There has been some wonderful football at this World Cup. Plenty of it. But not every contender has turned up breathing fire. Germany have flickered rather than flamed. Belgium look like a side still arguing with itself. And European champions Spain, for all their pedigree, have yet to put together ninety minutes that make you sit up and say, yes, them, that is the team that wins it. The bookmakers have noticed. Spain have slipped to third favourites despite topping their group, which tells you how the mood has drifted.
Here is the thing, though. None of those sides has the problem facing Uruguay. Because Uruguay no longer have a problem. They have an inquest.
La Celeste are out. Beaten 0-1 by Spain in Guadalajara, they’ve disappeared at the group stage like an unwanted guest at a state banquet. Uruguay have the unwanted honour of being the only South American nation not to reach the last thirty-two. Champions in 1930 and 1950. The country that gave the game the Maracanazo and a century of swagger. That’s all in the rearview mirror has Bielsa leads his team to the airport.
The goal that did the damage came three minutes before the break, and it will sit with one man for a long time. Álex Baena struck the ball from the edge of the box. It was a shot carrying no real menace until it reached Fernando Muslera. The forty-year-old got two hands to it, then somehow none, and the ball squirmed over the line. It was a goalkeeper’s nightmare in its purest form.
What happened next is where it turns curious. Muslera did not come out for the second half. Off he went, replaced by Sergio Rochet, in what was almost certainly the final act of a long international career. The easy story is that Bielsa hooked his keeper in a temper. The truth, by the manager’s own account, is gentler. Muslera asked to come off himself. “It’s a decision Muslera took himself,” Bielsa said afterwards. For a man who first played at a World Cup in 2010, and who had never once been substituted in one, it was a quietly brutal way to bow out.
The change that actually deserves the scrutiny arrived shortly before the hour. With Uruguay needing a goal, Bielsa took off Federico Valverde. His captain. His best player. The Real Madrid midfielder who had carved out Uruguay’s clearest opening of the first half. Off he came, for Federico Viñas, in the name of a more attacking shape. Valverde walked to the bench like a man who could not believe what he was watching, and plenty of neutrals felt the same.
It is the call that will follow Bielsa around. Add a red card for Agustín Canobbio deep in stoppage time, and you had a night unravelling in every direction at once. Canobbio, on last night’s performance might not earn another cap.
So does it all point to the manager? That is the question Uruguay woke up asking, and it is a fair one. Marcelo Bielsa is seventy now. El Loco, the great romantic of the dugout, the man who reinvents clubs and half breaks himself doing it. His future with Uruguay is suddenly an open debate. To his credit, he did not duck it. “I wasn’t able to maximise the potential of Uruguay’s players,” he admitted, taking the blame onto his own shoulders.
He also argued his team had deserved far more than two points from three games. The Group H table will tell you otherwise. Then came the mixed zone, where a visibly irritated Bielsa barked “get on with it” at the television crew before the interview had even begun. Seventy or not, the fuse is as short as ever.
The Uruguayan press did not reach for the velvet gloves. El País branded the team “the disappointment of South America,” the only CONMEBOL side to fall at the first hurdle. Ovación called it “a resounding failure” and noted, witheringly, that this is now two World Cups running in which Uruguay have gone out in the group stage. El Observador, never shy, had already described one display as Uruguay playing like “the branch office of hell.”
“Bielsa destruyó la naturaleza de Uruguay, los futbolistas fueron infieles con la historia y los dirigentes rehenes de lo que firmaron: el fracasó de la celeste en el Mundial 2026” Bielsa destroyed the nature of Uruguay, the players were unfaithful to its history, and the officials were held hostage by what they had signed: *La Celeste*’s failure at the 2026 World Cup.
Montevideo Portal had warned the team was “on the edge of the precipice.” They duly stepped off it.
That last point lingers. Two group stage exits in a row, 2022 and now 2026, though only this one belongs to Bielsa. And it raises the uncomfortable question of whether a genuinely gifted generation, Valverde, Darwin Núñez, Rodrigo Bentancur and the rest, is being quietly squandered. The honest answer sits in the middle.
The players underperformed. The keeper erred. The manager made a substitution that defied the situation in front of him. But the man in the dugout always carries the can, and nobody knows that better than Bielsa.
Spare a thought, finally, for the side that went up as Uruguay went down. Cape Verde, a nation of just over half a million people, at their first World Cup, are through to the knockouts. Romance and ruin, side by side, ninety minutes apart. That is the tournament for you.
Bielsa will carry the can for all of it, the goalkeeper included, which is a touch unfair given the one substitution everyone is furious about is the one he insists he never made.
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