No one who was alive to watch England’s quarter-final in the 1966 World Cup, whether at a sunlit Wembley stadium or on black and white television, would ever forget the tall figure of Antonio Rattín, Argentina’s captain, walking slowly around the Wembley touchline, heading for the tunnel, accompanied by two uniformed policemen and his team’s trainer. It was barely half an hour into the match and Rattín, who has died aged 89, had initially refused to leave the pitch after being sent off by the West German referee, Rudolf Kreitlein.

Five players had already been booked, Rattín among them, when Kreitlein made his fateful decision. The official reason for the captain’s dismissal was said to be “violence of the tongue”, which was strange since neither man spoke each other’s language. Kreitlein was later quoted as observing that while “Rattín said nothing I could understand, I could see in his face what he was saying.” It took eight minutes to get the player off the field, an unprecedented act on an English pitch; later Rattín claimed that he had been asking for an interpreter.

After agreeing to leave, he first sat down on the red carpet intended for the use of the Queen. Then, pausing by a corner flag on his way to the tunnel, he put out his hand and pointedly tweaked the pennant, emblazoned with a Union Jack. “I regret that,” he said many years later, “but nothing else.”

England went on to win the match with a goal in the second half, which sent them through to meet Portugal in the semi-final and West Germany in the final. But the incident against Argentina on 23 July, on a glorious summer afternoon, began a darkening of the relationship between the two nations.

As the England players celebrated the win, Alf Ramsey, their manager, physically stopped one of them, George Cohen, from swapping shirts with an opponent. Although the statistics would show that England had out-fouled their opponents by 33 to 19, Ramsey claimed that the Argentinian players had been “acting as animals”.

Many South Americans, not least Rattín, were convinced that the expulsion had been contrived to help a European team through to the next round. The ill-feeling between England and Argentina was intensified by the brutal Intercontinental Cup matches two years later involving Manchester United and Estudiantes de La Plata, by Diego Maradona’s “hand of God” goal against England in Mexico City during the 1986 World Cup quarter-final (seen as revenge for defeat in the Falklands war), and by David Beckham’s expulsion for retaliation in a last-16 game in Saint-Etienne in 1998.

By an extraordinary coincidence, Rattín’s death in Buenos Aires came on a day when the footballers of both nations were again involved in the quarter-final stage of a World Cup. Argentina’s players wore black armbands for their victory over Switzerland, already aware that success would lead to a meeting in the semi-finals with England, who had beaten Norway earlier in the day.

Although England would know Rattín only as the central figure of that controversial match in 1966, Argentinians saw him as a significant figure in their football culture. At 6ft 3in, he began his career as a defender before developing into a powerful defensive midfielder, an expert in breaking up opposition attacks and a forerunner of the pivotal figures around whom today’s great teams are often built.

Rattín was the son of an immigrant father from the Italian city of Trento who arrived in Argentina after the first world war, settled in Tigre and worked as a ship’s engineer. During a humble childhood, Antonio used his bicycle to make deliveries for a dry cleaner before starting to train as an electrician. He played for youth teams before joining Boca Juniors, one of Buenos Aires’ great clubs. On the morning of his debut at their stadium, La Bombonera, he fell from a ladder while installing wiring at a bank and had to play with his arm heavily bandaged.

Nevertheless, in that first game, the “superclásico” against the mighty River Plate, he fulfilled instructions to mark the great Ángel Labruna, a member of a legendary forward line known as La Máquina (the machine), and Boca won 2-1. He would play in 27 fixtures between the two clubs, of which Boca lost only five.

Rattín won five national championships and the Copa Argentina in 15 years with his only professional club, for whom he played 357 times, retiring at 33 when he felt his powers waning. He collected 34 international caps between 1959 and 1969, winning the Nations Cup – the so-called “Little World Cup” – in Brazil in 1964.

Turning to coaching, he managed Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata and Tigre and, in a brief and unhappy return, Boca Juniors in 1980. Leaving football behind, he entered politics and in 2001 was elected to the national chamber of deputies, representing the rightwing Federalist Union party. He became the chairman of the chamber’s sports committee, but stood down in 2005, serving as a Peronist councillor for the Vicente López district until 2009.

A statue of Rattín was unveiled at La Bombonera in 2005, but in another respect his legacy endures everywhere football is played. After the chaotic scenes of his dismissal in 1966, the referees’ supervisor at the tournament, the Englishman Ken Aston, devised a system of yellow and red cards to avoid ambiguity and linguistic misunderstandings over disciplinary measures during matches. It was introduced in 1970, at the next World Cup.

• Antonio Ubaldo Rattín, footballer and politician, born 16 May 1937; died 11 July 2026