Peter Daicos


Peter Daicos is a former professional Australian rules footballer who played his entire 250-game career with the Collingwood Football Club in the VFL/AFL.
He is considered to be one of the greatest players in the history of the Australian Football League, and is a member of the Australian Football Hall of Fame. During his 250-game career, his league honours include a premiership and kicking the 1991 Goal of the Year. He also represented his home state of Victoria a total of five times.
Daicos is considered to be one of Collingwood's all-time greats, being named in the club's Team of the Century, leading the club's goalkicking for five seasons, winning the best and fairest twice, and playing in the club's drought-breaking 1990 premiership.

Personal life

Daicos is commonly known as the Macedonian Marvel as a result of his ethnic Macedonian ancestry.
He was raised in a family background with the Macedonian language spoken at home and church services attended on Sundays but with an important difference being his interest in Australian rules football instead of soccer, including playing with the school team whilst at Preston East High School.
His son, Josh, played for the Oakleigh Chargers in the TAC Cup before he was drafted to Collingwood with pick 57 in the 2016 national draft under the father–son rule.

VFL/AFL Career

Peter debuted with the Collingwood Football Club in round 4, 1979, against, in what was, at the time, the largest winning margin in VFL/AFL history. He went on to play 250 games with the Magpies until his retirement in 1993, and he won a premiership with them in 1990; he kicked Collingwood's first goal in that match.
In the 1990 season, Daicos scored 97 goals playing mostly from forward pocket, a feat made all the more remarkable because he was considerably shorter than many full-forwards of the era, and was not playing in the traditional position of a spearhead full-forward. His skills in scoring from impossible angles, as well as his ability to get rid of defenders, led pundits to start naming him The Magician.
In fact, one of his goals, drawing the 1990 Qualifying Final became the subject of a Toyota Memorable Moments advertisement, first screened in 2005.
In 1999, Daicos was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame. In 2002, he was elected in the AFL Greek Team of the Century reserved for players having full or partial Greek heritage.
In 2005, Peter Daicos became coach at a local club called the Greythorn Falcons, and in 2006 he coached them to an 80-point win in the Grand Final.
In 2007/08, he launched SportzStats, a hybrid online/offline sports statistics tracking and diary system for junior players in various sports, and, as of 2009, he is also a weekly guest tipper on the Score Five Footy tipping game.
In 2010, Daicos resumed commentating duties with the AFL Live radio team. Nowadays, his name is regularly used by journalists and Australian football fans as an adjective to describe a difficult goal scored from the boundary in play, especially one that is dribbled along the ground in a controlled manner; for example, a 'Daicos goal'.