The news that César Luis Menotti has had a growth removed from his right lung perhaps shouldn't come as a great surprise. El Flaco (the Thin One) has been, after all, one of football's great smokers, a man whose hawkish face seems somehow incomplete without a white diagonal protruding from his lips. He remains in the Hospital Italiano in Buenos Aires, but is now out of intensive care and is expected to make a recovery.

Whether the 72-year-old will ever coach again, whether he will ever light up again, is less certain, but he seemingly has the best wishes of the world behind him – and that perhaps is the most extraordinary thing about him. That Menotti is revered in Argentina is natural: he won them their first World Cup and inspired the counter-revolution against anti-fútbol; what is more surprising is the depth of affection felt across the rest of the world.

Pravda this week ran a headline "Get Better, El Flaco!" There was a piece about his illness in the Arizona Daily Star. English friends of mine who shrugged with indifference when Valeriy Lobanovskyi and Enzo Bearzot died and when Ivica Osim had a stroke, have seemed genuinely moved. And this for a man who won the World Cup in circumstances about which allegations continue to be made for a country led at the time by a military junta: Argentinians may be expected to differentiate between national football team and national government; outsiders rarely make the distinction.

Part of it, of course, is about image. Menotti is a highly charismatic man, and with his gaunt face, collar-length hair and perpetual cigarette, with his unapologetic theorising, has always seemed emblematic of a particular form of South American left-wing intellectualism. Part of it is his relationship with the junta, which wasn't as oppositional as has at times been claimed but certainly wasn't close. And part of it is the football his teams – and those of his disciples – have played: attractive, smart, committed to attack. Anybody who is ever tempted to dismiss tactical study as dry should spend five minutes watching an interview with Menotti.

"I maintain that a team is above all an idea," he said, "and more than an idea it is a commitment, and more than a commitment it is the clear convictions that a coach must transmit to his players to defend that idea. So my concern is that we coaches don't arrogate to ourselves the right to remove from the spectacle the synonym of festival, in favour of a philosophical reading that cannot be sustained, which is to avoid taking risks. And in football there are risks because the only way you can avoid taking risks in any game is by not playing …

"And to those who say that all that matters is winning, I want to warn them that someone always wins. Therefore, in a 30-team championship, there are 29 who must ask themselves: what did I leave at this club, what did I bring to my players, what possibility of growth did I give to my footballers?

"I start from the premise that football is efficacy. I play to win, as much or more than any egoist who thinks he's going to win by other means. I want to win the match. But I don't give in to tactical reasoning as the only way to win, rather I believe that efficacy is not divorced from beauty …"

He emerged into an Argentinian football culture in which efficacy and beauty, if not quite divorced, were at least undergoing a lengthy separation. The backlash against the Estudiantes of Osvaldo Zubeldía was just beginning, but they had shown what could be done with discipline, work rate and excessive physicality. Even after Argentinian football had begun to react against their cynicism and gamesmanship, the terrible fouls and the deliberate, pre-planned intimidation and provocation of opponents, Chacarita Juniors offered an alternative model of anti-fútbol, less overtly unpleasant, perhaps, but just as suspicious of beauty, just as convinced that efficacy meant hard-running and percentages.

Menotti combined the two, exposed the divide as false. The opposite of efficacy is not beauty, but inefficacy: there is no reason that the two should be mutually exclusive. And as the Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger highlighted last week in his application of the term "sterile domination" to Barcelona, that which is beautiful can at times be so efficacious as to feel dull, at least to those on the receiving end.

Menotti's Huracán, an unfashionable team from the shabby Parque Patricios district of Buenos Aires, won the 1973 Metropolitano championship playing glorious attacking football. "To watch them play was a delight," an editorial in Clarín asserted. "It filled Argentinian fields with football and after 45 years gave the smile back to a neighbourhood with the cadence of the tango." So beguiling were they, that when they beat Rosario Central 5-0, the opposing fans applauded them. "The team was in tune with the popular taste of Argentinians," said their forward Carlos Babington. "There were gambetas, one-touch moves, nutmegs, sombreros, one-twos, overlaps."

After Argentina had been humiliated by the Dutch at the 1974 World Cup, anti-fútbol exposed by totaalvoetbal, Menotti was an obvious choice as national coach. What was needed was not just a change of personnel, but of philosophy. "There's a right-wing football and a left-wing football," Menotti. "Right-wing football wants to suggest that life is struggle. It demands sacrifices. We have to become of steel and win by any method … obey and function, that's what those with power want from the players."

