Football Flash

Reaching the knockout stage, the ongoing EURO 2016 is still the headline-hitting event across Europe, but in Romania, football fans kind of lost interest for EURO 2016, since the national team was edged out of the competition’s group stage. At the moment, attention-grabbing for Romanian football fans is the race for the national team manager position. The shortlist includes four names, Laurenţiu Reghecampf, Ladislau Bölöni, Mircea Rednic and Cosmin Olăroiu.

Newsroom, 23.06.2016, 13:27

Laurenţiu Reghecampf is currently the manager of Steaua Bucharest, but for quite a few years now he has eyed the top position of the national squad’s technical staff. At the helm of Steaua, Reghecampf won two editions of the domestic championship. He left for Saudi Arabia, then he made his comeback to Steaua, a team that this year he managed to take to the runner-up position in Romania’s League One and also to the Champions League’s preliminaries.

Ladislau Bölöni has an outstanding career, both as football player and as football manager. Boloni was part of Steaua’s line-up in 1986, when the Romanian team won the then European Champions’ Cup. As a football manager, he had jobs in France, Portugal and Belgium. At the helm of Sporting Lisbon, he won the Portuguese championship, while with Standard Liege Boloni won the Belgian championship. Boloni spent his last years in Arab countries.

The third hopeful for the position of national squad manager is Mircea Rednic, one of the most distinguished Romanian football managers. Rednic won the domestic championship with Rapid and Dinamo, and in the last season he took Dinamo as far as the championship’s play-off stage. Of the four candidates, Cosmin Olaroiu stands the highest chances to take the job at the moment. In 2006, Olariou took Steaua as far as the UEFA Cup semi-finals. In 2007 he left for the Arab countries. With Al Ain and al Ahli, he won the United Emirates’ championship. In 2015, Olaroiu took Al Ahli to the finals of the Asian Champions League.

To the aforementioned list, Romanian ProSport newspaper also added the name of Bruno Labbadia, current manager of HSV Hamburg in Germany.