Ferenc Puskás (1927-2006) 

The Case For: 

'The Greatest Ever'

***** The Hallmark Titan Rocket Magic Herald Player at Mastery at Three Dynasties *****

'The Greatest' All Time Top Ranked National Teams (update 5.8.2021) source: www.eloratings.net
All Time Rank	Nation	Max Elo Points	Peak Date Set
1. Gold	Hungary (captained by Ferenc Puskás)	2231	July 4, 1954
2. Silver	Germany	2223	July 13, 2014
3.Bronze	England	2216	Nov. 9, 1912
No. 4	Brazil	2194	June 17, 1962
No. 5	Spain	2165	June 23, 2013
No. 6	Argentina	2160	April 3, 1957

'The Greatest' All Time National Top Division Zenith League Goalscorers The International Federation of Football History & Statistics (update January 5, 2022)  source: IFFHS World's Best Top Division Goal Scorer - Wikipedia
All Time Rank	Star Player	Nationality	Goals
1. Gold	Ferenc Puskás	Hungary	511*
3. Silver	Cristiano Ronaldo	Portugal	487
3. Bronze	Lionel Messi	Argentina	475
No. 4	Imre Schlosser	Hungary	417
No. 5	Gyula Zsellengér	Hungary	416
Puskás was banned from playing by FIFA for 18-months for his defection from Hungary from 1956-1958.
'The Greatest' Ferenc Puskás & Sándor Kocsis at Budapest Honvéd (1950 - 1956) The Greatest Strike Duo in National Top Division Football History source: Positional Hall of Fame: The Greatest Functional Lines of All-Time (xtraimmortal.blogspot.com) Budapest Honvéd Players Total Matches Total Goals Goal Ratio Sándor Kocsis 176 217 1.23 Ferenc Puskás 164 163 0.99 Combined Game Statistics: 340 380 total goals 2.22 gls./game

Ferenc Puskás

The World's Greatest Goalscorer & Soccer's First Superstar

www.Puskás.com       

        Once there came a man from very humble origins who pursued football's horizons during times severely tried by the calamities of the 20th Century and as by some vast undivided magic played together with the greatest players of the ages on fabulous teams modern as any who helped make European, athletic and sports history and who universalized the greatness of two titanic renowned teams of all times.

       IF the sport of association football is keyed to the tenor of the ruling goal on a perfectly functional team to decide a match's result not necessarily possession, then there was no other more historically influential, game-changing and efficient powerhouse top-flight offensive star player in the game than Ferenc Puskás.  Puskás is still considered the most eminent national and national top division goalscorer unified in the sport.   As a golden master records-making goalscorer Puskás was somebody who rows somewhere far on a sojourn to set in the sky high scoring numbers, records and historical precedence.   But scoring goals is not everything but also conceived in well versed team participation rejoicing with high skill and a decided playmaking presence for players who could excel and perform well with others and for Puskás there is a centerstage to that praise being recognized as one of the very greatest 'players' the sport has ever seen.

       The annual FIFA Puskás Award well receives those players who have scored the most 'aesthetically significant' or most 'beautiful goal' in a calendar year.  Puskás was honored for being named the top national 1st division goalscorer in the 20th century by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (I.F.F.H.S) in 1997.  He was also the greatest goalscoring varsity national player of the century who ever lived, scoring 83 goals in 83 matches for Hungary and the sheer breadth of his output showed just how immense and indeed Olympian an athlete's scope legitimately can be.   

     Under a radio and newly televised world of roaring cheers and whistles of the greatest ever sides known, wholly in the midst of goalscoring prowess shouts three dynasties, Budapest Honvéd, Hungary and Real Madrid that forever changed and revolutionized and dominated football and Puskás' amazing goal-striking élan, needful to teams as elemental gist, became the greatest top-tier offensive player of the ages.  And yet no action of any contemporary or other future player is as so well efficient as the incomparable skills of Puskás.               

       Knowing Puskás we can view 20th Century football in perspective for Puskás is the great master player whose teams most completely indicated the ways and the times in which football turned from the traditions of much earlier times to the new mode in the second half of the century; and only Puskás holds the proud distinction of being on three of the most hailed and renowned teams of all time: mighty Budapest Honvéd (1949-1956), Hungary (1945-1956) and Real Madrid (1958-1967), the latter two have remained, for many, the greatest teams to be seen in all the records of the sport and the two principal teams of all time. 

      Puskás showed like a banner his resilient and contriving wit that caught sport-defining and all-time greatness as new football ages and history to Puskás' constructions went as captain of the near invincible 'Golden Team' that announced and instructed a new era at the historical moment of the rise of new tactics and the sport's re-invention in the early 1950s.

        Among the old 20th Century lanes and paths at forward inside-left all postwar and 'modern football' took its cadence from a man named Ferenc Biró Puskás as the game found the tremendous power stroke as the captain of the near invincible Hungarian 'Golden Team' that pronounced 'socialist football' chic and as the main goalscorer at Real Madrid, Puskás' extraordinary career flashing between gold levels presided over dream teams of the most elevated players and illustrated what it was to play the game accurately as a vision of joy and perfection.

       Very few players had careers or stories to tell quite like Puskás for a number of occasions.  In all that reporting of his career a common thread in playing days that made him unique, simply that there is an air of the precious about almost all that he did, a glinting Midas touch, everything he touched on the field turned to gold in his life's work.  Puskás only played on three teams: Budapest Kispest-Honvéd, Hungary and Real Madrid, three teams that were to take turns in dominating his life amid their greatest flowering in golden periods of their own with an elegant yet fiery competitor with gracious outgoing manners whose career crackled with re-inventive life.

        Three parts of the gigantic oeuvre of Puskás at Kispest-Honvéd, Hungary, Real Madrid and beyond as one who distinguished himself favorably in managing teams on five continents, Puskás' life runs into many stories and Puskás' own personal journey is an entire odyssey.  Not far from the roars of duty on the pitch Puskás was also somebody famously known to a great many people having managed on five continents and his coaching career takes a different telling.             

