A key product of the Cold War was modernization theory, devised by American social scientists against the promise of rapid economic development promised to Third World nations by the socialist model. Mixed with rapid urbanization and mass participation in political discourse across the Third World, the Cold War rivalry never remained confined to the coordinating towers of great power politics but trickled down to ordinary imaginaries of modernization and assessments of rival regimes, including in popular culture. Such ‘democratized’ imaginaries of geopolitical rivalry often produced eclectic forms for discussing the tenets of global competition. Sport is one such realm of popular culture. The Cold War transformed sport from an urban pastime into a veritable international order mimicking the United Nations, fought between teams competing on behalf of nation-states and ideologies, dramatizing a cultural discourse of modernization where performance levels in international tournaments were taken to reflect the superiority of modes of political organization, as ‘modernization theory in action,’ to use Begüm Adalet’s phrase. This paper focuses on a transnational professional society of soccer coaches during the Cold War. This society gave birth to vernacular modernization theories about sport organization and performance. Through an analysis of discourses on team organization and athletic technique, formed in the transregional traffic of ideas and communication between colleagues across national and geopolitical boundaries, I discuss how soccer coaches created eclectic modernization theories in the idiom of sport, by negotiating the political boundaries of dirigisme and free initiative as they materialized in the athlete’s body and team organization. The presentation will center around one figure: Tamer Güney (1935-2020), a soccer coach and a vernacular intellectual, who went from being labeled a communist to becoming a football development expert for the Turkish Football Federation. I will argue that Güney was key in popularizing an eclectic ideology of “sportive autonomy” that was grounded in his everyday struggles of power against physical educators, who were steeped in statist ideologies as a professional group but blamed by Güney as a dirigiste bureaucratic class suppressing the free muscular plasticity of young athletes. By using the globally circulating categories of Cold War sport such as ‘autonomy,’ Güney contributed to a vernacular historical revisionism about the physical educationist foundations of Turkish nation-building.