The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide to Football Glory: the Story of Bela Guttmann

Before Pep Guardiola and before José Mourinho, there was Béla Guttmann: the first superstar football coach. Remarkably, Guttmann was also a Holocaust survivor. Having narrowly dodged death by hiding for months in an attic near Budapest as thousands of fellow Jews in the neighbourhood were dragged off to be murdered, Guttmann later escaped from a slave labour camp. His father, sister and wider family were murdered by the Nazis. But by 1961, as coach of Benfica, he had lifted one of football’s greatest prizes: the European Cup – a feat he repeated the following year. Rising from the death pits of Europe to become its champion in just over sixteen years, Guttmann performed the single greatest comeback in football history.