2025/26 winter stocktake: FK Dukla Praha

Amidst a complete top-down overhaul from the owner, sporting director and head coach all the way down to much of the dressing room, Dukla welcomed the year 2026 by losing one more longtime voice on the board (CEO Tomáš Mejzr), having that same new head coach called out publicly by the very same new sporting director (who’d wasted no time in signing a couple more random foreigners) for not introducing any tangible identity, all the while sharing the league’s basement and coming out as the favourite to wrap up the regular season dead last in our winter simulations. Yeah, safe to say, it’s not gone great…

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2025/26 team preview: FK Dukla Praha

In a way, FK Dukla Praha find themselves in much the same boat MFK Karviná were in last summer. They, too, are waving goodbye to coaching from a bygone era — only here it’s condensed into one name rather than spread out like with the Silesians. In its place comes a young coaching staff pledging a possession-heavy brand of football, hoping to facilitate the club’s entire transformation in the process. That would be, crucially, done with the backing of new majority owner Matěj Turek, a 40-something involved in a number of start-ups or fixer-uppers, taking over from soon-to-be 70-year-old Petr Paukner. Fittingly, it was Karviná who issued a timely reminder to Dukla on Day 1: “This won’t be easy.”

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