Edin Terzic: The man who bleeds black and yellow plotting Real Madrid’s downfall

Edin Terzic’s great friend and former colleague Slaven Bilic likes to joke that his erstwhile assistant is such a committed Borussia Dortmund fan that the man who will lead the German club into the Champions League final on Saturday even decides his footwear accordingly.

Speaking to Telegraph Sport, Bilic, for whom Terzic worked at Besiktas and West Ham, is clear on this point. “Edin wears yellow trainers,” Bilic says. “He prefers yellow shirts to white shirts – not because he necessarily likes yellow but because it’s Dortmund.

“He knows the songs and everything. So when somebody from my staff mentioned Edin as Bayern Munich manager I said: ‘No way. He would never go there.’ And that’s because he is truly Dortmund.”

At Wembley, against Real Madrid on Saturday evening, comes the culmination of an extraordinary story – a coach who is above all, a lifelong supporter of the team he has led to the biggest final of all.

He was born in 1982, to a Bosnian father and Croatian mother, who had left the then Yugoslavian Republic for a new life in the great north-west industrial belt of West Germany, as it was then. Terzic, with his older brother Alen, grew up steeped in Dortmund fan culture.

Both now work for Dortmund, Alen, as an analyst – and Edin as the manager of a team that has defied the odds. In the third Champions League final in Dortmund’s history, Terzic, 41, is up against Carlo Ancelotti, the greatest Champions League manager of all-time.

Terzic watched his first Dortmund game aged nine at what was the Westfalen Stadium on November 23, 1991 – a 2-1 win over MSV Duisburg. He did so on the terrace known as the Yellow Wall, with Alen and their late father.

In his teens, Terzic make it into the Dortmund Under-15s team for a single year until surgery on an ankle injury meant that he was forced to drop out of the club’s youth system. What marked his career out after that was a deeply held determination to keep coming back. As a striker he played in the fourth tier of German football, while he also completed a sports science degree at the Ruhr University in Bochum. Studying for his Uefa A licence at the German football association he met Sven Mislintat, now back at Dortmund as technical director after an ill-fated stint at Arsenal.

In 2010, at 28, Terzic returned from lower-league football at his final club, the less celebrated BV Cloppenberg. He became an assistant coach in Dortmund’s academy from the under-17s upwards. He would become a scout for the club, too, during the period in which they signed Robert Lewandowski, Łukasz Piszczek, Shinji Kagawa, Ilkay Gundogan and Ivan Perisic.

During the Jurgen Klopp era, he worked as an analyst for the first team. It amounted to a remarkable apprenticeship and his talent was spotted by Bilic.

As Croatia manager in 2012, Bilic asked Terzic to analyse the strength of the Republic of Ireland team – drawn in the same group at the Euros. After he left Lokomotiv Moscow in 2013, Bilic sought a new assistant. “I really needed someone to be a coach but more an analyst,” he says. “I didn’t want one of those guys who was just good with a computer but couldn’t relate it to football. Before I went to Besiktas my brother said, ‘What about Edin?’ We met for the first time in Split in May 2013 and we clicked straight away.

“Already at that time he was highly rated at Dortmund even if he didn’t have a big position. I spoke to Michael Zorc, the sporting director at Dortmund at the time, and he said ‘I am only loaning him to you. He’s going back to Dortmund one day because we count on him, big time’.”

The years with Bilic at Besiktas and then West Ham gave Terzic an insight into the world away from Dortmund. There were two third-place finishes in Turkey and then a seventh-place finish for West Ham in 2015-2016, with a then club-record points total. The Dimitri Payet departure dealt Bilic’s regime a severe blow from which they never recovered.

“Edin is first of all a great guy,” Bilic says. “Very emotional. His big strength is communicating with people. He’s great at man-management. I could see that straight away. He is 14 years younger than me and he knew exactly what his role was. Only intelligent people with great empathy understand that.

“I had a staff with senior people and he knew exactly where his place was. He also knew how to stand firm with his opinions. He knew what to say to me when we were alone or when we were with the chairman. He’s brilliant.”

It was not simple either once Terzic returned to Dortmund in 2018 as assistant to first team manager Lucien Favre. In December 2020 he was appointed caretaker after Favre’s sacking. In February 2021, the club announced Marco Rose’s appointment for the summer and then under Terzic the team won 10 out of their last 13 to finish third.

In 2022, when Rose left, Terzic, who had been technical director in the interim, was finally given the coach’s job. Infamously, he missed out on winning the league title on the final day of last season

His is, of course, also the great immigrant story. Terzic’s father was a welder who could spend months away from the family home in Menden, southeast of Dortmund, working on assembly lines. His mother, from Osijek in Croatia, worked in a shop. The pair had emigrated separately and met in Germany in the 1970s. Both their sons, as well as daughter Julia, are German born.

The Terzic parents saved to build a house in Osijek, near Croatia’s eastern tip. They were part of a large Yugoslavian community in Menden that maintained the music and culture of their former home. At the same time the Terzic boys were fascinated by one of the great German club traditions.

On Saturday, Terzic, the German boy born to immigrant parents, completes an astonishing journey. He is a boyhood Dortmund fan, and a former youth team player, academy coach, scout, analyst, assistant, caretaker, technical director, and now Champions League final manager. Few could be said to have walked the path quite so comprehensively. Does that make this final all the more difficult?

“If you ask whether it is hard to play in front of your friends then – yes - it can be,” Bilic says. “It can become a burden. You can become too emotional, but for me there is nothing wrong with emotion. It can only help you and I think definitely it is a plus for him. It’s hard when you fail, it becomes a bigger pressure. But it can be decisive in helping you.

“I am always more positive. Every big team in history – Barcelona with Xavi, Andres Iniesta, and Manchester United with [Paul] Scholes, [Nicky] Butt, [Gary] Neville. Those teams were created by local guys. They created something special. Not just on the pitch but also the relations with the fans.

“It can also be the hardest thing to be a prophet in your own town. But I think it gives you something special that you do not have unless you have that bond.”