Background
Mircea David was born in Sinaia, in October 1914. In the summer holiday, his father bought him a football.
Mircea David was born in Sinaia, in October 1914. In the summer holiday, his father bought him a football.
Moreover, he attended the match between the local team California Oradea and Wacker Wien, and he admired the Austrian goalkeeper, Rudy Hiden. This was the reason because he chose to be a goalkeeper.
After a match between Romania and Italy, played in Rome, he was nicknamed by the Italian football fans Il Dio, because of his incredible saves. After a short period of time, Mircea moved, with his family, to Oradea. In the high school, David began to play oina, a Romanian traditional sport, similar to baseball.
After a time, he started to play football with his older friends.
But after a while, bored because he was often selected as a goalkeeper, he refused to play football and he went to gymnastics. Because of that, he started to play football again.
Club career
In 1933, he started his senior career at Clubul Atletic Oradea. In one of his first matches for CAO, he saved seven penalty kicks in a friendly match against Minerul Lupeni.
He continued to play well at his club, where he stayed until 1938, when he was sold to Venus Bucureşti together with his team-mate Augustin Juhasz because the club was in a financial crisis.
In the next season, he repeated the performance. He remained at Venus until 1947, when he left the Bucharest-based team for 23 August a team from Lugoj. Manager career
After his retirement as a player, Mircea David began his managerial career at Football Club Politehnica Iași.
After winning the promotion to Divizia A in 1960, he renounced to be a manager and was appointed as a member in the structure of Romanian Football Federation.
International career
David made his debut for the Romania national football team in October 1936, in a match lost against Hungary. On 14 April 1940, Mircea David was selected in the starting lineup for the match between Romania and Italy, the World Champions.
The match, which took place at Stadio Nazionale PNF, was the game when David became a legend. After a first half dominated by the Italians, David was already a hero for Romania, because of a couple of marvellous saves in front of Silvio Piola and Sergio Bertoni.
Romania took the lead shortly after the break, when Iuliu Baratky scored the first goal of the match.
Despite receiving two goals from Amedeo Biavati and Silvio Piola and being seriously injured after a collision with Sergio Bertoni, David was determined not to give up. He continued to rescue his team by plunging in the feet of the Italian strikers. Until the end of the game, he jumped in air to catch a ball and, after a wonderful save, he felt on the ground and fainted.
He continued to play after awaking and ended the match in the ground.
He was also praised by Silvio Piola and the Italian fans, who nicknamed him "Il Dio".
Quotations: "With Piola as a striker and David in the goal, a manager doesn"t have any problem to win a game".
He was a member of the Romania national football team which competed at the 1938 Fédération internationale de football association World Cup, but did not play any match.