Whatever happened to Hagi?
Big Jack’s player of Italia 90 still revered in Romania
BRAN CASTLE lies a sleep-inducing four-hour car journey north of the Romanian capital, Bucharest, in the heart of Transylvania.
But when your chauffeur, and guide, is a pistachio-guzzling football nut whose eyes ignite at the mention of ‘Italia 90’, those four hours whizz by like, well, 90 minutes.
‘Romania has many heroes,’ he says. ‘Ireland’s Bram Stoker is one of them for what he gifted to us in tourism, and another is Gheorghe Hagi. We Romanians not only love him because he is our greatest footballer, but the money he earned from his career, he came home and put it back into our country. That made us love him even more.’
Later, while nursing a cold Ciuc (one of the country’s flagship beers) in a Bucharest sports bar, three familiar faces repeatedly appear on the screens.
One is Dan Petrescu of Chelsea fame, current manager of CFR Cluj, and who named one of his daughters after the Stamford Bridge outfit; another is ‘ Gicu’ Popescu who represented Tottenham Hotspur in the mid-1990s, and is the current President of FC Viitorul.
The third is Hagi, the man with the wand of a left foot, that Jack Charlton named his player of the tournament at Italia 90.
Having scaled the heights of the Romanian domestic league at an early age, young Hagi went on to play for Real Madrid and Barcelona, either side of a stint with Italian side, Brescia, before hanging up his boots at Turkish outfit, Galatasaray.
Such was his majesty on grass, the globally admired attacking midfielder was labelled ‘the Maradona of the Carpathians’. In 1999, he was ranked number 25 in World Soccer magazine’s top one hundred players of the 21st century.
In 2001, Hagi, the manager, took up the reins as boss of the Romanian national team. He also managed a number of clubs, including two spells at Galatasaray, and a spell at fellow former club Steaua Bucharest.
His son, Ianis, was born during his father’s time as a player in Turkey. Last January, Ianis signed for Steven Gerrard’s Glasgow Rangers on a six-month loan deal from Genk, lighting up the Europa League with a brace against Portuguese side, SC Braga.
In recent newspaper reports, his agent claims that Jose Mourinho has asked about his availability this summer; he says Manchester City are interested too.
And where did the young Hagi perfect his footballing feet? At his dad’s academy, of course.
In 2009, Gheorghe Hagi put a dream into practice, backed by approximately ten million euro from his own pocket, when he founded a new football team, FC Viitorul Constan a, on Romania’s east coast.
He took financial risks, on the back of his frustration of watching a once dazzling national side crumble from the heights of a World Cup quarter-final in 1994 – their response to that heartbreaking loss to the Republic of Ireland four years earlier – into an international footballing wilderness.
‘I had a great career as a player and I’m very happy with what I achieved, but this is the second part. My mission now is to help others achieve their dreams, in football and in life,’ Hagi says of his academy project.
Initially, his senior first team was intended as a finishing school for his apprentices before selling them on at a substantial profit, but in 2017, less than ten years after its foundation, Viitorul stunned Romanian football by winning the Liga 1, their equivalent of the Premier League.
Winning the title qualified them for the following season’s Champions League.
However, with an average squad age of just under 23 years, they were eliminated in the third qualifying round.
Still, when you count the pennies they have spent compared to their European rivals, it’s the plot of fairytales.
Hagi did his homework meticulously. Remembering what he had learned under Johan Cruyff at Barcelona, that ‘simple is best’, the renowned workaholic visited five leading Dutch academies.
What he learned there, he added to his own blueprint, and soon his plan was ready to put into action.
Hagi is a national hero because he put his money where his mouth was, pumping his millions back into Romania’s economy.
‘Viitorul’ is the Romanian word for ‘future’; he can name every player on the club’s books, at any age.
His vision is that an academy, at any club, in any country, has to produce one first-team player per year. In 2018, homegrown rookies made up over half of his first team. In the past ten years, FC Viitorul has made approximately €35m from selling players.
He also revealed that he came close to signing for Tottenham and Newcastle in the mid-nineties – what a sight that would have been for sore Premier League eyes.
Now, he is content to watch how his son gets on in British football, and ponder over what might have been instead.
Jack Charlton was widely acknowledged as an exponent of the long-ball game, therefore Hagi wouldn’t have been the name that immediately comes to mind when guessing his player of Italia 90.
But that was the Geordie’s choice, and keeping him quiet for 120 minutes in the heat of the Genoese sunshine on that June day almost 30 years ago was no easy task.
In fact, Hagi, with his chest puffed, converted Romania’s first penalty in the famous shoot-out, ultimately settled by Arsenal’s David O’Leary.
Other Romanian names from that game, that still roll off the tongues of Irish football fans, would be goalkeeper, and captain, Silviu Lung, who went on to produce two professional goalkeeping sons, and the man who saw his penalty saved, Daniel Timofte.
Timofte later told Packie Bonner that by shooting the ball towards his palms he ‘made him a superstar’, and opened a bar in his hometown of Petrosani called, quite fittingly, ‘Penalty’.
It was his way of showing those
Romanians who never let him forget his miss that he finally ‘was over it’.
Hagi’s day in the sun would come again, as he scored three times at USA 94, before Romania lost, once again, in a shoot-out to Sweden in the quarter-finals.
He captained them at his last World Cup in France, in 1998. In all, he represented Romania 124 times, scoring 35 goals.
Clontarf’s Bram Stoker may never have made it as far as Transylvania,
instead hearing enough about Vlad the Impaler’s bloody antics to conjure up his ‘Dracula’ creation from a professor in neighbouring Budapest, but Gheorghe Hagi, the wide-eyed footballing boy from Sacele, travelled the world, and conquered its many playing fields.
He says football gave him everything he wished for in life. Now he works around the clock to uncover a child prodigy that he hopes will one day fill his shoes.