Arpad Weisz revisited by David Roberts

I originally published this four years ago, on another site. It seemed a fitting day to republish it. It sits as a sad companion piece to the other recent articles on Hungarian football managers in Italy and the Mitropa Cup. Both Arpad Weisz and  Istvan Toth Potya, managed Inter , the first rather more successfully than the latter. Weisz , Toth-Potya and Gerta Kértesz all managed cubs in Italy during the 1930s, all of them came to a tragic end in 1945. Weisz had also played with Bela Guttmann for Törekvés in Budapest. Reading the article again, I found it also contained some more useful background on Milan in the 1930s and the racial laws which fitted in with the article on Stolpersteine. So it is worth another read. 

Arpad Weisz –Holocaust Memorial Day 27 January 2019

 Imagine Wenger, or Guardiola or Mourinho forbidden to work in England, with all their civil rights suspended, their kids kicked out of schools and in the end being put on the first plane out of the country. Then imagine them being torn away from their families worked to death in a quarry or a mine or a factory, only they are all fit men and it takes a long time to work them to death. Imagine Arpad Weisz. 

I had this article knocking around for a while. It forms part of a longer work on Hungarian footballers in Italy- that may or may not see the light of day. Several things inspired me to do some editing and just publish it now. Firstly it is International Holocaust Memorial day on 27 January 2019 and the 75th anniversary of Arpad Weisz’s death on 31st January. Secondly, Inter have been playing their last two games behind closed doors after some –It does seem strange how a racist minority can attach themselves to a club called Internazionale whose motto is actually Fratelli del Mondo ( Brothers of the World). The club has responded well with a campaign on social media. Finally, in the days when football managers careers finish with multi million Euro pay-offs and TV punditry , it seems worth remembering days when a manager’s career could end in a god forsaken Labour Camp somewhere in Polish Silesia. Arpad Weisz 1896-1944 Most of this article is based on a book “Dallo Scudetto ad Auschwitz” written by an Italian sporting journalist Matteo Mariani. Moreover, a very good book it is. 

After he got onto the story of Weisz, Mariani visited various Italian archives, Bologna , Dordrecht in the Netherlands and tracked down some by now very old people who had known the Weisz family. For me, the only drawback it is that Mariani writes in a little too emotive style, but then in I think he ended up caring very deeply, about what happened to Weisz so perhaps it is not such a bad thing. In addition, although the interviews and some of the research is well documented, some of the sources remain a little obscure with a lack of footnoting and references. That is a minor criticism; particularly poignant are the interviews with Weisz’s son’s childhood friend and the correspondence that revealed. It is a hugely valuable book for those interested in football, the Holocaust and Italy in general. The book restored the lost Weisz to memory in Italy, such that there are now memorials to him , memorial football matches and even a graphic novel for young adults and that can only be a very good thing. 

Arpad Weisz was born in 1896 at Solt, a small town on the great Hungarian plain on a bluff overlooking the mighty Danube River. In those days, Hungary formed part of the Dual Monarchy or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Solt was not a significant sort of place, not on the Hungarian railway system and without a stop for the steamers that plied up and down the Danube. Blisteringly hot in the long summers and bitterly cold in winter. It did not seem like a place with great opportunities for a young man with no apparent interest in farming or horses. Arpad studied and got his High School diploma he moved up the river to Budapest as soon as he could. 

There are differences of opinion on how the football came to Hungary in the first place; most seem to trace back to Hungarians returning England. By whatever means the ball arrived, they were certainly playing football in Hungary before the end of the 19th Century. Indeed the first unofficial rulebook for football in Hungary seems to have come out in 1896. In 1897, the first football team was founded; Budapest Gymnastics Club and the first international match took place between Austria and Hungary. Well it is difficult to say that it was an international since they were both part of the dual- monarchy. The number of football teams increased, initially just in Budapest but then spreading out into other towns. The football section of the Ferencvárosi Sports Club was founded on 3 December 1900. 

By the time, Weisz entered his teenage years; football was thriving in Hungary, with a well-established league, a cup competition, visiting foreign teams and the national side competing internationally. Understandably, Mariani has not been able to locate much about Weisz’s early years. Clearly, he was not playing very top-flight football in Hungary otherwise his name would be recorded somewhere. Apparently, he studied law, worked in a bank and maybe played amateur or semi-professional football somewhere in Budapest. 

