Miroslav Klose

Miroslav Josef Klose was born in Opole, Poland on 9 June, 1978 to Josef Klose and Barbara Jez. His father Josef was a footballer who used to play professionally for the club Odra Opole while his mother was a handball player who played for the Polish national team.

Miroslav Klose moved with his family to Germany in 1986, when he was eight. He showed interest in football from a very early age and before long he joined the club SG Blaubach-Palatinate, which competed in the 7th tier of German football.

He continued to play football throughout his early life and trained as a carpenter as well, but his life changed when he was signed up by the club FC Homburg in 1998. A year later he joined FC Kaiserslautern.

Miroslav Klose made his debut for Kaiserslautern in the Bundesliga in 2000 and the following season he scored 16 times for the club to end up as one of the prolific goal scorers in the league. A year after his Bundesliga debut, h made his debut for the German national team and the following year he scored 5 goals in the World Cup for Germany to finish as the joint top scorer.

After spending five years at Kaiserslautern, during which he scored 44 goals in 120 games, he joined Werder Bremen in 2004. In the same year, Klose went to European Championships to represent Germany but he wasn’t fully fit and couldn’t score any goals as the national team went out in the group stages.

In 2006, he scored 5 goals in the FIFA World Cup in Germany and helped the young team reach the semi finals of the tournament. The following year, he left Werder Bremen after playing for the club for three seasons and scoring 50 goals, to join Germany’s biggest club Bayern Munich. He helped the club win the league title and the DFB Pokal tournament at the end of his very first season.

He led the German attack at the European Championships in 2008 and scored 2 goals to help the team finish runners up in the tournament. Two years later at the World Cup in South Africa, he netted four goals as Germany ended up as the semi finalists. In the same year, he won the German Super Cup with Bayern Munich but left the club for Italian club Lazio the following year after having scored 24 league goals. He is still with Lazio and has scored 48 goals in 125 league games.

In 2014, he was selected to play for the German national team at the FIFA World Cup in Brazil and at 36; he scored two goals to become the highest goal scorer in World Cups. He also became Germany’s highest ever goal scorer after totaling 69 goals, one more than Gerd Muller. He had stated that the World Cup would be his last international tournament and he retired from international football after Germany lifted the World Cup.

Miroslav Klose was awarded the German Player of the Year award in 2006.

He is FIFA World Cup all-time record goalscorer.

He is the only footballer to have had four or more (consecutive) FIFA World Cup medals.

Klose is the only footballer to have appeared in four or more (consecutive) semi-finals in FIFA World Cups.

He also holds the record for scoring most goals from headers in a single edition of the FIFA World Cup.