Mircea Lucescu, aka Il Luce, accepted the offer of the Romanian Football Federation and will be the new coach of the national team, after Edi Iordănescu retired, and Gică Hagi, the first option on the FRF list, refused the offer last week.
The decision was taken on Monday, following a discussion that Mircea Lucescu had at the FRF headquarters, after a 4-hour talk with FRF President Razvan Burleanu, according GOLAZO.ro.
Lucescu (79 years old) returns to the bench of the national team after a break of 38 years. He also managed the first national team between 1981 and 1986.
He achieved a great feat: qualifying for the final tournament of the 1984 European Championship, after winning the toughest preliminary group in Romania’s history: alongside Italy, Czechoslovakia, Sweden and Cyprus. At that time, only 7 national teams qualified for the Euro, to which the host country was added.
Lucescu coached only one national team, apart from Romania, it’s Turkey, between August 2017 and February 2019, but the mandate was a failure.
The last team that Il Luce coached was Dinamo Kyiv, from which he resigned in November 2023, due to some health problems that he accused.