This is the story of Ernő Egri Erbstein, one of football’s great innovators, a tactical
pioneer and an inspirational champion – a Hungarian who helped to change Italian football
forever.
He is probably the greatest football manager you have never heard of.
Born in 1898, on the fringes of the fading Habsburg Empire, Erbstein reached adulthood
during the First World War and served briefly as an officer in the Hungarian army.
When hostilities came to an end, he made a life for himself as a moderately talented
professional footballer, but it was not until his playing days were over that he began to
make a lasting impression on the game.
Armed with a fascination for philosophy and sports science, he called on those academic
interests, alongside his love of the game, to help shape the direction of football as
it grew into something globally significant.
Working in Italy, during the 1930s and 40s, Erbstein helped to bring the game into the
professional era, developing fitness techniques, opposition scouting reports and modern tactical
ideas, while the teams he instilled with his ground-breaking theories went from strength
to strength.
He enjoyed success regionally with clubs such as Bari, Cagliari and Nocerina, but made his
name in a relative footballing backwater.
As manager of Tuscan club AS Lucchese between 1933 and 1938, he took the minor provincial
club from the third tier to the top flight with two promotions, before registering what
remains their highest-ever finish – seventh in Serie A, above both Roma and Inter.
Erbstein was praised for pioneering modern scouting methods, for his focus on technique,
fitness and dietary requirements in training, and also for his tactics and his motivational
speeches on matchday.
Most of all he was celebrated for his humanity.
His players loved him.
In an era when the term ‘cult of personality’ carried sinister connotations, he wielded
his strong character to positive ends.
In 1938, shortly after accepting a major job with title-chasing Torino, Erbstein was forced
to flee Italy due to the passing of anti-Semitic legislation by Mussolini’s Fascist government.
He returned to his home city, Budapest, but when Hungary was occupied by the Nazis in
1944, he was rounded up into a labour camp.
As the dark days of the Budapest Holocaust threatened to end in tragedy for many of the
Hungarian capital’s interned Jews, Erbstein and future European Cup winning coach Bela
Guttmann met in a labour camp.
In an extraordinary turn of events, the pair planned and led an escape with a group of
others, and survived the remainder of the war in hiding with the help of his family.
Despite those traumatic wartime experiences, Erbstein’s passion for football never left
him and he returned to Italy in 1946 and was immediately welcomed back to Torino by the
ever-supportive club President Ferruccio Novo.
His club was still following the path he had set them on before he was forced to flee the
country eight years earlier, but now they were two-times champions of Italy and he had
a job on his hands to convince them that they could become even better.
They soon realised he was right.
Over the next two-and-a-half years, the Grande Torino turned Serie A into a one-horse race,
winning league titles at a canter and playing a brand of football that contemporaries described
as being akin to the Dutch total football of the 1970s.
Erbstein’s Torino played a an intense attacking game, fusing the Central European short passing
game with Italian guile and the solidity of the English W-M shape.
It became known as Il Sistema.
He favoured a staggered midfield, with wing-halves Giuseppe Grezar and Eusebio Castigliano sitting
deep behind inside-forwards Ezio Loik and Valention Mazzola, the team’s captain and
the golden boy of Italian football in the 1940s.
They formed a kind of four-piston pump at the centre of the team, thrusting up and down
the pitch as a unit, fuelling the team with their energy, while each individual component
was capable of unlocking opponents with intricate passes to the wingers, Romeo Menti and Franco
Ossola, or the flamboyant center-forward Guglielmo Gabetto.
Behind them was a physically dominant three-man defence – Aldo Ballorin, Mario Rigamonti
and Virgilio Maroso - who pressed high up the pitch to ensure that Erbstein’s sistema
was a tactic that, when effective, left opponents overrun, overpowered and, ultimately, overwhelmed.
Goalkeeper Valerio Bacigalupo was as good as any in Italy, an acrobatic presence between
the posts and charismatic figure in the dressing room.
It was the ultimate team, and with Erbstein at the helm, they never stood still.
They won Serie A five times on the spin and, on one occasion, provided 10 of the starting
XI for an Italy international game against Hungary.
Such success has ensured that they will always be referred to as Il Grande Torino – the
Great Torino – and they are still considered by many to have been the greatest Italian
club side of all-time.
Devastatingly, they are remembered as much as anything for the tragedy that ended their
glorious period of success.
On the fourth of May, 1949 the plane carrying the Grande Torino home from a friendly game
against Benfica in Lisbon crashed into the embankment wall of the basilica at the top
of the Superga hill overlooking the city of Turin.
All 31 people on board were killed, including 18 members of the squad and their manager,
Ernő Egri Erbstein.
Erbstein: The triumph and tragedy of football’s forgotten pioneer, by Dominic Bliss, is available
to buy now from theblizzard.co.uk and on Kindle.