đź“… ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 30 October
In British football, a goalkeeper wandering upfield for a late corner is a rare spectacle. Dimitar Ivankov, born in Sofia on 30 October 1975, made the penalty spot part of his job description, and I will admit I had no idea such a career existed until I read up on him.
What happened on this day
Ivankov came up through Levski Sofia's youth teams and played 275 games for the club over nine seasons, scoring 25 goals. He became captain and a favourite of the crowd, won the Bulgarian league three years running, from 2000 to 2002, and lifted the cup five times between 1998 and 2005. In June 2005 he moved to Turkey to join Kayserispor, where he made 94 league appearances and scored six goals, and in the 2008 Turkish Cup final, which stayed 0-0 after extra time and went to a shootout that finished 11-10, he saved three penalties and scored two himself. A month later he signed for Bursaspor, where he scored a 95th-minute goal against Fenerbahçe and won the Turkish league in 2010. He then moved to Cyprus, to Anorthosis Famagusta, which he joined in June 2011 and left on 8 August, by agreement with the club, after two Europa League matches and its exit from the competition.
On 4 April 2010 he scored his 42nd goal, every one of them a penalty according to Bulgarian Wikipedia. On the pages I checked, that makes him the highest-scoring European goalkeeper on record and, on the Bulgarian list of penalty-scoring keepers, third in the world behind Rogério Ceni of Brazil (69) and José Luis Chilavert of Paraguay (46); count goals of every kind and he drops to sixth, and the English page, to be fair to anyone settling a pub argument, calls him sixth in its opening and third further down. I did not know anyone kept a league table of goalkeepers' penalties, but apparently they do. For Bulgaria he won 64 caps, the first in 1998; he was in the squad at Euro 2004 but did not play, behind Zdravko Zdravkov, and made his last appearance on 3 March 2010, Bulgaria's national day, in a friendly in Warsaw that Bulgarian Wikipedia records as a 2-0 win for Poland.
Why this matters for British expats
Shumen has a footnote in the season of Ivankov's first league title. In 1999-2000, with Levski taking the championship, the club from Shumen was in the same top flight. It lost three points for failing to turn up to a home match against Slavia Sofia, which one would have thought was the easy part of hosting, and the game was awarded to the visitors 3-0. Ivankov himself has no Shumen link on either of his pages, so I will not claim him, but by the following season the city's club was one of four replaced in the division.
Sources and further reading
The career summary draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Dimitar Ivankov and its English counterpart, which disagree usefully on where his 42 goals rank. The cup final, the penalty table and the league seasons come from further English and Bulgarian Wikipedia pages.