FC Schalke: 10 best players in post-war club history
By Josh Sippie
1. Klaus Fischer
Scoring goals certainly isn’t everything, but when you are FC Schalke’s leader in goals by over twice what the second place guy has, then goals definitely amount for a whole lot. And that’s where Klaus Fischer finds himself, with 226 total goals (182 in the league) across 349 appearances (295 in the league).
The numbers speak for themselves, but they don’t say enough about Klaus Fischer and the impact he had for Schalke. He joined the club shortly after his near namesake Fichtel and together they helped Schalke grow and improve season after season. Zipping past the bribery scandal that was quickly forgotten after winning the DFB-Pokal Cup in 1972, Fischer’s first big success was, like Fichtel’s, one of the last his club would find in the years to come.
As well as being Schalke’s all-time top scorer, he also ranks as the Bundesliga’s second highest scorer of all time. But it wasn’t always the number of goals that won the show, it was the nature of them.
Fischer was renowned for his bicycle kicks, a skill that forwards today even struggle to master (unless your name is Zlatan). But Fischer had a near patent on it, including a massive bicycle kick goal scored internationally in 1977 that would be voted as goal of the decade and goal of the century.
Hard to do much better than that.