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Josef "Pepi" Bican (September 25, 1913 – December 12, 2001) was a Czech-Austrian football forward. It is estimated by respected footballing statistics page RSSSF that Bican scored around 800 goals in all competitive matches, not including friendly games. This would make him the all-time most prolific scorer in football history known to date.^[3]

He was a member of the Austrian Wunderteam of the 1930s and was the season's highest scorer in the whole of Europe on five separate occasions. Bican had the ability to play with both feet, he also had considerable pace and was able to run 100 metres in 10.2 seconds, which was as fast as many sprinters of the time. The International Federation of Football History & Statistics awarded Bican the "Golden Ball" as the greatest goalscorer of the last century.

Early life

Bican was born in Vienna to Ludmila Bican, a Viennese Czech woman and František Bican, who came from Sedlice in southern Bohemia. Josef's father František was a footballer who played for Hertha Vienna. He went to fight in World War I and returned uninjured. However, František was to die at the age of just 30 in 1921 because he refused an operation to treat a kidney injury sustained in a football match. His mother worked in a restaurant kitchen. The family's poverty meant that Bican had to play football without any shoes, which helped him hone his ball control skills.

Bican attended the Jan Amos Komenský school, a Czech school in Vienna. Four years after his father's death in 1925, Bican, at 12 years-old, started to play for the Hertha Vienna junior team. As an 18-year-old, Bican was spotted by Rapid Vienna, who were a big club in the city at the time.

Club career

When Bican first joined Rapid, he received 150 schillings, but, by the age of 20, Rapid wanted to keep him so much that they paid him 600 schillings.

In 1937, Bican left Vienna to join Czech club Slavia Prague. He played for Slavia throughout World War II. In eight league seasons he would score 328 goals, including 57 in 24 matches one particular year.

He was in the leagues that he played the top-scorer 12 times in his 27 years career and Europe's top scorer in five consecutive seasons, from 1939/40 to 1943/44 while the most of players and the physically healthful youngmen were in the war.

In the devastated Europe after the war, several of Europe's biggest clubs should have wanted Bican. Juventus offered him handsome terms to join them, but he refused, supposedly after he was advised that Communists might take over Italy. He stayed in Prague and, ironically, the Communists came to power there in 1948. Bican refused to join the Communist Party, just as he had refused to join the Nazi Party in Austria.

Bican tried to improve his standing with the Communists by joining steel works Železárny Vítkovice. In 1951, he joined FC Hradec Králové, but, on 1 May 1953, the Communist Party forced him to leave the city and, therefore, the club. After being forced to leave, he returned to Slavia Prague, or, as it was known then, Dynamo Prague. He finally retired from playing, still at Slavia, at the age of 42 in 1955. He was the oldest player in the league at that time. During this time Bican briefly managed Hradec Králové and Slavia and then was appointed manager of Pilsen.

International career

On 29 November 1933, aged 20 years and 64 days, Bican made his debut for Austria in a 2-2 draw against Scotland. He went on to play for them at the 1934 World Cup, when the Austrian Wunderteam reached the semi-finals. His solitary goal in the tournament came in extra-time in the Austrians 3-2 victory over France.

At the time Bican was playing for Slavia Praha, he applied for Czech citizenship. However, when he eventually became a Czech citizen, he discovered that a clerical error meant he couldn't play at the World Cup in 1938. In total, he scored 29 goals in 34 international matches for 3 teams (Austria, Czechoslovakia and Bohemia & Moravia). His final national team appearance was for Czechoslovakia in a 3-1 defeat against Bulgaria on 4 September 1949.

However, his success did have its downside. Other members of the team became jealous of the tall, handsome Bican's success. He was often called abusive names, such as "Austrian bastard".

Life after retirement

Tombstone of Josef "Pepi" Bican at Prague's Vyšehrad cemetery

In the spring of 1968, Bican was told that he would be allowed to take a coaching job abroad. He impressed the Belgian team Tongeren and they hired him as a coach, where he had some success taking them from Division 4 to Division 2.

Around this time, Pelé was heading for his "1000th" goal and many journalists were looking for another player who had scored a thousand goals. A former German player suggested Bican, who he claimed had scored 5000 goals. When reporters asked Bican why he hadn't made more of a fuss over his goalscoring feats, he simply said "who'd have believed me if I said I'd scored five times as many goals as Pelé?!" However to score this 5000 goals he should have kept an average of 185 goals/year along all his 27 years of career, a fact that would be extremely unlikely to go unnoticed, so counting league goals Bican scored 643^[4].

Josef "Pepi" Bican spent the last few months of his life in hospital with heart problems. He had hoped to be home for Christmas, but died less than 2 weeks before that, at the age of 88.

Trivia

• During his youth career, one time that his mother, Ludmila, came to watch him, she was so annoyed about a foul her son had been on the receiving end of that she ran onto the pitch and beat the opponent with her umbrella.

• It was not only his incredible goalscoring feats that endeared Bican to the footballing public. During his time with Slavia, crowds used to number their hundreds just to watch him train because Bican's training sessions were often more like circus acts - and fans were happy to pay a few korunas to watch him. Whilst the rest of the squad practised routines or ran laps, Bican would turn up with a hamper of empty bottles, which he would proceed to balance on the top of the flat wooden crossbar, spaced about one foot apart. He then stepped back to the edge of the penalty-area, put down a bunch of balls and took aim. One by one from twenty yards Bican would knock the bottles off the bar with his shots, and on a bad day - the story goes - would maybe miss one in ten.

References

External links

• (Czech) ČMFS entry

Austria squad – 1934 FIFA World Cup Fourth Place FW Bican • FW Braun • DF Cisar • GK Franzl • FW Hassmann • MF Hofmann • FW Horvath • DF Janda • FW Kaburek • GK Platzer • GK Raftl • FW Schall • DF Schmaus • DF Sesta • FW Sindelar • MF Smistik • FW Stroh • MF Urbanek • FW Viertl • MF Wagner • FW Walzhofer • FW Zischek • Coach: Meisl