Science fiction

As a 14 year old I was absolutely obsessed with Adidas Predators. It was probably the first accessory I was aware of that acted as if it was something else, something greater than what it was for. My awareness of football boots up to that point had been fairly unremarkable. I knew that different brands made boots but they were generally just black leather with a different logo stitched on the side.

Predators capitalised massively on the trademarked innovation of a wide red tongue held down by elastic which looped under the boot. Much like Gillette introducing ever more bladed razors which claim to improve on the shave quality, this new flattened tongue allowed for a cleaner ball strike due to the uninterrupted contact area. I didn’t realise it but this was my introduction to product design which I would end up studying in college. These type of products which doubled as sporting accessory and cultural artefact really piqued my interest, they seemed to have more in common with science fiction than sport. A perfectly balanced blend of red and black with the three iconic white stripes, the boots were an instant classic. Although a strong point, the visuals were not the main attraction for a lot of purchasers. The most marketable aspect of the boots was the fact that David Beckham was wearing them whenever he whipped a free kick into the top corner.

Beckham

In all of football, from the first records to the current second you’re reading this, no one could strike a ball as well as David Beckham. What he did was twofold. The deliverable of the actual strike, the end product, was undeniable, he scored free kicks and placed crosses on foreheads at an astonishing rate, and he did it beautifully. The way he struck a ball, the stance, the run up, the sinewy approach to every stage of the process, they all combined to communicate one thing; craft. He could pass the ball ten feet and make it look like a complex execution.

If someone unfamiliar with the game watched Beckham and a standard player strike a ball, they would instantly know that Beckham was doing something to a higher level. Prowling like a panther in approach, as if sizing up the various curves of the ball so as to sniff out the most amenable one. Tilting and swerving as he made contact, physically living the trajectory he was sending the ball down, head bowed, arms cruciform, striking leg foreshortened so as to look scarcely believable.

In 1968 when Dick Fosbury won Olympic Gold his novel new way of approaching the high jump revolutionised the sport and the ‘Fosbury Flop’ was born. I’d argue that Beckham’s approach to striking a ball had a similar but smaller impact on football. I still remember the first time I was aware of who Beckham was; I was ten years old, a 1997 January FA Cup tie between Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur was being shown live on TV and somehow in my Irish home it was available. I watched him send these looping crosses into the box all game and I marvelled at the way he hit them. When he scored a free kick in the second half my mind was blown. His execution seemed so technical yet so routine. I thought ‘why doesn’t he just do this EVERY TIME?’. It felt like the sport went up a level. I’d never seen anyone strike a ball with such panache.

A history of ball strikes

Periods in football history are defined by their photo quality, their footage quality and crucially how the players moved. In early days of black and white the players would run in extremely functional ways. Functionality enforced a strict regimen of movement. These were players who played as part of work teams, their main function was factory work and athleticism was only an extension of this. Their physical aims were housed in the factory; movement was a means to an end, all straight lines and distinct aims, lifting, moving, placing. I mentioned in my 1966 article that in the photos and footage of England winning the World Cup you can see at a glance that people don’t move like that anymore. Styles of movement come and go, just like singing. Placing footage of Beckham striking a ball beside footage of a player from 1960 you’d think they were playing two different sports. His run up contained the previous 60 years of football, so many layers of thought and trend, like sediment that had settled over the decades. Body language was now much more than functional; it was part of a high performance execution, a disguise to fool the opposition, an enhancement of the player brand.

The technology of the sport is always in constant conversation with the execution of the sport. Beckham didn’t hit a ball like that because he wanted to, he did it because that was the smartest way to approach the ball that was being used. In 1960 players wore work boots and generally seemed to strike heavy footballs from behind with a rising leg, hitting with the toe. Beckham would wrap his momentum around the ball to produce the whip effect, the momentum and direction coming from the instep. As he made contact his body would noticeably veer quickly from leaning back on his left leg to almost falling over on his right. This lateral movement showed how he was hitting across as opposed to through the ball, a specific technique that resulted in the ball curling inwards and seemingly picking up speed as it flew through the air. This was his trademark and the most iconic part, the right foot that struck the ball, was draped in red and black Adidas livery. It promised some smaller fraction of his output, a new skill tethered somehow to these leather shoes.

Mystique

Beckham is the most self-aware player in football history and set the template for how modern players manage their image rights. He always knew his exact worth and held it in the back of his head. He leveraged his image, his skill, his looks, his lack of a distinct or strong personality, which was obviously by design; an empty vessel is the perfect container for advertising aims. These elements of his personality must have combined to amplify the drama of his ball strike. Even though he just runs up and kicks the ball without any particular preamble like dropping grass on the breeze or blessing himself, he gives a performance laden with effort in that few seconds.

Beckham’s greatest moment was his 93rd minute free kick against Greece to drag England to last minute World Cup qualification. That moment, from preamble to strike to iconic celebratory leap into the air, was probably the biggest moment in recent English sporting history, and it came from a foot draped in a lily-white Adidas Predator, which by then was shorthand for the man. This ball striking super power was the mechanism that Adidas used to elevate the Predators away from every other boot that went before them. They became an icon, because of David Beckham. His magic, a movie-star athlete, gave them their mystique. As a gullible fourteen year old, I gobbled it up.

Mud odyssey

My school Gaelic football team trained in a field. It was a ten minute walk away, up a one-lane road with grass growing in the middle. I walked that distance in my new Predators, eager to see how many top corner goals I’d score. This new, flat red tongue would no doubt prove a massive difference in my fledgling sporting career.

At the pitch one set of goals was positioned on a small hill so it felt like that goal line would be at about the same level as the opposite crossbar. The Ox mountains ran alongside, looming on the horizon like a grey tsunami held in intimidating stasis. I can’t remember many top corner goals that day, which probably means there were none. With the last kick of training, maybe thanks to tongue innovation, I sliced a pass or a shot over the endless verge of thorn bushes that provided a boundary between our pitch and the neighbouring field. My trainer jerked his thumb and off I had to go to retrieve the ball.

The next field was home to a herd of cows and their hooves, combined with the constant rain, had churned the solid earth into a type of brown, quicksand lasagne. I stood on the metal gate, one leg either side looking for the white ball. Hopefully it was near - it wasn’t. About one hundred metres away it sat, pristine like a distant egg, it’s bottom third suctioned in mud. With the trainer watching me I knew I had to trudge to that ball. There was no other option than to hop in. It went up past my ankles, cold.

The mud never left the creases, it never left the plastic fuzz of the velcro, it never left the white stitching of the logo. Between the hyper designed Adidas Predator and the mud, mud won, hands down. As I waded out of the field holding the ball I looked at my newly brown predators. The glamour of whipping a free kick into the top corner was very far away. Mud was real. On that ten minute odyssey through the slop I was forced to abandon any care of my newly purchased fashion statements. Every ounce of mystique and splendour they had was drowned in the shin deep slime. The part of me that wanted to own these things, just to have them near me, withered. I still appreciated what they were and how they became what they were but the need to have them, that disappeared. The thought that they would help me be better at the sport was now laughable. I handed the ball to my trainer, feeling my socks soak in the freezing cold liquid invading every crevice around my shrivelling feet. A cow took me in, black eyes like twin marbles, and went back to chewing the grass, bored of looking at the young boy in mismatched training gear, brown from the shins down.

Also from this series…

Name: The Zidane Roulette
Player: Zinedine Zidane
Period: 1989 - 2006
Teams: Cannes, Bordeaux, Juventus, Real Madrid, France

Roulette

Zidane did not design and perfect this move but, like a croupier flicking cards to a host of hapless poker players, he dished it out with no apparent effort. Many players before him executed it to a high degree but people want to associate it with him and that’s solely down to his grace on the ball. As he spun, the red and black of his Adidas Predators mimicked the blurring colours of the roulette wheel leaving countless players, who gambled and lost, in his wake.

The Zidane Roulette happens in two parts. Essentially it’s a change of direction. The dribbler uses one foot, usually the one that is in opposition to the direction they want to be facing at the end of the move, to gently tap or roll the ball inwards across the body towards their other foot. As with most dribbling skills the first foot to be used is generally planted in the ground as ballast to push off and gain momentum in the opposite direction. The second foot will then rake the ball backwards, usually with the studs, if not 180 degrees then enough to rotate away from the close attentions of an opposition player. This pulls the ball away from the previous direction of travel and crucially turns the dribbler’s back to their marker using their own body as shield for the ball. When the second foot completes the backwards motion it plants in the ground leaving the player in a wide legged stance, which gives a low centre of gravity and allows for more strength on the ball. It’s an escape method that also sets up the player for their next move. It’s elegant, it’s functional, it’s shorthand for Zinedine Zidane.

Another era

Even in his own time Zidane he seemed like a man from another era. Iconic from the ground up, a combination of a curious bald spot hiding above the definitive v of his widow’s peak which sheltered shadowed searching eyes, his surly disposition at odds with the grace he was almost obligated to dole out during every game.

The Wes Anderson film ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ weaves a caper through memories of a fictionalised version of mid-century Eastern Europe. The story finds its heart in a nostalgia that aches for past days of grandeur and class purged by the cost effectiveness of the post-war world. These lost ideals are personified by the prim and proper Monsieur Gustave, the hotel concierge of the Grand Budapest. He epitomises this nostalgic era and his passing acts as the demarcation between past and present, which are the two time periods in which we are shown the titular hotel.

In the past the hotel is resplendent, filled with guests dressed like royalty with multiple scurrying staff fulfilling all manner of outlandish tasks. When we see it in the present it has decayed; subdued to a shrunken cost-effective skeleton tarnished by remnants of various charmless makeovers. The staff are now few and feckless, the decay of the establishment linked to a perceived decay in moral sensibility. Watching old highlights of Zidane rotating his way through games can feel like looking back and luxuriating in a lost old world class, exhibiting a grace since exorcised from the world. His roulette was one of only a few things that perfectly captures the late ‘90s to the mid ‘00s in European football. Watch the Elastico by Ronaldinho or a David Beckham ball strike, they all share a luxurious quality that has been sanded off the game in its current form.

Saying that, I’m not a fan who laments the modern game. I find enjoyment in all expressions of the sport. My point is that looking back on footage of Zidane can make you appreciate a lost past in the game. Crucially however, watching him in his own time also made you feel that. He had the air of the legendary about him, like an immigrant from a momentous past, come to class up our mundane modernity with his gallant roulettes, adorning matches like crystal chandeliers affixed to the ceilings of 2am takeaways. This laconic Frenchman pirouetted through the action with the audacity of colonial architecture; grand, imposing, resonant. He gave you undeniable value for money. You’d seen the roulette. It was cast iron, like a firm handshake. First he was facing that way, then he’d twirl, and then he was facing that way. The ball went with him, and he looked good doing it. What else could you want?

Nonchalance

His effort was below the surface, his top half always easing between a variety of billowy shapes, arms like twin windsocks in a soft breeze. It was the bottom half that was all industry, a clanking piece of agricultural machinery, boots like crampons propelling him from leg extension to leg extension as he turned his back on bamboozled opponents in every corner of the pitch. The breezy upper-half body language was his trademark, that’s the mood we connected with and remembered. There’s a term in Italian, sprezzatura, which translates as something akin to effortless grace. Zidane was the physical embodiment of this. He prowled about the match, easing into a roulette one moment, a first touch Cruyff turn from a kick out the next. He would string these skills together with the simplicity of water circumventing a stone in a shallow riverbed - nonchalant athleticism at peak hum.

Writing anything about him is a thrill. Around the millennium he really was football’s answer to history. If you’re a fan you are subject to the nostalgia obsession the media around the sport deals in. Past players are now pundits and generally view the current crop as morally inferior or a pale imitation of what came before; it’s a well worn trope. As a result you can start to think like Tony Soprano in his first therapy session “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over”. The previous generations were encased in the good old times. It takes strength of character to look with clear eyes and appreciate what you have in the moment. Zidane was his period’s answer to the weight of history, a talent that could be mentioned in conversations alongside Cruyff and Pele, reassurance to a young fan that what they’re getting to experience matters too.

At the end of ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ former lobby boy Zero Moustafa poignantly remembers his long passed friend, Monsieur Gustav. “There are still faint glimmers of civilisation left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. He was one of them. What more is there to say?”.

More from this series…

Player: Mohamed Salah
Era: ‘The Egyptian King’
Period: 2017/18
Club: Liverpool F.C.

Intro

From the 27th June 2017 to the 26th May 2018, Mohamed Salah completed a journey few players in football have managed. In under a year he went from standard, talented winger to global superstar. This era covers his ascension to fan-bestowed moniker ‘The Egyptian King’.

Liverpool were just about course corrected after a season and a half under the stewardship of Jürgen Klopp. Everything was now pointing in the right direction but a few gaps in the squad remained. The club needed a new winger and opted for Salah.

Earlier in his career he was playing well and winning leagues for FC Basel, which led to Chelsea giving him a short stint in London. However they had a desperate Mourinho in charge and as is his way, he cut loose anything and anyone who did not equal immediate success. In this case it meant he showed a young Romelu Lukaku, Kevin De Bruyne and Mohamed Salah the door. This sent Mo on a short odyssey to Serie A where he graced Fiorentina and then Roma with his still unheralded talents. Lighting up Rome meant that the stats department at Liverpool knew they had to go big and go quick for a player that had already gotten used to the physicality of the Premier League and was now showing the potential to be a superstar.

On the 27th June 2017 Salah arrived at Liverpool for a fee that would rise to £43million and eventually become one of the all time bargains. As signings go it was nothing more than a mild eyebrow raiser, the club had brought Sadio Mané in the previous Summer and he had proven to be an instant success. For this luck to happen twice in a row would be unheard of so the hopes for Salah were a bit muted. I was hopeful the club had another solid performer on the books who would be capable of getting up and down the pitch and executing the high intensity approach of the manager. As it turned out, he was capable of fulfilling my narrow expectations and so much more.

