On May 2, 1986, winning the Cup Winners’ Cup, in the final over favorites Atletico Madrid, was the apotheosis of a scientific project that silenced the skeptics.
Valerig Lobanovskyi, known as “The Colonel” for his past in the army, claims that “everything in football is a number and every movement in a match is an equation that must be solved.” Born in 1939, graduated in thermal engineering, with pride, in his first life he was a decent former striker, and then became the youngest coach in the USSR. Obsessed with physical preparation, when – in the mid-1970s – he began coaching Dynamo Kyiv, he wanted Professor Valentin Petrovsky with him, the coach who led Valery Borzov – nicknamed “The Two-Legged Rocket” – to become the fastest man on Earth. Authoritarian, strict in his convictions, quadrangular in posture, intimidating but respectful like a god: with Dynamo Kyiv – according to the count of spring 1986 – there are eight Soviet championships, six national cups and the 1975 Cup Winners’ Cup, with the Hungarians beating Ferencváros in the final. But in the 70s, football was rarely seen on TV, and Lobanovskyi was known to very few people. And many, among those few, called him some kind of mad scientist, from Soviet folklore. But now – at the beginning of the summer of 1986 – the world has changed, Lobanovsky is forty-seven years old. And they are making a revolution.
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