Manuel Pellegrini: ‘If I had another life I wouldn’t dedicate it to football’

It was sarcastic to start with, Manuel Pellegrini says, but that didn’t last long. When he arrived in Argentina, a cup winner in Chile and league champion in Ecuador but largely unknown there, San Lorenzo de Almagro were in a state. Coco Basile had pushed out the priest who would become Pope Francis and as he recalls it, an unloved ground lacked stands in all four corners, their real home long since sold to Carrefour. The joke ran that they had a supermarket, not a stadium.

One did, anyway. The other had Pellegrini arriving for that very reason. He was The Engineer they didn’t have, someone to finally finish the place. The name stuck. “It ended up being admiring, recognition,” he says. That season San Lorenzo became clausura champions and the Copa Mercosur followed, their first international trophy. He won another clausura with River Plate two years later then crossed the Atlantic. He never went back. That was 19 years ago. On Saturday night, he takes Real Betis into the fifth cup final in their history, against Valencia.

Pellegrini graduated in civil engineering in 1979 while playing at Universidad de Chile, where he made more than 450 appearances in 13 years, earning an international cap against Brazil in 1986. It was hard then, and he had to put final exams back 18 months; it would be impossible now. “These days you’d have to choose: the demands are too great in football and academically.” Combining coaching and engineering already was. Which is why none of this should have happened.

“It was absolutely clear management wasn’t going to be my path,” Pellegrini says. “I always intended to be a footballer but when I finished playing my plan was engineering. I graduated at 24, played to 34. I had started a small company,