As his season was filled with great moments, I’ve picked out a few that stick in my memory. Each one is indicative of a particular reason he became unstoppable.

Arsenal

In the third game of the season Liverpool welcomed Arsenal to Anfield and cruised to a four nil win in the remnants of the Summer sun. This game contained a moment that perfectly encapsulated the Salah of this period; a zippy, turbo-boosted finisher who would terrorise defences for years to come.

With Liverpool two nil up, Arsenal are pressing for a way back into the game. They’ve pushed too high and left their half of the pitch completely empty. Salah wins a header, gets the ball under control and gets to race away from the rest of the match which is left in his wake, pursuing him like an angry mob. Sadio Mané bends his chasing run across the path of the two Arsenal defenders, allowing Mo a clean route. He surges upfield towards the Kop like a runaway race car and slots the ball past the helpless Petr Cech.

Liverpool release a highlights package after most home games called ‘Inside Anfield’. It shows tunnel footage before and after games and the teams getting on and off their bus. The edition released after this match captured a moment that framed this breakaway in the best possible way. The camera is deep in the tunnel looking out towards the sunny day. We can see two club employees and a police officer standing in the tunnel watching the action, silhouetted against the brightness of the day. Opposite us is what was then ‘The Centenary Stand’ (it was renamed The Sir Kenny Dalglish Stand two months later) basking in the shade of the hot day. The red sides of the tunnel lead our eye into the only narrow rectangle of sunlit bright green pitch we can see, the single point perspective of it all lends the scene a tinge of Kubrick. The white marking of the halfway line rises directly up and away from us, disappearing in the flattened horizon our ground level viewpoint affords us. It’s like being huddled in the curtains at the side of a stage watching a play unfold.

When Salah wins his header off screen to start the counter, there is no one in the rectangle of pitch we can see, but the crowd all roar and stand to their feet. Suddenly Mo races past, from the left to right, like someone sprinting by your living room window, and he’s gone. Then Sadio Mané follows, leading the chasing pack of panicked Arsenal defenders, and they’re gone. As more players chase back, left to right, we hear the stadium erupt as offscreen, Salah has scored in front of an adoring Kop.

The image of him leading an entire team like Roadrunner outpacing Wile E. Coyote always stuck in my mind as the perfect image of his threat in that first season. That burst of acceleration allowed him the extra split second to choose the decision that would make the difference.

Everton

The Merseyside Derby took place on a dark Sunday afternoon at an Anfield powdered with a lightly falling snow. This was the first time Salah was taking part in the heated local rivalry and expectations for his impact were high. With three months of Premier League play and 12 goals behind him, the home fans were quietly hoping for something memorable from the free scoring winger. Anything achieved in this game would be multiplied in satisfaction by the fact it was a) against Everton and b) would be scored past Jordan Pickford. It turned out to be the most memorable goal scored across the world in the 17/18 season and would go on to win the 2018 Puskas award. The stature boost from winning this was passed on to the club itself. The last player to win a high profile world award of this magnitude was Michael Owen in 2001 with a Ballon d’Or. An example of the Mo Salah effect in action.

In what would come to be seen as his trademark finish, Salah muscled his way through some Everton defenders at the corner of the box and jinked past another. The touch that took the ball away from the last defender rolled neatly into his path and allowed him to hit the shot, left footed, first time. This finish, the curled instep finish, into the far top corner past a flailing midair goalie, is the most aesthetically pleasing goal in football. It combines three great elements; the top corner, a delicate curl and a shot that sails through the air. There’s inventiveness, there’s boldness, there’s skill. I see these goals and I think to myself ‘this is why I watch the game’.

Even though it won the Puskas Award, it turned out this was a dry run for an even better execution against an even better goalie later in the season. Facing his previous club AS Roma in the Champions League semi-final, Salah had the same finish from the same spot on the pitch. This time it clips the crossbar as it goes in, instantly adding to the beauty. Alisson Becker didn’t stand a chance.

Tottenham

As the record breaking season progressed, I kept expecting opposition teams to figure out how to stem his impact but he just kept popping up with goals or assists. He attained an air of inevitability which is perhaps the most effective thing a player can wield against opponents, it sows the seed of resignation. Two examples of this in action are his solo run against Spurs at Anfield, which to this day is still one of the most impressive things I’ve seen him do, and his third goal against Watford at Anfield, which made me accept he was going to be extremely hard to stop for any opposition.

Against Spurs, with Liverpool drawing 1-1, he receives the ball in the opposition box, flicks it up against the hand of a defender, stops to appeal to the ref which acts as an almost decoy because the defenders start to turn to appeal the decision. In this second Salah is already chasing the ball to the end line where he chops inside a helpless sliding defender, then dummies past another. Hugo Lloris is bearing down on him and Salah just manages to poke a shot upwards into the net. It’s such a tight bit of navigation through a maze with moving walls and he performed it exactly when his team needed it. It shows the skill he has but also the mentality behind it.

The dribbling he exhibits in the lead up to this goal and the next goal in my list show case his most essential talent. Thierry Henry was an amazing dribbler and speaks about the central element in getting past opponents. You watch their feet, when their heels hit the ground they’re flat footed, that’s when you push the ball past them. It’s a core principle of dribbling and Salah consistently uses this but also showcases another. He moves quickly, he turns in many directions. In the lead up to a shot his body can seem to cycle through many poses, he shapes this way and that sounding out the opposition reactions for the moment to strike. All these posture changes are based on one thing; many small steps.

When a player is sprinting they stride, powered by mighty long smooth movements. What they gain in momentum they sacrifice in mobility. The best dribblers do not sprint, they take many small steps. Each time the feet touch the ground gives them a chance to minutely change direction and make the defenders reconfigure. Messi does it, Hazard did it, Salah does it.

Watford

Against Watford he performs a solo run but it’s not him carefully navigating his way through a defence like his Spurs goal. This time he’s leading a chasing pack a merry dance so he can pry open enough space to get a finish away.

Sadio Mané entered the box and offloaded the ball to him as he zoomed past. When he takes possession Salah has five defenders clumped in front of him. He shapes to go right, forcing the clump to migrate this way, then he cuts back onto his left, the clump migrates back expecting the shot to come straight away on his favoured foot. He delays it a split second, dragging out the reactions of each and every defender. With each individual reaction they’ve made their choice, they’re now all knee-deep in their momentum; outstretched legs, one last slide, a ravenous sprint, no other movements all possible. The second chop inside has set Salah off balance and as he’s falling forward he manages to delay his kick for as long as possible. As he tumbles downwards he scuffs the ball with a grubby swing of his leg, there’s nothing cinematic about it. The ball hops and trickles into the net as he’s fooled those five defenders and now the goalie, who are all robbed of crucial reaction time.

This was the goal that made me think ‘oh this guy really could be unstoppable’. What he did was so unshowy and ruthless, the entire point was shaking that defence to it’s core so he could find the angle. Every decision he made wrong footed the opposition and the fact he finished it with a scrappy attempt showed the breadth of approaches he had in his toolbox.

The Egyptian King

From his almost under the radar arrival to breaking the Premier League scoring record 11 months later, Salah experienced a condensed journey from professional footballer to global superstar. That progression is usually spread out across a longer period but this was squashed into the confines of a single Premier League season. The ‘Egyptian King’ chant, which is based on lyrics from the song ‘Sit Down’ by Manchester band James, and nickname started around January 2018 - fans were obviously confident enough that Salah was indeed a special player.

The last player with a King moniker was Kenny Dalglish, a unique figure woven into the fabric of the club both in a football sense and a wider cultural one. For Salah to be the only other player with a royal nickname shows the level of his impact. He finished the season with 60 goal involvements in 52 games, breaking the previous league scoring record.

End of season stats 17/18
PL 36 games - 32 goals, 11 assists
FA Cup - 1 games, 1 goal
UCL - 13 games, 10 goals, 5 assists
UCL Qual - 2 games, 1 goal
Total: 52 games, 44 goals, 16 assists (1 penalty)

Global

Beyond his undoubtedly impressive achievements on the pitch, his impact off of it was more interesting. CNN dispatched Becky Anderson, the anchor of their International news, to Merseyside to interview Salah about his mesmerising first season. It seemed like he was at the centre of the entire world. Then in addition to his ‘Egyptian King’ chant the Kop started another one referencing his scoring feats and the line ‘If he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim too’. While the phrasing is clunky, the core message is one of tolerance and embrace at a community level. A study released by Stanford University around this time stated that Salah had contributed to a more positive perception of Muslims and hate crimes in the Liverpool area had dropped by 16%.

I write about football, concentrating on particular players or moments or skills but I usually arrive back at the power the sport holds. It’s embedded so deeply in so many communities and as a result holds such social potency. This first season, the coronation of The Egyptian King, stands as a heartening example of when everything aligns and things just… get better.

Further reading…

Player: Zinedine Zidane
Date: 9/07/2006
Competition: FIFA World Cup
Stadium: Olympiastadion, Berlin
Team: France
Opponent: Italy

World Cup Final

On the evening of the 9th of July 2006, amidst the grandeur of the Olympiastadion in Berlin, France met Italy to contest the World Cup final. After winning the tournament on home soil in 1998, then disastrously exiting at the group stage in 2002, France had a point to prove. That maiden win wasn’t a flash in the pan, they could once again rise to the occasion. Their captain, Zinedine Zidane, also had a burning desire to make this a triumph. In his thirty fourth year, he had retired from club football six weeks earlier with Real Madrid and would completely end his playing career after France’s participation in that World Cup.

Penalty

In the 5th minute of the match, winger Florent Malouda chases a ball into the Italian box. Marco Materazzi, the Italian centre-back, runs across him and clips his knee, prompting an immediate penalty call from the referee. Zidane steps up to face his former Juventus teammate, Gianluigi Buffon. They look at each other for a split second, the whistle goes, and Zidane, head bowed, surges towards the ball. He shapes to shoot like he wants to take the net off, but melts into languid panenka form at the last second.

Fooled by the run up, Buffon has dived to his right and watches as the ball sails off the underside of the crossbar, bounces directly down into the clean, green turf past the goal line and bounces out again. There’s a moment of hesitation where France are claiming the ball crossed the line and Italy are contesting it but the referee and linesman have seen it’s a goal. Zidane wheels away in relieved celebration. Trying a panenka in a World Cup final? This man feels no pressure.

Italy equalise in the 19th minute through a towering header from Materazzi, making up for the penalty he gave away minutes earlier. The match proceeds to be a cagey affair, as most finals are. With the onset of extra time and the finish line firmly in sight, things begin to loosen up.

The Moment

In the 110th minute, the play is moving away from the Italian box, players from both teams are slowly trotting out, back towards midfield. Marco Materazzi is walking alongside Zidane. His mouth is moving and he’s keeping Zidane in the corner of his eye. From the body language alone you can see he’s saying something to get a reaction, minutely checking if there’s any physical response. Zidane starts jogging past him. They’re both moving slowly so his progress is only really about two feet. Materazzi can see his chance to land another verbal blow is evading him. Whatever he says next is pertinent because Zidane turns and looks back at him. He stops running and suddenly has turned to square up to him.

Materazzi has kept his walking pace and direction completely even. He knows what he’s doing. His presence slowly moving into the personal space of Zidane is too good an opportunity to resist. He has assumed no confrontational air, he continues his bland walk, a frown does not even cross his face. His body language merely says ‘here I am, just your average player trying to innocently reach midfield, it would be a great shame if someone were to shove or even slap me and were sent off as a result’. He’s using his body as bait. He will absorb the blow, whatever it is, and take one for the team. It’s dastardly pantomime villain stuff, but no one expected what Zidane did next.

Head

In the 1998 World Cup final Zidane scored two towering headers to push France to victory. Each time the ball met his head it rifled through the Brazilian defence and past their keeper like a harpoon. He generated so much power they felt like shots he had caught on the volley. That night in Paris there was a verve to the French performance, it just never felt like Brazil were going to win it. For me, that night was the emergence of Zidane, well before his elegant volley to win the Champions League in 2002. The use of his head was my introduction to him and ironically it was also his last act.

When I hear ‘headbutt’ I think of someone using their forehead to strike someone, generally in the face. It’s a sneaky, darting move which can do serious damage, an advertisement for not letting anyone aggressive get within your personal space. In my Ronaldinho articles I discuss how he uses techniques in new ways to reframe the possibilities associated with them. Here Zidane used the headbutt but somehow he elevated it. He does not mangle Materazzi’s face, we see no blood, no teeth are lost in the altercation, there is no sickening result for us to recoil from.

Instead he thrusts his head directly into his sternum, much like a stag. It’s such an odd movement that the first time you see it, it’s just puzzling. Part of me was thinking ‘is that even a foul? Is that even a headbutt?’. There’s a level of primitive absurdity to it, completely at odds with the elegance that is synonymous with the midfielder.

When the match was happening I worked in a slot machine arcade. My shift started at 7pm, just as the game kicked off. Luckily there was a pub in the adjoining building which was owned by the same business. I nipped in to refill the milk for the tea machine but was really just lingering at the door watching the match. I managed to hold on to see the panenka penalty but whenever I felt the stare of my boss I’d head back to the arcade to actually do my job.

I must have nipped back in for unneeded milk again later on because I caught this incident too, furtively watching the tv round the corner, in constant mid-exit at the door, holding my milk jug prop to prove I was doing something. Watching it live I thought Materazzi made a meal of it, that he crumpled willingly to help the referee see the red card in the situation. Rewatching the incident I was taken aback at the sudden strength of the impact but even more so at the technique.