         It is no more in the legends than as if in some colossal drama all along post-bellum football history everywhere on victory's geography and conning the sport's new times Ferenc Puskás was athletic, extrovert, a rigorous player so strong and right of great craft from whom every jot of greatness unfolded from the large Cold War politics of the late 1940s, the entire football revolution made real by a new race of outdoor athletes with the 1949-1956 'Magical Magyars' to 1958-1966 Real Madrid's peerless compositions, top-flight football seemed to culminate to its crowning stage and set records still untouched and altogether unreached.

       How little the formative years sometimes tell about an individual's potentialities is exemplified by the fact that Puskás, who was known as Öcsi ('Sonny' or ' Little Kid Brother ' pronounced: Uhchee) in his youth were he mastered the game with a liberated intelligence and talent during the war years would lead a life of creativeness and wit, be involved in three of the most stupendous matches of the century from start to finish immersed in the atmosphere of the sensational that caused him to be ranked among the most celebrated players of all time and become a great sports figure of the classic past.  Three of his games where he was the chief participant, the 6-3 win over England where he scored two goals and made two more, the 1954 World Cup Final match (the world championship decider where he opened and closed the scoring with two goals) that lived under a cloud of suspicion and the 7-3 win over Eintracht Frankfurt in the spring of 1960 where he scored four goals are among the best ever done.   

The Greatest National Trio of hammering goalscoring bravado Players with 100+ Caps and 30+ International Goals (rsssf.com)

Hungary 2 : 0 West Germany  (Puskás 6', Czibor 8') 8th minute Hungary 3 : 3 West Germany  (Puskás 6', Czibor 8', Puskás 87') 87th minute July the 4th 1954 | 1954 World Cup Title Game

     Soccer's Scoring 'Bambino', Folkloric Great Legend, Tournament Extraordinaire, Horatio Alger & Coaching Ulysses

        In pouring goals with a streak of physical rhythmic élan there is the inexhaustible fund of buoyancy with Ferenc Puskás on jaunts of crowning growth of matchless world-famous teams who run the race of fame, conquering their field of aim, endowed them with the glows and glories of cosmic and dynamic features.  Puskás' potent, felt, interior command has the quality to strike deep who built one thing after another with a remarkable talent through him the current and index of three superber risen teams that will rank as defining sport-changing powerhouses equal or better than the greatest sides known.

        A whole generation will best remember Puskás as a great master player associated with five prestigious European Cup ('Champions League')' title matches while paired with iconic club players Alfredo Di Stéfano and Francisco Gento at star-spangled Real Madrid.  Playing alongside Di Stéfano and Gento from 1958-1964 Puskás was primarily the best and most effective topflight goalscorer on the 20th Century's highest ranked top league team and by their insatiable passion and ability to draw many dashes of brilliance in the business of leading men by their hardworking talents made these three energetic masters of the sport all time eminences.  With three such famous steerers piloting events who met problems and dealt with solutions to set things right and doing the kinds of things that others could not and showing more always going to exultant brilliant deeds Real Madrid reached superb heights and came in for an insuperable pre-eminence over teams at the Bernabéu Stadium that defined the greatest league 'home-field advantage' in sports' history.

        Another generation will joyously recall Puskás for his goals and enduring exploits with Budapest Honvéd and the Hungarian 'Golden Team' while teamed with Sándor Kocsis, Nándor Hidegkuti and Ferenc Deák.  There alongside Hidegkuti and Sándor Kocsis, Puskás formed the most powerful and greatest scoring trio and winning partnership in all international soccer history.   Superlative big wins with Hungary in 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955 and 1956 became a revelation to the people of some great ecstatic sports order and were so shapely and heralded victories a whole new reinvented vision, an entire new conception seemed contained in those games that football became stronger, richer and more varied.  

     At Hungary a new socialist health takes hold of the Hungarian team primed with new plot and rhyme as manager Gustáv Sebes rebuilt it with a finer forge of goal besetting tactics and a good bulwarked defense that ran the footballing world for six years that stood like a star-studded team of hammering goalscoring bravado and here Puskás' game was national happiness managing heroic feats with the highest rated national team of all time.

      Of the crowds of great teams who came and went aloud in the raptured ears of men beheld Puskás' Hungarian 'Golden Team' within the circuit of European football there entering a seven-year reign of a national Hungarian side that was peerlessly the best team of them all during a doctrinaire and the most extravagant and cavalier age of football, but Puskás and his strike partner Sándor Kocsis transformed them as 'statistically the greatest ever'. 

      At Hungary, a great deal of their success located Puskás to be the center of most things involving the team as a sharp operator both on the field and off with a fine grasp of public relations.  The indisputably star player was the uplifter of an already great Hungarian side who drove his teams with a demanding love for winning to heights unrivaled and raise their minds to brave thinking that gave spur to his country's post-war football flowering.  The quintessential fact is that with Puskás at the helm Hungary became the most powerful footballing force in the world that lost a single game in six years.            

       Continually bringing his returns and sending the scoring sunrise out of these teams Puskás and not another player is the one that helped unclench the gates to five European Cup title matches so that no team ever afterward could proceed to match his last team the century.  Before Puskás, Real Madrid had won the first three European Cups after the competition opened, after his arrival and on his retirement in 1966 the Real Madrid team would win three more European Cups plus twice runner-up title game silver medals in the tournament and a 1st division 'world championship' in 1960 and Puskás after that had become all the way a bona fide Legend who has kept his record place at top-division scoring ladders.       

          What a momentous and imposing 22-years of footballing pleasure for Puskás with Kispest-Honvéd, Hungary and Real Madrid, his donnée glory-bound, they were to enjoy an honor of world-class nonpareil teams of acme strength as Puskás, brisk wielder of speed and the ruling goal, unbound the old defensive spell by his superior lambent shoots along a wide circumference of talents and skills and into untraveled records and great forever legends.  Whether at Honvéd, Hungary or Real Madrid they enter the world 'the greatest' as Puskás quite unsheathed the old heat at forward inside-left as none had or has before.  Rivaling teams seem talent-hindered characters caught in unstopped teams perfecting the game and casting a real reckoning with a hail of scores all who played alongside him picked up magic in his nearness, the man of center inside situations who helped build glories their longevity.

