Rómulo Cortez (born 1942) is a Bolivian former football coach and player. Starting professional football at 17 with C.D. Jorge Wilstermann of the domestic league, he took part in first-ever Copa Libertadores, the premier club tournament for South American countries. He played his only game with

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

during the 1967 South American Championship. Cortez was joint top scorer in the 1968 American Soccer League with 10 goals for the Washington Darts, sharing the honor with teammate Gerry Brown.

Coaching career

Plying his trade abroad in Germany and North America (for the Washington Darts), Cortez began to develop an interest in coaching, doing courses in Mexico and Brazil as well as training in Spain, getting a master's degree in sports science in Germany. Later, the former footballer coached a host of clubs, including top teams in the

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where he won individual awards. Managing the Maldives national team on their

1998 FIFA World Cup qualification The 1998 FIFA World Cup qualification competition was a series of tournaments organised by the six FIFA FIFA#Structure, confederations. Each confederation — the Asian Football Confederation, AFC (Asia), Confederation of African Football, CAF (Afr ...

campaign, Cortez led his charges to a poor run of results, losing 17–0 to

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...

in the first round, 12–0 to

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twice in the second and fourth rounds, and 9–0 to Iran again in the fifth. Including 3-0 and 6–0 defeats to

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in the third and sixth rounds, the combined scoreline in their campaign was 59 goals conceded. In response, the Bolivian stated that half his players wanted to quit following the first fixture as they were timorous about possible traducement from their supporters back home and said that the situation was unfair. Hired by the Real Cochabamba Football Academy board to become their technical director and manage their under-15 and under-17 squads, Cortez also was instructed to use his experience to teach their coaches in 2011. Expatiating and dilating on the state of Bolivian football, Cortez explained that it requires fundamental knowledge of the game, both technically and tactically but lacks professionals and that 95 percent of coaches are former players. Back in 2014, the former coach proposed a project for the restructuring of Bolivian football, which included ideas for a unified amateur second division and a creation of a coaching school; he also specified that the Bolivian Football Federation should be the only body responsible for managing the national football team.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cortez, Romulo 1942 births Living people Bolivian men's footballers 20th-century Bolivian sportsmen Bolivia men's international footballers Bolivian football managers Maldives national football team managers Bolivian expatriate sportspeople in the Maldives Men's association football forwards Expatriate men's soccer players in the United States Club Always Ready players Bolivian expatriate sportspeople in Spain Bolivian expatriate sportspeople in West Germany Bolivian expatriate sportspeople in the United Arab Emirates Bolivian expatriate men's footballers Bolivian expatriate football managers Expatriate men's footballers in West Germany Expatriate men's footballers in Spain Expatriate football managers in the United Arab Emirates