Materazzi knows his role in the script he’s been throwing together on the fly and willingly crumples to the ground, reduced, triumphantly, to weeping wreckage as Zidane stands over him, lost in the swirling red mist. The card is quickly produced. Zidane makes the last, long walk to the dressing room, having ejected himself from the biggest match of his career. His final act as a player was a violent one, one that abandoned his team in their greatest moment.

Triumph

Italy went on to win the final and lift their fourth World Cup. Materazzi scored in the shoot out, having also scored Italy’s only goal in the match. He also gave Zidane the perfect scenario to see red and abandon his team. His fingerprints are all over the match, all over Italy’s triumph, but does he feel like a winner? Is he held in the high regard you would expect? In Italy I’m sure he’s celebrated, and a lot of football fans will accept that he was preparing an obvious trap that Zidane could have easily avoided. He didn’t force him to resort to violence. Within the arbitrary laws of the game Zidane failed spectacularly. However everyone watching is doing so from outside the systematic confines of the match. Moral elements are questioned, people have biases against certain types of gamesmanship, the way Materazzi made his comments will be seen as sneaky and lacking in courage. He achieved victory but in doing so he hollowed it out, and since that day it’s come to feel like Zidane ultimately triumphed.

Football is entertainment, the sporting events happen so that narratives can move forward. This is what people ruminate on and fall in love with, the soap opera in the background. An event happening as part of a player’s career is infinitely more interesting than that same event happening in isolation with no context. Zidane was a modern day great, a player seen as legendary when he was still active, on an equal footing with the historic greats of Pelé, Maradona and Cruyff. At the time I was nineteen and saw him as historic, he had the timeless air of a player that will always be remembered. Before the 2006 final he had joined a tiny and exclusive club of players (which has come to include Beckenbauer, Müller, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo, Messi and Rodri with Mbappé and Yamal waiting in the wings) that had ‘completed football’ - winning a major league title, the European Cup, the Ballon d’Or, the World Cup plus their respective continental championship.

Having this sense of completion allowed him a freedom of choice, he was unshackled from the obligation to prove himself. He could choose legacy over success, a route to immortality that is more resonant. His actions share a sense of notoriety with his fellow Frenchman, Eric Cantona, who is always remembered first and foremost for his kung fu kick assault and then the resultant press conference where he mentioned seagulls and walked out. These occurrences outside the usual arena of sporting prowess are a better window into the character of the person and that’s why they live longer in the public consciousness. We feel like we know the subject that smidgen more.

Endings

Football fans are needy, we demand success, the fullest version of the story must always be realised. With this declarative final act Zidane declined our demands. He rejected his obligation to us and to the demands of sporting rivalry. To let the thing go when it’s in your grasp is ultimate control, maybe it’s enough to merely hold your destiny in your hand and know you could have had it.

People reflexively become more interested in something that doesn’t need our attention and the way Zidane so passionately rejected the expected outcome suddenly lent him a sheen of the antihero. He was done with the worship of fans, he wasn’t too bothered about delivering on demanded expectations. This choice is what lets him emerge as the overall hero of the piece, rising above the narrative to end his story on his own terms and exit in a blaze of controversy. Giving us a story that is endlessly more emotive than another team lifting a trophy they were quite likely to win in the first place.

Over the years Materazzi has expanded on what he said to rouse such anger and as you probably expect it’s nothing admirable. As a result he feels diminished, like a villain somehow vanquished in victory, relegated to a mere footnote in a grander story.

Further reading…

Same old question

Whenever global football or some prominent element of it arrives on the shores of the United States the same old question crops up. It was asked with the arrival of Pelé in the 1970s, and again with the hosting of the 1994 World Cup and Diana Ross’s penalty technique. It was asked with the 2023 arrival of Messi and with the hosting of the 2026 edition of the competition it’s once again on the lips of every talking head and content creator. ‘Will the US soccer craze grow from this point or simply recede to previous levels of interest?’.

The fact the nation’s media generally frames it as a craze means the question contains the answer. When you call it a craze, you’re admitting you view it as a fad, a thing with a lifespan. However, this time one thing is different. There’s an element of soccer that American culture can’t resist. U.S. songwriter Tom Petty sang about blonde haired love interests and that seems to be as American as apple pie, which actually originated in England. Someone with blonde hair who originated in England would surely prove irresistible to the Land of the Free. Step forward, Erling Braut Haaland.

Venn diagram

By a complete long shot Haaland has landed smack bang in the middle of the US cultural Venn diagram, a demographic activation God lighting up multiple cohorts at once. He’s a Gen Z meme machine, absolutely cleaning up across social media. He’s a once in a generation talent, so he actually backs everything up with goals. He’s an NFL style big guy so is more readily accepted by that fan base. He’s a member of noted rap group Flow Kingz so has an in with the most popular music in the country. He’s a nice guy so is mentioned as a role model for young men. He’s built like a body builder so is instantly appealing to the Manosphere. He’s into raw milk, bone marrow and steaks so the further reaches of the online diet grift world see him as one of their own and this also probably gets him in with the vaccine-sceptic crowd. He’s a blonde-haired, blue-eyed physical freak who’s been playing in a jersey with a giant cross on it so the current political administration would be more than amenable to his stature growth in the country. Soccer has never had such a perfectly placed messenger to shepherd the sport to new levels of popularity.

Trojan horse

The 2026 World Cup has showcased the stars to a degree never seen before. This is perfectly illustrated by the golden boot race which is going blow for blow between the biggest names in the sport. Growing sections of the country have been enamoured with Messi since 2023 but now Haaland has entered the chat. While Messi relies on his on-pitch exploits to inspire adulation, Haaland combines his feats with a goofy good natured persona all delivered through reels and stories.

The main difference between the 1994 World Cup and the 2026 edition is social media. Now the sport can be injected into the public consciousness 24 hours a day through the most effective medium of our time; short form video content. In Haaland this medium has found the perfect protagonist. He’s unique in physicality and personality but crucially he’s a digital native with his own gargantuan online following. Since the tournament started he’s gained about 20 million followers on Instagram alone leaving him at 60 million as I type. He’s operating like a Trojan horse, people not totally bought into the sport find him entertaining and through this a slower more resilient interest in soccer is smuggled into their lives.

By all accounts the viewing numbers in the States have been off the charts, even breaking records for specific games. Concentrating on this side of things is intriguing to a point but the real barometer is the interest in the sport outside of the actual match. Do people seek more information about the topic when they’re not watching it? I’m a Liverpool fan and the smallest percentage of my time is spent actually watching them play. The rest is checking news, videos, subreddits, podcasts and reading newsletters and articles. If this side of being a fan grows in the States then football has a chance. And that is exactly what’s happening. Erling Haaland has become a social media phenomenon driving interest in the sport like no other subject.

US Media

During the World Cup fans have been spoiled with many sport media outlets suddenly turning their full production power to football. An avalanche of podcasts, YouTube clips and articles have been posted daily. As someone who loves to see other cultures experience the sport, this has been a treat. I’ve watched clips from more routine sources like Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, Rich Eisen, Colin Cowherd and Mike Florio, and then commentators like F.D. Signifier and comedian Adam Friedland. It’s been interesting watching them react to the news of the day with takes ranging from coherent to laughable.

One clip in particular stood out to me. In it Colin Cowherd spoke about Erling Haaland being proof of how good the United States could be at football because… they have big guys too. Now obviously this is the opinion of someone who is new to having opinions about football, but he’s passionate about the sport and I love that. There’s also value in it, it contains the DNA of the American mindset; bigger is better. More scores! More commercials! More height! More width! More muscle! It’s the belief that everything should be MORE applied to human physiology; Vikings! Now with 30% extra!

It’s the internet obsession with protein and analytics applied to players and it’s obviously completely taking the wrong lesson from the Striking Viking. Haaland is memorably large and strong but the majority of his game relies on shrewdness not brute force. However this fascination with him is indicative of a section of US society that, through him, are actually buying into the sport.

US compatibility

Let’s say Haaland manages to win over every undecided fan in the States, how compatible is the country with the culture of the sport? There’s already a hardcore population of soccer fans but I’m talking about it converting people who usually sit down to watch NFL. I remember football writer Sid Lowe talking about the difference in reporting on Messi’s 2015 Copa Del Rey Final goal. The European articles described his amazing free flow run by using the emotion of the moment to paint a picture of what it meant to the sport. By contrast the U.S. articles were more concerned with numbers; how fast he ran, how quickly he accelerated, how many players he dribbled past and the top speed of the final shot.

My opinion at that time was that the sport is a younger thing in the US. In Europe the general knowledge is of a higher average level due to generations of interest from fans who’ve played the game. When they witness an act of genius they understand it in their bones without reading that someone reached 33km/h from a standing start. Obviously the numerical take is much more transactional, the moment boiled down to cold hard numbers, dissected. In this process of statistical harvest the magic is lost. Again I can refer to Colin Cowherd’s passionate analysis of Haaland:

It’s the opinion of one man but it’s indicative of the wider cultural interest in stats which began with Billy Beane introducing revolutionary statistical analysis to the Oakland As in the early 2000s. From there analytics spread to football itself and even encroached into dating, with app filters to weed out people who don’t meet certain physical criteria, and even self-help with the rise of Looksmaxxing, the warped pursuit of a type of anatomical golden ratio. This cultural dominance of the humble stat bodes well for the future of the sport in the US as soccer is a numbers game now. xG has gone mainstream.

International element

If Haaland is a Trojan Horse for football, football itself is a Trojan Horse for other cultures. It’s the number one reason I love it; exposure to other cultures through the shared language of sport. To me this has been the potent undercurrent of the 2026 World Cup; locals sharing stories of heart warming cross-cultural bonding particularly Kansas city hosting Algeria.

The US has low levels of passport ownership so much less people embark on international tourism. It makes sense, their country is a diverse and scenic continent criss-crossed with roads. When this is on your doorstep why deal with long haul flights and jet lag? While not necessarily a bad thing it certainly limits the exposure of the general populace to other ways of life. International sport is one of the main ways I learned about other places and how they do things and it’s evident this is one big reason there’s been an uptick in soccer interest across the World Cup.

The US doesn’t really get to experience international men’s team sport in a meaningful way. Their most popular sport is American Football and that doesn’t have an international community of nations to compete against. Can you imagine the fervour a US Men’s team would inspire if there was a World Cup of American Football? So the sport loving American public has never really experienced the broad appeal of the ‘national team’ concept in a truly global sport. Basketball has an Olympic team every four years but I think the Olympics is so varied that the impact of any single sport is diluted. Women’s international soccer has achieved gargantuan results for a long time but men’s sport holds a more developed social foothold in the minds of the average sports fans. This is changing but for now it’s undeniable that there’s a stronger social interest in men’s sports and this can activate larger, previously unreached portions of the population. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the aftermath of the US triumphing over Australia in the Group Stage.

Take me home

The win was a great moment but that wasn’t why it was memorable. It was the collective emotion of the crowd afterward. The players watched a packed stadium sing ‘Country Roads’ by John Denver. The early days of US fan culture allowed some truly odd chants to gain cult followings and I sometimes watch compilations of them and wonder at their slightly forced nature. This rendition of ‘Country Roads’ finally put them all to bed.

It’s testament to the power of the sport that moments like this happen. It was sentiment devoid of nationalistic fervour but vibrant with shared memory and an easy enjoyment of togetherness. As a diverse group of players stood together, an entire stadium sang ‘take me home, to the place I belong’ and it seemed like a mass remembrance of what people not only loved but cherished about their country.

So, will the US soccer craze grow from this point or simply recede to previous levels of interest? I’m now certain that it at least has a new high point.

Further reading…

Players: Emiliano ‘Dibu’ Martínez, Randal Kolo Muani
Date: 18/12/2022
Competition: FIFA World Cup
Stadium: Lusail Stadium, Qatar
Team: Argentina
Opponent: France
Time: 120’ + 2’

Intro

The 2022 World Cup final took place on the 18th of December in Lusail, Qatar. Argentina, resurgent and radiating historical expectation, had roared through their side of the draw to meet a vibrant Mbappé-led France in the decider. The match felt saturated with meaning before it even kicked off and it proved to be as memorable as it was momentous.

For the first time ever we witnessed a Winter World Cup. The dwindling days of December represent the winding down of the year and this feeling mapped itself onto the narrative of this tournament; something was running out, we were nearing a conclusion. It felt like the resolution of the grand narrative that had been unfolding for the last fifteen years. This was the fork in the road of modern football history; Messi or Ronaldo? Ronaldo or Messi?

In the last few seconds of extra time with the teams level at three goals apiece, as a perfect ball fell from the sky Randal Kolo Muani was bearing down on Emiliano ‘Dibu’ Martínez. If he scored our world became the one where France added another World Cup to their recent perma-form but if Martínez saved the shot we had the chance of the international return of Argentina and the crystallisation of the Messi legacy. The end of the debate.

Everyone watching Kolo Muani take his shot felt their guts somersault, for that split second the modern football world sat perfectly balanced atop a knife edge.

Moment

The greatest World Cup final had just passed before our eyes. Argentina managed to pull out in front with a two goal lead and until the equaliser it really felt like France hadn’t left the dressing room. There was a void where the vibrant Blues would usually be. I remember rumours circulating about a portion of the squad having contracted covid before the match and that would have made sense. They played like a generic international team, it was puzzling. Then in the 80th minute Kylian awoke and proceeded to score what might be the most historic hattrick of all time.

In the 120th minute, with the game at 3 goals apiece and time running out, Ibrahima Konaté, standing on the halfway line, lofted a Hail Mary over the top of the Argentina defence. It bounced once, having cleared the outstretched leg of the last defender, and fell perfectly into the path of the advancing Kolo Muani.

The French striker watches the ball fall towards his right foot. He strikes it beautifully, hitting smoothly and keeping the trajectory low. His leg rotates upwards to that insane degree professional athletes with iron hamstrings can reach. Right foot pointing skyward, left arm wrapped across his body with momentum. He’s done his job. The ball arrows toward the goal.

