Lobanovskyi left Ukraine national team after the side failed to qualify for the 2002 World Cup, losing to Germany in the play-offs. Under his predecessor Yozhef Sabo, the national squad consisted almost exclusively of Dynamo Kyiv players. Lobanovskyi, despite his own obvious connection with Dynamo, initiated into the national squad many players outside of Dynamo. Anatoliy Tymoshchuk and Andriy Vorobey (from Shakhtar Donetsk), Dmytro Parfenov and Maksym Kalynychenko (from Spartak Moscow), Oleksandr Spivak (from Zenit St. Petersburg), Volodymyr Yezerskiy (from Dnipro) and Andriy Voronin (from Mainz) were all either initiated or given their first starting spots in the national team during his tenure. Together with the Dynamo generation of the late 1990s (Shevchenko, Rebrov, Husin, Vashchuk, Shovkovskyi) these players were to form, after Lobanovskyi's death, the core of the team that reached the 2006 World Cup quarter-finals – the first and only time Ukraine has ever qualified at the World Cup – managed by Oleh Blokhin who had worked under Lobanovskyi for 13 years as a Dynamo Kyiv and Soviet Union national team player. Death Lobanovskyi had to deal with health issues since 1988, when he suffered his first heart attack. Having come back from the Middle East in 1996, Lobanovskyi looked in a visibly worse shape. He suffered a second heart attack in the autumn of 2001, which required surgery. In 2001, Lobanovskyi missed all away games of Dynamo Kyiv in Champions League due to hypertension and being banned from travelling by air. On 7 May 2002 during Dynamo Kyiv's game against FC Metalurh Zaporizhzhya, Lobanovskyi fainted and was hospitalized with a stroke. Lobanovskyi went through a brain surgery and his health was rated as critical. The press, which regularly monitored Lobanovsky's state of health, wrote that there was hope, but Valeriy Lobanovskyi had not regained consciousness. His heart stopped on 13 May at 8:35 pm. At the Champions League final in Glasgow two days later, UEFA held a minute's silence in his honour. Lobanovskyi's funeral on 14 May 2002 was attended by the President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine's Prime Minister Anatoliy Kinakh, other politicians, Lobanovskyi's former players Andriy Shevchenko, Oleh Blokhin, Igor Belanov, Oleksandr Zavarov, Serhiy Rebrov etc. In general, from 60.000 to 150.000 people attended the funeral. Lobanovskyi was buried at Baikove Cemetery. The tombstone is adorned with a colonnade with the inscription in Russian We are alive as long as we are remembered (in original: