President
The amazing life of the great selector!
Vlatko Marković, prominent president of the Croatian Football Association, was born in the Bosnian town of Bugojno. He started his football career in the Iskra club, and then developed it in the Zenica club Čelik. As a young man, he enrolled in the Faculty of Physical Education in Zagreb and signed up for the Dinamo team. From 1958 to 1966, he was a defensive player in it. During his career, he played 252 games and scored four goals. He was often the target of jokes about his game, so the media wrote about him that he was the only player in the history of the club who managed to shoot the ball over the Eastern Maksimir grandstand. Later, he led the team several times, and his most significant achievement as coach of Dinamo was in 1980, when the team won the Yugoslav Cup in a match against Crvena Zvezda.
He also played for Austrian Wiener SK, Belgian Gent and Vienna Austria, and ended his club career in 1968. He played sixteen times for Yugoslavia, and was part of the team that participated in the World Championship in Chile in 1961.
He began his serious coaching career at the Zagreb Football Club, where he led the so-called "golden generation" of the 1970s. The players remembered him as a good coach with whom they often went out and hung out after successful matches. Later, he was the head coach of SFRY for the under-23 team, with which he won the title of European champion.
Little is known about the fact that, apart from football, he was also a successful restaurateur, so he opened the first cafe serving espresso coffee in the city of Zagreb on Volovčica. His most significant success was becoming the president of HNS in 1998. He was president for fourteen years, until 2012, after which he was declared honorary president. He had a hard time saying goodbye to this position, which is why his sentence was famous when he answered the question about his departure to journalists - I will leave when I want to! –
