Béla Guttmann was born into a Jewish family in Budapest on 27 January 1899. Trained as a dancer as well as a footballer, he played for MTK, for Hakoah Vienna, with whom he won the Austrian championship in 1925, and then in the United States with the New York Giants, and won six caps for Hungary, appearing at the 1924 Olympics. He survived the Holocaust in hiding and in a forced-labour camp near Budapest, escaping in December 1944; his father, his sister and much of his extended family were murdered at Auschwitz. He then coached across ten countries, from Milan and Honvéd to São Paulo, and won the Portuguese championship with FC Porto in 1958/59 before crossing to Benfica that summer.

His first spell ran from 1959 to 1962 and remade the club. He is said to have dispensed with around twenty senior players on arrival and to have rebuilt from the youth ranks, and in 1960 he brought Eusébio to Lisbon. Benfica won the championship in 1959/60 and 1960/61 and the Taça de Portugal in 1961/62, but it is the two European Cups that define him: 3-2 against Barcelona in Bern in 1961, which ended Real Madrid's five-year monopoly of the trophy, and 5-3 against Real Madrid themselves in Amsterdam in 1962. In 165 matches over both spells he won 115.

He asked for a pay rise after the 1962 final, was refused, and left. The legend that he swore Benfica would not be European champions again for a hundred years has followed the club through eight lost European finals, though his biographer David Bolchover found no contemporary evidence for it, tracing the story to press coverage in 1988, and Eusébio, who prayed at Guttmann's grave in Vienna before the 1990 final, dismissed it as a lie. Guttmann returned to the Luz for a second spell in 1965 but won nothing, and his last match was a 3-2 defeat at Vitória de Guimarães on 28 March 1966.

He coached Peñarol, Austria Vienna and Servette afterwards and died in Vienna on 28 August 1981. He remains the most influential figure ...[Read More]