Weisz served in the First World War. Mariani intimates that he was captured by the Italians and from there learned the Italian language, but unfortunately, he does not refer to any sources on that. When you search a bit further you find out that Mariani did actually locate Austrian military records that show that the Italians captured Gefreiter Arpad Weisz (or Veisz in the Italianised version) on 28 November 1915 while he was serving with k.u.k Infanterie regiment nr. 32 “Maria Theresa”. The 32 regiment was a majority Hungarian regiment and usually based in Budapest. It is difficult to distinguish the place of capture from the handwriting; it appears to say Mrzli, which is consistent with the him being captured as the final days of the 4th Battle of the Isonzo raged in that area. The Italians sent Gefreiter Viesz to a Prisoner of War Camp at Trapani in Sicily for the duration of the war, about as far as you could get in Europe from the frontlines. Weisz was probably quite fortunate since being a prisoner of the Italians for the next three years probably saved his life through missing out on the next six Battles of the Isonzo where the Italians and Austro-Hungarians continued to fight over the same small bit of ground. I suppose they also gave him the opportunity to learn Italian. 

I am not sure why Mariani does not reference this discovery in his book since it seems to be an incredibly good piece of research and a bit of good luck in finding it. Most Allied Prisoners of War were repatriated in 1919 and Weisz must have returned to Budapest sometime in that year. Arpad Weisz signed for the Budapest club Törekvés Sportegyesület in the early 1920s, alongside Ferenc Hirzer. That year, Törekvés finished in 5th place in the Hungarian League, while MTK Budapest won their 10th successive title. 

The situation in post-war Hungary was not good to say the least. The collapse of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, led to Hungary losing vast amounts of territory including its access to the sea. A short-lived works Soviet under Bela Kun took over the country, leading to a Civil War , a White Terror and an occupation by the Romanians, There was huge economic dislocation as an economy which had been based on integration with the rest of the Empire was forced to go it alone, cut off from its transport links and natural resource. Small wonder that Weisz went abroad to play. Next season, both Weisz and Hirzer moved to the Jewish side Maccabi Brno in Czechoslovakia. Weisz was also a Hungarian international. In the immediate post- war years, the Hungarians could not find many countries to play against , but between 1922 and 1923 Weisz turned out in two matches against Austria, two against Switzerland and a couple of semi-official fixtures in Germany. 

On 4 March 1923, Arpad Weisz played his first game on Italian soil as part of the Hungarian national side. The match at the Stadio Marassi in Genova was the first encounter of the former wartime enemies since the armistice and the first chance for the Italians to put to rest their previous defeats against Hungary. In fact , the Italians for reasons of political expediency were quicker to forgive their former foes than the other Allied Powers. Seven or eight years previously, the Italians and Hungarians had been shooting each other in the desolate battlefields of the Karst, now they were just kicking footballs at each other. Mariani suggests that he was part of the Hungarian squad for the 1924 Olympics in Paris, but on the other hand FIFA records do not seem to include him as a squad member, other sources do. He is not listed as playing in any of the matches that Hungary played at the Olympics, but was presumably a squad member. 

In the days before television or before scouts travelled widely, international matches were the only opportunity to observe foreign players at close quarters. The game in Genova provided an opportunity for the Hungarian players to show their talents in front of Italian coaches and technical staff. Indeed, it was at this game that Weisz came to the attention of the technical staff from Alessandria. Weisz signed for Alessandria for the 1924-5 season. A number of commentators mention Weisz as having played for the Italian Club, Padova but this almost certainly based on mistaken identity with another Hungarian player Dino Weisz who definitely played for Padova at the time. Weisz was among the first of a steady flow of Hungarian players and managers who began to arrive in Italian football in the early 1920s, attracted by the opportunity, higher wages and standards of living decidedly higher than under the troubled conditions prevailing in Budapest. 

Clearly, newly Fascist Italy was not a paradise on earth, but it must have offered a welcome contrast to the ongoing issues in Hungary, Also in 1925, Weisz’s former teammate at Maccabi Brno, Ferenc Hirzer signed for Juventus. On 2 August 1926, the Carta di Viareggio was published which reorganized the structure of Italian football. Alongside, the reorganization the Carta di Viareggio allowed that henceforward only players of Italian citizenship and nationality would be able to register for Italian clubs. For a transitional period for the 1926-7 season, clubs could to keep two foreign players on the books, with only one on the field at a time, but from the 1927-28 season, there was a total ban on foreign players being registered with Italian clubs. The main effect was on the 80 or so Hungarian and Austrian nationals playing in Italy. Many returned home, but a number moved into technical or coaching roles, which fell outside the new rules. 