        This football symphony-maker, this conspicuous student of the game, this teacher of athletes, this organizer of huge teams eternally floating solutions played far off into the match and confronted it with swing and improvisation with the eyes of the craftsman and artisan so that power streamed out of him.  For Puskás, who captained Kispest-Honvéd and Hungary, Real Madrid joyfully meets a new translation as a strong scoring flair plays ever through them for they have found nothing mightier than Puskás who once led Real Madrid in scoring for five straight seasons and had 25 or more goals each full campaign for six years beginning from his first in 1958 and disported the most strong drive cast from a left foot — the great thunderstone that gave upon the sylvan scene a stunning accuracy quick to return a score, the whizzing cannonball intoned with relish that splits the defense.       

      Magnifying and applying comes 31-year-old Puskás, the old camerado, and there joins a group of superior circuit at Real Madrid who have passed their prelude.  Putting in higher claims for greatness and a new tangible good, their strong football tenoned by Puskás-Di Stéfano-Gento, a swift-streaking full-sized engine speeding with superstars for Puskás it was a new superbly rising apex.  Making appointments with all great first-division sides abroad or at home at the Bernabéu Stadium they are the sierra of football launching a top-division verve that stands leagues off anything that came before or after.        

Famous sports hero 'Pancho' Puskás in May of 1962 prior to the 1962 European Cup Final versus great Hungarian manager Béla Guttmann's Benfica in Amsterdam.  Puskás in the title game would go on to score 3 big goals and take a 2-0 and 3-2 lead at halftime for Real Madrid.  Puskás holds the all-time record for best goal ratio in the European Cup ('Champions League') past 35 scores with 36 goals in 41 matches (0.878%)

      At the Bernabéu, like no three alike in Puskás-Kocsis-Hidegkuti at Hungary, Puskás-Di Stéfano-Gento (1958-1964) were a belaureled story and they were rare, century-wide talents foiling others with a long stretch of losses in a world-record 121 (Feb. 1957- March 1965) undefeated league matches in sports history's greatest franchise 'home-field advantage' —  the unalterable winning pathos charged with sensational Puskás, Di Stéfano, Gento in rugged fluid spaces in the make of the prodigious Real Madrid mowing the endless duplication of 121 back-to-back undefeated league home matches as an all-time unsurpassed historic achievement.

     Relishing well their streak here they separate from other footballing men to produce the team electric of a side that shall grow athletically great and far more astonishing from what anyone supposed.  It is here in form, plan, union, plain excellence seeing it through the vigor of the names of Puskás, Di Stéfano, Gento amid bloomings of glory ever-returning spring for six years that hit the sports world with their ripe renown.  Here visiting sides are taken and tossed where they pull the exceedingly superb playing wires with all the sweet questionings at midfield to set an emblazoned zone for the clean favored legended press of Puskás-Di Stéfano-Gento as visiting teams were scorched by the hot scores of the greatest and most decorated strike trio of them all playing out the winning lightning, the perfect top-division order trusted to Puskás-Di Stéfano-Gento. 

     At the Bernabéu, with the sternest defense on earth led by the great José Santamaría, the legendary instant defensive conductor all over the game signifying sureness the team unfolded undefeated home seasons for the world-record eight years.  With Puskás, Di Stéfano and Gento raking the broad field with reverent feet and with the last conquests of their eye, out of the talented dimness of every side opposite equals the Real Madrid magnificent advance in picture perfect pride and original energy drilling imagination right through the opposition with sweet speed — the journeywork of the stars in football's perfect day — as the whole well-wheeled harmonious landscape rang and Victory looks gigantically up. 

     Or to announce by all the world's press a fifth consecutive European Cup title superb and strong and portray the dreamed-out game in the spring of 1960 and finding himself in the center of football pomp never superseded upon or fighting the uneven fight in the 1954 World Cup finale (his second goal and equalizer being the most marvel of all) where botched refereeing and reputed doping spelled the loss against a West Germany team that changed the course of European and world history.

'The Greatest' Duos of All Time

       Or to famously assail the world sport's high estate in 1953 in London to rousing adoration in his 10th career year in the 'Match of the Century' where old legendary football victories spread by a formidable world-renowned English side that put all the rest of world football in the shade and who had much practice and great talent to receive opponents when they come, there, at Wembley Stadium, the English possessors of history's stoutest greatest and long-fabled 'home-field advantage' of classic legends rare and old since organized football first began in 1863, Puskás, with an eye for the unique situation leading his heralds fired the goal heard around the athletic world in the sport's first new powerful and spectacular manifesto and produced a game-changing titanesque masterpiece prophetic of the future that now all 'modern football' can date from it — perhaps the very best of games played last century were the ones played by Puskás.

      Warmed by dazzling mastery, the air is blue and prodigal and filled with victory's perfume with the three teams Puskás was on broadening outward as they crossed and recrossed the pitch calling out for gain and in the activity and destiny of eleven performers where the good and the best and the legended move fantastically, the art is long, turning loose the system of practiced skills for the new maneuver and the unconsciously coordinated acts and upsprang the perfect team.  Game after game with strict inscrutable élan the three teams Puskás played for sparkle hot, outlasting all and were not detainable, kept creations at ease and moved more ways than one amid the palings of their rivals.  All fashion of opposing defending unable to douse the old witty one-two-three as Puskás chanced upon the spot and with his rotund body's full consent rend open the candescent heat, the cannonball's unavoidable straight beam over decades of the thoroughly dominant.  

     In all that proud old soccer world last century strong upon him is the life that is always in sight of the perfect team and here would be salvation and all the wisdom they'd ever need.  To roll the thunder from his vigorous left-foot, to see that power is folded in wondrous interplay, to conquer Europe and the world with another exceptional team after the Hungarian 'Golden Team' amid a renewed showered acclaim was the folkloric legend of Puskás.  Here were teams that legend could sing of as a paragon of vitality bringing infectious happiness directed by a wily uomo universale of renaissance dreams who became a runaway star and the very best player in the world.       

