The famous striker, Ferenc Puskás was chosen the greatest football player of all time.
If you have ever heard anything about football, we are sure that you know who Ferenc Puskás was: iconic Hungarian football player, star of the national team who won Olympic gold in Finland in 1952, and important member of Real Madrid football team.
Well, in Hungary, for the majority of us he still remains the best player of the world, even years after his death. And now, he has been crowned the winner of Goal.com’s online voting called Legends World Cup, after crushing Cristiano Ronaldo for the title. Puskas claimed a massive 69 per cent of the 192,471 votes in the final, which is totally unbelievable and awesome.
Photos: goal.com
Considered an outsider at Goal.com at the start of their 16-man tournament to determine the greatest player of all time, Puskas defeated Dutch master Marco van Basten in the first round, and after that, he beat Argentine icon Diego Maradona in the quarter-finals.
The Real Madrid icon then won a battle against Zinedine Zidane – thanks to the voters – to assure his place in the final. There, he triumphed against Ronaldo with the help of 97,323 Hungarians (a stunning 1% of our country’s entire population) who voted for our national hero.
Why is Puskás still such a superstar?
Even 10 years after his passing, Ferenc Puskás is still a legend. Wherever I’ve travelled around the world, and I was asked about my nationality and hometown, I’ve always heard about the following things: “goulash!”, “ah, Budapest, beautiful city!” and of course the name of Puskás. But why can he be so popular nowadays, as well?
I think partly because in the last decades, the Hungarian football didn’t have as iconic players as the members of the so-called Golden Team were and partly because Puskás could achieve something in the world of football much different from the one we know today, that makes people of the 21st century also admire him and remember his name.