Romania’s national soccer coach Mircea Lucescu resigned shortly after his team was eliminated and a subsequent hospital stay due to heart problems. The Romanian association FRF announced this on Thursday.
Lucescu, the oldest national coach in football history at over 80 years old, had looked after the Romanian team for the second time since August 2024.
Romania missed its first World Cup participation since 1998 the previous week due to a 0-1 defeat in the playoffs in Türkiye. Three days later, the coach, who had already sat on the Romanian bench from 1981 to 1986, had to go to hospital temporarily because of heart problems that had occurred in 2025.
A successor to Lucescu, who broke the national coaches’ guild age record in Turkey at 80 years and 240 days, has not yet been determined. However, Romanian icon Gheorghe Hagi is considered a promising candidate. The “Carpathian Maradona”, as the former FC Barcelona star is also known, had already temporarily been responsible for the selection of his home country in 2001.
