Read for 5 minutes22 Jun 2026 07:45 PM IST
When Miroslav Klos came to Kusel in 1986, he knew two words of German. He was eight years old. Miroslav was born in Opole, where his father left Poland to play professional football in France in Burgundy. Now the family was settling in a small town in Rhineland-Palatinate, and the boy who would one day score more World Cup goals than anyone in the history of the game could not yet ask for directions to school.
He learned the language the way he learned most things in those years, slowly, on the ground, without anyone looking close enough to notice it was happening. He played for SG Blaubach-Diedelkopf, a club in West Germany’s seventh division, a level where no one was scouting. During the day he trained as a carpenter. Chaff on his hands, chaff in his hair, the trade that he was good enough at football remained for much of his adolescence, more of a hobby than a plan.
He didn’t turn professional until he was twenty, with FC Homburg’s reserves, an age at which most strikers destined for greatness are already decided. Close wasn’t hired for anything. Then came Kaiserslautern, followed by a 2001–02 Bundesliga season in which the goals continued to flow and Rudi Volker built his team. World Cup In Korea and Japan, carpenters decided to accompany them.
What happened next catapulted him to fame in a way that no one, least of all Close, had planned. Five goals, all of them headers, a hat-trick in an 8-0 rout of Saudi Arabia. Twice he marked the goal with a full somersault, a front-flip he had practiced for years and nicknamed by the Germans: the Salto-Klouse.
He did so again at home in 2006, scoring five more runs and winning the Golden Boot. By then the carpenter’s apprentice had become a German footballer, a Werder Bremen forward who was a sight to behold with or without the ball anywhere near him. Bayern Munich signed him in 2007 and he won two league titles before moving to Lazio in 2011, where he scored five in a single game against Bologna, the first man to do so in Serie A since 1986.
Honesty came in stride, as if he couldn’t help it. At Bremen in 2005, Klose chased the ball into the penalty area, went under a challenge from Bielefeld goalkeeper Matthias Hein and the referee pointed to the spot. Hain receives a yellow card. Klose got up, went to the referee and told him the decision was wrong. The penalty was cancelled. He was then presented with a fair play award and seemed almost annoyed as he was praised for acting the way he thought everyone should act anyway. Seven years later, in Lazio colours, he scored a handball against Napoli, went straight to the referee and told him. The goal was scored. No card. A handshake instead. The same logic applied off the pitch. At Lazio he would immerse himself in an ice bath after every training session. The young players refused. At the end of the session when they saw him collecting bags of balls, they asked why he had trouble. He could not understand the question.
By 2012 he had also made a decision about his knees: no more summersaults. Thirty-four years old, two years out from the second World Cup, and his body had begun to send him receipts for stunts. He mostly followed discipline. In Brazil in 2014, he equalized with Ronaldo for his fifteenth World Cup goal against Ghana, although, last time out, some habits outweighed the resolution against him. Three days later, against the hosts, by a margin of 7–1, he scored the sixteenth goal in a football match that the whole country remembers. A collision in the build-up prevented him from landing properly, so his lifetime record goal was marked by a slide on his knee.
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Germany won the tournament. Klose retired from international football in the final, having helped them to victory, seventy-one goals from one hundred and thirty-seven caps, standing alone at the top of the world game for twelve years.
He is now the coach at Nürnberg in Germany’s second division. Tonight in Dallas, Lionel Messi plays Austria with his record. A goal and it’s been twelve years since Klose topped the list.
When asked about it before the start of the tournament, Klose simply said that the record always goes to someone and he was happy that if it was someone, it would be Messi. Somewhere in that sentence is the same boy who once told the referee that no one would have given the goal back.