The national team of Bulgaria is the finalist of the 2025 FIVB Volleyball Men’s World Championship in the Philippines and secured a podium finish.
The last time they were on the podium was in 2006, but the last and only time they were in the final was back in 1970, when they earned silver on home ground. In Saturday’s semifinal in Pasay City, Bulgaria outlasted a fighting Czechia in four sets, and on Sunday, they will play against Italy.
Bulgaria broke away a few times in set one, but their abundant serving errors and a fantastic 19-year-old middle blocker Antonin Klimes kept Czechia in the set. Still the southern Europeans pushed on to take it by a five-point margin with middle and captain Aleks Grozdanov nailing the winner. Bulgaria’s 21-year-old outside hitter Aleksandar Nikolov was unstoppable in set two, but this time, with his counterpart Lukas Vasina continuing his excellent performance and opposite Patrik Indra picking up speed, the Czechs took advantage of Bulgaria’s unforced errors to level the score. Vasina closed the set with a powerful block-out shot. Bulgaria continued to take a lot of risk from the serving line and while that did not pay off as much as they would have liked, Aleks Nikolov continued to swing successfully from all sorts of angles and the blockers put in a great effort to lead the team to the set win, with Nikolov closing it with a kill block. The lead changed hands several times in set four, but after 16-16, the Bulgarians got a mini break and no longer let go of their advantage. The winning point came as a serving error by Czechia and got the Bulgarian party started celebrating a 3-1 (25-20, 23-25, 25-21, 25-22) victory. All three scoring elements worked better for the Bulgarians – 56-49 in spike kills, 12-7 in kill blocks and 8-4 in serving aces.
Aleks Nikolov made his best scoring performance so far in the tournament, contributing as many as 31 points towards the victory. He fired three aces, raised one kill block and spiked at a 57% success rate to lead his team to success. Aleks Grozdanov impressed with an 88% success rate in attack and put away four kill blocks and an ace to finish with 12 points. Opposite Asparuh Asparuhov added another 10, one more than 18-year-old setter Simeon Nikolov, who produced two aces, two blocks and five successful swings. “Incredible! I am lost for words… We are medalists of this World Championship and I can’t believe it! Tomorrow we are just going to try to color the medal in gold. But we have a medal, so we are happy,” an elated Aleks Nikolov told VBTV. “It definitely felt like a really good game. I owed it to the guys after the bad start against the US. They pulled me out in that game and we managed to win a great quarterfinal. I had to repay them by playing this game like I did, so I am happy that I could.”