In 1925, Weisz began a ten-year association with the city of Milan. For the 1925-6 season he signed for Inter, making 11 appearances as a player and scoring three goals, two at Brescia and one at Verona in the space of a week. Unfortunately, Weisz never fulfilled his potential as an Inter player. His career was cut short by a knee injury and in those days before sports surgery and rehabilitation had reached the level of today, he retired to the bench and never played again. 

In 1926, Inter were bought from Ernesto Olivetti , by Senatore Giuseppe Cesare , Borletti was an entrepreneur who had been involved in the textile industry. During the war he had diversified into the production of watches and other measuring instruments, but his real breakthrough came when he expanded into the production of fuses. Towards the end of the war, Borletti founded the department store Rinascente in Milan, aimed at the Italian middle to upper classes, just to be the safe sound he also founded a second distribution chain, la Unica Prezzo Italiano ( UPIM), which sold products at fixed prices of up to four lire. Both chains of stores are still around today. 

Milan in the 1920s was the industrial powerhouse of Italy. In the west of the city, Alfa Romeo were producing their new post war model the Alfa Romeo RL at the large plant dominating the zone of Portello. A little further to the North West, Isotta Fraschini were producing the chassis for their legendary 8 series cars, as well as aero and marine engines. A whole industry of specialist coachbuilders had grown up to provide bodywork for Alfa and Isotta. Pirelli dominated the central area of the city, while also expanding their production further north to the Bicocca area. The northern area of Sesto San Giovanni was heavily industrialised, with the Falck Steelworks, Osva producing metal products, Ansaldo- Breda making trains and Magneti Marelli producing electrical components for cars and later lighting and radios. In the same area Campari produced the Aperitivo which had become synonymous with Milan. 

In this period Inter were playing in the Stadium at Via Goldoni, while in September 1926, city rivals AC Milan had inaugurated a brand new Stadium with capacity for 35,000 people, the Nuovo Stadio Calcistico San Siro, in the north west of the city near to the racecourse. The first match played there was a Derby match against Inter, with AC Milan winning 6-3. In 1927, Weisz had the good fortune to select the 17 year-old Giuseppe Meazza, to play for his Inter team in a pre-season tournament the Torneo Volta in Como. Born in the Porta Vittoria area of Milan, Meazza had lost his father in the killing fields of World War One. He had grown up in the streets of Porta Vittoria, while his widowed mother worked as a market trader. Meazza’s precocious talent was spotted by Fulvio Bernadini, an Inter Centre-forward who recommended him to Weisz. In his first outing at Como, Meazza scored twice and Inter won. From them on, Meazza became a first team player. In the 1927-28 season, he played in 33 Championship games and scored 12 times. In a 34 game season, he only missed one game. This was the last season played under the old format, there were two leagues, Girone A and Girone B of 10 teams each , with the top four from each going through to the Girone Finale. Inter went through into the final round as joint second and then finished the tournament 7th overall. 

At the end of the season, Weisz left Inter. It seems difficult to find where he was during the 1928-29 season. Mariani suggests he was in South America . Other articles suggest he was managing the Hungarian Club, Szombathelyi in that period. I did read one article that is pretty conclusive that he was managing a Hungarian club, Sabaria FC during a tour of the United States and Mexico ( and possibly elsewhere) . Sabaria FC was from the Hungarian city of Szombathelyi and the club went through a number of mergers and name changes, so that sounds plausible. At least one publication mentions Weisz as definitely being with Sabaria FC and that the Mexican Club El Espana tried to recruit him . It also seems that Sabaria FC – beat America 6-0 on Mexican soil, they also lost to Mexican club Atlante. There is no doubt that Sabaria were in the United States in March 1929, where they played three matches at Starlight Park against the New York Giants and New York Hakoah. One can only imagine the impression of seeing 1920s New York City and Mexico City on a group of young men from the Hungarian plains. Searching on the internet, there were some tantalizing clues that the club also played in Cuba. Then on a Hungarian website, somebody has posted a full schedule of the tour; five games in Cuba, three in New York and eleven in Mexico. Sabaria FC lost twice in the US and once against Atalante in Mexico. Various Spanish articles describe Weisz as being the entredajor or coach and of being offered and refusing employment in Mexico. It also seems to be no coincidence that Weisz’s future wife came from Szombathelyi. It is all a bit a hazy , but it does seem he spent the time in the Americas and may have been with Sabaria/ Szombathelyi for at least some of this time.

