Despite his modest start, Mr. Sacheri, now 48, has emerged in recent years as one of Argentina’s most prominent authors and scriptwriters. Besides his work on a movie that won an Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2010, he has revived the soccer story as a respectable literary genre with compelling tales that use the sport as a prism to explore his nation’s idiosyncrasies.

He often finds himself wondering how it all happened.

“It’s like a chain of surprises,” Mr. Sacheri, who has thick eyebrows and graying stubble, said in an interview in a cafe here in Castelar, the anonymous Buenos Aires suburb where he grew up and still lives. “My literary goals were always very modest: I just wanted to hear my name on the radio.”

When he did, that Saturday in October 1996, he rushed to preserve the memory. “I go to find a pay phone,” he recalled, “I ring my wife. I tell her to switch on the radio and to record it, so we could save it on a cassette.”

In the years since, Mr. Sacheri has found critical and commercial success.

“Sacheri took the baton from Soriano and Fontanarrosa,” said Cristina Mucci, a prominent cultural commentator and book critic. “He adopted a popular subject, then added his own reflections and anecdotes that clearly resonate with a mass public.”

Over the past few years, Mr. Sacheri, who writes from a room overlooking the garden of his home, has also vaulted to international fame, giving Argentine fiction a new audience.