Mário Zagallo, a fixture in Brazilian football, dies at the age of 92

Mário Zagallo, who as both a player and coach helped lead Brazil to four World Cup soccer championships, became a national hero and one of only three people to lift the tournament trophy in both roles, died Friday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by his family on his social media channels. Rio de Janeiro’s Barra D’Or Hospital, where he had been a patient several times in recent months, said the cause was multiple organ failure.

Zagallo was an attacking wing as a player and a tactically minded coach known as ‘the Professor’. He was part of the Brazilian teams that won back-to-back World Cup championships in 1958 and 1962 and was the head coach of the 1970 Brazilian champions.

His victory in 1970 made Zagallo the first person to win the World Cup as a player and as a coach, a feat since matched only by Franz Beckenbauer of Germany and Didier Deschamps of France. But it may also have been that team’s style of play, as well as its success, that cemented a recurring role for Zagallo in Brazilian football history.

Led by stars such as his former teammate Pelé, Jairzinho and Carlos Alberto, the 1970 Brazilian squad is widely regarded as one of the greatest football teams ever assembled. It came about in a crisis after his popular predecessor fell out with the country’s military government: Zagallo was appointed head coach less than two months before the tournament’s opening match. Zagallo found himself having to act as coach to many players who had only recently been his teammates.

“It was easy to lead because the players saw and felt that I had the strength of personality to make the changes I thought were necessary,” Zagallo said. remembered in a 2011 interview with The Blizzard, a quarterly football magazine. “I have imposed myself – and this kind of leadership for the group is fundamental, even if you have participated in this group before as a player.”

Adapting to Zagallo’s tactical changes, the team danced and danced their way into the hearts and minds of fans not only in Brazil but around the world.

Led by Zagallo, the Brazilian team, dressed in its famous canary yellow jerseys, refined football to high art in its six consecutive victories in Mexico in the first World Cup broadcast in color around the world. As the team cruised through the tournament highlighted by a string of memorable goals, the team showcased the fluid, elegant attacking style known as ‘o jogo bonito’ (‘the beautiful game’), which became Brazil’s calling card worldwide.

Zagallo returned as head coach and led Brazil to a fourth-place finish in 1974. Two decades later, back on the national team bench as assistant to Carlos Alberto Parreira, he helped Brazil win its fourth championship with a victory over Italy in the 1994 final in Pasadena, California.

Parreira’s team, a grinding and more results-oriented side, was less popular than previous editions of the Seleção, as Brazil’s national team is known. But it was celebrated for presenting the prize that the country covets above all others.

Four years later, with Zagallo back in top position and stars like Ronaldo once again leading a powerful attack, Brazil returned to the World Cup finals. But the run came amid criticism from a nation of amateur coaches, who feared that Zagallo, despite his ties to Brazil’s most mythical teams, had indulged his pragmatic side.

He did little to appease the purists when he declared that a triumphant end justified any means. “I would rather win with ugly football than lose with attractive football,” he said. Unfortunately, Brazil did not do that: it was a big favorite and was stunned by host country France in the final.

In 2002, when the team traveled to South Korea and Japan to capture the record fifth title that had eluded it in France, Zagallo served as a special advisor to Luiz Felipe Scolari’s coaching staff.

That was his last personal connection to a tournament, and a title, that had defined his life for more than half a century at that point.

A pivotal moment in his life came in 1950, when, as a teenage soldier providing security, Zagallo watched Brazil be stunned by Uruguay in the final in front of a crowd of around 200,000 at Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã Stadium. That defeat, in Brazil’s first trip to the finals, was a bitter blow to the nation, and he was among tens of millions of Brazilians who shed tears of disappointment. “That day has never left my mind,” Zagallo told the BBC in 2013.

He went even further in his conversation with journalist Andrés Cantor for the book “Goooal: A Celebration Of Soccer” (1996). “From that moment on,” Zagallo remembered about the 1950 World Cup: “I only have football memories.”

Eight years later, as a national team player, he helped rewrite the ending. In the final in Sweden, Zagallo teamed up with a teenage Pelé to score a goal in a 5–2 win that clinched Brazil’s first world title. Four years later he was back in the team when Brazil repeated the feat in Chile.

Mário Jorge Lobo Zagallo was born on August 9, 1931 in Atalaia, a city in the eastern Brazilian state of Alagoas. His father, Haroldo Cardoso Zagallo, was a textile manager. His mother, Maria Antonieta Lobo Zagallo, was part of a family that owned a fabric factory.

Mário Zagallo said his father had hoped he would become an accountant and work in the family business. Instead, he devoted his life to football, spending his professional career at two clubs in Rio, making his debut with Flamengo in 1951 and retiring from Botafogo in 1965.

He married Alcina de Castro, a teacher, in 1955. They had four children: Maria Emilia, Paulo Jorge, Maria Cristina and Mario Cesar. Zagallo’s wife died in 2012. His survivors include his children and several grandchildren.

Since Pelé’s death in 2022, Zagallo was the last surviving member of the first Brazilian team to win the World Cup. He would burnish his legacy over five decades as coach, assistant and advisor to generations of Brazilian teams.

He would eventually manage more than a half-dozen clubs in his native Brazil, as well as the national teams of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But he was never far from his country, serving four different terms as Brazil’s head coach.

And even when he did not hold the post, he remained a fixture, regularly called upon – in successes as well as failures and especially in times of difficulty – as a wise and leading link in the greatest teams and the greatest triumphs .

Alex Traub and Tariq Panja contributed reporting.