FEATURE: The Legendary Velibor "Bora" Milutinović

Paul Schmidt-Troschke takes a look at the incredible, record-breaking figure of Velibor "Bora" Milutinović, who managed at 5 World Cups, with different teams. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Hello and welcome to World Football, etc., with me, Paul Schmidt Troschke. If the whole world had to pick one person to lead a global football team, Velibor Bora Milutinovich would definitely be the best choice for the job. He was born in the old country of Yugoslavia in the year 1944 and lost his parents during the fighting of the Second World War, and became one of the most famous and well-traveled coaches in the entire history of football eventually. Nowadays he is also known as the miracle worker because he did something that no one else has ever done. He coached five completely different national teams in five consecutive World Cup tournaments from 1986 all the way to 2002. Even though just being at these massive sporting events was a huge deal, people really remember him because he took small teams that nobody believed in and somehow helped them win games that everyone thought they were going to lose. But his career started in the country where he was born, as a midfield winger at FK Partizan Belgrade. After then playing for Monaco, OGC Nizza in France, FC Rouen in France, FC Wintertour in Switzerland, and finally the UNAM Pumas in Mexico, he made a transition which is as rare as his career. Immediately after playing for the Pumas, he became their coach in 1978, and it took him just three years to coach the team to winning the season and become Mexican champions in 1981. His unique journey through the World Cup started as well in Mexico in 1986, where he lived and worked for many years already. He took over the national team during a particularly difficult time for the country, just one year after a terrible earthquake ruined many cities, and he built a team of players who cared deeply about each other, their country, and above all, worked as hard as they could. Due to his exquisite qualities in tactics and leadership, Mexico made it all the way to the quarterfinals, which to this day was the best they had ever done in a World Cup, before they finally lost a very close game to West Germany after a penalty shootout. However, people really started to believe he was a worker of miracles four years later, when the tournament went to Italy in 1990, many argue to be the best World Cup ever. He was hired to be the head coach of Costa Rica just 90 days before kickoff, but he quickly removed some of the older players and made sure that everyone on the team was actually forming a unit. Against all the odds, and what everyone guessed would happen, the new team from Central America shocked the whole world by beating Scotland and Sweden, which let them move on to the next round. By the time the year 1994 came around, the United States was getting ready to host the World Cup, while not even having a functional National League, and most of their players were just college students or men who played part-time. The people in charge of United States football asked the miracle worker for help, and Bora quickly took on the huge job by making the team play more than 90 practice games to get better, while also making strict rules like telling the famous player and nowadays terrible TV commentator and personal kryptonite of Slatan Ibrahimovic, Alexis Lalas, that he needed to cut his hair if he wanted to stay on the team. All of this paid off when the United States made it past the first round, and the best part was the surprise win against a strong Colombian national team. Four years after that, at the 1998 tournament in France, Milutinovich became the coach of Nigeria that had a lot of natural skill, but lacked in almost every other category. Once again, he managed to create and coach a team which went on to surprise everyone once again when they beat Spain with a score of 3-2 and finished at the top of their group, making Bora the first and only coach to ever take four different countries to the second round of the World Cup. His final big World Cup moment then happened in 2002, when he took on the very difficult job of coaching China because the country had been trying to reach the World Cup for many years without any luck. He helped them finally reach the tournament, and even though they had a hard time and did not score any goals against the much stronger teams they played, the people of China still loved him and even built a statue to honor him in one of their provinces. But what traits made him what he became and enabled him to pull off miracles almost nobody believed were possible. The main reason why Bora Milotinovich was so special is not because he used very complicated tactics or had secret ways to play the game, but because he completely understood how people think and how to help them feel comfortable in new places. He knew that coaching small teams meant he had to do much more than just the tactics, selecting the right players and make them play as a team, but to make them completely believe in themselves in the bleakest situations against all odds. He taught players how to deal with pressure extremely well, and was a master at fitting into completely new and to him unknown cultures and environments in basically no time. In the end, Bora Milutinovich was much more than just a coach who moved from job to job to make money or a name for himself, but he was the friendly face who showed that the World Cup is for everyone, in fact. He proved time and time again that if you have a lot of passion, a strong mind, and a real understanding of how people feel, you can help small teams play just almost as well as the biggest and most famous teams in the sport. His amazing story of traveling the world and making miracles happen is something that we will probably never see again. And with that, thank you so much for listening. And don't forget to rate the podcast or leave a comment, and definitely check out our Friends of World Sports etc. Patreon page. There you will find a growing library filled with our premium content, and you can find the link to that page in the show notes and the podcast description.