FORMER REPUBLIC OF Ireland manager Martin O’Neill has been linked with a shock return to management with Rapid Bucharest of Romania. 

Rapid have endured a disappointing season: having finished second in the regular league season, they have lost seven and drawn one of the eight games in the play-off round. They consequently sacked manager Cristiano Bergodi, with an interim coach, Bogdan Lobonț taking charge of the final four games of the season. This weekend marks the final round of fixtures, after which Rapid hope to announce Bergodi’s permanent successor. 

According to reports in Romania, that successor could be 72-year-old O’Neill, who hasn’t worked since he was fired by Nottingham Forest in 2019. 

O’Neill is reportedly in the picture for the job, along with other contenders Marius Sumudica – a former player and assistant coach at Rapid – and the veteran former Romania boss Mircea Lucescu, who has twice managed the club before, most recently in 2000. Lucescu is now 78, and his most recent job was with Dynamo Kyiv, whom he left last year. 

Taking the job would mark a major departure for O’Neill, as all of his club management jobs have been in Britain. He is also shortly due to take up the role as chairman of the League Managers Association, succeeding long-serving Howard Wilkinson. 

O’Neill was elected to the position ahead of a rival seven candidates, and will take over on 21 May. Wilkinson has been in situ since 1992, having been a founding member. The role did not preclude Wilkinson from working in management: he was Leeds boss at the time of the LMA’s foundation, and remained in that job until 1996, later going on to coach England U21s, Sunderland, and Shanghai Shenhua. 

O’Neill, however, has hinted that his management career is over, recently telling the Telegraph that the Forest job was his final job. 

“I had no idea when I left Forest that it would be my last job in management”, said O’Neill, who also complained at being perceived as an outsider while Ireland manager. 

“I never won over the media”, said O’Neill. “I don’t know why, but I said in my book I was made to feel like an outsider. I was called the Ulsterman, I’ve tried to explain this… just recently I heard an Irish commentator saying we have had outsiders as managers, we had [Giovanni] Trapattoni and we had O’Neill.

“I’m definitely an Irishman. I’ve always considered myself an Irishman. No doubt about that. It does hurt me, of course it does. Deep down, at the end of it all, I honestly felt, from pretty early on, they were almost looking for the team to lose so they could have a go at me.”