He loved football more than anyone else and even died on the playing field. Mircea Lucescu, 80 years old, passed away on Tuesday evening at the University Hospital in the capital, with all the efforts made in the last few days to keep him alive. Lucescu is the most titled Romanian coach, who has known more glory abroad than in the country. In Romania, he won the championship with Dinamo and Rapid, but abroad he won the Ukrainian championship with both Shakhtior Donetsk (a total of 9 championships) and Dinamo Kiev, and in Turkey he won the championship with both Galatasaray and Beşiktas. Interestingly, after winning the championship with a team, he had the courage to go to his rivals and win with that team as well. In the country, he was the first Romanian coach who managed to lead the Romanian national football team to a European championship, the one in France in 1984, where he qualified after an extraordinary match in Bratislava, against Czechoslovakia. Before becoming a coach, he was a footballer, having 362 matches in League 1, with 98 goals in all competitions. He knew glory as a footballer, even being the captain of the Romanian team at the World Cup in Mexico in 1970, when Romania actually played Brazil, and Mircea Lucescu exchanged shirts with Pele, as the sports newspapers write. He won Shakhtar Donetsk the UEFA Cup in 2009, in a final won against the German team Werder Bremen with 2-1. He also won the European Super Cup. He also coached in Italy at the beginning of the 90s, being the coach of the well-known International Milan team for half a season, which had Ronaldo as a player. He wasn't very lucky in Italy, and statistics say that if Lucescu's matches had ended in the 75th minute, he would have been the champion of Italy, because he scored a lot of goals in the last 10 minutes. After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, when he was a coach at Dinamo Kiev, he returned to the country, so that in the fall of 2024, surprisingly, at the age of 78, he took over the national football team of Romania. The last match supported on the bench was the one on March 26, in Istanbul against Turkey, where Romania lost 1-0, and which, because of the upset, accentuated his health problems. On Sunday, March 29, he suffered a fall on the lawn of Mogoşoaia, the training ground of the national football team, and was immediately transported to the hospital. After a week, he thought he would recover, and just when he was supposed to leave the hospital, he went into a crisis again, from which he never came out. Răzvan, his son, was a footballer – goalkeeper – and his coaching career follows him, succeeding in winning the championship in Greece with PAOK Thessaloniki. In Ukraine and Turkey, Lucescu was a very well-paid coach, with 3-5 million euros per year, according to Fanatik. In Romania, he had several real estate businesses – blocks of flats – in the Western area of the Capital, but not only. He was an extremely tactical and strategic coach and had the ability to discover young players, whom he later made into great footballers. It is interesting that on the stock market, he appears as a shareholder – 16.5% of the shares in Romradiatore Braşov. As foreign languages, he spoke English, Italian and French. What the football teams where he coached write about Mircea Lucescu:
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