 Mariani also speculates that Weisz had previously spent time coaching in Montevideo or Buenos Aires, but there seems little firm evidence of this. Weisz was definitely back in Hungary for on 29th September 1929, he married Ilona Rechnitzer in Szombathelyi . The newly married Weisz was back in Milan as Manager of Internazionale for the start of the new Serie A season in October 1929. 

By this time they had been forced by the Fascist Regime to change their name from the rather too foreign sounding Internazionale ( with its assumed associations to socialism/ communism) to Ambrosiana (after the patron saint of Milan). They later compromised with the name Ambrosiana- Inter. Serie A was now a truly national league comprising 18 clubs in total. There were two each from Milan, Turin and Rome, plus Napoli, Trieste, Bologna and Genoa, the numbers completed by Alessandria and Pro- Vercelli, Brescia, Livorno, Cremonese, Pro-Patria, Padova and Modena. The season kicked off on the 6 October with a surprise, the reigning Champions, Bologna lost 3-0 away to Lazio. By January 1930, Ambrosiana, Juventus and Genoa were joint top of the table. On the third to last game of the season, Ambrosiana faced Genoa at the Arena Civica . (They had meanwhile moved out of via Goldoni. Anticipation was high, the Nerazzurri had previously won championships in 1910 and 1920, would 1930 be another lucky year. Weisz became the first foreigner and the youngest manager ever to win the Italian Championships at the grand-old age of 34. (The record as youngest manager still stands today) 

Having won Serie A, Weisz then took his Ambrosiana team on a convincing first run in the Mitropa Cup, an early forerunner to the Champions League. After poor showings in the first two outings of the Mitropa, in 1929, Yugoslav clubs were replaced by Italian ones in order to strengthen the competition. In 1929, Inter had failed to qualify from an Italian play-off and the Italian qualifiers, Juventus and Genoa had lost on aggregate to respectively Slavia Prague and SK Rapid. The eventual winners were Ujpest. For the 1930 season, Weisz was clearly looking to improve the Italian position, the chances of which were not helped greatly when Ambrosiana the draw faced them against the formidable Ujpest in the first round. So Weisz returned to his native Hungary with his victorious Ambrosiana side. They lost the first game 4-2 at the Hungaria Ut stadium in Budapest and then won their home fixture at the Arena Civica in Milan, by the same score line 4-2. That left the fixture all square at 6-6. A play-off at the neutral Wankdorf Stadium in Bern finished 1-.1. Then there was a final play-off back at the Arena Civica on 14 September 1930. What a thriller, that turned out to be, with Ambrosiana winning 5-3. The four matches had produced 22 goals in total. It is difficult to imagine today what replaying a tied fixture twice would do to TV schedules. 

The day of Ambrosiana’s victory also witnessed the Nazi Party victory in German elections, the NSDAP finished in second place with over six million popular votes and gained 95 extra seats in the Reichstag making the second largest party in the German Parliament. Little did the victorious Weisz realize what effect these momentous events away from the football pitch would have on his future. 

Ambrosiana did not start the semi-finals badly, holding Sparta Prague to a 2-2 draw at the Arena Civica. They then got hammered 6-1 by the hosts in Prague and so lost the semi-finals 3-8 on aggregate. However, an Italian club had taken the first steps out of the group stage. Despite Ambrosiana’s exit, in the semi-finals the top scorer of the whole tournament remained Giuseppe Meazza with seven goals in total. 

Despite, the scudetto and the progress in the Mitropa Cup, Weisz parted company with Ambrosiana- Inter six games into the 1930-31 season, he went south to Bari for the 1931-32 season. In 1932, he went back to Ambrosiana- Inter, staying until 1934. In two seasons he secured two respectable second place finishes and took Inter to the finals of the Mitropa Cup , where they lost to Austria Vienna. After Inter, he went to Serie B club Novara for the 1934-35 season, reaching second place in Girone A of Serie B. 

