Béla Guttmann
"It's no exaggeration to call the Hungarian Jew Bela Guttmann an avant-garde figure at a time when football was far from being a global game", wrote historian W. Ludwigs Tegelbeckers about one of the most successful coaches in the history of football.
Guttmann spent six decades working as a player and coach in 13 countries in Europe and North and South America. In many of these countries he played his part in making continuous, coach-led training an accepted feature of the game.
Even before Guttmann began as a coach at the legendary Jewish team SK Hakoah Vienna in 1933, he was familiar with the various systems through his international engagements as a player. Following the disbandment of Hakoah by the Nazis he managed to flee to Hungary, where he celebrated his first successes as a coach with Ujpest Budapest.
His trail disappeared in 1939. When Guttmann reappeared in 1946/47 as a coach at Ujpest again, he won both the league and the league cup. In 1956 the sought-after coach remained in South America after a tour with the exile team of Honved Budapest. With his attacking 4-2-4 system at FC Sao Paolo, which was built around very fit players, he is regarded as the father of the Brazilian World Cup successes in 1958, 1962 and 1970.
The graduate of the MTK Budapest school of football celebrated his greatest successes in Portugal with Benfica, who won the European Cup in 1960/61 and defended the trophy a year later to break the dominance of Real Madrid.
"Both as a Jew and as a foreigner", says Tegelbeckers, "as he considered himself wherever he went, Guttmann always lived in the here and now. For him fate was not something that was preordained and had to be accepted without a fight, but always an opportunity that could develop into something more or something less."
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