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Splints in the cabin of Sparta. Nedvěd mentioned a difficult chapter in Koller’s career

Today he is a legend of Czech football, the best scorer of the national team, every pupil who decides to crack the football alphabet knows Jan Koller.

But Koller’s football journey was far from always smooth sailing. At first, it actually led randomly from Smetana Lhota to Prague, where a tall young man got a part-time job in a bank that withdrew federal coins from circulation.

At that time, Jan Koller played football for Milevsko in the division. And he got the opportunity to train in Prague with Sparta B team.

There they noticed his atypical abilities and in 1994 they tried him in the league’s A-team.

But Koller’s two-year engagement in Sparta was far from as happy as it might seem at first glance.

“I was looking at icons I knew from TV. Almost all of Sparta was in the national team at that time… At the beginning it was fine. But the problems came when I started playing in the starting line-up under coach Jarabinski,” Koller hinted in Jiná liga magazine that the established stars did not take him to the party. And apparently that is still a very weak expression.

“All this has strengthened me tremendously for my next football career,” Jan Koller also said in the Other League, where he did not want to spread more about his problems in the Sparta cabin some time ago.

The film Jan Koller, which will be released on August 11, also deals more intensively with this bitter chapter. “He had a hard time with the attackers, who were on their heels. You could see that he could play European football, and they were worried about his place and gave him problems,” says Pavel Nedvěd, for example, in the film.

By the way, you can watch a sample from the film in which the Ballon d’Or winner comments on this topic at the beginning of this article. As well as the statement of Roman Vonášek, with whom Koller later headed to Lokeren, Belgium. Or the memory of coach Jozef Jarabinski.

“When I left, the rest of the stars got into it,” says Jarabinský bluntly.

Horst Siegl, who was supposed to be the main figure who did not make life easy for Koller at Letná, commented on the topic for the film.

We will probably learn more in the film Jan Koller, which will be released on August 11. It is an almost two-hour long documentary, which was filmed by the director Petr Větrovský with the two-meter striker and many witnesses and companions of his career.

“John Koller? This is such a story that it’s for a movie. That’s just for Hollywood,” his teammate from the national team, Pavel Nedvěd, winner of the Golden Ball, commented on the story of the good guy from Smetana Lhota.

The film was born, its originally planned premiere was postponed by the covid pandemic. But it will hit the screens in August.

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