When he was filling the net for Hajduk Split in the former Yugoslavia in the 1970s, Slavisa Zungul seemingly had it all.

He was playing the game he loved for a top club and the national team. He was young, good-looking and a heartthrob. He also loved the nightlife. He had just about everything – except his freedom.

So the 24-year-old striker took a major gamble. He decided to leave his country and wound up defining a sport that was in its nascent stages in the United States – indoor soccer.

Played within the dimensions of a hockey rink, the game earned many nicknames due to a fast-moving ball that rebounded off the boards and players; pin-ball soccer and disco soccer were among the favorite terms.

It didn’t matter to Zungul, who was so dynamic and so prolific in the Major Indoor Soccer League that Sports Illustrated’s JD Reed declared him “the Lord of All Indoors”. His first name was Americanized to Steve, and the rest became MISL history, whether it was racking up goals, records or championships at a ridiculous rate.

“He was the greatest indoor player to ever play here,” said teammate and goalkeeper Shep Messing, who backstopped Zungul’s New York Arrows to four consecutive MISL championships.

“You talk about Tatu [the Brazilian who starred for the Dallas Sidekicks] but nobody was as good as Steve. He partied, he played hard, and he scored goals – and he was actually underrated in terms of his ability to be a playmaker. He was good in the air and lightning quick with his first step, can hit a ball with the inside out of that left foot, outside of the left foot, inside of the right, outside of the right, control it in a tight space. He was a champ.”

Zungul loved to party, though scoring goals might have had a higher priority. “He was an offensive scoring machine all by himself,” said Fox Soccer’s JP Dellacamera, a play-by-play man for MISL national TV games.

“He didn’t need anyone necessarily to set him up. He could do it by himself if he had do.”

By the time he retired at 35 after the 1989-90 season, Zungul had written the MISL record book. He played for eight championship teams, four with the New York Arrows and four with the San Diego Sockers.

He finished with 652 goals, almost 200 more than the second leading goalscorer, Branko Segota (463). He also had the most assists (1,123).

“He scored in every game,” former Arrows teammate Damir Sutevski said. “Most of the games were remarkable.”

His goals were measured in quantity and quality. He once hammered in seven in a match and scored three goals in 37 seconds. He connected for a stunning 108 goals in 40 games one season. With the 1980-81 championship on the line, Zungul tallied the game-winner in sudden death overtime against the host and arch-rival St Louis Steamers.

And that was his Reader’s Digest version of accomplishments.

“Steve was scoring with every part of his body,” said Segota, who played with Zungul on three teams. “He was always in position. He loved to score. It didn’t matter. He would dive in there just to score the goal.”

Yet, there is a sad side to Zungul: the career sacrifice he made to leave communist Yugoslavia for better opportunities. As superb as he was indoors, Zungul was just as lethal outdoors with Hajduk Split in what is now Croatia. His decision to play in the US robbed him of some of his prime years.

As a youth player for rival Dinamo Zagreb, Sutevski had an inkling Zungul was destined for greatness.

“He was a great player always,” he said. “His nose for the goal was always dangerous. We tried to control him, but it wasn’t an easy job.”

With Zungul as the main scoring threat (177 goals over six seasons), Hajduk Split won three Yugoslavian First Division titles. He was considered one of the top six forwards in Europe, the Gerd Müller of Yugoslavia. He also made 14 international appearances.

Hajduk reached the quarter-finals of the 1976 European Cup, losing to PSV Eindhoven and the 1973 UEFA Cup semi-finals, falling to Leeds United. Not surprisingly, Zungul stirred interest on the international market, including Italian giants Inter and AC Milan.

“They would have given a fortune for Steve Zungul to go play,” said Don Popovic, the coach and architect of four Arrows’ championship teams. It never materialized.

“A lot of people didn’t understand him because he liked to go to discos and dance all night long,” Popovic added. “But nobody prepared himself better for the game than Steve Zungul. He’s a game player. He’s not a practice player. He doesn’t really like practice. So they suspended him because of that, because he did things wrong, in their opinion.”

Zungul hadn’t been paid in weeks and he reportedly feared he would lose the best years of his career because he might have been forced to serve in the army. All Yugoslav males had to complete compulsory military service, and players could not leave the country until they were 28.

Popovic, a former Split player, called Zungul’s manager, who happened to be one of her former teammates, and discovered that the striker was experiencing problems with the club president.

“He doesn’t like his freedom, he doesn’t like the way he expressed himself,” Popovic said. “Steve Zungul is a good-looking kid. All the girls are after him.”

Zungul was dating the Yugoslav model Moni Kovacic. She was traveling to New York, so he convinced Split that he was going to play some indoor exhibition soccer games in the States during the winter break.

