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Sinisa Mihajlovic died Friday at age 53 after a battle with leukemia. His wife and his family shared the news Friday. The Serbian soccer legend had been forced him to work from the hospital for the last few months while he was coaching Bologna FC, his last club as a manager. As a player, Mihajlovic played for Vojvodina, Red Star Belgrade, AS Roma, Sampdoria, Lazio, Inter Milan and Yugoslavia. He was famous for his incredible left foot and thundering direct free kicks. During his career as a defender he scored over 100 goals and after he retired he immediately started to work alongside his former teammate and friend Roberto Mancini, who was also his coach at Inter Milan. Mihajlovic became his assistant at Inter and then started his career as a first team coach and managed Catania, Fiorentina, Serbia, Sampdoria, AC Milan, Torino and Bologna. 

On July 2019 Sinisa Mihajlovic shocked the world and announced that he had been diagnosed with leukemia. He never left his role as manager and continued to work from the hospital. He decided to surprise his team and the whole soccer community and was on the bench for the first match of the 2019-20 season against Hellas Verona, despite his physical condition. After a positive course of treatment, he came back to the bench the following year. Mihajlovic's second stint at Bologna ended in September when the club fired him after a poor start.

In March 2022 he announced that he needed to restart treatment and his condition worsened in the past weeks before he died in Rome, surrounded by family.

Mihajlovic's legacy is a complicated one. He lived through the consequences of the war in the 1990's in Yugoslavia and was also criticized for his relation with Serbian paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan who he knew since his time at Red Star Belgrade. While he was already living in Italy, Mihajlovic still had his family back in Serbia. He was friends with a lot of soccer players and managers and had a particular friendship with his own former manager Vujadin Boskov, and he always considered him as an example to follow since he started his coaching career. 

When Boskov was the AS Roma manager, it was Mihajlovic who suggested to him that he play a young talented kid in the academy. "We bring this kid with us - he recalled - he's good, if it goes well with us we'll make him debut. We were winning 2-0 (against Brescia) there were 15 minutes left to go, I approached the bench and asked the coach to put him on". That kid was Francesco Totti.

"Goodbye boss, you will always live in our hearts," Bologna said in a tweet.