Don Popovic, who came to St. Louis from Yugoslavia to play soccer and stayed, starting the Lou Fusz Soccer Club in 1992 that taught the game to thousands of kids and enhanced the region’s reputation as a soccer hub, died on Monday (Sept. 29, 2025). He was 84.
Popovic arrived in St. Louis in 1967 to play for the St. Louis Stars in the only season for the National Professioal Soccer League, and while he would play and coach in a number of other cities, with no shortage of success, it was St. Louis that he called home. While the leagues he played and coached in, the NPSL, NASL and MISL, are long gone, he left a lasting mark with Lou Fusz, the club he started along with the St. Louis auto dealer whose name it bears. The club became one of the top clubs in St. Louis and now, under the name Lou Fusz Athletic, also has lacrosse and American football teams in addition to soccer.
“We’re trying to create a love of the sport,” Popovic said in an interview on the club’s Instagram page. “All my life I play soccer, and if I started again, I’d probably play soccer. You can’t take this away from somebody. If you love the sport, you will do anything to help the kids and to help the soccer.”
“Salt of the earth,” said Jim Leeker, a teammate of Popovic on the Stars and now the head of the St. Louis Soccer Hall of Fame, which Popovic was inducted into in 2004. “I could ask him anything, he’d give me a straight answer. He was very congenial, would never turn you down. If anyone came up to him, he was your long-lost cousin or nephew and he was a father figure. He had a way with the kids. He always called St. Louis home. He fell in love with St. Louis.”
Popovic was born in Berane, Yugoslavia (now in Montenegro), and started his pro career there with Red Star Belgrade and Hajduk Split before coming to play for the Stars. He was a midfielder with a knack for flash who was known then by his given name, Dragan. He was traded after the 1967 season to Kansas City and returned to the Stars, now in the North American Soccer League, in 1969, also serving as an assistant coach. He stayed until 1971, when he left to play and coach in Canada. In 1973, he played on a Canadian select team in a game against Arsenal.
It wasn’t until 1976, when he became a full-time coach, that he became known as Don. He started in Rochester, N.Y., when the NASL was in its heyday, then joined the fledgling Major Indoor Soccer League, working in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, back to New York and then back to St. Louis with the Storm in 1989. He won four consecutive MISL titles from 1979 to 1982 with the New York Arrows and was named coach of the year in both the NASL and MISL. When he returned to St. Louis to coach the expansion Storm in 1989, he had the second-best winning percentage for a coach in MISL, .684.
Popovic was fired by the Storm in 1992, but didn’t want to leave St. Louis, his wife’s hometown. Fusz asked him to coach one of his son’s teams, and from there the idea grew into starting a club. “I think I’ll get a lot of enjoyment from this,” Popovic said at the time. “In all my years of coaching in America, I did so many demonstrations, camps and clinics with the kids.”
“This will keep him in St. Louis,” Fusz said, “and it will give the kids an opportunity to learn the basics from a highly experienced coach.”
And they did, as the club grew and grew, building fields in Creve Coeur and buying the former Rams training center in Earth City, which includes an indoor field. Lou Fusz became one of the largest clubs in the state, with more than 150 teams in all age groups, and won state and national championships.
“When I stepped in at Lou Fusz as a technical director,” said interim City SC coach David Critchley, “Don was the director of coaching, finishing up his fantastic coaching career. I went to his house a couple of times and he was just kind of updating me on the landscape of St. Louis soccer and the culture and I always remember going to his basement and every wall was just covered in memorabilia, autographs from all the world’s greatest players and teams. A fantastic human being, fantastic for soccer in the entire country, not just St. Louis. May he rest in peace.”
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Tom Timmermann | Post-Dispatch
Soccer reporter
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