Ferenc Puskás with English pioneering legend Arthur Rowe, manager of Crystal Palace and advocate of 'push and run' football and Alfredo Di Stéfano in 1962.   Arthur Rowe was employed in Hungary as a consultant and manager in 1938-1940 and also gave a series of lectures on the merits of the 'WM' system.
Top Division Tournament Extraordinaires All Time Best Scoring Efficiency in the European Cup (Champions League) by Goal Ratio (min. 35 goals)
Rank	Star Players	Goals	Matches	Goal Ratio
1. Gold	Ferenc Puskás	36	41	.878
2. Silver	Alfredo Di Stéfano	49	58	.845
3. Bronze	Lionel Messi	120	149	.805
4.	Ruud van Nistelrooy	56	73	.767
5.	Cristiano Ronaldo	134	176	.761
6.	Robert Lewandowski	73	96	.760
7.	Eusebio	46	65	.708
source: http://www.worldfootball.net/alltime_goalgetter/champions-league/tore/1/ Real Madrid's 'Very Best and Greatest' Major Players by Goal Ratio (minimum 171 total goals) (Update 5.5.2021)  Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Real_Madrid_C.F._records_and_statistics Real Madrid Rank Star Player Total Goals Total Matches Goal Ratio Year Active 1. Gold Cristiano Ronaldo 450 438 1.03 2009-2018 2. Silver Ferenc Puskás 242 262 0.92 1958-1966 3. Bronze Alfredo Di Stéfano 308 396 0.78 1953-1964 No. 4 Hugo Sanchez 208 282 0.74 1985-1992 No. 5 Karim Benzema 277 555 0.50 2009-present

        Puskás is both extraordinary in the main theme of his world-famed classics that are among the most colorful parts of the mid-century and in the volume of his output and succeeded in catching the flavor of a time and place in European history the sport shall never see again.   Puskás was probably closer to the essential character of the proud high noon of the post-bellum 'Golden Age' of association football than anybody else that played the game, and he is considered one of the great originals among footballers and perhaps the best ever—Puskás, immortal on all rosters as an animator of forces of style that would serve as a model for many generations.

     The remarkable career of Puskás stretched across the whole modern post-war period and showed how a truly great player can reflect the varying developments of his age yet maintain an unmistakable individual sovereignty, unique and inimitable.  His games were massive, elemental, becoming wonder games of the age demanding depth and insight.  Puskás also remains incomparable also since his scoring streaks set him apart from all others and found in him all the livable lessons of life and football.   A hundred anecdotes celebrated the great sports star and authentic folk hero in exile.  As a player who was never bought or sold in his life Puskás spent his entire career at the very topflight of his profession that seemed to raise his game to a sublime level.    

     It has been well said that Puskás, the man, the great player with the eminent position in the field, the legend, and his life and times considered together were in many respects unprecedented.  Puskás often enters the conversation of where the greatest footballers ought to be lodged in the sport's pantheon of all time.  The roster of the greatest would include men who have shaped football's affairs as well as imprinting their potent influence on national and club-level productions and be outstanding among players beyond the prowess of the average soccer player.  Not many players have had the versatility, enduring career stamina and lastingness, prolific quality and the knack for the spark which notifies championship outcomes, all of which belong to Puskás.

     If debate for being the greatest ever player is plainly laid to figures for most goals at the highest levels both in the club and the international game and not to be estimated in any way by other criteria 806 career official goals would epitomize a very top honored place in the sport’s hallowed iconography.  Puskás was the most significant top-flight forward football ever saw both in top national leagues in Hungary and Spain and nationally. 

     How tremendously quick Puskás was able to conclude things very fast with his rippling single footedness that, in the least, there were a towering 806 total official goals by this happy man's confrontations with goalkeepers during his 22-year career with an unidextrous feel that prized out the tightest defenses.  Puskás' assured urbanity, smartness and energetically inquisitive intelligence during the game's commotion coupled with a superb effortless command of his left leg put away all doubt that, as a player, Puskás was found worthy of being in the top four players who ever played the game. 

     Football history's fourth player to surmount 800 official career goals, a benchmark for very elite status, was achieved by Puskás and he is the only player in history to have scored in an Olympic Final (1952), Central European Championship Final (1953), World Cup Final (1954), European Cup Final (1960, 1962), Intercontinental Final (1960) and who also scored four goals in two 'Matches of the Century' with England.  

"The World's Greatest Goalscorer", an exhibit to an exceptional player, Ferenc Puskás, at the National Football Museum, Manchester, United Kingdom, 2015.

        During a busy decade of a difficult rebuilding world in the post-bellum era, in the arc light and formative glow of nascent mass media with a global reach and increasingly networked newswires at the dawn of live television that meet audiences as never before made possible a new kind of connectedness and a new kind of culture which we call mass or popular culture.  Around this time Puskás became the game's first superstar both at franchise level and in the world game who foreruns the likes of Alfredo Di Stéfano, Pelé, Johan Cruyff, Diego Maradona and it was Puskás who first spoke to and for this new era as football was being reinvented and telecommunications effectively shrank the world. 

      Mustering game-altering scores and prolific like the first and all-time greatest American baseball player Babe Ruth (the 'Bambino' who scored a world record 714 homeruns) Puskás never did acclimate to using his nondominant right foot for much except to dribble and wired to command a luscious control of the ball and he also scored few goals with his head.  But he more than made up with an on-field generalship and a deep cerebral reading of the game as a daring highly competitive genius.  He had a keen footballing brain to match his otherworldly accuracy.  He had intuition with extra sensory awareness to grasp other sides' nuances with novel thinking and an encompassing eye in less than fifteen minutes of play by issuing a stream of instructions to orient his team and in his younger years often yelling at players many years his senior as a 'playing coach’ solving ever-changing game vistas on the run. 

