As long as you face up to your responsibility and believe that you can turn that failure around in future, I think you grow as a person.

That’s not to say it was easy.

I was starting my career with heavy baggage. It would be quite a challenge to prove that I could still have a big, international career.

Coaching wasn’t always my goal, though. To tell you the truth, for most of my playing days I had thought that when I finished as a player, I would commit my life 100 per cent to construction.

I was already an engineer while I was still playing and had set up my own construction company, so it seemed destined that was my path.

What changed? I met Fernando Riera. He was my manager at Universidad de Chile and a coach who was very well known internationally – the man who took the Chilean national team to third place at the 1962 World Cup.

Bit by bit, over the five years he managed me as a player, he stirred that vocation in me so that, in the end, I decided to do the coaching courses.

“Living alone is like a test you have to undergo if you want to work in different countries”

My parents weren’t that pleased. They thought it was a waste of time to quit an important career as an engineer to commit to football. But if I’m ever asked about my choice I always reply the same way.

The best decision I ever took in life was to work doing what I liked.

I liked football more than engineering. It was a decision that had a lot of risks, no doubt about it. But I was not afraid to take them.

For a time I did both – working as a manager and keeping my engineering career going – but in 1994 I realised that I had to commit exclusively to football. That it was impossible to be successful unless I was only a manager.

After leaving my first job in 1989, it was another 10 years before I left Chile to work in Ecuador.

I felt it would be a really useful experience if I wanted to work internationally. But leaving Chile was a very difficult decision to make.