Great Stories from Calcio’s Past: Helenio Herrera and the Fat Man, Plus Other Tales of Ruthlessness

Helenio Herrera and “catenaccio” usually go hand-in-hand: two words so interlinked that, were there a calcio thesaurus, each would be a synonym for the other. An amazingly successful coach based on an amazingly defensive system, Herrera has written his name in the lore of both Inter and Italy. Besides the bolt-approach to football, however, Herrera was known for one other attribute: he was, in essence, an asshole.

In 1967 Herrera was invited to watch the European Cup final in Glasgow. Before leaving Italy to get to the match, he offered to a mister Jock Stein- already in Scotland- a lift back to Italy on his private jet once the game was over. He then boarded his jet and arrived in Glasgow to watch the game, between Celtic and Rangers. Upon his arrival, however, he promptly negated his promise to give Stein a lift back to Italy, claiming that he was simply too fat to fit in the plane’s narrow isles. Luckily for Stein, he had not cancelled his previously-made arrangements back to Italy anyway and he was able to get to the peninsula.

There were other times he appeared to be, in the words of Jonathan Wilson, “heartless” (Inverting the Pyramid, 187). He once played a player whose father had died before a match began and only revealed the tragic news once it was over. There are even suggestions that he may have inadvertently killed a player. At Roma, he coached Giulano Taccola who fell ill before a match. His tonsils were removed but to no relief, but further medical examination revealed that he had a heart murmur. Herrera kept this to himself and played the forward anyway, who only lasted forty-five minutes before needing to come off. Two weeks later he forced Taccola to train before a match against Cagliari despite awful conditions, both internally and externally – he was ill with a cold (Not to mention the murmur, which he still didn’t know about) and the weather was brutal. The player watched the match from the stands, collapsed in the dressing room later, and died a few hours after the game ended.

As if these incidents were’nt bad enough, Wilson goes on in his book, suggesting that Herrera even rigged matches as well.

A great coach, then, perhaps undisputedly so, if one were to look solely at his trophy cabinet. However, his ruthlessness towards his players was nearly as cold and unforgiving as the style of calcio he advocated. He remains a legend, then, but perhaps he should be remembered infamously.

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