In September 1935, he arrived at Bologna where he was to cement his reputation as one of the best coaches in Italy of the 1930s. In his first two seasons Weisz won two scudetti ( championships) with Bologna ( 1935-36 and 1936-37) , in his third season they finished fifth. In May 1937, Bologna as the Serie A Champions travelled to Paris for the Trophy of the International Exposition “Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne”, a tournament of eight of the best teams in Europe. Competing with Bologna were; FK Austria Vienna, SK Slavia Praha, Olympique de Marseille , FC Sochaux- Montbeliand, VFB Leipzig, Phobus FC Budapest and Chelsea FC . On 30 May, Weisz’s Bologna beat FC Sochaux 4-1 in Paris, while Chelsea drew 1-1 with Olympique and went into the next round by ballot. On 3 June Chelsea beat FK Austria Vienna 2-0 in Paris and Bologna beat Slavia Praha 2-0 in Lille to set up the final in Paris. After Chelsea’s emphatic win they went into the final as favourites; however, after a keenly fought match Bologna won 4-1. 

Weisz had been coexisting with Fascist Italy since the 1920s, the ban on foreign players had been a pain, but his playing career was effectively over anyway and there no restrictions on foreign managers. In 1938, things started to go badly wrong. Since the Risorgimento, Italy had not been a particularly anti-Semitic country. National Unification in 1861 had entailed the closing of the ghettos and the granting of full civil rights to all citizens regardless of religious belief. Many of Italy’s Jews played a prominent role in the rise of Fascism – there were five Jews at the Piazza San Sepolcro, three Jewish Martyrs for the Party cause before 1922 and 230 who officially participated in the March on Rome. According to 1930s estimates around a quarter of Italy’s adult Jews belonged to the Partita Nazionale Fascista (PNF). However, by 1938 matters began to turn for the worse. Achille Starace, the PNF Secretary was a leader of the racial campaign. In July 1938, he had the Foreign Minister, Count Ciano distribute a circular to Italian diplomats stating the PNF’s official line on race. Fascism, he said had been campaigning for the “quantitive and qualitative improvement of the race” since 1933. Starace went on to explain that; “With the creation of the Empire, the Italian race came into contact with other races. Hence it had to guard itself against hybridity and contamination”. Racial laws already applied in Italy’s imperial territory and it was logical to extend them to the Kingdom itself. Through his Journal Critica Fascista , Bottai proclaimed the originality and spirituality of Fascist Racism which he defined as “eminently spiritual even if it sprang from purely biological data “ The aim was to prove that Italian Racial laws were not just copied from the Germans “ but rather were the natural expression of three thousand years of Italian history , thought and art”. From August 1938, the Fascist regime introduced a series of racial laws banning Jews from being scholars or teachers in Italian schools or universities, from serving in the armed forces, from having Christian servants and from marrying Christian “Aryans”.

By September 1938, time in Italy was running out for Weisz. On 7 September, Royal Law n 1381 concerning the Expulsion of Foreign Jews was published in the Official Gazette. Article 1 established that from that date foreign-born Jews were forbidden from establishing their abode in the Kingdom of Italy, Libya or the Italian Aegean Islands. For these purposes, the law defined as Jewish anybody with both parents being Jewish, even where they professed a different faith. Article 3 revoked Italian Citizenship granted after 1 January 1919 to any foreign Jews. However, it was Article 4, which finished Weisz providing that any foreign Jew in Italy, Libya or the Aegean Islands who became resident after 1 January 1919 be required to leave within six months of the publication of the Law and that anybody remaining beyond that date were to be expelled in accordance with the Public Security Laws. Effectively, Weisz had until March 1939 to leave Italy.

 Therefore, the winner of three Serie A Titles; the youngest man ever to manage a side to victory in Serie A; and the man who had launched the career of Giuseppe Meazza, found his children banned from schools, lost the job he loved and had to leave his adopted homeland simply because he was Jewish. The last time he saw Italy was on 10 January 1939 at the border town of Bardonecchia before his train pulled into France. 

Mariani has been able to locate the Letters from the Prefecture, confirming that Weisz family had left Italian territory. The Italians are good at bureaucracy. They do not seem to have grasped the risk of leaving all their incriminating documents neatly filed for posterity. 