As Argentina's football philosophy drifted left, though, the country lurched politically to the right. Isabel Perón had been deposed as president in a coup in 1976 and replaced by a right-wing military junta that savagely repressed dissent. The rise of anti-fútbol had been played out against the background of the right-wing dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía: just as the quasi-militarism of Vittorio Pozzo's Italy had seemed to reflect Mussolini's leadership, so too Argentinian football in the mid-late 60s seemed to reflect the pragmatic approach of the government.

Menotti's relationship with the junta was far more complex. In that he self-consciously harked back to a lost golden age – "our victory is a tribute to the old and glorious Argentinian football," he said after the 1978 World Cup – he appealed to the conservatism of the generals and that, plus the propaganda capital of his success, allowed the junta to overlook his overtly left-wing beliefs. Menotti himself clearly felt uncomfortable about the way the success of 1978 was exploited, but then, as he asked in his autobiography, what should he have done? "To coach teams that played badly, that based everything on tricks, that betrayed the feelings of the people? No, of course not." Instead, he argued, his football, being free and creative, offered a reminder of the free, creative Argentina that had existed before the junta.

That, of course, is to idealise his side. Menotti's belief in artistry did not extend so far as giving a 17-year-old Diego Maradona a place in his squad, even though he had handed him an international debut almost a year earlier. He played an aggressive 4-3-3, if not modelled explicitly on the Dutch, then at least resembling their shape. The direct running of Mario Kempes, Leopoldo Luque and Oscar Ortiz, along with the more cerebral plotting of Osvaldo Ardiles and the erratic brilliance of René Houseman, meant that their football was at times thrilling, but for all Menotti evoked la nuestra, the flamboyant style of the 1930s, his side played – at best – a modern interpretation of it.

"He spoke a traditional discourse," said the philosopher Tomas Abraham, "but in 1978 he shut the players in a laboratory for months, without women, eating vitamins … [and playing] … a pace of game that when they went out on River's pitch, even the Hungarians said looked desperate." Hungary, beaten 2-1 at El Monumental in Argentina's first game of the tournament, became so frustrated by a series of niggling fouls that Tibor Nyilasi and Andras Torocsik were both sent off for retaliation in the final three minutes. "Menotti prepared the players physically with technical advances," Abraham went on, "but his discourse was this: the important thing is to feel the ball, to pass it, to knead it, to dribble with it."

That, perhaps, is only natural. The world, after all, had moved on from the 1930s, both tactically and in terms of physiological preparation, but there were also allegations of less defensible chicanery. Most notoriously, there were the claims made in the Sunday Times on the morning Argentina beat England in the 1986 World Cup that in 1978 Peru had been bribed to roll over their second-phase game Argentina needed to win by four clear goals to reach the final. Perhaps they did, perhaps they didn't; the financial paper trail is inconclusive, and to watch the game is to see a team with nothing to play for slowly being overwhelmed by highly motivated opponents in a ferocious atmosphere. If the game was fixed, it appears nobody told the players until midway through the first half: Juan José Muñante hit the post early on and their goalkeeper Ramón Quiroga, who had been born in Argentina and would later take much of the blame, made a number of scrambling saves.

Where there was clearer gamesmanship was before the final against Holland. The Dutch bus took a needlessly circuitous route to the stadium, exposing it to Argentinian fans who hammered on the windows and yelled abuse. Argentina delayed their arrival on to the pitch, leaving the Dutch standing around, exposed to the fury of the crowd, and when they did finally emerge from the tunnel, they protested about a cast René van der Kerkhof had been wearing on his arm throughout the tournament.

The joy of Menotti's football – or, perhaps, to be cynical, the joy of hearing him talk about football – outweighed those doubts. His career has not been laden with silverware, but as he himself claimed early, that was never really his primary goal. He restored a joy to the Argentinian game, provided an alternative to the approach of Zubeldía, which was taken on by Carlos Bilardo. Argentinian football in the 1980s vacillated between Menottisme and Bilardisme; without Menotti and his success there may not even have been a debate.

There is a focus in football on medals, but as Arrigo Sacchi – whose own haul of trophies is meagre compared to his reputation – has observed, there is also a place for style. It is for his style and the style of his teams that Menotti is remembered, and it is those memories that have drawn this week messages of support from all around the world.