Ex-Ballon d’Or Winner Hails Victor Boniface

The most capped German player of all time and 1990 Ballon d’Or winner, Lothar Matthaus has hailed Nigerian striker, Victor Boniface as a player he could trek from Germany to Belgium for.

Matthaus, who made a record 150 appearances for Germany (83 of those appearances for West Germany) in 20 years, said he was surprised a German Bundesliga club didn’t sign Victor Boniface earlier than this summer.

Boniface has been in fantastic form since he joined Bayer Leverkusen from Belgian club Union Saint-Gilloise in last summer’s transfer window.

His impressive start to life in Germany has earned him six goals and two assists in five Bundesliga games. These stats helped him to win the league’s Player of the Month and Rookie of the Month awards for August.

Boniface has possibly been one of the best transfers so far this season with 11 goal contributions in his first seven games in all competitions.

Lothar Matthaus, 62, who is a Ballon d’Or winner and FIFA World Cup champion said he wasn’t surprised over the prolific form of the 22-year-old Nigerian striker who moved to Bayer for a reported €20.5 million barely two months ago.

“On the contrary: it was incomprehensible to me that he played in Belgium for so long and no German club noticed him,” Matthaus wrote in his Sky column.

“Congratulations to Leverkusen — for the other scouting departments in the Bundesliga I say: 17 times the grade 5 that they didn’t bring this player from Belgium for this amount,” continued Matthäus.

“Perhaps some clubs had concerns because he had already torn his cruciate ligaments twice,” said the record international player:

“But after I saw him two or three times, I thought, ‘I’ll walk from Munich to Belgium for this player’.”