Since the establishment of the European Champions Cup (ECC), Real Madrid has been the dominant club. Madrid won five consecutive titles, in the finals they were better than the teams from Italy, France and Germany, and profiled themselves as a European football power. The end of the winning streak came in the 1960/1961 season, when they were eliminated by Barcelona, who were defeated by Benfica in the final.
The following year, Benfica defended the title. This time the opponent in the final was Real Madrid, for whom even the hat-trick of Ferenc Puskas in the first half was not enough for the cup. The team from Lisbon won 5:3. It was a meeting of the teams that until then were the only ones to win KES. The prevailing opinion was that the team that wins that final is the best in the world.
Bela Gutman led Benfica to European titles. A Hungarian of Jewish origin, the football globetrotter arrived in Lisbon in 1959 from Porto, where he had won the domestic championship the year before. In the new environment, he continued with specific methods - he told the older, more experienced players to look for a new club, and he built the team around young footballers - Eusebi, Aguas, Simoes and Kolunja.
With the Hungarian expert on the bench, the most brilliant period in the history of Benfica followed - two domestic league titles and two European trophies were won, and then Gutman cursed the club. Everything happened after the Amsterdam final with Real, when the "eagles" became champions of the Old Continent for the second time, and the coach asked for a raise. At the club, they didn't even want to hear it, and the Hungarian then said a sentence that still breaks the ears of Benfica fans.
"From now on, and in the next 100 years, you won't win a single European title," snapped Gutman angrily and left the club. Admittedly, he returned for a short time - it was in the 1965/1966 season, but after the elimination from KEŠ, he left forever, and his curse continued to hover over "La Luz".
Back then, nobody took Gutman's words seriously. But the years passed, and Benfica never won the European title again. It lost the KEŠ final five times, the Uefa Cup final once, and was defeated twice in the Europa League final.
INSTEAD OF THE DANCE FLOOR, HE DANCED ON THE GRASS PODIUM
Gutman's life story begins in Budapest, where he was born in 1899. His parents, members of a dance troupe, expected that little Bela would follow in their footsteps and make a living on the dance floor. But his legs were not for the waltz - instead of a dancer, the Hungarian became a football player.
He started his career in the Hungarian MTK, where he won two championship titles in 1920 and 1921. Those were difficult days for the Jews in Hungary - there was a regime in power that implemented the policy of anti-Semitism, so Gutman went to Austria, to the Jewish club Hakoah.
Both in his playing and later in his coaching career, Gutman did not stay long in one team. It was the same in Vienna. The team went on tour to America in the twenties, and the young Hungarian, fascinated by the new world, decided to stay in New York. Along with playing football, he traded on the stock market, and the crash that followed in 1929 on Wall Street left him penniless, and he was forced to return to Europe, where he began his coaching career.
The first club on the new assignment was Hakoh. After that, he worked in the Netherlands and Hungary, and he continued his coaching work even after the ordeal he endured during the Second World War. In Siokanul, Romania, he received vegetables instead of a salary, since there was a great famine in the country in those years. He didn't stay long there either. The split came when the president of the club started interfering in the coaching business.
In Kišpest - today's Honved - he clashed with Puskas, whose father he succeeded on the bench. At halftime of the game against Djerba, he was disgusted by the game of a football player, whom he told to stay in the dressing room. He ordered the team to go out on the field and play with ten players. The decision did not please Puskas, who told his teammate to ignore Gutman's order. The expert left the club, got on the tram and never came back...
"I'M NOT A CRIMINAL OR A HOMOSEXUAL, AND I WAS FIRED"
After Hungary, his adventurous spirit took him to Argentina, Cyprus and Italy. He arrived in Milan in 1953.
And the stay at "San Siro" was quite turbulent. The first season passed quite calmly, and the next season he was fired after 19 rounds, when the team was in first place. At the farewell conference, he was brief:
“I got fired. We're the first, I'm neither a criminal nor a homosexual, and I got fired. Goodbye".
After parting ways with the Rossoneri, he worked for several years in Europe, and then went to Brazil, to Sao Paulo. There he won the national championship, introduced Brazilians to his football system and was indirectly responsible for the success of "carioca". His philosophy was based on the ultra-offensive 4-2-4 formation, which was advocated by the coaches of the old Danube school. It was not difficult for Brazil to adapt to that model at the World Cup in Sweden in 1958 - with Didi, Zagal, Vava, Garrincha and Pele in the team, the "cariocas" conquered the planet then.
After the episode in the land of coffee and samba, he returned to Europe, where he achieved the aforementioned successes with Porto and Benfica. After the conflict with the management of the Eagles, he trained with the Uruguayan Peñarol. But he also shot poison darts in Uruguay. Full of bitterness, he left South America, saying that Uruguayans think they are football experts, and that the famous "Centenario" can only be used for planting potatoes.
Until the end of his career, he was still in Greece (winning the Cup with Panathinaikos), Switzerland and again in Austria and Portugal. He moved from bench to bench 23 times, and never stayed longer than two years. Enough for everyone to remember him.
He died in Vienna in 1981, where he was buried. Before the KEŠ final between Benfica and Milan at the "Prater", his grave was visited by Eusebio. Black Panther asked for forgiveness. It wasn't worth it. Benfica also lost that final. 58 years have passed since the last European title of the Lisbon club. Will the Eagles really wait until 1962?
Survived the Holocaust by hiding in the attic
The shadow that hung over Europe due to the Second World War did not escape the Hungarian expert either.
However, little is known about his life during the war. The author of the book about Gutman, "The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide To Football Glory", David Bolchover once said that many rumors followed the story of Gutman's life during the war, and that the information that he fled to Switzerland was not true.
"He survived the Holocaust by hiding in the attic of his girlfriend's brother in Budapest," Bolčover once said.
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