      Mentally striding in to take the lead Puskás became an expert in the management of matches that revealed his calling as the darling 'golden boy' of the system in communist Hungary.  Many thought that no one had a keener relish for the texture of the game than Puskás whose agile intellect grasped knowledge hungrily and who came with a precocious talent at an early age making the national team all of eighteen as a supreme possessor with a heroic scoring indulgence on the ball that succeeded in catching the eye of Europe.         

        Much of what Puskás would come to stand for was determined long before his playing days at Real Madrid.  Before the post-war 'Golden Age' of football in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s properly declared itself, Puskás, armed with his rhapsodic talent, matchless whistling fastball and insights in the Budapest Kispest team before he reached ripe manhood's brink of twenty-one years showed his true worth and dazzled with a dividend scoring 50 goals in 31 matches in the league to lead all players in the world.   At present by the 1948-year Puskás had set the current of opinion that he had qualified as one of the elites in the game.  His well-known journey at Kispest-Honvéd saw Puskás score 358 goals out of his 350 games that effected an immense enlargement for the club's international prestige and elaborated a climax of Honvéd as the finest club side in the world before Real Madrid and the Brazilian Santos and already an initial career like this would have culminated with a first entry into Europe's pantheon of all-time greats.  Confronted with the question of how he came by way of these instruments and knowledge, many would later conclude it was by sheer genius.  

Under the coaching tutelage of world renowned Béla Guttmann in the 1947-1948 Budapest Kispest team, Guttmann's only management year at Kispest after replacing Ferenc Puskás Sr. as coach before it became the Army sponsored Honvéd in 1949, Puskás would have his most advanced and breakout prolific scoring year with 50 goals in 31 league matches to lead all players in the world.

       Perhaps the strange, foreign, narrow, rigid socialist world in which he lived was constructed to provoke the rebelliousness latent in Puskás' spirit.  Later estranged from his homeland due to the reprisals that were the fallout of the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolt and what might have awaited him for his refusal to return from abroad, and unconnected with interests in politics as Puskás was, he took that step that constituted a temptation to many, defecting from Hungary which owes its origin to his desire to escape the vindictive post-Revolt oppression that followed back home.

        The biggest name in Hungary and the pride of the 'Golden Team' had become a persona non grata by the communist authorities in Hungary after his defection and he was given an 18-month ban from playing by FIFA by demands of the new post-1956 Revolt Hungarian communist regime.   Interspersed with problems of adjustment which faced him in language and customs, Puskás was adrift and languishing in exile his career and fortune apparently behind him but had decided to remain a player and who dreamed of going back to be the greatest, he was determination's totem.       

Continued Below

Former FIFA President Jules Rimet pays homage to two great Midas-players, the greatest player in the world, Puskás and Gyula Grosics, the greatest goalkeeper in the world, prior to the kickoff of at 1954 World Cup Final.

By late 1954, Puskás has become the world leader for international goals that he achieved in the 'Match of the Century'.  Another great example of how great and influential 'The Galloping Major' was, by playing in a heavily publicized prestige friendly on a sensational night under the bright lights against Billy Wright's Wolverhampton on Dec. 13, 1954, Puskás' Honvéd helped inspire in the European Cup ('Champions League') itself the following year in 1955.

'The Greatest' Puskás, the greatest goalscorer in history with Real Madrid teammates José Santamaría, recognized as one of the greatest centerbacks in history and Alfredo Di Stéfano who was the greatest club player of all-time.

'The Greatest'

Three legendary and dazzlingly learned master craftsmen of the game on the 'Team of the Century': unquestionably the most talented and greatest club strike trio of all-time: Di Stéfano-Gento-Puskás (1958-1964). Football history's greatest, the most decorated forward line with 14 won European Cup titles between them, the three would combine for 437 goals together in just six years. At Real Madrid, Di Stéfano (five-time European Cup winner), football's greatest club player and top-tier tournament extraordinaire, would score 307 total goals out of 396 matches and Puskás (three time European Cup winner) would score 242 goals out of his total 262 matches. Francisco Gento is the only man to have won six European Cup titles as a player.  "The Greatest Ever" on the highest rated franchise team of last century.

     On the wrong side of thirty and serving an 18-month ban from FIFA, Puskás, the famous epicurean was now mostly thought out of shape and in the twilight of his playing days.  He has the capacity for change and sought to understand his new environment which molds the local mind and soon rose out of limbo and found himself in the employ of the greatest club and one the richest sports institutions in the world, Real Madrid at the height of its powers to begin a second consecutive and stunning double career. 

      By far the best considered players among the supreme to play in Europe last century were Puskás, Alfredo Di Stéfano, Johan Cruyff and Diego Maradona.  From the other far side of Europe would come Puskás to meet Di Stéfano, the greatest club player of all, on the same side in a storied centering of two iconic careers to begin another adventure in his second act, and a stander on high, the best of the two winningest, important, and quintessential teams in history cannot be told anyhow without Puskás. 

     Real Madrid's "decade of dominance" from 1956-1966 of which Puskás was a major part (from 1958-1966) is considered by historians to be the greatest era for any national top-division team that saw them enter eight European Cup championship title games, winning six major world trophies; and amid some of the fulfillments of the greatest 1st division offensive line (Puskás-Di Stéfano-Gento-Kopa-Rial) ever concerted massive with conjoining power advancing the due series and an unbending defense contending to excel led by a defensive superstar of the game, José Santamaría, made them the most famous team in the world.      

        Like the 'Magical Magyars', in 1958, Puskás found himself on a perfectly lauded, superbly destined, rightly charged sport-shaping team in Real Madrid, a full-dazzling side victoriously careering through the Spanish league and the newly minted European Cup for the solid prizes of the game, winners of the first three European Cup titles, a new team dominating previous ones driving the strong works amid vistas of glory just as positive and real as the 'Golden Team' of the 1950s.        

