Extraordinary Life and Times of Bela Guttmann: Introduction
Every time Benfica reaches the latter stages of a European competition, Bela Guttmann’s name comes up. As the legend goes, after leading the Portuguese club to their second consecutive European Cup (now Champions League) victory in 1962, Guttmann went to the club’s board and asked for a massive pay raise. When the club resisted, he left Benfica and followed his exit with this curse — Benfica would not be European Champions for the next hundred years.
The Guttmann curse, by now, has been etched into footballing folklore. The story might or might not be true (most likely, it is not). But an important detail we tend to overlook here is the two European Cups. The European Cup was, and still is, the most prestigious tournament in club football. In the early editions, which Real Madrid completely dominated, sides from Portugal were struggling to even get past the initial stages. As a footballing nation too, Portugal had never previously qualified for the FIFA World Cup.
How did a Hungarian Jew manage a Portuguese side to the pinnacle of European football in the 60s? A deep dive into this question unearths layers and layers of details. When put together, it leads us not just to one of the greatest footballing lives ever lived but to an extraordinary human story at its very core.
Guttmann grew up in a world where the roots of modern football were being laid by a bustling Hungarian Jewish community. But the early 20th century was also a time when antisemitism was on the rise in Europe. The American dream was soaring in the 1920s before it came to a sudden halt with the Wall Street Crash. The next decade and a half would see the world gripped by war, amidst which Jews across Europe were persecuted at an unthinkable scale. In the years that followed, while the continent tried to find its conscience back, football saw the rise of history’s most dominant side, the Hungarian Golden Team. And Hungary’s untimely downfall created a vacuum on top that was soon occupied by Brazil.
Quite extraordinarily, Guttmann could be found having an involvement in or being influenced by all the above. As his résumé indicates, he was one of the first truly global footballing individuals and the profoundness of his influence over the game is matched by very few. Usually, I write one-off football articles on subjects that could be very diverse. But the only right way to tell this story is by going into the details. So, instead of cramming 10,000 words here, I will be following this brief introduction with a four-part series (think of Star Wars, the original trilogy plus Rogue One) and try to narrate the mythical tale of Bela Guttmann, which indeed was stranger than fiction.
Hope to see you all on this journey.
Sources:
David Bolchover (2017), The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide To Football Glory
Jonathan Wilson (2019), The Names Heard Long Ago
