Colonel Lobanovski: football is born in the laboratory

He created ‘universal’ players, brought Dynamo Kiev and the Soviet Union to the top: the story of the engineer who led soldiers, not players

Colonel Valeri Lobanovski, born in 1939, with a degree in mechanical engineering, was not just a simple football coach, one of those who compile the formation, give a brief speech to the team before matches and then sit on the bench and give some orders to the players waving now the right hand now the left. No, he interpreted the job like a scientist: he shut himself up in his laboratory and, experiment after experiment, tried to make sense of his theories.

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