        The team that Puskás joined (1958-1967) were to splendidly press forward with glad scoring, pacing miles and miles each game with undeniable skill, health and power to five European Cup ('Champions League') title matches and five national championships.   Replenished with new-found powers and vastly fuller with the joy of the increase of the solid roll of prolific and vital Puskás, the team, receivers of new scoring stamina, put Real Madrid on a perfect equality or better than any other nonpareil franchise in history and become a grand producing land of the sport.  

       At a time when players think of retirement, Puskás faced a daunting challenge of learning a new language and culture in the distinct new world of Francisco Franco's Spain at variance with the communist world from where he was coming.  But with the gift of confidence and the right mental attitude Puskás soon endeared himself to everyone around him.  Most importantly he gelled with on-field boss and great Argentine star Alfredo Di Stéfano, the greatest player in the world at the time who was never the easiest man to know and who could be distancing to those he failed to get on with.  The driver at Real Madrid when Puskás arrived was Di Stéfano, then the regular captain of the team who was a man enthroned and who could really make the team perform.  With ego and cheek being part of the charm, Alfredo Di Stéfano, was the most determined and best footballer in the world this side of Puskás who dominated life at Real Madrid that won the European Cup the first three times after the competition opened. 

       But at first Puskás who earned a life of the most perfect satisfaction at Honvéd and Hungary as captain could not feel so fully in harmony with his new enterprise.  Having carried Honvéd and Hungary to heights never reached before, would his career be convertible towards far loftier activities abroad?

Joyous and winsome 'Pancho' Puskás training to be fit as a fiddle three days prior to the 1964 European Cup Final match.

       His joyous appetite which he has very well developed commonly fetches him and after early frustration with his weight in his first season, Puskás eventually loses the pounds and started scoring richly so that by the final game of the season against Granada he was on even terms with Di Stéfano for goals with both men neck-and-neck atop the league scorers' table.  In his unique situation and realizing he needed to gain a close acquaintance and the friendship of the great Argentine star, in one scene during the match against Granada, Puskás, who neglected little opportunity to knock it in himself when the net was open to him, took the occasion to lay the ball off for Di Stéfano to score as a thing worth doing to foster happy concord with the brilliant willful player considered by many the best in the world.              

      This well-rounded gesture and great personal deed where Puskás' regard for Di Stéfano outran his own competitive nature made Di Stéfano that year's top league goalscorer.  Puskás was every hour a gentleman and to love the public, to be a master of a nobler mind with a life-affirming substantial hospitality was Puskás.  The great Real Madrid team began to recognize that they were meeting the real Puskás for the first time and once more he is the new person drawing towards greatness.   

       Soon Puskás reached the right physical condition and again became a sunshot revelation cutting the jocund scoring sparkle with that peerless left foot soon scoring a greater number of goals than Di Stéfano himself to earn a high and prominent place in a talented constellation of Galácticos.  A particular image of the player went with such panache and Puskás’ nicknames in Hungary of 'Galloping Major' and 'Öcsi' (Sonny) now affectionately were termed into the Spanish 'Pancho' and was also given the impressive name of the 'Little Booming Cannon' as he assumed a position of foremost rank among the great players in the advanced and sophisticated game that Real Madrid practiced. 

       Club football scarcely attained such status of dominance than that of Real Madrid during the late 1950s and 1960s when Puskás played for them.  The years at Madrid exposed a Puskás increasingly chiseled to meet the physical demands on a world-renowned side in a second blooming of success near middle life who is working his passage to the center in a modern commercially oriented age and grew lean while he assailed eight seasons to become Real Madrid's best major player weighed by goal-ratio of the century.  Winning five Spanish championships along with way Puskás became a four-time Pichichi Trophy (the Spanish Primera División's top goalscorer) incandescent forward in tandem with Di Stéfano to form the basis for the greatest double act world club football has ever seen and became illustrious among the players at Real Madrid.  Many came to understand that the major goalscoring star in that constellation of talent was Puskás. 

      Here Puskás offered his style to everyone and helps tell them their destination.  By 1967 at the time of Puskás' retirement this Real Madrid team seemed to rebuff the remainder of the sports world with the conquered fame of heroes advancing on real ground toward the measureless ocean of greatness that took the ostensible applause and exaltation of the world for men have found nothing mightier than they were.  With Puskás who once led Real Madrid in scoring for five consecutive seasons and with many great players of talent safeguarding the enchantment the team pierces through the stock of previous great sides and becomes an awakened enterprise.  Soon the prizes they sought are won.  By 1966, their fame reverberates through the grandest scenery of all sport that all men knew to be true, they were "The Team of the Century".     

       Duly the great eleven appear in public in the proud and passionate city on the great team that has no conceivable failures that loss cannot touch at home and proceed the eleven around their well-beaten Spanish and European counterparts for six years; completer, dauntless, masterful, ample, never-surpassed, forever forward, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, a sunny race of footballing men, peals of goals dart out of them like dreams' projections.  They are ultimate in their own right, well-possessed of themselves where talent is impossible to feign and knowing the perfect fitness of things, the haven of sophistications.  There is something relentless in their fate as lusty confidences and the flush of the known game is in them, the errant ball to seize, then the splendor of the ball falling in where it is wanted, playing a swift sport through the air, advancing out of the sides or undergoing stratagems of movement and bursting through in un-looked for directions with transfers and promotions and sudden rightnesses the colloquy is there, the trio, Puskás-Di Stéfano-Gento, the ball conversing with the learned men of the game far fitter than words can describe.  With sudden gleams they pass, score and are gone to swiftly pass picturesque groups of teams, journeyers in uniforms of pure white over eight consecutive seasons undefeated at the Bernabéu. 

        Audiences throb to the brains and beauty of them thrilling works on the pitch as if no danger shall balk the practiced and perfect team sailing buoyantly over the roofs of the footballing world and all its records.  Projected through time, they soar above everything before or after and have gone forth among the legends through regions supreme.  A vast camaraderie interlocks all, they were dynamic men, debonair, wholly excellent and admirable.

