Dynamo Kiev 1973-98

This article was generously provided to ClubFootball by the British Council, which operates in China as the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy.

Valery Lobanovsky led Dynamo Kiev to eight Soviet titles, six Soviet Cups, five Ukrainian titles, two Ukrainian Cups and two European Cup Winners' Cups. In three spells at the club spanning three decades, he became legendary for his temper and for his method. Ben Lyttleton explores his scientific approach to the game.
 
Lobanovsky was a gifted mathematician with a degree from Kiev's Politechnic Institute and for him, football was a science, something that could be analysed until his teams seemed to function almost as a machine, with each cog knowing precisely its role in the overall mechanism.
 
It was his typically communistic prioritising of the rational that led to his greatest innovation - the use of computers to assess footballers.
 
"In my laboratory, we evaluate the functional readiness of players and how their potential can best be realised," explained his great collaborator Anatoliy Zelentsov.
 
"And we influence players in a natural way: we form them following scientific recommendations. With the help of modelling we assemble the bricks and create the skeleton of the team. We recommend how to compose the training programmes, how to evaluate them, how to understand the actions of players on the field - all from a scientific point of view, no emotions."
 
Lobanovsky's Dynamo sides may not quite have been the faceless robots the Western press often described, but there was a degree of selflessness, of pulling together for the common good, that found easy parallels in idealistic socialism - and the focus on science not emotion could come from any Marxist critique of humanistic individualism.
 
"All life is a number," Lobanovsky regularly said. It's a common enough mantra in Soviet academia, but he put it into practice on the football pitch.
 
"When I was a player it was difficult to evaluate players," he said. "The coach could say that a player wasn't in the right place at the right moment, and the player could simply disagree."
 
Lobanovsky was a dictator who brooked no dissent. He could not have operated as he did anywhere else but a totalitarian state and like the state (which measured the performance of everybody from potato-pickers to miners) he believed in analysis.
 
"In my day, there were no videos, no real methods of analysis," he said, "but today the players know that the morning after the game the sheet of paper will be pinned up showing all the figures characterising his play. If a midfielder has fulfilled 60 technical and tactical actions in the course of the match, then he has not pulled his weight. He is obliged to do 100 or more."
 
All life, after all, is a number.

By Ben Lyttleton, September 2003