In spring of 1939, Arpad Weisz after a brief sojourn in Paris arrived in the small Dutch town of Dordrecht. Paris, must have seemed a logical place to go, he was known there from his victory in 1937 and had some contacts in French football. There was nowhere else to go, Hungary’s treatment of Jews was becoming just as bad as Italy, Spain was in the middle of civil war and English clubs at that time would not employ foreign coaches. Germany was obviously out of the question. Nothing turned up in France, but Karel Lotsy, director of the Dutch Club Dordrechtsche Football Club (DFC), contacted him. They were in a relegation struggle having lost most of their games in the 1938-39 season. Weisz accepted Lotsy’s offer and managed to help keep DFC in the Eerste Klasse West II division at the end of the season. 

The Weisz family all moved to Dordrecht and registered as residents on 18 October 1939, settling in a traditional Dutch House at 10 Bethlemplein. In the 1939-40 season, Weisz managed to get DFC up to 5th place in their division, even winning a game against Feyenoord. That was the last bit of good fortune Weisz was to have. On 9 May 1940, the Germans entered Luxemburg unopposed and the following day invaded Belgium and the Netherlands. German paratroopers landed near Dordrecht, effectively sealing the fate of Arpad Weisz and his family. There was still one escape route open south into France and then onto Spain, Portugal or Switzerland. However, on 14 June 1940, the Germans entered Paris and the last remaining route to freedom was blocked. 

The same day, the first deportation to Auschwitz took place from the Polish town of Tarnow, as the train carrying the deportees passed through Cracow Station, the deportees heard an excited station announcer giving the news that Paris had fallen. At first the family were allowed by the occupying Germans to go about their business, then Weisz was no longer allowed to manage Dordrecht , the children were removed from schools and they were forced to wear yellow stars. At 7am on 2 August 1942, the Germans arrived at the family home and took the Weisz family away to confinement at Kamp Westerbork to wait their fate. Westerbork was about 130km from Amsterdam in the province of Drenthe, in the extreme North East of the Netherlands. In 1939, the Dutch Government had established a refugee camp there for German Jews already in the country. At the end of 1941, the Germans decided that Westerbork would become a transit camp for Jews destined to be deported to the east. Westerbork was not an extermination camp or death camp in itself, its purpose was to collect the Jewish population of the Netherlands and send them to the killing grounds of the East. In the words of one commentator, Westerbork was a site “about as inhospitable, as could be, far from the civilized world in the isolation of the Drenthe moorland, difficult to reach, with unpaved roads where even the slightest shower would turn the sand to mud.” 

On the 20 January at the SS Conference Centre in Wannsee, a conference of Nazi bureaucrats chaired by Reinhard Heydrich codified what the Germans had already been doing in practice, as the “Final Solution to the Jewish problem”. Inevitably, on 2 October 1942 Arpad Weisz and family were taken from Westerbork to the nearby station of Hooghalen where they were put on cattle trucks for the East with over 1,000 other Dutch Jews. Somewhere on the way to Auschwitz, the Germans separated Weisz from his wife and children. Weisz was sent to one of the many work camps in Polish Silesia. His wife Elena and children Roberto and Clara were gassed at Auschwitz on 5 October 1942, three days after leaving the Netherlands. Roberto was 12 years old and Clara 8 years old. 

As a strong and healthy athlete, Weisz survived for 15 months in the Labour camp. Mariani records that he died there on 31 January 1944. By the time he died, the Allies occupied half of Italy and the Fascist Regime, which had enacted the Racial Laws, was confined to the rump-state of the Italian Social Republic at Salo. 

Maybe Mariani, the sporting journalist gets the better of him at this stage, but his sporting analogy is quite apt. “The only thing that Weisz understood now was that the game was over. We are at the ninetieth minute of the match, that had seen a superb first half and a nightmarish second half….. finally the final triple whistle blew” 

Arpad Weisz is now commemorated by a memorial plaque at the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza at San Siro in Milan, (named for the player that he virtually discovered and whom he nurtured to become one of Italy’s greatest footballers). They also remember him at the Stadiums of Bari and Bologna and in Novara. If you search in the Internet, there are articles on him in English, Italian, Spanish, German and Hungarian. Most of them seem to be based on Mariani’s research, some our wildly inaccurate. I saw one Spanish article claiming he has played for Barcelona and many repeat the old Padova mistake. Still most of them are sincere. In the end, we should be very grateful for Mr. Mariani for bringing the lost Arpad Weisz out of the shadows and restoring him to his rightful place among the greatest of Italian Managers. I suspect his record as the youngest coach ever to win Serie A will stand for a very long time.