       If Di Stéfano kindled the engine as the 'starter' to the Real Madrid team and paved the way with his sumptuous zigzagging moves in broad zones Puskás was the sizzling 'finisher' with the final responsibility of leveling the cannonball shotmaking after breaching the final lines.  Together with the inexhaustible Di Stéfano scooting obliquely high and low between the goalzone and midfield, he and Puskás produced a giantized image of Real Madrid complete with fantastic examples of each on the pitch that made Real Madrid incontestably their own to an apparently endless series of victories at home.  He and Di Stéfano formed the 'card school' in the clubhouse making sense in and among themselves to clean up against the younger players on the team and transmitting the same type of reckoning charge on the field who settled into a friendship ritual at the end of won matches of 'keep-away' playing the ball back and forth among them to wound down the game clock. 

      From February 17th, 1957, to March 7th, 1965, Real Madrid achieved the world record, one-hundred twenty-one continuous league games undefeated at home that transported Real Madrid into an utterly different kind of club. 

       With the Puskás & Di Stéfano double portrait at Real Madrid like the unrivaled duo of Puskás & Sándor Kocsis at Hungary whose constant blaze was undone in 1956 with their defection, the team could prevail legitimately as history’s finest and most successful club enterprise that made home audiences see successive scenes of these two great standard-bearers exuberantly pulling every team astray with as much gusto and zest as could be had on rich running days.   With Puskás, who stood sole among men for most international goals with 83 with the Magical Magyars, audiences again saw a never-surpassed team invincible to the whole of the rest of the footballing earth possessed by all the ingenuity of every team's dream's celebration.        

       Imbued as they are with this genius aplomb in the midst of it all is Puskás at forward inside-left fronting the west and east end of the pitch as a marvelous athletic pillar; and here Puskás was considered the indispensable man of campaigns helping bequeath to Real Madrid a bevy of European Cup title match appearances, five in all, three of which were won by Real Madrid, including one that begot the famous 7-3 rout of Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960 and a "top division franchise world championship" in 1960 to win once more over the whole world's renown.  Certainly, in that most famous world franchise-making European Cup finals in 1960 Puskás maintained his magical power and old divine strength and registers a sophisticated sense of a master goalscoring legend that sensational 1959-1960 season (scoring 49 goals in 38 total matches, 1.29 goals/game) and to record the second half of his life at Real Madrid is to record his re-acquisition of world-class status and his transformation into a public living legend. 

        Ever unspent in his stride from one far summit to another in the great tradition of the European Cup during the time he played for Honvéd and Real Madrid, few players have put such an indelible imprint on tournament events as Puskás had.  A resounding trait associated with Puskás was being at his imaginable best in the biggest of games where his inescapable goalscoring flair and virtues stood confessed and he seldom seemed to have missed anything, scoring 42 goals in 47 matches in all top-division European tournament games and the quality of that work was always superior.   Particularly in these extravagant top-echelon games Puskás had given out the most singular performances and produced so accurate a stretch of goals of serious dreaming intensity that he became the all-time tournament leader in the European Cup for goal-ratio past 35 scores, an achievement still unmatched in the field. 

        The quintessential fact that Puskás set the thing that is the supreme, casting the pulses of the indispensable scoring to vivify all and unclenched the gates in the European Cup tournament so that no team ever afterward could proceed to match them the century.  Burnt into gold points on the supreme theme of the European Cup Puskás here amazingly scores 36 goals in 41 European Cup tournament matches that he entered and who scored the record, 7 goals in two European Cup finals.  Puskás who in the 1960-61 season scored an everlasting 15 goals in the Copa del Rey in nine matches and scored a Real Madrid record 12 goals in the European Cup also scored a Real Madrid yet-record six goals in a Primera división match and became the oldest ever Real Madrid player at age 38 and 233 days and the team's oldest goalscorer the day that was his very last league game for the team.       

Still at the top of his game, 38-year-old 'Pancho' signing his autograph to Dutch player Kuiver after scoring 4 goals in an emphatic 5-0 Real Madrid rout of Dutch champions Feyenoord in the European Cup in September 1965.

       When the meridian is low in the first leg of the 1965-1966 European Cup on September 8th Puskás scores a goal against Feyenoord in the 1-2 away defeat.  The Real Madrid team would need a superb effort to overcome the strong Dutch champions in the home game played at the Bernabéu and the old legend does something to set a crown upon his lifetime's effort with a kind of valediction and it is a privilege to see Puskás' last aspiring grandeur at the age of thirty-eight in his final major field of endeavor. 

       In his old age of 38 in the late September autumn air the game is crisp, and the match entered a complete emphatic display as Puskás, the old meteor of the team, plays one his greatest ever games and became the epitome of a durable practitioner achieved by his longevity.  There he plays with wonderful vigor and runs without growing weary or faint among the equally earnest and turned on the valves to unswaddle his prize with a sense of familiarity and belonging feeling recaptured at Wembley in 1953 and Hampden Park in 1960.  There the eternal player re-affirmed his Real Madrid legendary status rooted in the franchise's folklore.  The European Cup return match found Puskás more truly and rewarding as ever as the match is streaked with his sunset golds by brilliantly scoring four goals in a stunning 5-0 win that set Real Madrid on the path to its sixth European Cup title in ten years, a sporting feat that took dominion everywhere and helped build for new team a new everlasting reign ending all argument:  Real Madrid became the top division mountain of all time. 

      Still echoing with the lustrous trade when Puskás played for them so liked and popular was Puskás at Madrid that in his testimonial match that was usually accorded players of distinction at Real Madrid after their retirement from the club nearly eighty thousand people attended Puskás' own at the Bernabéu Stadium on May 26th, 1969.  Huge numbers of supporters turned out for the occasion to have the biggest possible send-off when the last applauses waved to re-echoed Puskás for a saying farewell to a great football hero on a Monday evening in one great emotional night against Rapid Vienna for a much fondly remembered legend after nine years as one of the greatest-ever players to wear the all-white strip that brought him a place in the hearts of Real Madrid fans.  Conversely, three days later, the event taking place at the Bernabéu had been Europe's championship Cup Final between Ajax and Milan watched by 32,000 spectators which only speaks of the joyous and warm acclaim by which Puskás was held. 

