In 2011, I traveled from Bucharest to Constanta to interview Romania’s greatest football legend. The meeting was to take place in Ovidiu, the small seaside town 20 kilometers north of Romania’s main port, which Gica Hagi chose to host the most ambitious project in national football since Communism ended in 1989.

After a few stints as a coach with Steaua Bucharest, Istanbul’s Galatasaray and the Romanian national team, Hagi had just started his own club and football academy.

I wanted to know what made him put his time and money in such an uncertain and demanding enterprise just when the country’s most powerful football club owners were on the brink of bankruptcy or about to go to jail.

It was a sunny summer Saturday morning by the Black Sea and he was sitting on the stands watching one of his junior teams face Farul Constanta, a club that Hagi played for at the start of his career. Two years after its foundation, Hagi’s academy was offering training and accommodation to more than 300 children and teenagers recruited countrywide and enrolled in its several junior teams.

It also had a senior side, named Viitorul – The Future in Romanian, formed by young talents fresh from the academy that at the time was playing in the national second division. “I want to support them because I received a lot of support in achieving what I achieved,” Hagi told me during the halftime.

He spoke about Luceafarul, The Morning Star in Romanian, the team created in the late 1970s by the Communist sports authorities to groom the nation’s best young players for glory. Besides making them competitive and disciplined, Luceafarul offered the boys guidance and protection from the dangers that success can pose to tender minds, even under a system like Communist Romania’s, which dramatically limited the rewards and the freedoms of all its subjects.