Paris (AFP) - Croatia’s famed football coach Miroslav Blazevic -- who led the country to a third-place finish at the 1998 World Cup -- died on Wednesday, the national football federation said. He was 87.
“The whole football family has lost ‘the coach of all coaches’ today,” the federation wrote on social media.
Blazevic died in the capital Zagreb after a long fight with cancer, spurring a flood of condolences.
Croatia’s national team coach Zlatko Dalic paid his respects, saying he mourned his “football father... a true inspiration for everything I achieved in my coaching career”.
“Ciro was unique -- an unsurpassed motivator and speaker... a man with great style and an even bigger soul and that’s why we all loved and respected him,” Dalic said in a statement, referring to Blazevic by his popular nickname.
Born on February 10, 1935, Blazevic started his playing career in his hometown of Travnik in neighbouring Bosnia.
In the early 1960s, he began coaching in Switzerland and moved in 1979 to Croatia, which was then part of the former Yugoslavia.
In Croatia, he coached Rijeka and later Dinamo Zagreb, where he led the club to their first Yugoslav championship in 24 years.
After winning the title, Blazevic’s popularity soared at home where he was known for wearing fashionable white scarves in public.
“Dinamo’s 1982 win was the crown of my coaching career,” Blazevic told local media in 2021.