Lobanovski’s Dynamo Kiev: the European triumph on 2 May 1986

Valerij Lobanovski, known as the “Colonel” for his past in the army, claims that “in football everything is a number and every game action is an equation to be solved”. Born in 1939, graduated in thermoengineering, proud bearing, in his first life he was a decent ex-striker, then he became the youngest coach in the Soviet Union. He is obsessed with physical preparation, when he began – in the mid-1970s – to coach Dynamo Kiev he wanted Professor Valentin Petrovsky with him, the trainer who led Valery Borzov – nicknamed “The two-legged missile” – to become the fastest man on earth. Authoritarian, rigid in his convictions, tetragonal in his pose, feared but respected like a deity: with Dynamo Kiev – in the counting of that spring of 1986 – there are eight Soviet championships, six national cups and the 1975 Cup Winners’ Cup, beating the Hungarians of Ferencvàros in the final. But in the 70s football on television is still rarely seen, and Lobanovski is known to few. And many, among those few, label him as a sort of mad scientist, from Soviet folklore. But now – in this early summer of 1986 – the world has changed, Lobanovski is forty-seven years old. And he is making the revolution.