Only Talant Was Faster: Ortega Races to Third Champions League Title

Antonio Carlos Ortega celebrated his third EHF Champions League title as a coach. It is his ninth title overall, if we also count the six he won as a player while wearing the Barcelona jersey. The fact that this is an era with few parallels in the history of Europe’s top club competition is best illustrated by the data that, since the EHF Champions League has been played in this format from 1994, only Talant Dujshebaev managed to reach three trophies faster.

Namely, Talant won the title three times in his first four seasons with the famous Ciudad Real dream team — in 2006, 2007 and 2009. Among the coaches who had the opportunity to lift the trophy three or more times, the most decorated of them all, Valero Rivera, needed 14 seasons on the Barcelona bench, from 1983 to 1997, to reach number three. He later finished with six trophies, including five in a row up to 2000.

His successor, and Ortega’s predecessor, Xavi Pascual, also reached three Champions League trophies, but over a 12-year period, from 2009 to 2021.

The only non-Spanish coach to win three trophies is Alfred Gislason, who did it with two clubs. First with Magdeburg in 2002, in his third season on the bench of the team from the GETEC Arena. Later, he achieved the same with the fantastic generation of Kiel in 2010 and 2012. He took over the “Zebras” in the summer of 2008, replacing Zvonimir “Noka” Serdarušić.

Looking at the pre-EHF era, the legendary Spartak Mironovich led SKA Minsk to three titles in 1987, 1989 and 1990, while he sat on the bench of the famous team from 1976 to 2016. Horst Dreischang celebrated three times with Gummersbach, in 1967, 1970 and 1971, but over a period of 12 seasons, starting in 1959.