Edin Terzic’s good friend and former colleague Slaven Bilic likes to joke that his former assistant is such a devoted Borussia Dortmund fan that the man leading the German club to the Champions League final on Saturday even chooses his boots accordingly.
Speaking to Telegraph Sport, Bilic, for whom Terzic worked at Besiktas and West Ham, is clear on this point. “Edin wears yellow sneakers,” says Bilic. “He prefers yellow shirts to white shirts – not because he necessarily likes yellow, but because it is Dortmund.
“He knows the songs and everything. So when someone on my staff mentioned Edin as manager of Bayern Munich, I said, ‘No way. He would never go there.” And that’s because he really is 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 led to the greatest final of them all.
He was born in 1982 to a Bosnian father and a Croatian mother, who had left the then Yugoslav Republic for a new life in the great northwestern industrial belt of West Germany, as it then was. Terzic grew up in the Dortmund fan culture together with his older brother Alen.
Both now work for Dortmund, Alen as an analyst – and Edin as manager of a team that has defied all expectations. In the third Champions League final in Dortmund’s history, Terzic, 41, will face Carlo Ancelotti, the greatest Champions League manager of all time.
Terzic watched his first match against Dortmund at the age of nine at the Westphalia Stadium on November 23, 1991 – a 2-1 win over MSV Duisburg. He did this on the terrace known as the Yellow Wall, with Alen and their deceased father.
In his teens, Terzic was a member of the Dortmund Under-15s team for one year, until surgery for an ankle injury forced him out of the club’s youth system. What characterized his career afterward was a deep-seated determination to keep coming back. As a striker, he played in the fourth tier of German football, while also completing a degree in sports science at the Ruhr University in Bochum. While studying for his Uefa A license with the German Football Association, he met Sven Mislintat, now back at Dortmund as technical director after an ill-fated spell at Arsenal.
In 2010, at the age of 28, Terzic returned from lower-level football to his last club, the less celebrated BV Cloppenberg. From the under-17s onwards, he became an assistant coach in Dortmund’s youth academy. He would also become a scout for the club during the period in which they signed Robert Lewandowski, Łukasz Piszczek, Shinji Kagawa, Ilkay Gundogan and Ivan Perisic.
During the Jürgen Klopp era, he worked as an analyst for the first team. It amounted to a remarkable internship and his talent was noticed by Bilic.
As manager of Croatia in 2012, Bilic asked Terzic to analyze the strength of the Irish team, who were in the same group at the European Championship. After leaving Lokomotiv Moscow in 2013, Bilic looked for a new assistant. “I really needed someone as a coach, but more as an analyst,” he says. “I didn’t want a boy who was just good with a computer, but who couldn’t connect anything with football. Before I went to Besiktas, my brother said: ‘What about Edin?’ We met for the first time in Split in May 2013 and hit it off straight away.
“Back then he was already highly rated at Dortmund, even though he didn’t have a big position. I spoke to Michael Zorc, Dortmund’s sporting director at the time, and he said: ‘I’m only lending it to you.’ He will return to Dortmund one day because we are counting on him enormously.”
The years with Bilic at Besiktas and then West Ham gave Terzic a glimpse into the world outside Dortmund. There were two third-place finishes in Turkey and then a seventh-place finish for West Ham in 2015–16, with a then club record in points total. The departure of Dimitri Payet dealt Bilic’s regime a serious blow from which it never recovered.
“Edin is first and foremost a great guy,” says Bilic. “Very emotional. His great strength is communicating with people. He is great at man management. I saw that immediately. 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 of seniors and he knew exactly where his place was. He also knew how to stand firm for his opinions. He knew what to say to me when we were alone or when we were with the chairman. He’s brilliant.”
Even when Terzic returned to Dortmund in 2018 as assistant to first team manager Lucien Favre, it was not easy. In December 2020, he was appointed caretaker following Favre’s dismissal. In February 2021, the club announced the appointment of Marco Rose for the summer and subsequently under Terzic the team won 10 of the last 13 to finish third.
In 2022, when Rose left, Terzic, who had been interim technical director, was finally given the coaching job. It is infamous that he missed out on the national title on the last day of last season
His story is of course also the great immigrant story. Terzic’s father was a welder who could spend months working on an assembly line outside the family home in Menden, southeast of Dortmund. His mother, from Osijek in Croatia, worked in a shop. The couple had emigrated separately and met in Germany in the 1970s. Both their sons, as well as daughter Julia, were born in Germany.
Terzic’s parents saved up to build a house in Osijek, near the eastern tip of Croatia. They were part of a large Yugoslav community in Menden that preserved 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, completed an astonishing journey. A boyhood Dortmund fan, he is a former youth team player, academy coach, scout, analyst, assistant, caretaker, technical director and now Champions League final manager. Few can be said to have walked the path so completely. Does that make this final all the more difficult?
“If you ask if it is difficult to play in front of your friends, then – yes – it can be,” says Bilic. “It can become a burden. You can get too emotional, but for me there’s nothing wrong with emotion. It can only help you and I think it’s definitely a plus for him. It’s hard when you fail, it becomes more pressure. But it can be decisive in helping you.
“I am always more positive. Every great team in history – Barcelona with Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Manchester United with [Paul] Scholes, [Nicky] Ass, [Gary] Marcel. Those teams are made by local guys. They have created something special. Not only on the field, but also in relations with the fans.
“It can also be the hardest thing to be a prophet in your own city. But I think it gives you something special that you don’t have unless you have that bond.”