Somehow Dibu has advanced so he’s only about ten feet away as the ball is struck. This speed of advancement has allowed him to close the angles significantly. If the volley hadn’t been low, this probably would have gone in.

Martínez has advanced in starfish mode, going to ground like a crashed aircraft, legs juddering over the surface, his bulk rattling forward under the pair of outstretched arms like wings hanging askew. The only avenue of advancement for a kicked ball is through the crevice between his left knee and the ground, but even this is shrinking by the moment.

Kolo Muani strikes it and in that instant the entire footballing world holds its breath. The ball powers into the instep of Dibu’s left foot, arcs upwards and lands back in the middle of the box, just a few feet away. Mbappé has advanced parallel to play so when the ball ricochets back, he’s too far forward to connect with it. A slower player would have been perfectly placed for a tap in. A defender clears the ball and everyone takes a deep breath. The life has been played out of this game, the shoot out awaits.

I think this is the most pressurised moment I’ve ever seen in a football match and Dibu was the perfect player to step up to the mantle.

Dibu

He’s a one off, in multiple ways. He’s the stereotype of the crazy goalkeeper taken to the nth degree. Almost unparalleled in terms of his goalkeeping style, he seems to relish penalties and high pressure one on ones. His physicality is another area of note. He’s a big unit but he does not have the hyper athletic svelte build of most modern high performance athletes. You get the sense he doesn’t know what body fat percentage he’s currently operating with. He looms and lumbers, appearing to me like a guy who walked off a building site to play a match. The fact that he’s a goalie allows him to revel in this, if he was an outfield player he’d be sanded down to the bare bones like the rest.

‘Dibu’, his nickname, comes from a popular Argentinian live action sitcom where one of the characters is animated (think Roger Rabbit). His larger than life personality meant this teenage nickname ended up sticking. That outsized presence was the ingredient that saved this romantic Argentina from being gunned down at the last second and allowed the tiresome Messi Ronaldo debate to finally be put to bed.

I’ve always felt that Argentina really clicked when Dibu claimed the position as his own. Up to that point they never really had a goalie that projected the confidence that he does. Further up the pitch they’re so reliant on Messi that to have a large presence at the back gives the team some balance both in competence and personality. Dibu is the antithesis to Messi; large, boisterous, physical. He brought balance to a squad that up to that point was destabilised by the gravitational pull of their talismanic but quiet captain. This animated lunatic named after a cartoon character was the missing ingredient and in the most pressurised moment of the most pressurised game, his presence seemed to fill not just the goals but the entire stadium. Kolo Muani never had a chance.

Next in the series…

Name: The Cruyff Turn
Player: Hendrik Johannes Cruijff / Johan Cruyff
Period: 1974 - 1984
Teams: Netherlands, Barcelona, Los Angeles Aztecs, Washington Diplomats, Levante, Ajax, Feyenoord
Competitions: World Cup, European Championship, European Cup, La Liga, NASL, Eredivisie

What it is

‘The Cruyff Turn’ is the most high-profile move named after a player. It was performed for the first time (we’ll get to that) by Johan Cruyff in the Westfalenstadion at the 1974 World Cup. In the 22nd minute of the final group game between the Netherlands and Sweden, Cruyff found himself on the left wing just outside the Swedish box. He was tightly marked by defender Jan Olsson. How he wriggled free from his attentions was a defining moment in football; he simply outthought him. The style of this approach to problem solving forced the viewers to analyse the sport in new terms.

Description

Cruyff finds himself in a tight position where the only avenue of progression, dribbling along the end line and entering the box, is at his back in addition to being guarded closely by Olsson. As he’s facing directly back down the pitch his most obvious option is to pass to a team mate and move to a new position. This would be the accepted next logical step. It’s most likely hovering in every player’s head as the likely outcome. Cruyff knows this. So he does it, up to a point.

He performs the exact body movement involved in passing infield to a waiting team mate but segues into something else just before his foot hits the ball. He’s sold the initial movement so well that the defender has bought it, hook, line and sinker. Cruyff is now free to tweak the movement of his striking foot to instead tuck the ball neatly behind his standing leg and use the resultant momentum to tip his body gently into that direction. With that small bit of misdirection he has found himself galloping into the most thrilling thing there is for a winger; a big, delicious, empty patch of grass.

The most iconic element of the movement is the emphatic leg plant that Olsson performs to block the expected pass, but no ball ever comes. He expects Cruyff to be in his peripheral vision and his body language betrays the shock for about two seconds. He appears like a man who’s just awoken in the middle of a match and is completely confused. Meanwhile, behind him Cruyff is accelerating into the box. All we can see is the iconic number 14 emblazoned across that vivid orange as Olsson begins to turn like a jolted sleeper tumbling from bed.

Deceit

Rather than being an intricate flowing movement, the turn relies on misdirection, an outthinking of the opponent. There’s an element of showmanship involved and this is where the football fan in me begins to salivate. This type of dishonesty is why I love the sport. The best players create the problems they know how to solve, they build careers on it.

I watch the sport to see players fool the opposition. Call it what you will; creativity, problem solving, inventiveness. Players who employ misdirections are the ones who know the game, they’re so accustomed to the rhythm of the sport. A player who employs high level technical moves is, in a way, brute-forcing their way past an opponent. They will age out of being able to do this. A player who operates with feints, dummies and no-look passes becomes a part of the flow of the match. They are like conductors, directing the attentions of their opponents where and when they need. They don’t need to use physicality to overcome oppositions players, they can use the structure of play to operate around them, out of reach.

I’m going to assume you’ve watched a martial arts film or are at least familiar with the tropes they work with. Sometimes there’s a muscular fighter who can do a triple somersault and kick an opponent in the head. But then there’s an old master who can topple an opponent with one side step that throws them completely off balance. That’s the difference between executing elasticos or roulettes at high speed and doing something as simple as a slight shimmy to throw someone’s body weight off at the exact right second. Cruyff was tuned into the flow of the match. That’s what set him apart.

Cool

He is one of the divine few who sit at football’s undisputed top table. Alongside Pelé, Maradona and Messi he takes his place as the only European. Beyond his time as a player, in which he won three back to back European Cups, his time as a manager was what tilted the world of football tactics off its axis and sent it hurtling in a new direction. His innovations shaped the modern game and as a result all modern managers.

He was part of a new wave of player that came to prominence after the peak of Pelé. Cruyff approached the game in an intensely cerebral way but with the character of a rockstar; he seemed countercultural and unbothered. He was cool. The shrug of the shoulder attitude and his long hair lent him an air of a man who may have been famous even if he wasn’t a footballer.

The relaxed way he dished out the turn was the superpower that catapulted it into the global football mind. Here he was with his modified two stripe Adidas kit, as opposed to the famous three stripes (his deal with Puma meant he would refuse to advertise other manufacturers), evading defenders like he wasn’t even that bothered, and he wasn’t; this was the only World Cup he would partake in. His whole vibe of ‘cool and talented’ (which let’s face it, is never going out of style) informed football in the 1970s.

Two years later Czech player Antonín Panenka pulled off something in the same spirit of cool misdirection. At the 1976 European Championships he shaped to smash a penalty but at the last second opted for a delicate chip. Cruyff’s legacy is felt in the spirit of that move.

Why did it matter

It mattered in that it offered one of the greats his crowning achievement; his moment of glory that will live for eternity. It’s the shorthand for recognising his genius. Of course Cruyff wasn’t the first player to have done this move. It’s a body feint, as natural to the flow of the game as jogging. I think the reason it stuck to his image so securely was that the 1974 World Cup was the first tournament where it was completely broadcast in colour across the globe. Seeing this genius in his vibrant orange perform such a clearly clever move in a high pressure situation imprinted on the watching world. Kids playing ragged kickabouts all over the planet would have immediately been proclaiming ‘I’m Cruyff’ and trying this move every time they got the ball.

While you can’t actually invent a body feint (you may as well claim to have invented something as mundane as rolling up your sleeves) it points to the power of the myths that build up around football. People idolised Cruyff to such an extent that they were willing to believe no one had ever done this before. As fans, I think we want magic in the world and we elevate our heroes from humans to something approaching superheroes. They become the vessel through which we experience possibility. For most people possibility is a thing that dwindles as they age and being electrified by football is a way to reconnect with it.

Broadcast television energised the spread of Cruyff’s myth, it amplified the ecstatic version of him, the mental shorthand we had for him. It was one of the first truly historic football moments caught in full colour, an artefact that will live forever and in doing so cast this young man from Amsterdam as an eternal genius of his craft.

Further reading…

Name: The Burden of 1966
Period: 1966 - present
Team: England Men’s Team
Competition: World Cup, European Championships

Hark back, dear reader. Long ago, deep in the mists of time, before the age of the Premier League, before colour television, before radio phone-ins, the World Cup arrived on the shores of Britain. Teams from all over the globe came to participate and eventually the illustrious hosts, England, emerged victorious. On the 30th of July 1966, the Jules Rimet trophy gleamed as it was held aloft in front of a rapturous crowd. The world had found equilibrium, history could now end. Football had come home.

Until the 21st of June 1970 when it left again, and went to Brazil.

And it hasn’t been back since.

What it is

‘The Burden of 1966’ is a mood, an insidious general vibe. It’s how the country of England collectively deals with the pressure to repeat the achievement of winning a major international tournament. Every squad announcement, team lineup, press conference quote and friendly performance are hyper analysed. The weight of history dovetails with the intense football media to create a sense of overwhelming demand that restricts the freedom with which the players can approach important games.

A Simpler Time

1966 itself is now so far away it’s like a fable from a simpler time, completely removed from our modern sensibilities. Photographs of the final sometimes have that saturated look of basic colour that’s been applied to black and white artefacts after the fact. The protagonists collectively exhibiting multiple facets of human behaviour that have disappeared, all standing in ways no one does anymore, using facial expressions that have aged out of usage. Just to see them is to know they are from a different era.

Events that happened so far back always feel to me like fossils embedded in rock, compressed on all sides by the crushing weight of time, essentially unknowable. Black and white 1966 may as well be 1850 at this stage, it’s taken on the guise of something that happened before the modern age, like a footballing Industrial Revolution. With each passing year its vitality as something to connect with lessens but conversely its power as a cultural force only grows and gains heft.

That period between 1966 and 1970 (1422 days) acts as a bridge between the visual past of the sport and the first modern age. The 1970 tournament brought the innovation of global broadcast, so more fans were seeing the games, sometimes in full colour. This global dissemination of the action links it inextricably to our own modern world in a way that 1966 can’t rival. That these two tournaments bump up against each other in history feels odd to me, 66 feels ancient but 70 has a modern verve. It’s like seeing Abraham Lincoln posing for a photo with Sylvester Stallone.

History

1966 stands as the only moment of glory in the long history of English Men’s football. Since that transcendent event 60 years have passed. Counting World Cups and European Championships, that’s 29 tournaments without a follow up victory. With each failure it looms larger, a silhouette on the far horizon of history, a towering achievement casting a dark shadow that has swallowed up every squad so far.

With each new failure, 1966 has amplified in meaning, going from glorious past to gigantic burden. It’s cast the England team itself as something to be solved rather than a joyful expression of a country’s intense love of football. In the English football landscape it really does loom, with no colleagues to tower alongside, it totally dominates the culture.

The Media

The other source of pressure is the English media. This system acts like a great, all-seeing eye that surveils, magnifies and dissects every aspect of the team and its participation in any tournament. They endlessly analyse each new manager with a view to them being proclaimed the one who can finally deliver the win or a failure who must be hounded from the post. Every opinion and counter-opinion is embodied with vigour in every area available. With the constant need for copy and content, narratives that will accompany managers termination are prepared as they preside over their first press conference. With the current incumbent, Thomas Tuchel, there’s already many threads of discussion about his interpersonal skills and how this could become a flash point during an extended tournament camp with a team of bored, young millionaires. The fires are being stoked.

National mood is linked to the output of the media and it lurches wildly from ecstatic praise to morose introspection which in turn leads to the scapegoating of players. Everything is perpetually teetering on a knife edge and this environment of constant potential recrimination must sap players of enthusiasm, each match feeling like something to be endured rather than approached with zeal.

This 24 hour media spotlight, converting anything it passes over into a story for mass consumption, piles anxiety upon the crushing pressure already brought by history. It’s like an experiment to see how much expectation can be heaped upon players until they succumb to their own inevitable implication in the next great failure.

One isn’t enough

In HBO’s Succession, Greg, a naive but ruthless ladder-climber, is pleased he’s being left 5 million dollars in a will. To the multi-multi-millionaires he keeps company with, this is almost laughable, a source of problems as opposed to the means to financial freedom. By their standards, you now only have enough to know you don’t have enough. For the following snippet of the script I’ve cast England as Greg and Connor and Tom can interchangeably be Brazil or Italy.

The poorest rich person or in football terms; the least successful of the successful teams. Essentially you need one thing to remedy this failing; more.

Other countries with multiple wins don’t need to obsess over one particular triumph, they merely celebrate the most recent and the rest fade into history to be fondly remembered whenever the feeling arises. Brazil have five wins, Italy and Germany have four each. With these countries I’ve never seen any specific discourse about one particular year.

France have assumed their place in the modern game, winning in 1998, losing a final in 2006, winning in 2018 and losing a final in 2022. They’re consistently in the mix. They’re at ease with their chances and enter each tournament as favourites.

Uruguay have two but their wins are in 1930 and 1950 and to me they don’t feel like they count in the modern game. They’ve lost the lustre of recency, essentially going a bit stale so as to almost expire in terms of relevancy. But at least they have two.

Spain are in the same boat as England, although their major difference is their one win was recent and has been surrounded by three European Championship wins. They’re gleaming with modern relevance.

