The Greatest Tactician in History - Part 2

Márton Bukovi was a difficult, brilliant man, the sharpest brain in the most influential footballing culture of all. But he was also somebody of great courage

This the second part of a profile of the great Hungarian coach Márton Bukovi, perhaps the finest tactical brain football has ever known. The first part was published last Thursday.

“What I’m about to say may be unpleasant, but I simply want to,” Bukovi said in 1943, which is how he seems to have approached most conversations in his life. “Players rarely think about football. I did think. I made up systems, asked coaches, wanted to know. I thought about the ways of training, often unsatisfied with the practices we had. I felt that we needed to work with more of a plan, that what we were doing was an inexcusable improvisation, that coaches didn’t recognise anything new and would simply drill in the same thing they did when they were players. What I’m really trying to say is that I always had a magnet drawing me to the coach’s calling. A man carries that germ and then gets infected, even though he didn’t think about it, or didn’t have that firm intention, and he finds peace in the calling that suits him best. And I wanted to be a coach.”

And yet had it not been for the incident in the square with René and the fat man, Bukovi may never have had his chance. After a few months working with Sète’s youth team, Bukovi returned on holiday to Budapest where he was offered a job at MTK. He didn’t want to coach anybody he had played with, though, and so ended up accepting an offer from Građanski Zagreb, who had written to Hungary asking for help.

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On It Was What It Was, the football history podcast, we look back at the decline and fall of Diego Maradona. Listen here.

On Libero, we plunge into the big underlying themes that shape football, including Argentinian fan culture. Listen here.

Issue 57 of The Blizzard is out now, featuring Ivica Osim and the death of Yugoslavia, football in Cornwall, how punk was shaped by terrace chants, the development of the Bhutanese league and the Liverpool striker who lost a leg and became a stunt diver. Buy here.

And, ever wanted the history of football tactics explained in one gorgeous poster? Or the Premier League as Fibonacci sequence? Then you’re in luck. Buy here.

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