Remembering Mircea Lucescu, a coaching legend who won 38 trophies across 1,668 games

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Managing his nation in a World Cup qualification play-off less than two weeks prior to his death, having stayed in the role despite health issues, spoke to his lifelong association with the sport. “If my health allows me, I will continue,” Lucescu said in 2023 when asked if he had considered retiring after four decades in management. “There is no life for me without football.” Lucescu was, unquestionably, a football legend. As a player, he captained Romania at the 1970 World Cup and won seven league titles with Dinamo Bucharest. His legacy, however, is a remarkable 47-year managerial career in which he won 38 trophies. Yet it began by chance rather than design. In 1977, an earthquake struck Bucharest, killing over 1,500 people. It resulted in Lucescu’s wife, Neli, wanting to leave the city. Authorities in Romania, under the strict communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, granted Lucescu’s family a move that month to Hunedoara, 400km north-west of the capital. Within 18 months, Lucescu was player-manager of local side Corvinul, overseeing their rise from the third division to qualification for the UEFA Cup (today’s Europa League). When the Romania national-team job became available in 1981, Lucescu was the standout candidate. When he left that role in 1986, having led Romania to their first European Championship finals two years earlier, nobody could have predicted that Lucescu would return to the role nearly four decades on. But this was a manager who, throughout his career, continued to reinvent himself and bounce back. Unprecedentedly, he won the domestic title with two clubs in three different countries: Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine. In each case — Rapid Bucharest after Dinamo Bucharest, Besiktas after Galatasaray and Dynamo Kyiv after Shakhtar Donetsk — he did so at a direct rival. Managing in an era when Western European clubs dominated continental competition, Lucescu won the UEFA Super Cup in 2000 with Galatasaray and the Europa League at Shakhtar in 2009 — the most recent Eastern European success in the tournament. “I am extremely curious and I always wanted to learn,” Lucescu told football website Panenka in 2017, reflecting on growing up in Romania, when it was a society closed off from the world. “I learned languages, I wanted to evolve, to avoid routine, and become passionate.” Lucescu, more than any other football figure, found success through adaptation in both the Cold War and post-Soviet eras. In an interview with UK newspaper The Guardian published a day before Romania’s World Cup play-off semi-final against Turkey in March, Lucescu disclosed that he had recently been in and out of hospital. He said on the possibility of not managing that game in Istanbul: “I can’t leave like a coward.” Emanuel Rosu, the Romanian football journalist who spoke to Lucescu for the article, recalls the manager’s positive energy ahead of the tie. “He was hungrier than ever,” Rosu tells The Athletic. “The possibility of Romania at the World Cup kept him going during his illness. “Until his last breath, he was talking about the future, what games he was looking forward to. Lucescu could not live without football. It was his obsession and the drug that kept him alive.” The 1989 Romanian Revolution brought an end to Ceausescu’s regime and the following year, Lucescu moved abroad for the first time. He had gained respect in the Italian game when his Romania side managed a win and a draw against Italy, with two clean sheets, during qualification for the 1984 European Championship. He spent almost a decade in Serie A, with roles at Pisa, Brescia and Reggiana culminating in an unsuccessful four-month stint at Inter in 1998-99. “I feel I was overwhelmed by the popularity of some of the players I had, by their personalities,” Lucescu recalled in a previous interview with Rosu. He highlighted what he believed to be disciplinary issues within the Inter squad and particularly with star striker Ronaldo. “He used to stay up late. I should not have accepted it but nobody at the club did anything. He had a special relationship with the club president (Massimo Moratti).” His time in Italy did not yield major trophies but Lucescu’s work there with physical trainer Adriano Bacconi helped revolutionise football data. Lucescu had always been obsessed with physical-performance numbers but was unable to harness his knowledge without