Nepali National Team’s ex coach Rudi bribed the referee with a bottle of whiskey

At the age of 86 when most of the people enjoy their retirement, Rudolf Gutendorf wants to be on the sideline of a football pitch for one more time. Having been managed 18 national teams, highest for any manager in the world; Rudi still thinks he can manage yet another team. Besides the national teams, he has managed different clubs in Germany, USA, Peru, Spain and Japan.

After a remarkable managerial job with few teams in Germany, he was later appointed by German government and German FA as their missionary for football. In his tenure he managed teams from almost every corner of the world from Africa to Asia, From South America to Australia to the Caribbean.  He has had both on the field and off the field experiences during his managerial career. He managed a team suffering from civil war, been on the both side of bribery, been sabotaged by his own players and sacked from the job only due to his religion.

While managing the national team of Nepal, he was tried to be bribed to lose a game by quiet a huge margin.He turned down $500,000 from an oil-rich sheikh to lose 8-0 in the Asian Games. But later, in a game between Nepal and India, when the game was halted by heavy rain, he bribed the referee with a bottle of whiskey just to let the game resume. He knew Nepalese player were good on playing in the rain and had good studs in their boots than their Indian counterpart. Nepal won the game 1-0. The toughest job he had would be managing the national team of Rwanda. The country was in post-war situation after a long civil war between two tribes of Rwanda. His job was to manage a team which consisted of players from both the tribes. There was no unity within the team. But he managed to unite the team and this led to mitigate some hatred among these two tribes in whole Rwanda when they played 2-2 against the strong Ivory Coast side in world cup qualifiers.

According to Rudi, his most saddest moment in his managerial career is when he was sabotaged by his own players while managing FC Hamburg. After the inclusion of Kevin Keegan in the team, the captain and other players sabotaged him which led him to be sacked from the club. Other incident which he finds bitter is his removal from his managerial duty of Iranian olympic team after the religious leader didn’t want him to manage them for being from other religion.

But even after all these experiences and ups and downs in his career, Rudi believes he has still some football left in him and sees himself one day managing a team.

You can read his conversation with BBC’s world football program here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/21636939