That’s why consistent victories, like Brazil and Italy who have spaced out their wins through the decades, feed into the image of a country as a superpower (although Italy have severely fallen off by not appearing at the last three World Cups).

As time passes England’s 1966 triumph gains a sense of staleness, feeling more like anomaly than achievement. There’s a countdown on that relevance, feeding into the pressure.

The Return

It currently feels like the England players are tiny scurrying figures, desperately trying to evade the roving media glare as they carry out their quest of bringing the trophy home. The towering presence of 1966 can only be toppled with a World Cup triumph.

On the upside, this means the national obsession with adding that crucial second triumph is temporary, even though it doesn’t seem it. The addition of a second trophy is the seal of approval that says ‘yes, you are now an undisputed football giant, you’ve shown you can do it twice. Relax’. When it happens the need for a third will be almost like a bonus, a pressure free pursuit.

When 1966 is eventually consigned to history it will revert to being less complex, less potent, simply remembered as something nice that happened a long time ago.

Next in the series…

A sumptuous scythe
Of dexterous pleasure,
To deduce the length
No eye could measure.
Crystalline, perfect,
To within a hair.
He hit the pass,
That wasn’t there.

Intro

When Argentina defeated the Netherlands on the 9th of December 2022 it represented only the second time they had progressed past the quarter final stage of the World Cup since 1990. The victory brought with it an air of destiny. Could this Messi fairytale actually manifest? Would top level sport bend to the will of so many fans in every corner of the world who wanted to see the magical Argentine emerge triumphant?

As a single match, for sheer moment to moment entertainment, it’s probably the most entertaining one I’ve watched. There was sublime skill, perfect kit contrast, absolute head loss, needless provocation, a near brawl due to Paredes walloping the ball directly into the Netherlands subs bench, narrative drama and to top it off the full emergence of ‘Evil Messi’ (well, not exactly evil but ‘Rude Messi’ doesn’t have the same ring to it). His prolonged ear cupping celebration whilst staring at Louis van Gaal and Edgar Davids was so out of character it was almost shocking.

He stood, ears cupped, eyes like lasers, cultivating the siege mentality that would energise his team mates and mobilise a world of Argentina fans in the stadiums and the streets, online and off. Van Gaal and Davids, likeable and decent people, pleaded with Messi in confusion after the match ‘Leo, Leo why are you like this? What’s happened to you!?’. But Leo had assumed the spirit of Diego, it was too late for everyone else now.

It reminds me of Michael Jordan fabricating personal beef with opposition players to motivate himself. If no one is good enough to keep the pressure on me, I suppose I’ll have to do it myself.

As a spectacle the match is merely set dressing for the centrepiece, when Messi found the trajectory for his pass to meet the feet of Nahuel Molina, something shifted in the sport. The previous high bar for what a pass could be moved up a notch. We had witnessed history unfolding before our eyes in a blaze of inventiveness. Messi had pulled magic from thin air exactly when he needed to.

Moment

In the 33rd minute with the game scoreless, Nahuel Molina cuts inside from the right wing and offloads to his captain. Messi receives the ball not far from the furthest point of the centre circle, his blue and white shirt a stark contrast to the milling orange opponents. There are 7 Dutch players between him and the goal, Frenkie De Jong and Nathan Aké are closest. In that orange zone there are 2 Argentina players, Molina and Julián Alvarez. Molina backpedals, signals for a return pass but realises he’s asking Messi for the ball, immediately thinks better of it and continues his run forward. He knows that something is about to happen.

Messi furtively dribbles forward, in a way that’s more akin to toying with a cat, trying to get it to swipe a paw. Aké is matching his every step, trying not to get suckered in as he nears the box. The entire move hinges on the following movement. After Molina had gestured for the return pass Messi shapes his body to pass into his path. This causes Aké to micro-pause, just to see if the ball is being passed but Messi shifts his hips and continues on with his original run. Aké is off balance but he recovers quickly. This tiny shuffle has allowed Messi the smallest bubble of breathing room.

In his frustration at having been caught out with the body feint, Aké comes at him to win the ball. The discomfort of allowing an attacker to veer nearer and nearer the box demands a reaction, the mazy dribble must stop. What all defenders know is that fouling Messi here is nearly equal with giving a penalty away. He is being chased through a minefield to which he is impervious. As he shapes to pass, Aké attempts to cover the passing lane to Alvarez by diving in, extending a leg to block the pass. This was his fatal mistake.

Messi knows somewhere in that blindspot over his own right shoulder, lost in the periphery, Molina is continuing his run. Aké is anticipating the pass to Alvarez who is in a more central location. The extended leg would block the central pass but its extension allows for a glorious nutmeg, a nutmeg which would activate the Molina pass.

Messi has Aké and Marten De Roon crowded in front of him, with De Jong closing in. Beyond them stands Virgil van Dijk, Jurriën Timber and Daley Blind. Messi looks forward but passes sideways, a no-look pass to a blue and white streak advancing through the Dutch defence like a dagger. Molina, who started the move, finds the ball, a meandering heat seeking missile, magically returning to his feet. In the short time available he manages a dainty finish with the outside of his right boot as he clatters into and over the advancing goalkeeper. The ball nestles into the side netting, an ordinary poked finish acting as confirmation for the best pass, the best assist in football history.

Meaning

A player that starts and finishes a move is usually seen as the architect but here that logic is inverted. Like a puppet master Messi has used Molina as bookends for his genius. Throughout the move he treats Alvarez as a decoy, the object of his attention, shaping to pass into his run. A plan within a plan within a plan, he shapes to use Molina, this decoy leads to his shaping to use Alvarez, which itself is a decoy to revert to his original plan to use Molina. As with all great sequences of play this happens across an eternity-like 3 seconds, during which the world was on the edge of its seat.

Of the galaxy of cosmic Messi moments this is perhaps the most mesmerising. He employs a body feint that upends the momentum so he can continue on his way then executes a no-look pass through six internationals, one of which is Virgil Van Dijk. His pass just deletes 6 players and he didn’t even need to look to make it.

That moment left me speechless. It’s such a privilege to know you’re witnessing history and still have over an hour of the game left to luxuriate in it. This was an undisputed moment of magic, football from the gods. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it but passages like this have made me wonder ‘is Messi the best a person has ever been, at anything, ever?’.

The best way to view the complexity of the situation is the aerial camera angle. Seeing the players as roving dots helps your brain to understand the angles that open and close passing lanes with every passing fraction of a second.

I try to cherish the fact we still get to see his highlights and just to know he’s still lining up for active matches gives me a thrill. A day will come when there are no more Messi matches, no more amazement, he will have lined out for the last time and these gifts, these days when possibility is still alive and moving, will begin to fade into the mists of memory. What’s interesting is that players are always remembered more fondly as time progresses, with Messi how is that even possible?

Secret

‘There is a secret inside him’. That line could stand alongside the old English that adorns Lord of the Rings. It has a timeless quality, like some old soldier praising a hero he once saw win a great war. This is the brilliant bonus of people speaking in their second language, whether the quote was in English originally or was then translated, repurposing phrases with a new cadence can lend an esoteric quality. We have van Dijk, one of the most imperious centre backs in history, a player who looks like he’s never had to sweat, wondering in awed tones at what this guy is even capable of.

The ‘secret inside of him’ phrase conjures images of golems, mythical clay men, who come alive with magical purpose when a slip of paper with a written instruction is placed inside them. There is a secret inside him, something we mortals are not privy to. It leaves us to ponder the mystery, a small gap we can peek through, wide eyed, and gasp at the majesty of skill, and wonder what else is even possible.

They say talent hits a target no one else can hit, but genius hits a target no one else can see. Messi hit that target, and he didn’t even need to look.

Next in the series…

Mineiraço

On July 8th 2014 the Brazilian anthem blared around the Mineirão before the World Cup semi final between Brazil and Germany. Júlio César and David Luiz, both rattling with emotion, clutched a Brazil jersey between them. It held the name and number of Neymar and was so jagged with crease lines it looked on the verge of snapping.

In the previous round Neymar, the talisman of A seleção, had suffered a spinal injury which ended his involvement in the tournament. As the anthem volume ebbed away to let players and fans roar the remainder of the lyrics together, the event took on an odd and solemn air. If you tuned in not knowing about the injury you would likely think Neymar had tragically passed and this was a heartfelt tribute to the fallen genius. He loomed over proceedings and his absence from the ensuing devastation at the hands of Germany absolved him of any guilt. That was the day that Neymar began to haunt Brazil.

The 1-7 loss immediately manifested into a neurosis of continental proportions known as the ‘Mineiraço’ (the blow of the Mineirão). Neymar, untarnished, became the symbol of hope for the fans, a spectre that floated over proceedings; if he had played, the disaster would not have come to pass. Suddenly the Brazilian footballing consciousness had whiplashed around the idea of their samba prince and held it close. He was their salvation, wedded to the very idea of Brazilian success. In their desperation they would come to rely on the unreliable.

Brazil

If any country is synonymous with the World Cup it is Brazil. The canary yellow jersey, the blue shorts, the iconic nicknamed players; all these ingredients combine to lend the tournament an undeniable cultural heft. When I hear strains of samba music, particularly the cuica, which for years I thought was some form of trained musical bird (you can hear it at the start of ‘Soul Bossa Nova’ by Quincy Jones), my mind instantly snaps to A seleção lining up before a match.

FIFA owes Brazil a great deal. Beyond success and entertainment, they brought culture to the World Cup, a larger than life identity that fans all over the planet could immediately grasp and understand. For me this type of exchange is the lifeblood and the superpower of football. Teams deal in culture in an organic transfer that happens around the nuts and bolts of the actual sporting affairs. People learn about other countries and customs and realise there’s many corners of our planet where people do things differently but ultimately enjoy the same basic activities as everyone else. I see it as a type of global humanising ritual, an entertaining inoculation against ignorance. With five World Cup wins Brazil repeatedly shared the country’s unique personality on the world stage through the decades, but with the 2026 edition of the competition they are about to equal their longest ever World Cup drought.

When the tournament kicks off it will have been 24 years since they last lifted the trophy in Japan at World Cup 2002. The previous comparable gap was between Mexico 1970 and USA 1994. Add to this the looming possibility of Germany equalling the record five wins Brazil have, and that anxiety amplifies into a sense of desperation. They’ve held top spot of the World Cup winners table since 1994 but for Brazil to be Brazil they need to be the mythical winners, out in front, the Real Madrid of international football, rising above it all.

Modern football is shaped against a backdrop of Samba skill but a sense of desperation clings to their participation in this specific World Cup. If they go out early or unceremoniously, it could prove to be the end of their cultural magic, the end of the mystique. When people feel desperation their openness to solutions increases and spurious schemes, obviously long shots in the cold light of a clear head, start to gain a magical appeal. Enter Neymar.

Neymar

For all the hope the young Neymar brought, his only success with Brazil has been the 2013 Confederations Cup, a small 8 team tournament held the year before the World Cup in the host country as a dress rehearsal. FIFA has since discontinued it. When the country managed to win the 2019 Copa América, the only other tournament of note besides the World Cup, he was absent through injury.

He’s not worn the canary yellow shirt since 2023 when he tore his ACL and many thought that traumatic injury was one too far, that a door had closed permanently. There was now a cast iron reason to omit him from any future squads and as a result the days of Neymar rainbow flicking his way around the opponents box were consigned to history. But South America does veneration of players better than anywhere else. Argentina has erected a religion around Maradona, Pele is regarded as a de facto saint in Brazil and since bringing home the trophy in 2022, Messi is enjoying a sort of living God existence. Neymar by comparison is loved more for his potential than in thanks for past glories. When he gained global prominence in 2010 he was seen as the great hope, but problematically for Brazil, in 2026 he remains that same great hope.

With his inclusion in the squad for the 2026 World Cup, Brazil have reunited with the flotsam prince of flicks. The ghost of the ‘Mineiraço’ has come back to haunt them. It remains to be seen if he will even be fit to play or if Ancelotti has merely used him as a media sponge so the press won’t concentrate on the real core of the squad.

In the eyes of the nation he’s a player frozen in time, a dazzling magician untainted by the ‘Mineiraço’, the ghost of a glorious football past, once again the vessel into which the country has poured it’s collective, desperate hope.

Further reading…

Out of nowhere!

Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. What a collection of letters. A few Ks and wildcard Hs combine to surprise my Irish sensibilities with this fantastically ornate name. Things get even better when it’s spoken aloud. At first I thought ‘I’ll not be mastering this pronunciation’ but then to my delight, it actually rolls off the tongue in a glorious flourish. It goes up another level when you hear the surname wailed by a commentator across his diverse range of Serie A highlights. ‘Kvaratskheliaaaaaaaaa!’. It’s already timeless.

To me, a Liverpool fan who watches Liverpool games and sometimes keeps tabs on El Clásico through glances at the Livescore app, he came out of nowhere. The very first time I saw him was when Napoli eviscerated Liverpool in the group stage of the Champions League in 2022, already a fully formed world beater.

He arrived via the scenic route. Whereas a lot of promising European talents are ushered through the lower tiers of multi-club models until they arrive at the top of the food chain, he went East from his native Georgia, first to Lokomotiv Moscow then further again onto Rubin Kazan. Despite performing well, his time in Russia was cut short due to the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. He moved momentarily back to Georgia, playing for Dinamo Batumi before Napoli decided they’d seen enough and took a chance on him. From there his rise has been stratospheric. The Napoli fans bestowing the nickname ‘Kvaradona’ quite early into his time at the club in a comparison to Diego Maradona, the man their stadium is named after, is an indication of the immediate reverence he was held in.