technology. Alongside Bacconi, he invested in the software FARM (Football Athletic Results Manager), credited as being football’s first data monitoring programme, in 1994. Two years later, Lucescu sold his stake in the project, which was later bought by Panini. On March 26, Romania lost their World Cup play-off against Turkey, 1-0, at the Besiktas Stadium in Istanbul. Twenty-four years earlier, Lucescu won the Turkish Super Lig with another of that city’s clubs, Galatasaray, but was sacked at the end of the season. That summer of 2002, he joined neighbours Besiktas. Lucescu promptly took them to the title — their first in eight seasons — in the club’s centennial year. The championship was clinched on the penultimate matchday, with a last-minute winner against… Galatasaray. “When I left the club (Besiktas), I had two more years left of my contract but I left the money to the club with the firm commitment that they would use it to rebuild the stadium,” Lucescu, whose final match in management fittingly came in that very arena, told Rosu last month. The reverence with which he is held in Turkey — where he also coached the national team between 2017 and 2019 — matched that of his native Romania. After that March play-off, several of the Turkish players embraced Lucescu. Despite his success and admiration in Romania and Turkey, it was Ukraine where Lucescu had his greatest impact. After leaving Besiktas in 2004, he was appointed at Shakhtar Donetsk. At that time, Shakhtar had won just one of the first 13 titles in Ukraine, which became independent in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The dominant force were Dynamo Kyiv, who had been the old Soviet Union’s most successful club with 13 league championships and had subsequently won 11 of the preceding 12 Ukrainian titles. Lucescu’s arrival brought a power shift; he won eight league titles, five Ukrainian Cups and the Europa League in his first decade in Donetsk. Shakhtar’s success was bankrolled by Rinat Akhmetov, the richest businessman in the country, with a multi-national squad focused on a core of Ukrainian and Brazilian players. Dynamo Kyiv’s success had been built on speed, physical fitness and tactical discipline, but Lucescu’s approach embraced a South American-orientated approach of short passing networks and flair. Lucescu did not, however, tolerate players who, he believed, placed individualism over the collective. In 2007, Shakhtar broke the Ukrainian transfer record when signing Mexico international Nery Castillo from Olympiacos of Greece for a reported €20million (£17.4m/$23.4m at the current rates). In Castillo’s 12th appearance for Shakhtar, they were awarded a penalty in a league game against FC Naftovyk-Ukrnafta Okhtyrka. Castillo refused to give the ball to the team’s designated penalty taker, Cristiano Lucarelli, and took it himself. The shot was saved. Lucescu said it was “inexcusable”. Castillo never played for Shakhtar again. Everything changed for Shakhtar in 2014. That year, Ukraine elected a Western-leaning government, preceding Russia’s seizure of the Crimean Peninsula and arming of insurgent groups to occupy parts of the industrialised east of the country. Moscow-backed separatists took control of the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, known collectively as Donbas, which self-declared as independent states but remained unrecognised internationally. Shakhtar were forced to leave war-torn Donetsk and their 52,000-capacity, state-of-the-art Donbas Arena, opened only five years previously. The club had planned to install a bench with a statue of Lucescu outside the stadium but the sculpture was only completed in 2015 and never installed. The monument was eventually gifted to the Romanian football authorities. Playing while exiled from their home city, Shakhtar lost out on the 2015 and 2016 titles to Dynamo Kyiv. Lucescu resigned in May 2016 after 12 years, 573 matches and 22 trophies. Within weeks, he had joined Zenit Saint Petersburg: the Russian club sponsored by that nation’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom. “Lucescu joining Zenit directly after leaving a homeless and exiled Shakhtar was seen as traitorous,” explains Andrew Todos, who runs the Ukrainian football website Zorya Londonsk. “Some of his comments whilst at Zenit weren’t well received either.” In December 2016, Lucescu said: “Russia and Ukraine are one and the same country for me. They were separated by chance, history. But for my peers, it is the entire former Soviet Union.” Lucescu was speaking to