📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 6 June
What happened on this day
On 6 June 1979, at the Vasil Levski Stadium in Sofia, Bulgaria beat England 2-0 in a European Championship qualifier. Goals from Petar Mladenov and Plamen Markov (not the Markov with the umbrella, the footballer) did the damage. England's defence, which had looked shaky all evening, collapsed entirely in the second half.
The loss knocked England out of the 1980 European Championship. It also marked one of the bleakest moments in the managerial tenure of Ron Greenwood, who had taken over from Don Revie in 1977 and was supposed to restore some dignity to the national team. Instead, he watched his side lose to a Bulgarian team ranked 32nd in the world at the time, in front of a stadium full of fans who knew exactly what they'd witnessed.
For Bulgaria, the win was a statement. The team had quietly built a reputation as awkward opponents throughout the 1970s, capable of making life difficult for bigger nations if underestimated. This wasn't a fluke. Georgi Vasilev and Plamen Getov controlled the midfield, England's back line offered minimal resistance, and goalkeeper Ray Clemence (normally reliable) had an evening he'd rather forget.
The British press called it a "disaster". The Daily Mirror ran a headline wondering whether English football had hit rock bottom. It turned out rock bottom was still a few years away, 1980s England would produce a string of tournament failures and hooliganism scandals, but the Sofia defeat is remembered as the moment the myth of English invincibility finally died in the Eastern Bloc.
Why this matters for British expats
The banks are shut because it's Saturday. The roads into Shumen are clear. If you're planning a weekend trip to Sofia, the Vasil Levski Stadium is still there, a short walk from the centre, and still hosts the national team. It seats 43,000, and on match days the atmosphere is exactly what you'd expect from a city that remembers beating England.
The value here is purely cultural. Football is the one domain where Bulgarians and the British meet on genuinely equal ground, and the 1979 match is a touchstone. If you're the kind of expat who enjoys pubs, you will eventually end up in a conversation about football with a Bulgarian colleague or neighbour. Mentioning that you know about the 6 June 1979 result earns you a flicker of respect. It signals you've done the homework, you're not just here for the cheap property and the sunshine, and you understand that Bulgaria's football history includes moments of genuine triumph over the old powers.
The broader lesson: British sport assumes a certain gravity, England expects to qualify, to advance, to be taken seriously. The 1979 defeat is a reminder that other countries remember the upsets far longer than the British do. Bulgarians of a certain age will know this result off the top of their head. Most English people under 50 won't. That imbalance tells you everything you need to know about whose story travels better internationally, and why knowing the local version of history makes you slightly less of a tourist.
If you're watching the Euros this summer and Bulgaria isn't in it (they didn't qualify for 2024, and 2028 is looking uncertain), the 1979 match is the kind of thing worth bringing up over a beer. It's the conversational equivalent of acknowledging that the underdog occasionally wins, and that British football's golden era is more myth than reality.
Follow-on reading: Shumen.UK homepage.
Sources and further reading
Wikipedia records the match as occurring on 6 June 1979, though detailed English-language coverage is thin, most of the contemporary reporting lives in Bulgarian sports archives and British newspapers from the late 1970s. The standard Bulgarian football history references draw on match reports from the time, including the Sportna Tribuna archive.
The Vasil Levski Stadium's official history includes this result as one of its landmark nights, alongside Bulgaria's other major upsets (beating Germany in 1994, the World Cup semi-final run). For British readers, the defeat sits in the broader context of England's late-1970s malaise, a period comprehensively covered in British football histories like The Football Man and various retrospectives on Ron Greenwood's tenure.