Amazing Soccer Trivia

Since you enjoyed reading the wild soccer facts so much, here are some amazing firsts:

 Pele, the king of football, is said to have stopped two factions fighting a civil war in Nigeria during the year 1967. Both sides actually held a 48 hour ceasefire to watch Pele play in Lagos! That’s the power of football and Pele!

 Gerd Muller managed to score 68 goals out of the 62 games he played for West Germany.

 Tommy Docherty was sacked as Manchester United’s manager for sleeping with the physiotherapist’s wife!

 Before he joined Barcelona, Luis Figo had actually signed illegal contracts with Parma and Juventus!

 Brazil’s striker Ronaldo was declared the Most Valuable Player of the 1998 World Cup, even though Brazil lost the championship final to France. Ronaldo has also been named World Player of the Year thrice!

 Lilian Thuram is France’s most capped player with 137 caps and 2 goals.

 Hungary has won the most gold medals in the Olympics for soccer since the year 1952!

 Robbie Fowler signed for Manchester City from Leeds United with the understanding that his former team would continue to pay him a salary!

 During the largest soccer tournament ever held, as many as 5,098 teams and 35,000 players competed for the second Bangkok League Seven-a-Side Competition in 1999!

 Germany’s Oliver Kahn is the first goalie to win the Most Valuable Player of the World Cup in the year 2002.

 Brazil happens to be the only country that has made an appearance in every single World Cup final! And it is also the only country to have lifted the trophy five times.

 The fastest goal in a World Cup match was scored by Czechoslovakian Vaclav Masek after just 16 seconds into the game against Mexico in 1962!

 American Bert Patenaude was the first to score a hat trick in World Cup history while playing against Paraguay in 1930.
 Sweden’s Erik Nilsson and Switzerland’s Alfred Bickel are the only players to have played in a World Cup before and after World War II. They both wore their national team’s World Cup soccer jerseys in 1938 and 1950!

 Germany lost two World Cup finals in 1982 and 1986, making soccer uniform number 11 Karl-Heinz Rummenigge the only captain to have lost two finals!

 The first own goal during a World Cup was scored by Paraguay’s Ramon Gonzales in a first round match against the United States in 1930.

 Soccer legend Eusebio scored as many as 46 goals in the European Cup for his team Benfica!

 The fastest hat trick was made by Hungarian Laszlo Kiss during a match against El Salvador in 1982. He scored during the 70th, 74th and 77th minute of the game, which also makes him the only substitute to have ever scored a hat trick!

 The largest attendance for a soccer match saw a whopping 199,854 fans turn up for a match played by Brazil and Uruguay during the 1950 World Cup at the Maracana Municipal Stadium at Rio de Janeiro!