Behind those eyes: Pellegrini’s fascinating climb through South American football

By on December 1, 2015

There’s just one Premier League manager, Jose Mourinho, who didn’t play professional football in his younger years. Mourinho’s fairy tale story from a translator at Barcelona to an assistant coach before landing the job at Porto, where he made his name, has been well-told over the years.

Yet there’s another successful Premier League manager, Manuel Pellegrini, whose road from playing career to a success in management was also a long and winding tale. Buried deep into his long jacket on the touchline, behind his long nose are a pair of sunken, brilliant blue eyes conveying the years of wisdom he gained on the road. His rise up the managerial rank has been a slow and convoluted one, and perhaps due to his analytical personality and knack for saying a lot without really saying anything, his fascinating backstory is less well known to the broader fanbase. So what’s behind those brilliant blue eyes?

In journalist Patricio Abarca’s book, Pellegrini: Lessons about life and football, the life of a very private man is clued together with wonderful stories and anecdotes; though perhaps it’s a story from The Guardian that says the most: “Pellegrini’s desire to guard his privacy was illustrated when the Observer contacted Pedro,” they wrote back in early 2014. “Speaking in perfect English Pedro politely declined to comment, saying: ‘It would go against the promise I have made to my brother.'”

Pellegrini is one of eight children of their late parents — mother, Silvia and father, Emilio — and the grandson of an Italian immigrant to Chile. His father, owner of the family business, Constructora y Arquitectura, never had much interest in Pellegrini’s fondness for football as a child and after watching one of his son’s matches for Universidad de Chile, he commented that Manuel should probably wear a crash helmet as he headed the ball away on so many occasions. Emilio preferred classical music to football and Manuel was encouraged to study as a child.

In his university years, Pellegrini studied engineering, having failed the entrance test to the entrance test to medical schools in Chile. He balanced his schoolwork and football, studying in the mornings and evenings and playing football from 10:30am to 1pm. “It was not easy for me to get together and study because I was playing on the weekends,” said Pellegrini per Manchester City’s official website. “My greatest rival was structural calculus. The classes were given when I was training and I did what I could.”

But Pellegrini was undeterred and even took a liking to boxing in his free-time.

Pellegrini made his debut for Universidad de Chile in 1973 and remained there throughout the rest of his thirteen-year senior career. He was a well respected player, earning 457 appearances for his club and a solitary international cap for Chile — against a legendary Brazil side just before the 1986 World Cup. His biggest assets as a player weren’t his technical ability, but a keen tactical awareness and leadership ability that still serves him well today.

That same year, however, he made the decision to retire. “It was against Cobreandino [the Andes club now called Trasandino]. Our keeper deflected a shot and I jumped to head the ball away,” Pellegrini said per The Guardian. “A seventeen-year-old kid jumped at least half a meter and headed to the net. That day I decided I couldn’t keep playing.” Perhaps he would have delayed his decision if he knew that very seventeen-year-old, Ivan Zamorano, would go on to carve a successful career in Europe for Real Madrid.

After his playing career ended, Pellegrini considered his career options. Again, his father pushed him to pursue and academic or engineering career, but Pellegrini opted to take the reigns in charge of Universidad de Chile — he had always loved watching Fabio Capello’s teams — during a successful period for the club. Yet after a single disappointing season in charge of the Chilean club, Pellegrini was sacked. He blamed himself for leaving the club in charge of their assistant manager for multiple weeks while traveling to England to take coaching courses. Again, his father told Pellegrini he had no career in football.

Yet Pellegrini moved to Palestino, then O’Higgins, Universidad Catolica and finally back to Palestino in the mid-nineties in the hopes of making his name. It was during this time he suffered his darkest moment in management, when one of his players, suffering from clinical depression, committed suicide while on the road.

The tragedy made a lasting impression on Pellegrini, who ventured to Liga de Quito in Ecuador, where he won the league. He repeated the feat in Argentina, first with San Lorenzo and then River Plate, warranting a move to Spanish side Villarreal in 2004. After five years of success in Villarreal, Pellegrini was ready to step up to the challenge of managing Real Madrid. The Chilean had honed his man-management skills in Villarreal, in particular from a fractious relationship with Juan Roman Riquelme.

He spent a short year in the managerial circus that is Madrid and he wasn’t surprised when the call came from the club president to tell Pellegrini that he was on the chop. Yet Pellegrini still harbored a love for the arts to keep his mind occupied, in fact, he was in the office of Manuel Borja, director of Madrid’s national museum of 20th century art, when he took the call.

Afterwards, Pellegrini joined Malaga and lead the club on a famous run to the Champions League Quarterfinals in the 2012/2013 season. At the club’s end-of-season award ceremony that summer, Pellegrini announced that he would join City after Malaga were barred from European play due to Financial Fair Play. And despite a lifetime’s worth of ups and downs, Pellegrini is still playing attacking football with City — “death by beautiful geometry,” as the Daily Telegraph once said.

Homepage photo credit: By Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile from Santiago, Chile [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.