Miroslav Koubek

Miroslav Koubek is the most unlikely manager at this World Cup. Born 1 September 1951 in what was then Czechoslovakia, he was a journeyman goalkeeper in the Czech lower leagues whose coaching career began in 1983 and unfolded almost entirely within Czech domestic football — Bohemians 1905, Slovácko, Mladá Boleslav, Slavia Prague (briefly, in 2011-12), and three separate spells at Viktoria Plzeň over twenty years. He won the Czech First League with Plzeň in 2014-15 and the Czech Supercup the same year, and in his third Plzeň spell (2023-25, signed at 71 as the league’s oldest coach) he engineered consecutive deep European runs: a Conference League quarter-final in 2023-24, and a Europa League round-of-16 berth in 2024-25, an extraordinary outcome for a small-budget Czech club. That late-career Plzeň reinvention was what put him on the federation’s emergency shortlist in December 2025.

The appointment itself was a panic move. Ivan Hašek — the manifest’s listed manager — had run the squad into the ground across an underwhelming autumn 2025 window, with the federation reportedly losing the locker room before pulling the trigger and dismissing him after Czechia limped through their final qualifying matches in second place. Assistant Jaroslav Kostl oversaw a meaningless 6-0 win over Gibraltar in November 2025, and Koubek was confirmed on 19 December 2025 on a two-and-a-half-year deal, the oldest first-time senior international coach in modern UEFA memory. The remit was simple: get to the World Cup via the March 2026 playoffs. He did. The 2-2 first-leg draw with Republic of Ireland in Prague went to penalties (4-3); the 2-2 final against Denmark four days later also went to penalties (3-1), with Højlund, Dreyer and Jensen all missing for the Danes.

His tactical philosophy is genuinely old-school. Koubek’s preferred shape is a 4-2-3-1 in possession that defends as a back-five via the wing-backs (often 3-4-2-1 against superior opposition), with two big bodies in midfield (Souček and either Provod, Bucha or Sadilek), Schick high, and the goal-creation funneled through set-pieces and direct vertical balls. His Plzeň teams led the Czech First League in set-piece goals scored two years running, and the same pattern has continued at international level — seven of the Czech Republic’s 22 qualifying goals came from set-pieces. He has been openly humble about the limits of this Czech generation, saying in his first national-team press conference that “we are not Croatia, we are not Belgium, and we will not pretend to be.”

Koubek’s relationship with the squad is paternal and somewhat distant — he is sixty years older than Hugo Sochůrek, the teenage Slavia reserve he plucked into the preliminary squad — but the senior players speak highly of his clarity. Souček, Coufal and Schick have all credited him with restoring a defensive structure that had fallen apart in the final months of Hašek’s tenure. What’s at stake for Koubek personally is not legacy in the conventional sense — at 74, his coaching career is essentially complete regardless — but a strange, late-life chance to author a tournament chapter for a country that has not been at a World Cup since 2006. If Czechia get out of the group and reach the round of 16, he will retire as a national hero. If they crash out winless, he will retire anyway, but quietly, and the federation will move on to a younger, more European-style appointment.