Hugo Sánchez

Hugo Sánchez

Hugo Sánchez Márquez (born July 11, 1958), popularly nicknamed Pentapichichi, or Hugol, is a Mexican football coach and former striker. He played for four European clubs, including Real Madrid. He was also a member of the Mexico national team, and participated in three World Cups.Sánchez played twelve seasons in the Spanish Primera División and is the second highest goalscorer in the history of that league. He also


played for the Mexico national team for 17 years and participated in the World Cups of 1978, 1986, and 1994. He won the Pichichi Trophy five times, four of them consecutively, a record second only to Telmo Zarra's six trophies.As a coach, he won two championships as head coach of the club Pumas de la UNAM and briefly with Club Necaxa, both teams in the Mexican Primera División. He also had a sixteen-month stint with the Mexican national team, but was fired on March 31, 2008.[1]. Hugo Sanchez has signed up to start coaching again, now in Europe, for UD Almería [1] from the Spanish First Division starting December 29, in an attempt to save the team from descending to the 2nd Division by the Summer. He has succeeded in keeping UD Almeria free from relegation from La Liga for the 2009-2010 season.In 1999, the IFFHS voted him the 26th best footballer of the 20th Century, and the best footballer from the CONCACAF region.[2]As a teenager, Sánchez played for the Mexico national football team in the 1976 Summer Olympics. Having already played in over 80 international games, Sánchez signed as a youth player at the age of 18 for UNAM Pumas, a professional team representing Mexico's National University, where he completed a degree in Dentistry while keeping up his football career. That year, UNAM managed to get its first championship in the Mexican Football League. Two years later, he became top-scorer in the league with 26 goals. In 1979, UNAM agreed to exchange players during the off-seasons with the San Diego Sockers of the North American Soccer League (NASL). The NASL played during the summer and the Mexican League played during the fall, winter and spring. UNAM loaned Sánchez to the Sockers in both 1979 and 1980 where he became a dominant striker for the Sockers, averaging nearly a goal a game.Sánchez' five seasons with UNAM were the team's golden years. In his last season with the team, Hugo again became the top-scorer in a tie with his teammate Cabinho and UNAM won its second championship and the CONCACAF Champions Cup.After five successful seasons in Mexico, with 99 goals to his name, Sánchez drew the attention of several Spanish sides, and signed with Atlético Madrid in 1981. He turned down an offer to play for Arsenal FC, a prominent English football team. It took him a while to find his feet in La Liga, but by the 1984-85 season he was scoring regularly with a team that won the Copa del Rey, finished in second place in the Spanish League and won the Spanish Super Copa. That year Hugo also won his first Pichichi trophy for being the most prolific scorer in the league.At the high-point of his career, he signed for Real Madrid in 1985 and played with players such as Camacho, Butragueño, Gordillo, Schuster, Valdano and Míchel. This team won five consecutive league titles (from 1985-86 to 1989-90), the Copa del Rey in 1989, and the UEFA Cup in 1986. During those five years, Sánchez garnered four consecutive Pichichi trophies (the only player in Spain's football history to achieve this without sharing the trophy on any season), scoring 207 goals in 283 games. He scored 27 or more goals in four consecutive seasons between 1986 and 1990, including 38 goals in the 1989-90 season, tying the single-season record set in 1951 by Telmo Zarra and earning the European Golden Boot award to the best scorer in Europe. Overall, he scored 47 goals in 45 European Cup games.In 1992, Sánchez returned to his native Mexico for a season, before playing for a variety of clubs in Spain, Austria and the USA (he played for the Dallas Burn in the inaugural year of Major League Soccer, becoming one of two people, along with Roy Wegerle, to play outdoor football in both the NASL and MLS). He finished his career playing for Atlético Celaya with Butragueño and Míchel, his old colleagues from Real Madrid.In comparison to his "domestic" club success, Sánchez did not have a successful international career with the Mexican national team. He played 60 matches and scored 29 goals for the Mexican national team, but his years as a Mexican international coincided with a difficult period for the nation's football. Mexico did not participate in the World Cup of 1982 and 1990, in which Sánchez would have most likely been part of the Mexican squad. He scored one goal in eight appearances in the three World Cups in which he competed and was never selected for the "Best XI" World Cup squads. Sánchez's brash personality is often cited as the reason he did not play many games at the 1994 World Cup, purportedly as a result of internecine frictions between Hugo and the Mexican Football Federation (FMF).[citation needed]