Benfica: a Curse to Rival the Bambino's It is not quite the Curse of the Bambino, but the hoodoo that the Hungarian coach Bela Guttmann put on Benfica in the early 1960s was alive and well on Wednesday when the Portuguese club lost to Chelsea in the Europa Cup final - its seventh consecutive loss in a continental championship match. Guttmann, who died in Vienna in 1981 at age 82, was an itinerant and influential soccer coach. He also spent many years playing in the New York area for teams like the Brooklyn Wanderers, the New York Giants (yes, the cousin of the baseball team, both of which were owned by Horace Stoneham and played in the Polo Grounds), New York Hakoah and the Hakoah All-Stars before he returned to Austria before the outbreak of World War II. Guttmann's older brother died in a concentration camp during the war, but he is reported to have spent the war years in an internment camp in Switzerland. After the war, he embarked on a coaching career that took him back to his native Hungary, and to teams in Italy, Argentina, Brazil, Cyprus, Spain, Greece, Uruguay and Austria. But he had his greatest impact with Benfica in Portugal, where, along with the star striker Eusebio, he took the club to triumphs in the European Cup in 1960 and 1961, first defeating Barcelona (3-2) and then Real Madrid (5-3). The win against Barcelona was the first time any team other than Real Madrid had won the Cup. According to the Hungarian author Peter Zilahy, a little-known fact about those two games is that the five goals scored by the Spanish clubs were all scored by Hungarians who had played for the Golden Team, the Magical Magyars of the 1950s - Ferenc Puskas, Sandor Kocsis and Zoltan Czibor. It was a team that was the first to defeat England in England at Wembley Stadium and lost only 1 of 42 games from 1950-56, that being to Germany in Bern, Switzerland, in the 1954 World Cup (which is also where Benfica defeated Barcelona). After the triumph over Real Madrid in Amsterdam in 1962, Guttmann asked for a raise in pay and was denied. His contract was allowed to expire and he uttered those famous words: "In the next 100 years no Portuguese team will win two European titles and Benfica will never be champions of Europe again without me." (Note that Porto rendered half of that statement incorrect when it won European titles in 1987 and 2005, plus two UEFA Cups. Another stunning coincidence ... the coach of Benfica in 2000 also left in a salary dispute and eventually led Porto to a European title. His name: Jose Mourinho.) Since Guttmann in 1962, Benfica has played in five European Cup finals (in 1963, 1965, 1968, 1988 and 1990) and two UEFA Cup/Europa League finals (in 1983 and this season) ... losing all of them. "Every year when Benfica plays in the Europe they try to get rid of the curse," the Portuguese journalist Jose Carlos Soares told CNN. Any time that Benfica plays near Guttmann's grave, somebody will take flowers. It hasn't worked. One final coincidence: the loss on Wednesday was in the same city that Guttmann invoked his famous curse - Amsterdam. Last weekend, Benfica also let the Portuguese league title slip through its fingers on a late goal by Porto, much like Branislav Ivanovic's looping header that gave Chelsea the Europa League title. "I can't explain it," Benfica goalkeeper Artur said. How can we explain it? There's no logical reason why we've lost two such big games right at the end. We did what we had to do against Chelsea and we just lacked that little bit of luck.