Coaching Career
Luxemburgo started to be noticed as a top tier coach when he led Bragantino, a modest team from the countryside, to the title of the 1990 Campeonato Paulista (São Paulo State Championship). This gave him enough visibility to be hired by one of the top teams in the country, Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras. In 1994 and 1995 he led Palmeiras to win both the São Paulo State and Brazilian championships. When he left in 1995, Palmeiras' performance was visibly affected and when he came back in 1996 the team won the São Paulo State championship again.
After a brief passage through Santos, in 1998 he went to Corinthians and won the Brazilian National League that year. He left Corinthians the next year to join the Brazilian National Team. Different from when he left Palmeiras in 1995, Corinthians still performed at a high level and the team he built won the Campeonato Paulista and the Brazilian National League in 1999 and the Fifa Club World Championship the following year.
Luxemburgo coached Brazil after the 1998 World Cup until the end of 2000 Olympics. Most notably, he is known for centering his play around Rivaldo. In 1999 the National Team won the South American Nationals Championship undefeated. However, he is also remembered for the disastrous performance at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, where Brazil lost 1-2 in overtime to gold medal winners Cameroon despite having a two men advantage in that game. He was often blamed at this tournament for leaving out Romário, who had gone on national television, pleading his case to play in the tournament.
In 2001 he went back to Corinthians and won yet another State Championship. In 2003, he led Cruzeiro Esporte Clube to win the Brazilian National League. Even more impressively, the club managed to win two of the three competitions (the Campeonato Mineiro and the Copa do Brasil) without losing a single match. The following year he led Santos to win the Brazilian Championship.
Luxemburgo also stirred up controversy by having a one-way transmission device on a forward of his club team during a match. He claimed that the Cameroon match inspired him to create a device in order to tell his players where and when to attack. The CBF ruled days later that such electronic devices were illegal, but did not penalize him for using it in that match.
Read more about this topic: Vanderlei Luxemburgo
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