THE UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE LEGENDS(Ep.8) - Chijioke Bernard Onyekwere

 

 

Ferenc Puskás- Does these names ever sound familiar?Ferenc Puskás.Many of us must have wondered why the scorer of the most beautiful goal over the past year is always given the ''Puskas Award'',and reading this now you will be thinking if it is the same Puskás.There is only one Ferenc Puskás,and so yes,he is the one.Arguably the greatest player Hungary has ever produced,Puskas played 180 La Liga games and scored 156 goals.He won the spanish top scorer award four times.Born 2 April,1927,he was widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time.

 

He won the Olympics in 1952 and led his nation to the final of the 1954 world cup where he was named the tournament's best player.He scored 84 goals in 85 international appearances for Hungary.He won three champions league titles with Real Madrid in 1959,1960 and 1966.He scored 514 goals in 529 matches in the Hungarian and Spanish leagues,where he played for Budapest Honvéd and Real Madrid respectively.Between 1943 and 1956,he scored 352 goals in 341 matches for Budapest Honvéd and 156 goals in 180 matches for Real Madrid between 1958 and 1966.He won 10 national championships which include 5 Hungarian and 5 Spanish primera division and 8 top individual scoring honors.In 1995,he was recognized as the top scorer of the 20th Century by the IFFHS.He was declared the best Hungarian player of the last 50 years by the Hungarian football federation in the UEFA Jubilee Awards.In October 2009,FIFA announced the introduction of the ''FIFA Puskás Award'' given to the player who has scored the most beautiful goal over the past year.Ferenc Puskás led the famous Hungarian Golden team to a 32 match unbeaten record.

 

In the champions league the Hungarian maestro scored 36 goals in 41 matches and won the top scorer award a grand total of three times.Puskás also remains the only person to score a hat-trick in two finals and also holds the distinction of being the only player to score a hat-trick and being on the losing side,when Benfica defeated Real Madrid to win the European cup for the second successive season.While  we sit back and watch the younger generation struggling to prove themselves the best,we will have no choice(for the mean time)to declare Ferenc Puskás' achievements as nothing short of legendary.