Carlos Salvador Bilardo (born March 16, 1939) is an Argentine football (soccer) player and coach (and a physician by training) who achieved worldwide renown as a player with Estudiantes de La Plata and as coach of the 1986 World Cup champion team.

Born to Sicilian immigrants, Bilardo mixed football, study and hard work from his childhood. On school vacations, he would get up before dawn to help haul produce to the Abasto market in Buenos Aires. Even as he rose through the youth divisions of San Lorenzo de Almagro, young Carlos never gave up on his ambition to become a doctor.

A defensive midfielder, Bilardo did not achieve success in the carasucias era of San Lorenzo, and was traded in 1965 to second-division side Deportivo Español, where he became the team's top scorer. His tactical vision was noted by Estudiantes de La Plata coach Osvaldo Zubeldía, who was building a new team based on the killer juveniles (la tercera que mata) and was looking for a more mature anchor for the midfield.

Bilardo joined Estudiantes and became its captain and inside-the-pitch tactician. Over a four-year span, the team won one Metropolitano title, three Copa Libertadores titles and one Intercontinental Cup.

After graduating from the Universidad de Buenos Aires faculty of Medicine (together with fellow player Raúl Madero ), Bilardo retired from play and accepted the job of Estudiantes coach in 1971. For the next years, he would divide his time between coaching, his family (he married in 1968 and fathered a daughter), and helping manage his father's furniture business. He even found time to engage in medical research under Nobel prize winner Bernardo Houssay.

Following two years at Colombia's Deportivo Cali, he became Colombia national football team's trainer, but when success was not forthcoming, Estudiantes arranged for his return to Argentina.

Bilardo took Estudiantes to the semi-finals of the 1982 Nacional and went on to win the same year's Metropolitano title. The team's solid defense was based on Zubeldía's tactics, but it was the attacking might (fueled by players like Sabella, Trobbiani, Gottardi and Ponce) that won the attention of the media and the heads of the Argentine Football Association, who offered him what is arguably the most coveted job in Argentina: coach of the Argentina national football team.

He held the post from 1983 until after the 1990 World Cup. Under his watch, Diego Maradona became the most dominant player in football, and Argentina enjoyed their best international harvest ever.

From 1990 and onwards, Bilardo alternated teaching and journalism stints with coaching. He would reunite with Maradona in Sevilla FC and later in Boca Juniors, and have a brief term as the national coach of Libya, before returning to Estudiantes for the 2003-2004 season.

In a publicized episode during that season, Bilardo sat next to the pitch during a game against Club Atlético River Plate and drank from a bottle of champagne. He maintains that the bottle actually contained a non-alcoholic beverage. Media reactions varied from amusement to outrage.

Bilardo is known by fans and the media as el narigón (big nose).

External Links

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