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Josef "Pepi" Bican (September 25, 1913 in Vienna - December 12, 2001) was arguably the greatest Czech footballer ever.
He was born to Ludmila, a Viennese Czech woman and Frantisek, who came from Sedlice in southern Bohemia. Josef's father was a footballer who played for Hertha Vienna. He went to fight in World War I and returned uninjured. However, Frantisek was to die at the age of just 30 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 Komensky school, a Czech school in Vienna. At 12-years-old, Bican 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. When he first joined, he received 150 schillings, but, by the age of 20, Rapid wanted to keep him so much that they paid him 600 schillings.
On one of the few times 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!
As well as being a great all-round player who could use both feet, Bican had great pace - he could run the 100 metres in 10.8 seconds, which was as fast as many sprinters of the time.
On November 29, 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 Austria got to the semi-finals.
In 1937, Bican left Vienna to join Slavia Prague. He played for Slavia throughout World War II. At the same time, 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 September 4, 1949. Incredibly, he was the league top-scorer 12 times in his career.
However, his success did have its downside. Other members of the team became jealous of Bican's success. They called him a number of names, including "Austrian bastard."
After the war, several of Europe's biggest clubs wanted Bican. Juventus offered him handsome terms to join them, but he refused, 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 Vitkovice Zelezarna. In 1951, he joined Hradec Kralove, but, on May 1, 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.
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.
At that 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 Pele?!" Although 5000 goals seems unlikely to be true, the normal practice is to count league goals only. Bican scored 643 league goals.
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 - the grand old man of Czech football.
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