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When Team USA Needed To Get World Cup Ready, It Needed Boraball
May 12, 2026
Posted 2 hours ago by
The following is excerpted from The Long Game by Leander Schaerlaeckens, to be published on May 12, 2026 by Viking. It is available for purchase now. Velibor Milutinović, or Bora to both friend and foe, was born in Yugoslavia and orphaned by World War II. After a childhood spent kicking an inflated pig’s bladder around in the streets, he and his two brothers made the national team.
He signed with clubs in Switzerland and France before winding up in Mexico. He became a successful coach there and then managed the Mexican national team. With an unconventional approach, he brought a moribund team to an improbable quarterfinal on its home soil at the 1986 World Cup, making him a Mexican hero. He was hired by Costa Rica just two months before the 1990 World Cup, dumped half a dozen of the team’s stars, and made it the first Central American nation to reach the World Cup’s second round. He was a certified miracle worker.
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