In Europe, indoor soccer was considered part of the training regime, and except for tournaments, was not taken seriously.

“I said to him: ‘Indoor soccer is not recognized in the United States as an official sport’,” Popovic said. “I didn’t think nobody was going to pay attention.”

At that time, the MISL was not under Fifa’s umbrella. He played for the Arrows with few problems, though they tried to purchase Zungul’s contract from Split. They offered $150,000 raising it to $200,000. But the club rejected it, spoiling his chance to play outdoors.

“I didn’t want to steal the best player,” Popovic said. “That was big money at that time.”

Instead, Split never got a penny, and Zungul was forced to wait five years to perform outdoors, though he made an immediate impact only weeks after coming to America, scoring four goals in his Arrows debut in a 7-2 win over the Cincinnati Kids (owned by Pete Rose) on December 21 1978.

Zungul, who lives in Escondido, California, declined an interview with the Guardian through a friend. He reportedly hasn’t talked to the media for at least a decade.

Zungul’s competitive fire and desire for success sometimes spilled off the field.

After the Arrows their first title on March 25, 1979, Messing, who made headlines by becoming the first player signed by the league, was named MVP of the championship series. Zungul scored a record seven goals in the first game of the best-of-three series, a 14-7 Arrows triumph, and added three goals in the 9-5 clinching win in Philly. Messing, who made 26 saves, told the New York Times he wanted to share his award with Zungul.

But that sporting gesture was not enough.

“The Steve Zungul I know: the best and the worst,” Messing said. “What made him so great was the first season he was lightning out of a bottle, just electric, scoring goals. We were both alpha males. It was my team and I jumped leagues and I was the main player and Zungul came in. I loved him. We became great friends.

“I was given a huge trophy. On the bus as we left the arena, Zungul starts screaming at me that he’s the MVP,” Messing added with a laugh.

“We’re in the bus with Popovic and that team and riding back with that first championship and me and Zungul are going at it because Zungul says he deserves the trophy. That’s the striker like Giorgio Chingalia, fiercely competitive. We ended up fighting on the bus and having drinks together when we got back to New York. He had that volatile lightning temperament, personality and ego of all great goalscorers.”

It should come as no surprise that Zungul won the next three playoff MVP honors.

While his best-known battles came against defenders in front of thousands of spectators, Zungul had his clashes with Popovic. Popovic was a strict coach, calling up players at 10pm to make sure they were at home and not fooling around (remember this was years before cell phones, so players could not embellish where they were).

As the only player not living on Long Island, it was difficult to corral Zungul, who lived on the upper East side so he could enjoy all that Manhattan had to offer.

“I got frustrated so much,” Popovic said. “I said: ‘Listen, young man, you have to be home a day before the game.’ He said: ‘Pop, I know how much I need the sleep. I know how to prepare myself for the game. Let’s say I need a little bit more until one or two o’clock [in the afternoon].’

“He would sleep. He would prepare himself for the game better than anybody I ever saw. He was just enjoying the crowd. He became a monster on the field. He scored goals. I said to him, ‘OK, I am never going to ask again what you are doing on the field before the game’ because he was a game player.”

When the team was on the road, Popovic pleaded with his superstar to tone down it down just a bit and not make a spectacle.

“I told him; ‘Just find a hotel somewhere else,’” he said. “Right at 10 clock he is parading in front of the rooms. All of the guys are watching this model from New York, gorgeous-looking lady. Everybody says to me: how can he do it and we can’t do it?That’s Steve Zungul.”

Finally, after the US supreme court ruled that Zungul could play outdoors in 1983, he received an opportunity with the Golden Bay Earthquakes of the NASL, collecting 19 goals in 1983 (he scored in a memorable 3-1 triumph over the New York Cosmos and Chinaglia) and adding a league-best 30 and MVP honors the next year.

The NASL folded after the 1984 season, and Zungul returned to indoors, starring for the Sockers and Tacoma Stars before retiring in 1990.

Age and lingering injuries finally caught up to him – he needed to have a hip replaced after retiring. Zungul, though, still could produce some magic, making the ball disappear into the net in overtime for the Sockers in the 1989-90 championship playoff series at the Baltimore Blast.

Zungul ran a ball down in the left corner as goalkeeper Scott Manning came out to challenge him.

“He touched the ball into the corner and it was like an impossible angle,” Segota said. “It rolled down from his knee down to his foot and it went into the goal, empty net, and we won the game and everybody ran onto the field. The funny thing is the next time we went there, in the warm-up, we all tried to duplicate that shot and nobody can do it. It was just something unbelievable that happens instantaneously.”

Perhaps it was something so unbelievable that only the Lord of All Indoors could accomplish.