Nikola Milos is Fertiberia Puerto Sagunto’s new coach

Croatian coach Nikola Milos will manage Fertiberia Puerto Sagunto during the second half of the BAUHAUS Asobal season, with the clear aim of keeping the Valencian team in Spain’s top handball division.

Milos (19/07/1956. Gudovac. Croatia) returns to the red-and-white set-up after managing the first team in the 2006–2007 season in Primera Nacional, where he was crowned champion of the Valencian-Catalan Group, although he was unable to secure promotion to the División de Honor Plata, held in Toledo.

Nikola Milos has an extensive career both as a player and as a coach. In 1974, he began his career as a top-level player in the former Yugoslavia, where he played 440 matches for Partizan Bjelovar, winning two League titles and one Cup. In 1985, he moved to the Italian league, playing one season with Conversano and another in Rimini, from where he was signed by the then-powerful Alicante side Tecnisan de Alicante. He played the 1987–88 season there and two more seasons at Altea before retiring as a player in 1990.

His coaching education at the prestigious Yugoslav school and his knowledge of the Asobal league as a player enabled him, immediately after retiring, to coach Cadagua Galdar of Gran Canaria, with whom he secured promotion to the Asobal league. This was his first appearance in what was then the world’s best league, in 1991. After his time at Galdar, he returned to the Alicante coast, where he settled and worked at Altea’s academy and Asobal team. Following a brief spell in women’s handball with Iznalloz of Granada, he returned to coaching men’s teams, notably winning the Group Championship with Melilla in 1ª Nacional. After the aforementioned season with what was then Alser Puerto Sagunto, he managed Villa de Aranda in División de Honor Plata and Cangas in Asobal during the 2009–2010 season. He then retraced the route he had taken as a player, moving from Spain to Italy, where he reached the peak of his career as an elite coach. He managed SSV Bolzano, taking them up to the Italian Serie A in one year and, the following year, turning them into Italian League and Cup champions. In one of sport’s occasional contradictions, particularly in Latin countries, that historic double in Italy was not enough to earn him a contract extension, and he spent a year at Austrian club Bornbach Koflach, which was suffering serious financial problems, prompting Milos to return to his native country. There, Bjelovar, another club facing serious financial and sporting difficulties but the team that had brought him glory as a player, called on him to manage the side altruistically last season, an offer he could not refuse.

According to Fertiberia vice-president for communications Carlos Argente, Milos’s appointment perfectly meets the criteria established by the red-and-white board, as “we were looking for a professional coach who could devote 24 hours a day to the team and who had extensive experience at the highest level. Since Nikola Milos also knows the club, the choice was clear for us.”, Argente says that “we are very grateful for the more than twenty coaching offers that have reached us. For us, this is a sign that Fertiberia is a place where coaches and players want to come despite our limited financial resources.”

On 4 January, Nikola Milos will have his first meeting with his players at the first training session after the Christmas holidays.

Translation produced using artificial intelligence.