Ferenc Puskás

He scored more goals than he played matches. That is the whole career in one line, and it is true both for his clubs and, very nearly, for his country: 84 goals in 85 internationals for Hungary.

He also lost the most important match of his life, defected from his own country, was banned from football for two years, got fat, and then arrived at Real Madrid at thirty-one to begin the second-best spell of his career.

He was born Ferenc Purczeld on 1 April 1927 in Budapest. His father had played for the local club, Kispest, and later coached there. In 1937 he changed the family name to Puskás.

Ferenc made his first senior appearance for Kispest in November 1943, aged sixteen. His childhood nickname, Öcsi — "Buddy" — followed him through his whole life.

In 1949 the Hungarian Ministry of Defence took over Kispest and turned it into the army team, Budapest Honvéd. Puskás was given a rank and eventually became a major, which is where the other nickname comes from. He was not a soldier in any meaningful sense. He was a footballer whose employer happened to be the army of a communist state, which is also how the national team acquired the best players in the country.

He scored fifty league goals in thirty-one games in 1947–48. On 19 February 1949 he scored seven in one match, an 11–3 win over Győr.

Between 4 June 1950 and 3 July 1954, Hungary went thirty-two matches without defeat. Across a longer window — to February 1956 — the record reads forty-two wins, seven draws and one loss.

Puskás described how they played: "When we attacked, everyone attacked, and in defence it was the same. We were the prototype for Total Football."

They played a deep-lying centre-forward in Nándor Hidegkuti, and nobody in western Europe knew what to do about it.

England had never lost at home to a side from outside the British Isles. A hundred and five thousand people came to watch them not lose to Hungary.

England 3, Hungary 6.

Hidegkuti scored in the first minute, the twentieth and the fifty-fifth. Puskás scored in the twenty-fourth and the twenty-seventh.

The first of his is the one that survives on film. Billy Wright, the England captain, came across to close him down. Puskás dragged the ball back with the sole of his boot an instant before contact, and Wright ran past him into empty grass. Then he finished it.

Bobby Robson, who was watching: "That one game alone changed our thinking. We thought we would demolish this team — England at Wembley, we are the masters, they are the pupils. It was absolutely the other way."

Billy Wright, who had been on the pitch: "We completely underestimated the advances that Hungary had made, and not only tactically."

The return was played in Budapest on 23 May 1954. Hungary won 7–1. Puskás scored twice. It remains England's heaviest defeat.

Hungary went to the World Cup as overwhelming favourites, having just beaten West Germany 8–3 in the group stage. In that match Werner Liebrich tackled Puskás and gave him a hairline fracture of the ankle. He missed the quarter-final against Brazil and the semi-final against Uruguay.

He came back for the final, against the same West German side, and scored after six minutes. Zoltán Czibor made it 2–0 after eight. Morlock pulled one back on ten, Rahn equalised on eighteen, and in the eighty-fourth minute Rahn scored again.

Then, with two minutes left, Puskás put the ball in the net and the referee gave offside. The film has never settled it. Hungary's players said the linesman raised his flag after the referee had appeared ready to allow it.

Germany calls the match the Miracle of Bern. The historian Joachim Fest wrote that it was "a kind of liberation for the Germans — July 4, 1954 is in certain aspects the founding day of the German Republic."

Hungary, the best team in the world, never won a World Cup.

Honvéd were playing Athletic Bilbao in the European Cup when the Hungarian Revolution broke out. They had lost the away leg 3–2, and the home leg could not be played in Budapest, so it was staged at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels. It finished 3–3 and Honvéd went out 6–5.

Puskás did not go home. He did not see Hungary again until 1981.

The squad organised a fundraising tour of Italy, Portugal, Spain and Brazil, then split up. UEFA banned him for two years for refusing to return to Budapest. Milan and Juventus tried to sign him and could not. Manchester United wanted him — Jimmy Murphy, running the club after Munich, was interested — and English registration rules made it impossible.

By the time the ban ended he was thirty-one, out of condition, and the Italian clubs looking at him were worried about his age and his weight.

Real Madrid signed him anyway.

He scored 242 goals in 262 matches, starting at thirty-one.

He won four Pichichis, at thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-six and thirty-seven. He won five league titles and three European Cups. On 4 January 1959 he and Di Stéfano both scored hat-tricks in a 10–1 win over Las Palmas.

18 May 1960, Hampden Park, Glasgow. 127,621 people, a record for a European Cup final, and around seventy million watching on television across Europe. Real Madrid 7–3 Eintracht Frankfurt.

Puskás scored four: on the stroke of half-time, then in the fifty-sixth from a penalty, the sixtieth and the seventy-first. Di Stéfano scored three. Ten goals in a European Cup final is still the record as of 2026, and the match is routinely described as the finest exhibition of club football played in Europe.

Two years later, on 2 May 1962 in Amsterdam, he scored a hat-trick against Benfica and lost 5–3. He is, as of 2026, the only man to have scored a hat-trick in more than one European Cup final, and one of them was in a losing side.

He took Spanish citizenship in 1962, according to Wikipedia, which also credits him with a Spain cap in 1961 — the two do not reconcile and no source checked explains it. He played four times for Spain, three of them at the 1962 World Cup. He did not score. It was his second World Cup for his second country.

He retired in 1966 and went into management, taking Panathinaikos to the 1971 European Cup final — where they lost to Ajax and Cruyff — and later winning a championship in Australia with South Melbourne.

He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2000 and died in Budapest on 17 November 2006, aged seventy-nine. His coffin was carried from the stadium that bears his name to Heroes' Square for a military salute, and he was buried under the dome of St Stephen's Basilica.

Forty-seven goals in thirty-six games at thirty-three years old, in the season that ended with four in the European Cup final.

The twelve rows above add up to 84 appearances and 83 goals. The total line says 85 and 84. Both are Wikipedia's. The same gap appears in Pelé's Santos table, and for the same reason: a career reconstructed from match lists comes out a row short somewhere.

He also played four times for Spain between 1961 and 1962 without scoring.

Wikipedia puts his international rate at 0.99 goals per game for Hungary — first on his country's all-time list, and one of the highest returns in the history of international football.

Individual: Hungarian league top scorer 1947–48 (50 goals), 1949–50 (31), 1950 (25), 1953 (49). Pichichi 1960, 1961, 1963, 1964. European Cup top scorer 1960 and 1964. Ballon d'Or silver award 1960. IFFHS Top Scorer of the 20th Century. Named Hungary's greatest player of the previous fifty years in 2003.

In October 2009 FIFA created the Puskás Award, given each year to the most beautiful goal scored anywhere in the world.

It is a strange kind of immortality — his name attached not to a record or a stadium but to a category of goal, awarded to teenagers in leagues he never heard of. It also happens to be exactly right. What he is remembered for is not the 670 goals. It is a drag-back at Wembley in 1953 that left an England captain running at nothing, in a match that made an entire country rethink what it thought it knew.

The RSSSF counts 802 goals in 792 matches across his whole career, seventh on its all-time list. That is a wider count than the tables above, which cover league, cup and international football and come to 754 in 748; Wikipedia carries a third figure again, 619 in 618 for the two leagues and their national cups. The three do not disagree so much as count different things.

Two years of his prime were taken by a ban imposed for refusing to go back to a country that had just crushed an uprising. He lost a World Cup final with a hairline fracture in his ankle and a goal disallowed in the last two minutes. He arrived at the biggest club in the world overweight and too old, and scored 242 goals for them.

The record of the Hungary team he led — forty-two wins, seven draws, one defeat over nearly six years — is the best any national side has ever put together. The one defeat is the only match anyone outside Hungary remembers.