I think the fact he comes from Georgia carries a lot of weight, in the same way Salah being from Egypt does. These nations are not football backwaters, they’ve produced great players in the past but they don’t have the existing cultural expectation of excellence that helps talents develop in the football superpowers. It’s more straightforward for a young Mbappé to dream and excel in France because he has concrete examples of past glories and players to emulate, it’s a tangible aspiration. It’s more impressive to make it to the top tier of players without this cultural identity to immerse yourself in from a young age. It’s indicative of the hunger and mindset of Kvaratskhelia that he has forced his way to the top table.

Play style

A player with a gravitational pull, every time he pops up he seems to be on centre stage. The game happens through him. In a visual sense he ticks all the boxes for what you might call a stereotypical winger. He runs with his head down, darting ahead with loping strides like he’s pulling the ball along on a string. This darting movement is built around his eyes, like all great dribblers there’s a predatory sense to how he watches his opponents legs, always waiting for those planted feet so he can push off and away from the flat footed marker. His low socks add to the sense of pace, looking like his shin pads tumbled out and his socks wiggled down because they couldn’t keep up. Always moving at pace, with directness, never going backwards, always towards goal, a personification of the way the game needs to be played.

His strengths

Having watched him for the past few seasons he seems to have only grown in stature and impact. Usually players hit the difficult second season where the opposition have figured their approach out enough to slow their progress for a while at least. Kvara has not experienced this, it’s been success after success, all coming on a wave of praise and trophies. When evaluating him you start to add up the strengths he has and the list just keeps extending. I tried to list his comparative weaknesses but have come up short. At a stretch you could say he’s predictable but so was Arjen Robben, always cutting in on his left and no one was able to do anything about any of that.

In the interest of completeness here’s a list of his strengths as I see them:

I’ve collected some examples of this diverse skillset in action:

Simple dribble plus vision plus two footedness

He nutmegs Trent Alexander-Arnold with his right foot and as he drifts by him he sees a team mate on the opposite wing and pings a perfectly weighted instep curl with his left foot just out of the reach of the centre-back. This is all executed without a hitch, being adept at using both feet allows him to approach every situation with grace under pressure.

Imagination and execution

In this instance he’s slowly approaching the Israel goal from the left wing and as he comes near the edge of the box he picks out a perfect trajectory and just clips the ball into the far top corner like a golfer would chip onto a green. It’s hit without much back lift and the ball just sails freely by every other factor in the scenario; the backtracking defender is left watching, the goalie is rooted to the spot and the post and crossbar aren’t bothered by the ball either. It just sinks into the top corner, nothing but net.

Immaculate improvisation

He presses a defender who has just taken the ball from the goalie and forces a spill of possession. Racing towards the ball he dinks it just as the goalie arrives to gather. The ball delicately pops over the sliding keeper in a move which is a near carbon-copy of Messi versus Manuel Almunia when Barcelona played Arsenal.

Pure specialist technique under pressure

The technique needed to score free kicks is an oddity in the sport, something quite separate from the rest of the skills which all seem to happen around each other in the flow of a match. Free takers are specialists that need to develop something more akin to the skillset of a golfer, dealing with a pressurised moment outside the flow of play where you can’t rely on team mates. Against Fiorentina, Kvaratskhelia scores from a long way out in free kick terms, placing it into the top corner at ferocious speed. Mindset and technique combining to produce the goods and add another string to his bow.

Throwback

When he is praised there’s usually a part of the compliment that refers to him being a throwback, something reminiscent of an earlier time. It’s a lament disguised as praise, an understated form of ‘look what they took from us!’. Football, like all other areas of life, has a nostalgia infection. Here it manifests as observing something happening right in front of our eyes and saying ‘this thing we’re currently witnessing NEVER happens nowadays’. I could swear that there was less nostalgia not long ago, back in my day we didn’t hark back to imagined better times.

This casts him as a temporal anomaly rather than a valid result of modern football. It harks back to a vague, undefined time period when every winger was supposedly a dazzling magician, bamboozling defenders up and down sidelines the world over. By comparison the present has decayed into a morally degraded wasteland devoid of exciting football. Except hang on, Kvaratskhelia has been amazing since 2022, Salah just finished a seven year stint in the Premier league where he broke nearly every record from the wing, Saka has been dazzling since he’s been in the Arsenal team, Olise is on Ballon d’Or form, Doku’s been dribbling everyone that approaches him, Mahrez and Sané were unplayable for a while. I could go on.

Dribbling

There’s a totality to the way Kvara plays the game. He excels in all areas he can without an apparent weakness and the backbone of his entire approach is dribbling; running directly at people, then solving, at light speed, the physical equation the interaction throws up. When a player can deduce these tangled up moments of physicality, that is what gets fans excited, that is what astounds people and gets bums off seats and hands on heads.

It was the most exciting thing in football in 1930, it was the most exciting thing in football in 1970 and it’s the most exciting thing in football now. A great dribble is more exciting, more rewarding than a great goal. People understand that. Watching some jinky winger take the risk and come out on top, over and over, is just great entertainment.

No matter how bloated the corporate apparatus around football gets, there will always be dribbling, the soul of the sport. People tune in to see the game executed in this way. It doesn’t always happen, there’s only ever a handful of players who can do it, but the promise of it happening is what brings people back. It’s the sweet spot of the sport, where athleticism, imagination and skill intersect.

Kvaratskhelia is not a throwback, he’s not the future, he’s what the sport can be.

Then, now and always.

Next in the series…

Player: Dennis Bergkamp
Date: 02/03/2002
Competition: Premier League
Stadium: St.James’ Park
Team: Arsenal
Opponent: Newcastle

The lead up

It’s early March 2002 and the Premier League race is being fought, refreshingly, between Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and for a time Newcastle United. Arsenal are visiting Tyneside in a five thirty kick off as the last of the day’s light retreats between the ragged clouds just visible beyond the distant roof of St.James’ park.

It’s the tenth minute and Jermaine Jenas has possession on the left wing outside Arsenal’s box. He attempts a short pass to Laurent Robert but one of Patrick Vieira’s telescopic legs intervenes and possession is back with the Gunners. He immediately pops the ball to a waiting Dennis Bergkamp, floating in midfield. If we take the following move as starting at this point we can count Bergkamp as the one who initiates it, which is important.

He turns and sprays a lovely pass across midfield to Robert Pires advancing down the Arsenal left wing. When you watch football long enough you start to appreciate the way passes are hit and the way Bergkamp hits this marks him out as the highest level of technician, a baller. He pings it, slightly elevated but driven enough so it zooms, curling, towards the feet of the advancing Pires and bends away from the pressing Newcastle player. Right after the pass is hit, he keeps jogging in a straight line towards the goal, his head snapping this way and that, taking in the positions of all the players around him.

The play advances down the pitch with Pires in possession as two Newcastle players close in. He shapes to pass, feints and only when the two opponents are left flat-footed does he opt to fizz it in low to Bergkamp’s feet, who by now is just arriving centrally into the opposition box.

The goal

With his back to goal Bergkamp takes the first touch with his left foot, flicking the ball across his body to the right, as he peels away to the left. This is visually mesmerising because he’s swivelling away as the ball sails across him in the opposite direction, it feels like the action of a juggling showman. I’ve watched it so many times in slow motion, his arms careful so as not to handball and as he spins he takes on the energy of a gun-toting hero in a John Woo film, twirling along in a world where normal rules of movement have been suspended.

Newcastle centre-back Nikos Dabizas is caught flat footed, legs a mile apart. As the flicked ball sails past his face he is aware of a blurry Bergkamp stealing away in his left peripheral vision. He is frozen between the choices of following that escaping blur left or tracking the ball right. For a split second of madness he raises his hands to try and stop the ball but immediately drops them in an admission of defeat. Bergkamp, now fully turned and facing the goals, switches from balletic to brutish.

As a player, he was a contradiction. His elegant artistic side came complete with a nastiness that could compete with anything the Premier League threw at him. Thierry Henry cannot hide the admiration and love he felt for him and it seems to boil down to the fact he had that edge concealed like a razor blade within his play. He’d leave a late boot on someone in a tackle, he’d sneak an elbow in.

He extends an arm to keep Dabizas away but he really uses this to shove him to the ground. The elegant flick followed up with the direct shove encapsulates the best of football, the most adaptable players can contend with a range of situations and this showcases the full Bergkamp experience in the space of three seconds. He pirouettes like a ballerina, shoves the turning Dabizas to the ground like a bouncer, greets the flicked ball like a loyal pet and employs a right-footed finish so neat it’s like a snooker shot.

The composure of the finish is the perfect way to cap off the sequence. It’s like watching a gymnast blur through the air in mind-boggling rotations only to end with an emphatically statuesque and frozen landing. Bergkamp had pulled off a high stakes flick, completed his turn, manhandled Dabizas and then arrested all the movement and frenzy to pull this off. It’s as if the sequence of play suddenly froze and the Bergkamp who had gotten the ball to this point, now flustered from the exertions, switches places with a new, relaxed Bergkamp who steps into this scene fully composed, takes a beat and then calmly passes the ball into the corner.

This is what people mean when they say ‘ice in the veins’. It manifests as being steady amidst the chaos of the box. Everything resets in the player’s head and they can slot home with ease. Composure and panic are partitioned in two separate sides of the mind.

Positional knowledge

Bergkamp was a product of the Ajax youth system which is essentially a factory for top tier technical talent. To learn the game in the fullest sense, players are made to play all positions on the pitch, particularly the one they come up against when playing in their preferred role. A striker must play centre-back for a time to understand specifically what causes trouble for that position. That resultant positional knowledge surely played a part in knowing how the flick would affect Dabizas for the all important split second that splits his attention right down the middle. It imposes a type of momentary brain freeze while Bergkamp spins around the back to meet the ball coming the other way.

He used the ball as a decoy for his own movement, essentially assisted a goal he scored, and in scoring that goal finished off a move he started in the other half of the pitch.

Dennis Bergkamp, maybe the only player who could link up with himself.

Next in the series…

Name: The Midfield Mirage
Player: Sergio Busquets
Period: 2008 - 20225
Teams: Barcelona, Inter Miami, Spain

Iguazu

Whenever I hear the shimmering strings of ‘Iguazu’ by Gustavo Santaollala, I think of Sergio Busquets, moving through pairs of pressing opponents like a mirage, a whisper of a ghost, a rumour circulating in central midfield.

The track is named after the densely huddled series of over 250 waterfalls along the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. The iconic falls were heavily featured in the 1986 historical drama ‘The Mission’. Santaolalla himself is a renowned Argentine composer and multi-instrumentalist. ‘Iguazu’ is from his album ‘Ronroco’ (1998) a mesmerising collection created on the ronroco, a stringed instrument which is a distant relative of the lute.

The sounds of ‘Iguazu’ wash over you with a slowly developing sense of progression, no element taking precedence. To me it feels as if Santaolalla has taken the colossal grey mists that constantly rise from the densest huddle of waterfalls, and conjured it into music. He has captured this feeling of ephemeral visual pattern that sometimes arises in nature. Like watching thin layers of tide disperse across shimmering sand, when shards of glistening reflection dance across the face of the water, patterns align for that moment, there’s a building sense of satisfying fruitlessness, of trying to focus on shapes that only exist in neighbouring contexts. They’re here and they’re gone.

The elements of the song layer upon each other, pulling the focus of our ears so that we’re aurally squinting, trying to focus on two competing elements at once and getting a mystifying sense of something as a result. You end up letting the music wash over you like the mists of the falls.

Santaolalla has created this hypnotic wall of sound with nothing but his ronroco and an accompanying violin. This intricate and mystifying soundscape can be produced with these simple ingredients. Sergio Busquet’s play style mirrors this, by employing turns and feints, techniques open to any player, he creates poetic passages of play.

Busquets

He did the hardest things in the simplest way. That’s why I’m obsessed with nailing down how he moved. For Barcelona he WAS the system, in that his unique skillset was the glue that held everything together. He was the embodiment of the phrase ‘press resistant’, co-ordinated intense pressures from two players would be evaded with a movement as relaxed as a morning wave to a neighbour.

If you watch a highlights compilation of his movement while in possession you’ll see one thing over and over; multiple players bearing down on him and he’ll complete a feint so effective that one of the players is left flat footed while the other is sprinting away from play as he emerges with the ball going in the opposite direction.

He played as a deep lying midfielder, ferrying around between midfield and the back. His main strength was analysis, an ability to see and read the patterns in the match. He knew when to apply pressure and exploit these structures of play, nicking in and stealing the ball away then swivelling once, twice, and advancing away from what had looked like overwhelming pressure.

His interaction with the match was like that of a mirage, which reminds me of the entrance of Omar Sharif in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. He conjures from the heat haze on the flat horizon of the desert, a tiny undulating blob, as he advances he gains form and clarity until suddenly he is there, a man in broad daylight. He emerged from the environment, a shape that grew from nothing and could melt away again. For opponents Busquets materialised out of the match in the same way. He was the flow of the game, a pattern that couldn’t be touched, more visual phenomenon than player.

Seeing connections

I think the point of writing or making artwork is to provide an insight, to communicate with someone through the medium you’ve chosen. I feel football in my stomach and I understand it through this process, I get a smell of an image in my mind and I know if I follow that thread there may be some interesting thing at the end. Maybe if I make it, the final work will be emotive for other people.

Music plays a large role in coming up with random thoughts to then follow through to conclusion. For the longest time watching Busquets highlights gave me a particular joy, the way he’d cycle through basic movements, chain them together and emerge from pressure with the ball in tow, was really visually rewarding. The satisfaction of watching someone use apparently simple methods to arrive at complex solutions was immensely satisfying. As I watched I’d get a more visual sense of what he was doing within the larger system of the team and the match. His role was like that of lubricant in a system of cogs, he would rove and intercept and pass, a watchful eye keeping the play up to standard.

Listening to Iguazu and experiencing the layering of sounds reminds me of how Busquets steered a game, his presence felt like this, many minute alterations, almost transparent, always moving. He was a fleeting presence, his play style mirrored the music.

