Few footballing figures have attracted such a solemnly tended mythology as Valeriy Lobanovskiy, the coach of Dynamo Kyiv and Ukraine in the late Soviet years. Wreathed in an ancient silence beneath his worker’s cap, Lobanovskiy was a monolithic presence during the TV coverage of the 1988 European Championship, appearing suddenly in Stalinist close-up, vast concrete jowls framing the screen, sphinx-like, eternal, as old as the steppes. He was, the internet reveals, only 49 at the time. But presumably being potent, eternal, all-seeing and so on takes it out of you.
Lobanovskiy is usually cast as the father of things. Father of analytics. Father of a data-driven total football. At times he has been portrayed as a piece of Soviet industrial-sporting machinery made flesh, players reduced to units of human value, blobs beeping away on the screen of his vast beige computer monitor.
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