'I have the balls’ - Carlos Tevez on managing rivals of boyhood club Boca Juniors

Two months into his tenure as manager of Argentine club Independiente, Carlos Tevez employed a school teacher to his backroom staff.

Part of his holistic approach to training includes his players having to solve mental strategy problems after being put through the wringer in an exhaustive physical session, to assess decision-making under pressure. He soon learned that some players could not do elementary maths equations.

“That is poverty. We can help the kid with food and a lot of things but studying, knowing how to defend himself, reading what he is signing, not getting screwed…” Tevez explained, after bringing in the teacher to help with reading, writing and arithmetic having noted the spectrum of social backgrounds within his team.

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Tevez has always been a person to do things his way; ditching Manchester United for rivals Manchester City, going AWOL under Roberto Mancini and refusing to learn English in protest of the lasting damage to some family members made as result of the Falklands War.

Tevez is loved in his home country and humoured Boca Juniors supporters when he ripped up his lucrative contract at Chinese outfit Shanghai Shenhua in 2018 to return to his boyhood club, less than a month after leaving.

While still adorned, those Boca smiles have somewhat mellowed since taking on the job at rivals Independiente in August. He arrived during a time when the club were battling relegation. Six months earlier, a banner was unfurled by club ultras which read: “Win on Sunday, or bullets for everyone.”

Tevez has since