities and experiences, but they also arrived as people whose development could not be reduced to what they contributed on matchday.

For Santi, this is the more profound lesson. A club cannot build something lasting if every change of manager means starting again, every young player is treated as a temporary resource and every decision is measured only by its immediate effect on the first team. He admires the Proceso because it attempted to build a culture that could connect individual development to a wider institutional purpose. It recognised that progress takes time, that knowledge must be passed between generations and that the work of one coach should contribute to something larger than his own career.

That ambition matters at Atlético CP. Santi does not want merely to enjoy a successful spell before moving on to a more prestigious job; he wants to build a dynasty, although he understands that the word is easier to write than to realise. A dynasty cannot depend solely on the personality of its manager or the quality of a particular generation of players. It requires a club capable of learning, developing people and retaining its sense of purpose as circumstances change. The challenge is not simply to build a good team, but to help create an institution that remains capable of building good teams.

There is a difference, however, between admiration and emulation. Viera worked in a different footballing world, while Tabárez’s national-team project operated under conditions that Atlético cannot simply reproduce. Santi can learn from their questions, methods and convictions without pretending that their answers belong to him. He must find his own solutions in Portuguese football, with the players, resources and history available to him; the point of studying great coaches is not to become their imitation, but to become more capable of thinking for oneself.

Perhaps that is where garra and el toque meet most clearly. The first gives a group the commitment to keep working towards a shared purpose; the second gives it the intelligence and imagination to discover how that purpose might be achieved. Viera reminds Santi that the game must never stop being questioned. Tabárez reminds him that the people playing it must never stop being taught.

Santi has much to learn before Atlético can become the institution he imagines. For now, he has two useful principles to carry into the work: never assume that the game has finished evolving, and never mistake the development of a footballer for the whole responsibility of a coach.