The plucked strings of the ronroco occur at just the right speed to be noticeable as singular noises but they’re surrounded tightly enough by each other to have their relation suggest a shifting whole, a moving body of sand on the wind. Ephemeral, ungraspable, except in context. You can see the momentary shapes moving sands make, but they are not there to be touched, there’s no physical confirmation, you just watch the formation expand and contract across the surface as it moves.

Busquets existed in context, a momentary expression of the ball moving between two points on the pitch, licking past with the grace of an echo escaping down a hallway, or a drifting mist on the wind. You cannot interface with these things. They are illusions, existing only in a visual sense, they have no solid structure. Reach out to grasp them and you only change the formation, they have already reordered. What you tried to touch has evaded you.

Next in the series…

Name: Haaland Hang Time
Player: Erling Braut Haaland
Period: 2020 - present
Clubs: Borussia Dortmund, Manchester City
League: Bundesliga, Premier League, Champions League

Sport is unfair

Sport is unfair and Erling Haaland is a six foot five inch embodiment of that fact. Some people are just born with an advantage. His father played in the Premier League and his mother was a heptathlete - he’s the ultimate genetic nepo baby.

Players like this exist as the exception to the rule, they circumvent the usefulness of skill. Haaland, Zlatan, they’re physical freaks who can perform athletic feats no one else can. Thanks to their physicality they’re starting at a different point than 99.9% of the population. There’s a magic in that, it’s fun to think some people are gifted to the point of almost having superpowers.

Hang Time

What makes Haaland interesting is that he rarely relies on his imposing bulk, he’s a player that thrives on clever movement. Sometimes however, he will reach out and wrestle the the match to the ground and ‘Haaland Hang Time’ is his most acrobatic method of doing this.

When a cross is drifting over the box and out of the danger zone, Haaland can become airborne in an astounding way. He doesn’t so much leap as fling his body upwards in a slow, cumbersome rotation. A master at dispersing his body weight to control momentum, he uses his lowest limb as a type of pendulum to counter balance whatever shape he’s making up top to connect with the ball. He appears as a jumble of extremities arrayed around a gurning flushed face, a multi limbed man engaged in aerial yoga poses as a ball bounces off some uncouth portion of his anatomy.

Ronaldo will leap for a header in a vertical line, much like a basketball player shooting up towards a rim. By comparison Haaland flings his legs out and upwards, as he does so he drops his elbow and head back so the resulting momentum allows his feet to elevate above the rest of his body. In addition he twists so his back is nearly facing the ball, this coiled body position allows for the heel to strike with spiteful force, almost like a scorpion. The contortions generate the torque and the ball strike, an oddity, always befuddles a goalie for that important split second it takes to cross the line.

Gen Prem

Haaland feels like the most iconic of a new wave of players, the generation who were born to the Premier League, the likes of Liam Delap and Evan Ferguson. They have parents who played professional football in the mega money age and know where the pitfalls are, products of a type of footballing Bene Gesserit. Every chance to make them stronger, wiser, better placed to succeed is taken from a young age.

Haaland is an astounding confluence of slim chances; the large frame, the freakish athleticism, the mindset, the sporting parents, the insight of a career in professional football to guide his every move from birth. He feels like a one off, as all the great players do. Never having endured the ignominy of being referred to as the ‘next’ version of a previous legend, he was just that good from a young age.

What’s exciting about Haaland is that he has the physicality to be a striker who bullies the opposition but he doesn’t usually resort to this. A lot of his finishes are from clever box play and being able to read the game; he performs with the skillset of a much smaller player. As he ages he will undoubtedly add strings to his already well strung bow and I hope we can begin to see a greater range of goals.

He’s hit a thunderous distance strike against PSG and he’s had a rampaging run against Brentford. These are in stark contrast to the majority of his goals. It was said before Luis Suárez became consistent that he was a scorer of great goals but not a great goalscorer. I would say the opposite is currently true about Haaland. He delivers in quantity and that has a quality all its own, but he is developing a trademark finish and ‘Haaland Hang Time’ is it.

Case Study

Man City played Borussia Dortmund on September 14th 2022 in the Champions League. João Cancelo has the ball on the left wing, he looks up and sees Haaland deep in the box, sandwiched between two Dortmund defenders. He knows there’s a good chance he can just leave a ball hanging near the Norwegian and he’ll get some part of his body on it. So he dinks a driven cross with the outside of his right boot. It falls just past where Haaland could have realistically gotten his head on it. But this doesn’t matter, the multi-directional anatomy can just rearrange in real time and attack the opportunity through the most efficient route. He contorts like a modular efficiency program, reassembling in mid-air like Tetris.

He warps, generating momentum by twisting his body away from the goals. This odd movement results in him executing what is a type of back heel bicycle kick. His body looks like it’s been thrown from a helicopter without a parachute and has momentarily materialised in this football match - he’s just hurtling through open air, limbs askew.

With this left heel, upright like a viper, he flicks the ball directly over the goalie’s head and into the net as his own body tumbles to the ground. The defenders had doubled up on him, were marking either side and still he managed to find the key to unlock the situation. His physicality allowed him to access the only viable method of connecting with the ball.

He scored a near carbon copy of the goal against Sparta Prague on October 23rd 2024, so it’s as close to a ‘thing’ as he has. Ronaldinho had the elastico, Zidane had the roulette, Beckham had free kicks.

Haaland has hang time.

Next in the series…

Name: The Guardiola Overthink
Manager: Pep Guardiola
Period: 2015 - present
Club: Bayern München / Manchester City
Competition: Champions League

The Guardiola Overthink

‘The Guardiola Overthink’ is a recent phenomenon. It first appeared when Pep was managing Bayern and their seamless progression through the Champions League was undone by a tactical innovation he dreamed up on the plane en route to the match.

It crops up whenever he has a big European tie on the horizon. His teams generally wipe the floor with domestic opposition in addition to peaking towards the end of the season, so when they reach these knock out ties they’re usually operating as a well-oiled machine. If he could just leave the tactics alone the team would probably power through based on being in the groove but he makes a last minute tactical tweak and, you guessed it, his team get eliminated when a less talented manager would most likely just keep the winning formation going.

Why does Pep need to try the thing that won’t work? I think he believes so much in innovation that he’s willing to embrace failure so he can root out the positive thread and then follow that.

Pep

He seems to be a man tortured by ideas. They must bubble and multiply in his head, cramming together, occupying mental bandwidth, preventing him from pursuing any activity that doesn’t immediately result in the removal of said ideas to relieve the pressure in his mind. He can see tantalising tactical perfection just out of his reach. In ‘Pep Confidential’ by Marti Perarnau, Guardiola admits that he cannot go more than thirty minutes without thinking about football. His mind is like a whirling blender that needs constant sustenance.

When he follows a falsely promising idea too far, this is when the overthink presents. ‘I should leave my best player, the one my offensive play moves around, on the… bench!? My god, yes, it’s so obvious now’ - the inside of Pep’s head, probably.

This has resulted in him leaving the likes of Thomas Müller, Kevin De Bruyne and Rodri on the bench before the biggest game of the season. Interestingly the overthink only came into existence after he stopped managing Lionel Messi. There was never a scenario where he could even pitch the idea of leaving Messi on the bench, thanks to the power Messi held within Barcelona. But I think we can be certain, in his most blue sky thinking moments, Pep probably even toyed with that idea. The closest he could get to benching Messi was deploying him as a false nine.

Why it started

When Pep took over at Barcelona he won the continental treble (La Liga, Copa Del Rey, Champions League) in his first season. Until that point no La Liga manager had ever won it. Take into account the league was in operation since 1929 and Pep wins this on his first attempt, eighty years later. His first season and he achieves the broadest measure of success in his field. This was the 08/09 season. He again won the Champions League in 10/11. So in his first three years as a manager he won the treble, three league titles and the Champions League twice. It felt like Pep was going to carve up the Champions League for the next decade. The competition is synonymous with Guardiola precisely because of this expectation.

After Barca he went to Bayern, who had just won a treble of their own the season before under Jupp Heynckes. The pressure was on to deliver another Champions League as winning the league was almost a given. It didn’t materialise even though they would reach the semi finals every year during the three seasons of Pep’s tenure. This is where the overthinks began to appear. He knew he was inextricably linked to the competition and had a squad more than capable of winning it but his approach, obsessive micro-management, meant the languid calm of a winner who expects to win, eluded him.

At the time he was locked in an adversarial rivalry with José Mourinho who had been his opposite number at Real Madrid during Pep’s Barcelona tenure. Mourinho had managed to win the Champions League with two clubs, Porto and Inter Milan, and the need to match this feat would have been rocket fuel to Pep. Each season that passed at Bayern cranked the pressure up and that’s when the odd tactical tweaks began.

A list of Overthinks

Bayern vs Atletico, UCL semi final, 2016
Benched Thomas Müller

Müller was the symbol of Bayern, becoming known as ‘der Raumdeuter’, the interpreter of space, owing to his tetris-like ability to slot into unlikely free spaces in attacks and optimise the flow of the play. He had scored eight goals in eight Champions League games that season. Having a consistently scoring, homegrown player on the pitch for a match this big adds a much needed dimension of grit to a team and his presence was sorely missed.

Result: Knocked out

Man City vs Spurs, UCL quarter final, 2019
Benched Kevin De Bruyne

Kevin De Bruyne in 2019 was what we can now call ‘prime’ Kevin De Bruyne. A marvel, a spectacle, an all action powerhouse operating at peak performance. Leaving him on the bench is like opting to start with ten men, it’s that bizarre.

Result: Knocked out

Man City vs LFC, UCL quarter final, 2018
Benched Raheem Sterling

It was Salah’s first season at Liverpool and he was having an all-timer, scoring 10 open-play goals in the Champions League. Pep decided to let new signing Aymeric Laporte man-mark him whilst leaving out Raheem Sterling who would have held Salah back with his own forward runs.

Result: Knocked out

Man City vs Chelsea, UCL final, 2021
Benched Rodri

This was it, the entire point of the Man City experiment; Pep managing them in the UCL Final. He benches their most effective player in the position that would have dictated the match. They lose 1 nil to a through ball that travelled through space Rodri would most likely have been patrolling.

Result: Runners-up

Why it is (eventually) effective

From reading ‘Pep Confidential’ one of the main takeaways is that Guardiola is first and foremost an educator. At Manchester City his team talks take place in a lecture hall, his players are treated like students. His approach fosters an embrace of learning and adaptability. Kyle Walker has said that he basically didn’t understand football until he was coached by Pep. Guardiola is not dogmatic and chained to one style of play, he’s gone from Tiki Taka to playing with Erling Haaland up front. It sounds simple but he embraces the process of learning and that process includes experimentation, and experimentation includes failure.

Every failed tactical innovation is a creative rebirth, he must burn it all down to embrace the fertile soil of the aftermath. Each overthink is a mini disaster, but he does grow in that aftermath. He learns from his mistakes, and he always wins at the next attempt. He’s never gone more than one season without winning the league.

Conclusion

He has remained successful throughout his career, 17 years - longer than the usual lifespan of a coach at the top. These overthinks are the lifeblood of his adaptability and longevity, a short term pain for long term gain.

He’s won a treble with two clubs, at each end of his career, 08/09 with Barcelona and 22/23 with City. Only Luis Enrique has matched this. He’s won the UCL three times, these wins also bookend his career - 2009, 2011, 2023. He’s never gone more than a season without winning the league across 17 years, three clubs in three countries. He’s second only to Alex Ferguson in all time trophies won - 49 to 41.

His classic rivals (Mourinho, Klopp and Ancelotti) have exited their peak phases while he is still in his. Many of his current peers cite him as their biggest influence and he’s still actively beating them. Usually an influence this big would wane when the new crop comes through with updated takes on his methods but he’s still dominating.

His biggest overthink was the omission of Rodri from the starting line up in the 2021 Champions League final. Everything burned down around him, but he saw his mistake and he learned. When they again reached the final in 2023, Rodri started, Rodri scored, Rodri was named man of the match and City won one nil.

Pep was back in touch with his legacy, clutching the trophy with which he was and remains synonymous.

Next in the series…

“When man dabbles in the dark arts he can fall victim to the curse of the werwulf, cast out from his community, he transforms when the light is brightest and commits acts of violence and insanity. Once his fever has cooled, left with the result of his deeds, he begs for clemency” - Premier League Rulebook

If a man in 13th century regional England had bitten people in high profile situations, not once, not twice, but thrice, I am confident he would, at the very least, be tarnished with rumours of lycanthropy. If you could ally these examples of gnashing behaviour with multiple incidents of aggravated public anger and violence, the claim would be as good as rubber stamped by the King.

You know and I know that werewolves only exist in the imaginations of people, in the pages of books, in rural parts of Germany and on the big screen. However the belief must spring from somewhere. Men suffering from debilitating mental afflictions acting in outlandish ways gave rise to conclusions that groped for any manner of explanation with the knowledge available. Nowadays we can say that someone is acting like an animal and understand the analogy, but in 13th century England perhaps the phrase carried more meaning. Has this man become an animal? What dark arts is he practicing under cover of night?

We can look back and equate deviancy with claims in the the community that the subject is a werewolf. It makes me wonder, what would a peasant in 13th century England make of Luis Suárez’ actions whilst he played for Ajax and Liverpool? Would the behaviour qualify him for werewolf status?

If you’re not up to speed here’s a list of his tooth-centred offences:

20th November 2010 - Bakkal

While playing for Ajax, Suárez found himself in a huddle of players. When Otman Bakkal, a PSV player came close to him to say something, Suárez lunged forward and bit him around the area where the collarbone meets the bottom of the neck. They were facing each other at the time so it wasn’t a sneak attack from behind and over the shoulder. The fact they were not in the middle of play also makes it hard to dress this up as anything other than Suárez having a sudden random urge to sink his teeth into someone standing opposite him.

