Mimis Papaioannou, born from a mold that had been destroyed over the years, was a Greek football legend, a figure revered by friends and rivals alike.

He passed away on Wednesday, March 15, the same day that, coincidentally 93 years ago, Kostas Nestoridis, another legendary figure of AEK and Greek football, was born. Mimis was supposed to pass away at the age of 81 and after difficult years of isolation, without any meaningful contact with the environment and people who loved, honored and cared for him.

Mimis Papaioannou has always belonged to a very closed club of Greek footballers who, while linking their name and career to a “big” team, remain widely recognized and fully respected throughout the football world.

Despite the rivalry that existed at the highest level even in those romantic days of football, there was no fan to boo him, no platform to insult him. And he himself considered this award even more brilliant than all these frightening and terrible things that he did in the stadiums in the AEK jersey and our team.

He took his first steps in football with Veria, and everything he achieved there, which was his pass to the great salons of Greek football, looks like a drop compared to everything he has achieved in 17 years spent at AEK, as well as with our National team. Although he himself was in love with PAOK from a young age, he ended up receiving 140,000 drachmas from AEK, which played a very emotional role in his victory: Papaioannou was a refugee, and the common background with the evicted team helped him make a big decision to go to Athens before when he turns 20. Previously, Olympiacos rejected him.because he was small, played only with his left hand, and he had many like him.“.

He played for AEK for 17 consecutive seasons (1962-1979) until he traveled to New York to end his long career as player-coach of Pansiprios at almost 40 years old. He won five First National Championships (1963, 1968, 1971, 1978, 1979) and three Cups (1964, 1966, 1978), was the league’s top scorer twice (1964, 1966) and was the protagonist of two impressive AEK European campaigns, in 1968-69 to the quarter-finals of the European Cup and in 1976-77 to the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup. He then scored (as he did today, March 16, 1977) 3-0, sent the game against QPR on penalties and scored AEK’s last goal himself before Christidis beat Webb immediately afterwards. Detail; Mimis never converted the penalty and Fandrock put a lot of pressure on him to accept, arguing that “he had to defend Lakis Nicolaou, who had a turn and could miss because he was a defender”.

Had Mimis Papaioannou converted a penalty in his long career, he would most likely still be the top scorer in the Greek league to this day. He was first with 234 goals when he left for America and it took another 11 years until (his teammate) Tomas Mavros broke his record with 260 and Christophe Vasea surpassed it with 245 goals. His characteristic was that he jumped and stood amazingly. a lot in the air, which is why he scored many beautiful goals in his career despite being short like Domasos. Although he lacked a goalkeeper, he played twice as a goalkeeper without conceding a single goal! The first was in AEK’s 3-2 win over Olympiacos (he scored the winning goal) when he replaced the suspended Serafidis, and the second in a comfortable 3-0 win over Panachaki.

He has never been sent off, and in just his career he received three yellow cards! An example of his exceptional character was his gesture when he left the No. 10 jersey to Mimi Domasos that year (1978) when the “general” moved to AEK, the “leading” number he had in all previous years.

To date, Papaioannu remains in 6th place.^V position in matches (481) in the league and in 1^V scorers who have worn the jersey of only one national “A” team at the collective level. For the Blue and White he played 61 times and scored 21 goals, saving 5^V place in the scorer’s table. IFFHS named him the greatest Greek football player of the 20th century and a member of the best Greek XI of all time, while his figure covers one of the four columns of Hagia Sophia in North Philadelphia and he is absent from the field of his inauguration due to health problems with which he encountered.

Mimis Papaioannou was talented not only in football, but also in music. His own voice “dressed” the AEK anthem written with Christos Kolokotronis in 1971 by Stelios Kazantzidis, his personal friend and mentor, when he decided to quit football in 1965, frustrated by AEK’s refusal to transfer him to Real Madrid after a friendly 3-3 where he scored two goals for her. The exchange amounted to 4 million drachmas for the team and 750 thousand a year for him on a three-year professional contract. After the refusal, AEKa quit football in order to follow Kazantzidis and Marinela on a tour of Germany, where he sang Giorgos Zambetas’s song “The Best Student” in a T-shirt of the national team, with a slightly modified text: “I didn’t have a teacher, I had a little teacher, in class I got zero and twenty in the ball”!

Kazantzidis was the one who, after a few weeks in Germany, convinced Papaioanna to stop singing, which would have simply given him a good living wage, and devote himself to football, for which he had an inexhaustible talent. At first, not moving to Real Madrid from 5 consecutive European Cups cost him dearly, but when his anger finally subsided, he felt that his stay in Greece was ultimately good for him, as he admitted in an earlier interview in “Kathimerini”, talking about the scene:

“At a dinner organized by AEK for the Real Madrid delegation, Puskas came and surrounded me. When he came to my table, I was sweating. I looked into his eyes and could not believe that the great Ferenc Puskas was talking to me. He told me that I was a good player, that they would take me, and he gave me two pieces of advice. First, be calm, eat well and sleep well. Secondly, learn to play without the ball. Since then, people have remembered the football that Barcelona plays now, fifty years later. Movement without the ball. And I, sly, thought: If I don’t have a ball, who else deserves one?»

“I had a cousin from Thessaloniki who spoke good Spanish. We wrote a letter and sent it to Real Madrid, saying that if they need me, I can go to Spain, not play for a year, and then report back. The regulation allowed it. Real Madrid told me that its principle is not to spoil relations with the teams. If AEK gave, good. Otherwise, the transmission would not continue, as it does not. Although I didn’t regret it. I have already philosophized about this. I thought that among so many players, I might not get hooked and get lost. Staying at AEK, I made history and had a great career that I enjoyed. The only thing I sometimes think about is that with the 4 million dirhams that Real Madrid gave them, AEK could get their own 60 acres a little further away and now we would have a stadium. But they could have eaten the money and he would have had nothing. This was most likely. Let them eat them for other obligations of the collective, and not for a piece of land.