Former outstanding football player, representative and coach Ján Pivarník (78) spoke about the paradoxes that working abroad brought him. Although he honestly remitted huge sums of foreign exchange to the commonwealth from his lucrative coaching contracts, he experienced a cold shower when calculating his pension. The change in Slovak legislation for successful athletes helped him more significantly, he explained to .
After ending his active playing career, Pivarník spent a long time abroad, where he built his name primarily as a coach in the Arab world. Working across borders at that time meant strict financial and bureaucratic obligations towards the then common state.
“Every year I paid 30% of what I earned to the state. It was 8 to 10 thousand dollars a year,” he mentions the sums he brought to the state coffers in valuable foreign currency. Even that did not protect him from bureaucratic obstacles. Every time he returned home for vacation, his first steps necessarily led to Prague. He had to hand over his passport there to issue a new travel document and pay the income tax required by the state.
Although Pivarník brought considerable money to the state during his tenure, he was surprised by the amount of his pension after the division of Czechoslovakia. The authorities originally assessed him a pension in the amount of only 195 euros. He refused to accept this absurd situation and took action. “I called Prague, looked for confirmations and argued that I was paying foreign currency to the state,” he describes his efforts at the time. “You should have called, Mr. Pivarník, when we were one state,” was the answer from the Czech side after the division of the republics.
His initially extremely low pension later gradually climbed to 380 euros. A more significant adjustment came thanks to the Slovak legislation, which remembers successful representatives.
In Slovakia, a law was adopted according to which Olympic winners and medalists receive a monthly pension, the amount of which depends on the average wage in the economy. It was only thanks to this measure that Pivarník’s income stabilized at a more decent amount. “They increased my pension to 500 euros. I still get that much now,” concluded the former athlete.
Ján Pivarník was born on November 13, 1947 in the eastern Slovak village of Cejkov. He started his football career in the Slavoj Trebišov club, where he spent the 1965/1966 season. The young talented defender did not escape the attention of the officials of VSS Košice, for whom he made his debut in the highest Czechoslovak competition as a 19-year-old. He worked in the capital of eastern Slovakia from 1966 to 1972.
In 1972, he changed Košice to Bratislava. In Slovan, he became one of the best defenders of the former Czechoslovakia. In the white jersey, in 1974 and 1975 he won two titles of champion of Czechoslovakia and in 1974 also the Czechoslovak cup. In total, he played 267 matches in the highest Czechoslovak league and scored 14 goals as a defender. In Bratislava, in addition to football, he managed to study law, marry the actress Jarmila Koleničová, with whom he has a daughter Alexandra and a son Tomáš.
The legendary defender, who in the role of a false wing often made unexpected raids on the opponent’s goal, also made a significant impact in the Czechoslovak national team. While still a player of VSS Košice, he was selected as a substitute (did not play a single match) for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. The speedy full-back’s big moments came six years later at the 1976 European Championship in Yugoslavia. The Czechoslovak national team defeated the Federal Republic of Germany in the final in Belgrade after a 2:2 draw in regular time in a penalty shootout 5:3 and won the title of European champions. In total, Pivarník played 39 national team matches and scored one goal in them.
After the successful EC, problems with the cartilage in his knees began to prevent Pivarník from playing an active career. He was a player of Dukla Banská Bystrica for one season (1978/1979), but he did not play a single match. In 1979, he went to the Austrian Kittsee as a playing coach. At the end of his active career, he played three more matches for the Spanish club FC Cadíz in the 1981/1982 season.
Pivarník’s coaching career is also rich. He worked as an assistant head coach in the first half of the 1980s in the Austrian club Austria Vienna and in the Portuguese club Sporting Lisbon. This was followed by many years of coaching in Arab countries such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
He won the Asian Cup in 1994 with the Kuwaiti team Al Qadisiya. He worked as a head coach in the “nineteen” of Oman (1995/1996) and in the Arab clubs Al Salmiva (1997/1998), Al Arabi Kuwait (1998/1999), Al-jazira Club (1999/2000), Al Arabi Kuwait (2000/2001), Al Kuwait Kaifan (2002/2003) and Al Qadisiva Al Khubar (2003/2004).
