Very few Football League fans will ever see their club stumble into the limelight in their lifetime. Although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – there’s a footballing experience you get in the lower leagues that seems lost in the Premier League – any fan will tell you that one year of glory is worth a decade toiling away the 46-game season. They may now be confined to trudging through the Championship, crawling across the finish line to safety at the end of largely forgettable campaigns, but Fulham fans will always have those European nights 6 years ago.

This was 2010, when Roy Hodgson was still a widely respected manager and Bobby Zamora was a renowned goalscorer. Fulham’s league form may have been fairly uninspiring – 12th a season after their 7th place finish – but it was a run of 18 European games that defined their season, even though it culminated in a soul-crushing Diego Forlán winner in extra time. Before that, though, came a host of legendary nights, nights that would have doubtlessly drifted into many a Fulham fan’s mind while on away trips to Rotherham or Barnsley, and from them emerged cult heroes. Clint Dempsey and his chip to seal a 4-goal comeback against Juventus, for example, or Bobby Zamora’s goals to see off then-German champions Wolfsburg – but most of all, Zoltán Gera’s winner in the semi-final against Hamburg – heavy favourites to reach a final hosted in their own stadium – sticks in the memory of the Craven Cottage faithful.

Gera was subsequently named the club’s player of the year, and while he was eventually phased out by Mark Hughes the following season, Fulham fans remain fond of their Hungarian midfielder to this day. A stylish yet industrious midfielder that acted as both the heart and the engine of the team, he would contribute another 5 goals to their Europa League campaign in his most memorable season in club football.

By the time he returned to Ferencváros in 2014, Gera had a decade of English football behind him – chiefly spent at West Brom and interrupted by his spell at Fulham. It’s alleged that he was originally set for a move to Crystal Palace in 2004, who had also signed compatriot and sweatpants model Gabor Kiraly, until West Brom hijacked the deal and sent him to the Hawthorns. He would play a crucial role in the club’s ‘great escape’ the following season and go on to make nearly 200 appearances for the club, scoring 29 goals. There were iconic goals – his screamer against Liverpool on the opening day of the 2012/13 season, or the overhead kick against Manchester United for Fulham – typically followed by his trademark celebration, a cartwheel into somersault. There were also, however, injuries and a relegation in 2006, followed by a season in the Championship. Nevertheless, but for divine intervention in his youth, Gera’s fate could have been dramatically different.

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In the days leading up to that Europa League final, Gera had opened up about his past in several interviews. Speaking to the Evening Standard he remarked that ‘I am so lucky not to be in jail for doing bad things. Or even worse, dead’. Gera had detailed his teenage years, marred with alcohol, drug abuse and gambling, a period in which he was betraying himself and his dreams of playing football at the highest level by destroying himself physically and mentally.

Yet it wasn’t obvious that he would fall into the abyss. Born into a middle-class family in Pécs – his father was a postman and his mother worked in a brewery – and with respectable school grades, it wasn’t until he saw the ‘older boys’ in the school hallways that he began his years of drink and drugs, which would then lead to his dropping out of school and skipping training sessions. Soon enough, in his early teens, he formed a ‘gang’ with his friends, going around smashing windows for the sake of it, with the end goal of becoming a ‘feared and respected’ gangster in Hungary. The young Gera was often to be found at the casino – a back door helped him bypass the age restriction. By the time he was 16, he’d altogether given up on school and football.

It was around this time that his father first brought him to a church, but the effect wasn’t immediate – he would go back to the casino the following week, skipping church services, although the feeling wasn’t really there anymore. Eventually he went back, drawn to it by his own desire to break away from a life that he felt wasn’t leading to anything. It’s through this epiphany that Gera decided to go back to football, but the transition back into regular physical work wasn’t seamless.

In another interview, given around the same time, he recalls that, on his return to football, he was unable to play for more than 20 minutes without having to stop and put cold water on his legs, such was the damage done to his body in the preceding years. He recounts that doctors had told him he would never be able to play football professionally: years of abuse had rendered his body frail and weak, while his chest was unable to cope with the physical demands of the game. Nevertheless, Gera, fresh from his new-found faith, pushed on and rose through the ranks. He was signed by Pecs MFC in 1997, in 2000 began the first of his 4 years in his first Ferencváros spell, and in 2002 was handed his first Hungary cap.

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14 years later, as he chested the ball down and set himself up on the edge of the box – just as he did against Liverpool 4 years beforehand – for Hungary’s opener against Portugal – later named the goal of the tournament – Zoltan Gera had the bulk of his career behind him. He was playing his first international tournament at 37 as Hungarian football finally woke from its 30 year coma, and while Gabor Kiraly stole the show with his age, sweatpants and carefree antics, there’s a sense that Gera had played a role in Hungary’s revival.

The two seasons beforehand were spent helping to make Ferencváros into the behemoth of Hungarian football. Acting as a deep lying playmaker, he’s been crucial in the development of Adam Nagy – one of Hungary’s standout players who earned himself a move to Bologna – and more recently, his namesake and fellow central midfielder Dominik Nagy. They won the title last year – with a 21 point margin over Videoton in 2nd – for the first time since Gera’s last season in his first spell at the club. During his ten-year exile to England, Ferencváros would suffer relegation due to financial reasons, 3 seasons in NB2 – the second tier of Hungarian football – and go back up again, but it seemed fitting that they would only regain the title one he came back. He also scored the winning goal against Újpest in the Hungarian cup final, completing FTC’s double last season.

Gera, still religious to this day, has often said that he doesn’t see his past as something shameful, but more as a source of pride, that he managed to climb out of the abyss, insisting that his faith was the deciding factor in reviving his a career that seemed dead before it had begun. Now, with his window-smashing days well behind him, he starts the new season as a vital part of a Ferencváros team hoping to recreate the successes of last year.