Ferenc Puskas played pregnant, teammate Amancio Amaro liked to say. The day he arrived at Real Madrid in 1958, he was 31 years old, 18kg overweight and, banned by Fifa for defecting after the Hungarian uprising, hadn’t played football for two years. He couldn’t possibly go on a pitch like this: signing me is all well and good, he told the club’s president Santiago Bernabéu, but have you seen me? “I was the size of a large balloon,” he recalled and the coach, Luis Carniglia, didn’t know what to do with him either. That, Bernabéu replied, was their problem not his. As it turned out, blessed with a left foot like no other, 242 goals followed, the only problem that he hadn’t come sooner.
Most called him Cañoncito pum! (Little Cannon Bang!), although Alfredo Di Stéfano called him little cannon big belly. That summer Puskas trained wrapped in plastic and woolly jumpers. By the season’s end, he had scored the goal that took Real Madrid to the European Cup final; a year on, he scored four in the final but gave Erwin Stein the match ball. Old when he came, supposedly finished, he helped Madrid reach three more. He scored a hat-trick in 1962 and played in 1964 but when the 1966 final arrived, eight years after he had, it was over. Left behind while they travelled to Brussels, he was in a makeshift cup team facing Betis three days before and 1,000 miles south.