Russian media in the context of an adaptation process from Donetsk to Saint Petersburg, rather than expressing a political view. The timing of the comments, however, was viewed by many in Ukraine as insensitive. He had received Ukraine’s first class Order of Merit and was an honorary citizen of Donetsk due to his coaching success with Shakhtar. In May last year, Lucescu struck a different tone while speaking of Ukraine’s situation on Golazo’s Top Level podcast. That came three years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour. Lucescu said he would only consider returning to Russia when there was no more war, and said of the attacks on Ukraine: “You ask yourself, ‘Why all this? For what?’. The Ukrainian people are certainly suffering, but they are worthy of fighting until the end.” Lucescu left Zenit after one season and spent an unsuccessful 18 months in charge of Turkey’s national team. Aged 73, it appeared his options were running out. In Ukraine, Shakhtar had re-established domestic supremacy under Paulo Fonseca, while Dynamo Kyiv were becoming desperate. In 2019, Lucescu was critical of France Football magazine’s rankings of the game’s greatest coaches of all time. He had been 41st on the list, with legendary Dynamo Kyiv manager Valeriy Lobanovskyi, who had died in 2002, placed sixth. Lucescu said Lobanovskyi had “absolutely no results” outside Ukraine, prompting outrage from Dynamo Kyiv fans. “He loved controversy and he never saw that as a bad thing, but as a creator of energy,” Rosu explains of Lucescu. “He loved a good argument with his rivals. He loved saying his truth, no matter how bad some would take it. He was never shy to go public with tough statements.” Nobody, however, was prepared for what would happen a year later: Lucescu laid a wreath outside Lobanovskyi’s monument in Ukraine’s capital… after being appointed Dynamo Kyiv head coach. The announcement of his hiring prompted a series of protests from the club’s ultras, and Lucescu publicly resigned after just four days, saying he did not want to create “a hostile environment”, before being persuaded to reverse his decision and leading the club to a domestic treble. “Protests from Dynamo’s ultras never really went away,” Ukrainian football journalist Todos explains. “Most fans came around after the successes in his first season, but the ultras did not really change.” The following year, one impacted by Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Shakhtar won the league and Dynamo Kyiv finished trophy-less. In 2022-23, the latter slipped to fourth. “Once results turned, there were banners and chants demanding that Lucescu was sacked,” says Todos. Lucescu resigned in November 2023, a loss to Shakhtar proving to be his final match in club management. Being in charge of Romania’s World Cup play-off with Turkey last month saw Lucescu enter an exclusive club of four — alongside Roger Lemerre, Otto Pfister and Roque Maspoli — to have managed professionally when aged 80 or over. Another illustration of his longevity is that only six men have managed more Champions League matches than his 115. Razvan Lucescu, his son, is currently head coach of Greek club PAOK, and his own 22-year managerial career spans 846 games. “Mircea adapted styles based on the needs and possibilities of his teams,” Rosu explains. “His statement club was Shakhtar, where he played fluid, attacking football, centred around Brazilian talent. But at Galatasaray, he built a strong side with no money, after the stars had left. None of his teams looked like the others. He was always capable of reinventing himself and building teams from scratch.” “I need what football has to offer, the adrenaline, the tension. Football keeps me alive,” Lucescu told Rosu in 2017. “I guess that dying on a pitch is the greatest thing that can happen to a manager.” On March 29, three days after Romania’s play-off defeat in Turkey, Lucescu was taken ill at the national side’s training base in Bucharest. He had been preparing for a friendly the following week away to Slovakia but his health continued to fail, and he resigned as coach on April 2. Five days later, Lucescu passed away. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Colin Millar is a Senior Editor for The Athletic. Prior to joining The Athletic, Colin was European Football writer at Mirror Football. From Belfast, he is the author of The Frying Pan of Spain: Sevilla vs Real Betis, Spain’s Hottest Football Rivalry, and he can be found on Twitter/X: @Millar_Colin Follow Colin on Twitter @Millar_Colin