The Triumph and Tragedy of Football's Forgotten Pioneer

The Blizzard

“Erbstein’s was an extraordinary life that was characterised by courage and resourcefulness in the face of adversity. That he and his family survived the holocaust was a matter of astonishing good fortune, but just four years after the end of the war, Erbstein was killed with his team, Il Grande Torino, in the Superga air crash.”

In Episode Twelve of the Blizzard Podcast we bring you an extract from Chapters 10 and 11 of ‘Erbstein: The triumph and tragedy of football’s forgotten pioneer’ by Dominic Bliss, published by Blizzard Books in 2014.

The book is the result of years of painstaking research into one of football’s forgotten greats. Erbstein was part of the great Jewish coaching tradition developed in the coffee houses of Budapest, and after a playing career that included stints in Hungary, Italy and the USA, he moved to Bari to embark on a coaching career that soon became noted for its innovativeness. He would go on to coach the great Torino side of the 1940s who dominated Italian football, until the tragic accident that claimed the lives of the squad, and their manager, at Superga in 1949.

The extract in this episode details his family's experiences during the Hungarian holocaust, and how his quick wits and contacts helped spare the lives of his wife and daughters from a fascist death-march in 1944.

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The book is available from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost £3, while print versions are available from £10 + postage. You can also find it on the Kindle and Google Play stores.