Spinetto’s principal legacy, though, was not what he did for Vélez but the foundations he laid for anti-fútbol, the sense he left that football was as much about motivation and toughness as it was about skill. To call him a tactical revolutionary is perhaps too strong, for his ideas look basic by comparison with what was going on in Europe or in Brazil at the same time, and yet the very fact he thought so deeply about tactics and the style of the game made him a radical in the Argentina of the late forties.
