The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide To Football Glory

Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2017. Longlisted for the Coutts Football Writers Association Award 2018. Before Pep Guardiola and before José Mourinho, there was Béla Guttmann: the first superstar football coach, and the man who paved the way for the celebrated coaches of the modern age. More extraordinarily still, Guttmann was a Holocaust survivor. Having narrowly dodged death by hiding for months in an attic near Budapest as thousands of fellow Jews in the neighbourhood were dragged off to be murdered, Guttmann later escaped from a slave labour camp. He was one of the lucky ones. His father, sister and wider family perished at the hands of the Nazis. But by 1961, as coach of Benfica, he had lifted one of football's greatest prizes: the European Cup a feat he repeated the following year. Rising from the death pits of Europe to become its champion in just over sixteen years, Guttmann performed the single greatest comeback in football history. This remarkable story spans two visions of twentieth-century Europe: a continent ruptured by barbarism and genocide, yet lit up by exhilarating encounters in magnificent cities, where great players would strive to win football s holy grail. With dark forces rising once again, the story of Béla Guttmann s life asks the question: which vision of Europe will triumph in our times?