England mourns the 1966 world champion Jimmy Greaves

The football motherland England mourns the loss of one of its greatest strikers. Jimmy Greaves, 1966 world champion and Tottenham Hotspur club icon, passed away on Sunday morning at the age of 81. The Spurs announced.

The club was “extremely saddened” by the death of their record scorer. For the Three Lions, Greaves scored an impressive 44 goals in 57 internationals. At the 1966 World Cup, he was used in all three group games, but lost his regular place due to injury to the later final hero Geoff Hurst.

Even during his career, Greaves struggled with major alcohol problems. “I completely lost the 1970s,” he once said, “from 1972 to 1977 I was drunk all the time.” In 1980 he said goodbye to active football and reinvented himself as a popular expert. He has been in a wheelchair since a stroke in 2015.

Greaves made a name for himself at Chelsea FC, where he met 132 times in 169 appearances between 1957 and 1961. After a brief stint at AC Milan, he joined the Spurs. His impressive record there: 266 goals in 379 games. With the 1963 European Cup Winners’ Cup, Tottenham and Greaves became the first English club to win a European Cup.