The book about CSKA’s head coach and Russia’s national football team manager Leonid Slutsky, written by leading Russian sports journalist and writer Igor Rabiner, proves one thing: it turns out we really don’t know this public figure as well as we think. Just the story of his work at Volgograd’s “Olympia”—from recruiting a group of kids, two of whom later became bronze medalists at Euro-2008, to betraying his best friend and the burned-out coach’s car—is a gripping detective plot. More than a dozen people interviewed by Rabiner—from Slutsky himself and his mother to CSKA president Yevgeny Giner—reconstruct the entire dramatic picture of how a 22-year-old Volgograd graduate student who wanted to teach children to play football became the country’s strongest coach, the first boss in the history of a national team who never played at a professional level. And unique photos from his home archive make the portrait even more complete. This isn’t just a biography, but a documentary novel.