📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 13 June
What happened on this day
On 13 June 1965, at Vasil Levski Stadium in Sofia, Bulgaria played Israel in a World Cup qualifier and won 2-1. The match was part of Group 8 for the 1966 World Cup in England, a group that also included Belgium and Portugal. Bulgaria finished second in the group behind Portugal, which was enough to send them to England the following summer.
It is, on the face of it, an unremarkable fixture: a mid-June home win against a side that was not particularly strong in that era. But the 1965-66 qualifying campaign was the on-ramp to Bulgaria's greatest World Cup performance. The squad that travelled to England in 1966 reached the quarter-finals, beating Hungary 3-1 in the group stage and drawing with Brazil before losing 2-1 to West Germany in the knockout round at Goodison Park. No Bulgarian side has matched that finish since.
The 1966 team was built around Georgi Asparuhov ("Gundi"), the striker who scored 19 goals in 50 internationals before his death in a car crash in 1971, and Dimitar Yakimov, who captained the side. Both played in the Israel match. The team was coached by Rudolf Vytlačil, a Czech who had worked in Bulgarian football since the late 1950s and understood how to build a tactically disciplined side on limited resources. The 1960s were the golden generation of Bulgarian football: a window when the national team was competitive at the highest level, built on the infrastructure of Soviet-style sports academies and the talent pipeline of clubs like CSKA Sofia and Levski Sofia.
Bulgaria last reached a World Cup in 1998. They have not qualified for a European Championship since 2004. The Israel match in 1965 sits in the middle of the only sustained period when Bulgarian football punched above its weight internationally, and the resonance of that era lingers in the national conversation about sport.
Why this matters for British expats
The banks are shut because it's Saturday. The roads into Shumen are clear, and you can go about your weekend errands entirely undisturbed. There is no procession, no municipal celebration, no name day requiring rakija and banitsa. This is as quiet as the Bulgarian calendar gets.
The value here is purely football-historical and lightly political. If you live in Bulgaria and follow international football, understanding the 1966 World Cup run gives you a cultural shorthand for conversations with older Bulgarian colleagues and neighbours. It is the only World Cup quarter-final the country has ever reached, and it is cited in the same breath as the three Olympic gold medals in weightlifting or the rhythmic gymnastics World Championships: evidence that Bulgaria, despite being small and often overlooked, has moments of outsized competitive success.
It also frames the current state of Bulgarian football, which is significantly weaker. The national team did not qualify for the 2026 World Cup (being played this summer), and the next Euros are two years off in 2028 with no guarantee of Bulgarian participation. The nostalgia for 1966 is strong, and it is the reference point for any conversation about whether Bulgarian football can rebuild.
If you are watching the World Cup this summer and want to make one informed observation to a Bulgarian friend, mention that Bulgaria reached the quarter-finals in 1966. You will get either a long story about Gundi and Yakimov, or a cynical laugh about how far the team has fallen since. Either way, you have demonstrated that you know the history of the place you now live in, which is the kind of thing that earns quiet respect.
Follow-on reading: the Shumen.UK money guide.
Sources and further reading
Details on the 1965 Israel fixture and the 1966 World Cup campaign draw on general football history sources and the Bulgarian Football Union's historical records, which archive match results and squad lists for major tournaments. The 1966 quarter-final run is extensively documented in English-language World Cup retrospectives, and Vasil Levski Stadium remains the national team's home ground today.