football’s forgotten pioneer

Ernő Egri Erbstein was one of football’s great innovators, a tactical pioneer and an inspirational champion. A Hungarian Holocaust survivor, he helped to change Italian football forever as the architect of the legendary ‘Grande Torino’ side that won Serie A five times in a row in the immediate post-war era.

Born in 1898, on the fringes of the fading Habsburg Empire, Erbstein reached adulthood during the First World War and served as an officer in the Hungarian army. When hostilities ended, he made a life for himself as a professional footballer, predominantly with Budapesti Atlétikai Klub, but it was not until his playing days were over that he began to make a lasting impression on the game.

Possessed of 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 the sport grew into something globally significant.

Erbstein helped to bring the game into the professional era, developing fitness techniques, opposition scouting reports and modern tactical ideas. He embarked on a managerial career in Italy, where he enjoyed successful spells with clubs such as Bari, Cagliari and Nocerina, before making his name in a relative footballing backwater.

As manager of Tuscan side AS Lucchese between 1933 and 1938, he took the 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.

Erbstein was praised for pioneering modern scouting methods, for his focus on technique, fitness and dietary requirements, as well as his tactics and motivational speeches on matchdays. Most of all he was celebrated for his humanity. His players loved him.

In 1938, shortly after he accepted a job with Torino, Erbstein and his family were forced to flee Italy due to the passing of antisemitic legislation by Mussolini’s Fascist government. They returned to Budapest, but when Hungary was occupied by the Nazis in 1944, Erbstein was forced to report to a forced labour camp.

As the dark days of the 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, and he 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. 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. 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 a prototype form of the Dutch total football that emerged in the 1970s.

Erbstein’s Torino played a an intense attacking game. 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 the team 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. 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 4 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 players and their manager, Ernő Egri Erbstein.

In 2014, tournament co-founder Dominic Bliss published Erbstein: The triumph and tragedy of football’s forgotten pioneer, which is available from Blizzard Books.

The book has since been translated into Hungarian and Italian.