October 10, 1963, Puskás to play at Empire Wembley Stadium in another "Match of the Century", FIFA XI 'Dream Team' against Alf Ramsey's England team. The occasion  was the 100th anniversary of the Football Association.  To celebrate, the FA  organized what became known at the time as ‘The Match of the Century’. FIFA's first ever XI included the legendary lineup of Puskás, Di Stéfano, Gento, Kopa, Eusebio, Denis Law, Djalma Santos, and Lev Yashin in goal with over 105,000   in attendance.

       Cheerfully tallying life and football and powerhouse that he was a most noble quality of magnanimity to strangers in need was there during, above and beyond his working active years in football parks where he was wholeheartedly supported all his life.  After the 1956 Revolt there were pockets of Hungarian expatriates and exiles in every major city in the West.  While traveling with the team and beyond, he became a veritable consulate for people of these communities ready to lend his support financial or otherwise to those who were most in need that enlarged his character.  Wherever people were interested in aid and alleviation there Puskás, the lavish giver went as charming intercessor as Puskás’ story illustrates a remarkable 20th Century Horatio Alger tale of a generous to a fault player rising to the pinnacle of the game from humble origins from those youth games in the late 1930s.    

     In late 1954 some months after losing the 1954 World Cup both Sándor Kocsis and Puskás helped promote in the European Cup that began in 1955 with a celebrated inspiring encounter (the informal European championship final between Wolverhampton and Honvéd) in December at the Molineux in 1954.      

      Like a proud player who had helped lead the team so long Puskás would retire just as the game was assuming a tone that was becoming more and more conservative and stifling.  For the next quarter century of his life when Puskás was no longer producing on the pitch he was now contributing his time as a coach and as an elder statesman also that made his own earlier work live for younger generations.  He chose a consecutive journey-work life in management with a grand coaching tour that took him to far away clubs on five continents as a citizen of the world. 
     The 1970-1971 year bore witness to Puskás as a marvelous leader again that earned him a reputation for fine teaching.  He memorably guided a modest, distant, unheralded and little-known Greek club, Panathinaikos, with a very nice ordering of wins obtained over big tournament stalwarts to head into the 1971 ultra-prestigious European Cup Final itself that kindled the people of Greece into raptures, this in spite of being given not much of a chance by many and with the most lukewarm of outlooks.      

Puskás, the legend, the icon at the top of this game in 1971 as the head manager of the Greek Shamrocks to prove another journey's gifts: Ferenc Puskás' gleaming season in management with Panathinaikos, a magical European Cup campaign in 1970-1971 that confounded the pundits. Under Puskás' approach and guidance his Greek champion club routed Jeunesse Esch 7-1 on aggregate in the first round then proceeded to defeat Slovan Bratislava 4-2 in the second.  In the quarterfinal Puskás' side outlasted English champions Everton 1-1 on the away goal. In the semifinal the very powerful Yugoslav Red Star Belgrade had his team pinned down 1-4 on goals in the first leg playing away.       In a historic match that resonated sensationally in the whole of early 1970s Greece, Puskás' side reversed fortunes with a 4-1 thrilling late revival in their home stand that many could not believe. They faced Ajax in Wembley Stadium in the European Cup Final on June 2, 1971 and gave their much-heralded Ajax opponents a classic duel till the end losing only 0-2 (one of them an own goal).  Ajax began their run of winning three consecutive European Cup Finals in a row.

       FIFA President Sepp Blatter had seen Puskás play in the 1954 FIFA World Cup Final in Bern.   As an eighteen-year-old Swiss journalist, Blatter was involved throughout the match as a supporting spectator of the Magyars.  In homage to Puskás for what he represented on the field and for enduring personal virtues off of it, Blatter founded in 2009 an international recognition award, the FIFA Puskás Award, meant to ensure Puskás' memory would remain powerful as ever for future generations. 

     In a fulsome life of varied activities as a great player Puskás later became one of more noted Hungarian managers serving abroad whose journeys took him to five continents in the service of successive patrons and towards the end of his life became acclaimed consultant and ambassador to the sport until he retired to his native city of Budapest.  The daily side of him was all common sense, his characteristic response and feeling to life was a oneness to dedication, resilience, a wayward spontaneity and wit that gave as good as he got.  Puskás was one of the most living and appealing figures in recent memory because he expressed with the greatest glow the national dreams of personal freedom in the hearts of his countrymen whom people looked to for statements on the profession and life that gave this arch-player his grace who followed the promptings of his sunny-hearted compassionate sparkle to being the man that he was. 

      Perhaps it was inevitable that the twentieth century should rouse a Ferenc Puskás — a citadel of gentlemanly virtue on and off the pitch — and it was wholly appropriate, therefore, that the Nation's Stadium in Budapest finally bear his name in 2002 that does justice to a remarkable life superbly lived and finally acknowledged, here and elsewhere the greatest goalscorer of all time. 

     Generations of sportsmen labor to possess such greatness of a player like Puskás, in him the start of superior journeys, populous victories, world renown, a footballing herald to give the traits of new footballing ages outlining a history yet to be, a knower of the game, traveler of actions, rapt years and absorbing eras held some so much winning leadership and scoring greatness that he is considered long to be the greatest European player of the century.  

     To have a famous life on the pitch and beyond as a head manager on teams charged with untellable living wisdom, in him the drift of all things golden, giving all the drench of passions for audiences to experience the mystic deliria on many a championship teams entirely redeemed him.  But lovers of Puskás' productivity and prolificness have hailed him as the supreme footballer of all time and so this greatest of players, top-tier's greatest goalscorer, was also the original 'greatest ever player' in the world setting the thing that is the supreme on three teams. 

The greatest carrying the great, Puskás and Lev Yashin hoist up the legendary Stanley Matthews at Victoria Ground, UK (1965) after the winning World Select XI defeat England 7-6.  

The icon, the man, the legend, Puskás with Hugo Sanchez in Munich in 1997 to receive the IFFHS's award for being the world's all time top goalscorer at national top-division league football.