📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 10 October
After CSKA beat Barcelona in a Christmas friendly in 1970, the Dutch coach Rinus Michels, who took charge at Barcelona in 1971, is said to have wanted to open talks for Petar Zhekov, born on this day in 1944. The authorities in Bulgaria did not allow the transfer. That one sentence tells you a good deal about being a star striker in communist Bulgaria.
What happened on this day
Zhekov was born in the village of Knizhovnik (kni-ZHO-vnik), in the foothills of the eastern Rhodopes, 15 km from Haskovo. He started out as a defender at Himik Dimitrovgrad, moved to Beroe in Stara Zagora in 1963 and joined CSKA in 1968. Bulgarian Wikipedia counts six A Group top-scorer titles, the first with Beroe in 1967, and his 36 league goals in 1969 won him the European Golden Boot, the first of three Bulgarians to take it. With CSKA he won five league titles and four Bulgarian Cups. He scored 253 goals in the A Group, the national top flight, a record until Martin Kamburov passed it on 13 September 2021.
For his country he won 72 caps and scored 50 goals. He was one of 22 players picked by the Czech coach Rudolf Vytlačil for the 1966 World Cup in England, where he played one match, and in Mexico in 1968 he captained the Olympic side to a silver medal, scoring four goals, with a coin toss settling the quarter-final against Israel. Eighty-four goals in the calendar year of 1968, 24 of them in unofficial games, is the kind of tally that would have English tabloids inventing a nickname. In that Barcelona friendly he scored twice in a 4-1 CSKA win. He scored 23 goals against Levski Sofia, 12 for Beroe and 11 for CSKA, and on 27 May 1971 he played for a Europe XI in the farewell match of the Soviet goalkeeper Lev Yashin, and scored. In 1996, at 52, he was registered with Beroe again and played six games in the lower B Group, scoring three. He died in his sleep at 78, and his death was announced on 18 February 2023.
Why this matters for British expats
If you follow football, Zhekov is a good name to have ready in a Bulgarian café, and the British hook is the 1966 squad that came to England for the tournament English football treats as its own. In Haskovo province he is more than a name: the stadium in Knizhovnik carries it, and at the village festival on 2 August 2010 it unveiled a golden boot that Bulgarian Wikipedia says earned a Guinness record as the largest ever made for a person. Shumen does not appear in any of the pages I read, so that link is a blank. When he turned 70 in 2014, the Bulgarian Football Union sent no greeting and no representative, and he said he was surprised; he did get a Golden Ball from Press Club Bulgaria and a plaque from the sports ministry, and a children's sports festival was held in his honour at the Bulgarian Army stadium.
Sources and further reading
The career and records come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Petar Zhekov, checked against the English entry. The village details come from Bulgarian Wikipedia's Knizhovnik page and the Olympic tournament details from English Wikipedia's 1968 Olympic football page.