21st April 2013 - Ivanović

While playing for Liverpool, Suárez was dribbling against Branislav Ivanović, a Chelsea player. He attempts a nutmeg which fails. Play is winding down with the ball tamely bouncing out for a goal kick when Suárez grasps Ivanovic on the arm. He then lunges towards his elbow and sinks his teeth into the exposed flesh. What’s most noticeable with this incident is that he latches on initially but then adjusts his grip and seems to renew his vigour with a new bite. It’s an extended attack and the odd ferocity lingers in the mind afterwards.

24th June 2014 - Chiellini

In a high pressure World Cup match against Italy, Suárez is tussling with Giorgio Chiellini in the box while play is happening near the corner flag. A cross isn’t even being delivered, everyone in the box is still just jostling for position. Chiellini is looking out towards the sideline watching the play but Suárez is overcome with some sudden dark urge and sinks his teeth, through the jersey, into the Italian’s shoulder. This is the most predatory of the three, his stealthy approach from behind and sudden lunge help any animal comparisons immensely.

Add to these toothy attacks the existing fascination that surrounded Suárez in the British football media. It flicked over and back between hatred and adoration. He was a living contradiction encompassing all the things proper football fans hated and all the things proper football fans lionised. He would dive, feign injury and beseech the ref with a face of agonised pleading, but he was also a brutal competitor, chasing down every ball, harrying every defender and competing for every inch he could. He epitomised everything about football, the good and the bad, always one move away from upending his previous act and becoming either the hero or the villain.

He had primed an entire country to hate him at the drop of a hat. Communities are more willing to turn on someone who has wronged them in the past and in the enclosed settlements of 13th century England this would have been social suicide. It’s easier to point the blame at outsiders.

In looking at evidence you must remember a mob of peasants will not discern between strong evidence and spurious evidence, they just want a result. With this logic anything could be used against Suárez. The biting evidence is, obviously, stacked against him. Even one case of biting a person would probably get you whispers in the community, but three cases?! That would be grounds for a pitchfork wielding mob to descend on your home, declare you a threat to the fabric of society and then proceed to inflict some form of horrible crowd sourced death.

In many werewolf films we see the subject being met with the results of their nocturnal activities, experiencing self loathing and begging for forgiveness. Post-bite Suárez has done this every time, always releasing a statement recognising his actions as unacceptable and apologising unreservedly. Peasants would view this as reliably as we might view DNA testing, cast iron evidence.

It would appear that he resorted to biting when the pressure was greatest, under the brightest lights you could say. Any form of light, even if just a metaphor like I’ve just used, having an effect on the subject would again lend credence to the subject being a werewolf.

Another detail of note is the pronounced teeth of the subject, which could be interpreted as some form of vestigial fangs left over from the last transformation. Again, in the mind of the peasant this is damning evidence akin to a signed confession.

Verdict

I think, without doubt, in 13th century regional England Luis Suárez, due to his erratic behaviour, would have been the subject of werewolf accusations. Perhaps the most convincing of any would-be werewolf claim was his final act on the shores of England. What finally drove him off was being part of the Liverpool team that bottled the league and ended up finishing second; the metaphorical werewolf driven away by metaphorical silver. The peasants would have gobbled that one up.

Next in the series…

Player: Ronaldinho
Date: 21/06/2002
Competition: FIFA World Cup
Stadium: Shizuoka Stadium ECOPA, Japan
Team: Brazil
Opponent: England

Intro

On a warm summer day in Shizuoka, perennial favourites Brazil lined up against England to contest a World Cup quarter final. Brazil were in their lesser seen blue shirt and England were in white. As a tie it’s one that produced some classic moments whilst the bulk of the game itself wasn’t very memorable. Due to their outstanding record (they’d been to the previous 1998 final and won the 1994 tournament) Brazil could play with a confident ease familiar to champions. In fact this was the last time Brazil could be seen as a full representation of the flair and invention they represent in football history.

The first half

Early in the first half Michael Owen, four years on from his heroics against Argentina in 1998, had nipped in and executed a trademark neat finish to put England one nil up. In stoppage time Ronaldinho had picked the ball up in his own half and dribbled to the edge of the England box before giving Rivaldo a no-look assist. In this dribble he had sent Ashley Cole off balance with a perfect step over and then powered past him. This galloping wonder, the genius in full flow, was a sight the footballing world would get to know very well over the next few years.

The second half

At the start of the second half it was one goal apiece and Ronaldinho already had a no-look assist and one amazing dribble to his name. Then in the 50th minute England conceded a free on their left wing. Even if it had been being centrally placed, it was still outside sensible shooting range, and since it was near the sideline, the tighter angle compressed the goals making the target a lot smaller. Even free kick maestro David Beckham wouldn’t treat this as a shooting scenario, it was short pass or cross all day long.

The free kick

With England having conceded the free, their entire team has stood on the edge of their box bar Michael Owen and Emile Heskey who are standing in no man’s land. The ball is directly in line with the edge of the box and about twenty metres down the pitch. This is a sector of the pitch that not much happens in, shots rarely come from here, it’s a one two zone, a tackle or dribble zone. The only shot you could imagine happening from here is a pile driver where the player is running at top speed with backtracking defenders obscuring the goalie’s view. Ronaldinho is motionless, standing three steps back and has to hit a stationary ball. This situation has no momentum, there’s nothing on which to build. It’s also a moment where everyone can set up and prepare to react unlike the cut and thrust of a match where moments either happen or get pulled away in the tide of play.

Everyone watching was expecting a cross, except Ricardinho sitting with the Brazil subs. He was so familiar with the magic in Ronaldinho’s boots that he was excitedly telling the rest of the bench to prepare for celebration.

The Wrong Curl

To understand free kicks on their most basic level you need to understand which curl suits which situation. A player hits the ball with the instep and the curl goes inwards, across the body. They hit it with the outside of the foot and the ball spins away from the body. The outside of the foot technique, whether from the ground or from a volley, produces a more powerful shot because the player can strike through it with brute force. It also has a faster spin so the arc of the ball is much more pronounced, it’s a more box office technique but also less controllable. The instep is always a more refined execution because the foot cannot generate as much power this way. The foot has to wrap around the ball, not go through it. Once a player knows how to execute these techniques they can use the correct one for the corresponding scenario.

Anyone viewing this free kick scenario would immediately identify it as a crossing situation. A shot from here is crazy, and if any player was going to try it they would need to be a left footer because they can hit the instep shot which would be the accepted ‘right curl’ to use here. Ronaldinho is right footed, so for a cross here he should use the instep technique so it bends into the box but away from the oncoming keeper, David Seaman.

If a right footed player was attempting a shot the most sensible option would be the driven strike through the laces with a hint of the outside of the boot so the shot would have enough power and the trajectory would head towards the goalie and then veer or dip into the right top corner as it progressed, hopefully keeping the goalie flat footed at the right moment.

What Ronaldinho does is a similar method of operation to his Chelsea wonder goal, he uses a tool that’s tailor made for one thing and pursues a different end result. He hits the ball with an instep curl, except he hits it way too deep so that as it drops it sneaks into the far top corner. It’s the wrong curl, it’s aesthetically unpleasing, and it’s so odd it fools everyone in the stadium (except Ricardinho).

As with the Chelsea toe-poke, he has used something basic to wrong foot seasoned professionals who would never expect this to happen in a high level match. He shoots with a cross. David Seaman staggers backwards into the side nets, clutching his chest like a man who’s taken a bullet. Ronaldinho makes his way to the running track around the pitch and dances as his team mates grab their heads and struggle to comprehend what they’ve seen.

Did he mean it?

Some England players have said they view it as a fluke but the man himself said he meant it. In an interview he said he was aware that David Seaman would come off his line and this was a chance to give him a problem. I believe him. He’s pulled off more crazy moments than anyone else in the history of the game, from his aforementioned Chelsea toe-poke goal, to the bicycle kick off his standing leg to putting the ball under a jumping wall thus creating the trend for players to lie in the draft excluder position. He’s the one player you can bet meant whatever he did.

Where it ranks among free kicks

It’s the oddest and most unbelievable of the lot. As I mentioned, the ‘wrong curl’ adds an odd element of lowering the beauty of the moment. It’s the opposite of the perfect execution of a ‘right curl’ hitting the top corner like, for example, Declan Rice’s second free kick against Real Madrid. That strike embodies a sense of something ‘clicking’ for the human mind, it’s geometrically pleasing, a sequence of neat outcomes. The way the ball enters the goal is tangential to crossbar and post at once. The trajectory is sumptuous and all elements click into place.

This Ronaldinho strike is the complete opposite. The ball relies on falling to gather pace, it’s not struck with venom. In fact the momentum comes from Ronaldinho actually pushing through the ball with his instep. The trajectory pushes back against proper form. This is why Ronaldinho is a genius. He uses accepted functions of the game for other purposes; against Chelsea’s rock solid defence he shoots with a toe-poke from a stationary position, here he shoots with a cross.

Ronaldinho

I’ve said before, and no doubt will in future, Ronaldinho is the most magical player in football history. Messi is the most astounding but Ronaldinho has a streak of magic that is just not in other players. He feels like a glitch, a lightning strike from the gods. At heart he was a showman and embraced the fact that football can be effective whilst also being entertaining.

As people I think we huddle around joyous things for a type of cultural heat that in turn warms our souls. Ronaldinho would smile and dance and perform outrageous skills in the most pressurised moments. It was like he’d seen outside the system and knew the whole point is having fun.

In my last Ronaldinho article I viewed what he did as reframing the possibilities of the game. This was his main talent, an invention, a creative approach infused with fun. He stretched the framework of football, allowing for these type of executions. I always see him as a type of modernising force, the scout for the generation to come, arriving early and standing out as something magical before the Messi / Ronaldo duopoly solidified.

The meaning

This was the blossoming of Ronaldinho. All I knew of him, as a Premier League obsessed teenager, was the snippets of him in the FIFA intro on Playstation 2. He was immediately iconic in a way not many players are. He looked iconic, he played iconic, it was like Nike marketing conjured him up in a lab. In this World Cup winning Brazil squad containing Cafu, Roberto Carlos, Kaka, Rivaldo and Ronaldo he was, at 22 years old, already the most exciting, the most watchable, a genius with the ball at his feet.

For so many this was the intro to the man who would burn so brightly he would set the world alight. He would ‘complete football’ by winning the World Cup, the Copa America, the Champions League, La Liga and the Ballon d’Or. He would become the mentor of a young player called Lionel Messi and shepherd him into the Barcelona first team. In his first match he would provide the assist to set him on his goalscoring way and in that celebration he would lift him onto his back and demand the Camp Nou heap praise on the youngster.

He’s the fulcrum around which the modern football age clicked into place, a genius who straddled two generations, and smiled as he did it.

Next in the series…

Name: The Delap Long Throw
Player: Rory Delap
Period: 2007-2013
Club: Stoke City
League: Premier League

The Delap Long Throw was the most potent tactical weapon the Premier League has ever seen. When discussing fundamentally pivotal moments in European football, in terms of pairing a specific player with a specific role, it is not out of the question to mention it alongside putting Messi as a false nine. It remains a question asked of the opposition that went wholly unanswered during its period.

The origin of the technique came when a young Rory Delap left his extremely promising javelin career behind to concentrate on football. Another factor, according to Tony Pulis, is that Delap has a quirk in his shoulders that allows for further backward rotation resulting in more leverage when throwing. When applied to football, this combined transferable skill activated to such an extent that it disrupted the entirety of the Premier League. Many players could take a long throw, they’d loop the ball into the air aiming for it to land in the box. Due to the trajectory, a high arc, the ball wouldn’t have any pace, and the time it took to fall from the sky would allow defenders to adjust their positions.

What Delap could do was twofold; he could throw further than anyone else in addition to being able to throw a driven ball; not the lofted, floaty variety. He could throw as if it was fired from a cannon. The ball would have as close to a flat trajectory as possible. These throws would sear into the box asking for any glance to shift the momentum goalward. Essentially any throw-in far enough into the opposition half was like a free cross into the box that no one could block, except the cross was much more calculated and accurate than one hit with feet. You have so much more control when using your hands.

The introduction of the throw-in felt like a moment in military history when an innovation is introduced upon an unsuspecting enemy. Imagine the first soldiers lined atop a fortified wall watching their distant enemy, massed on the plain before them, roll out a large wooden contraption that we now know as the catapult. Never in their wildest dreams would they predict that within minutes a literal boulder would be hurtling down from the previously unthreatening sky. The ensuing rampant panic was probably of a similar level experienced by defences up and down England whenever Delap, poised on the sideline, was lathering the ball in the folds of his jersey to wick away any moisture before he unleashed his airborne assault.

Delap had played for various Premier League clubs until the planets aligned and he moved to Stoke City. Tony Pulis had taken over the previous season and his main idea was to have a pragmatic style of play. Stoke were still new to the Premier League and their only aim was to avoid relegation. They had to be horrible to play against. In their quest for points they would have to scrap for any advantage they could. It was the usual fight for survival that most promoted teams experience before they achieve midtable stasis.

In conversation with Ben Foster, Pulis relays how he found out about the unique ability. He was busy running two players through drills when his assistant Dave Kemp came over and said ‘ Have you seen Rory throw the ball?! I can’t believe it’. They get Delap over, who proceeds to throw the ball almost over the entire pitch. Pulis, laughing while remembering all this, just says to him ‘Rory, where’ve you been hiding that?’.

Throw-ins were seen as a kind of afterthought in the game, just some odd kink in the rules that had to be performed before the play could resume with feet. With his innovators cap on Pulis saw the potential unfolding before him. Stoke already had a tall team (in fact after Pulis had been in charge for a few years they would have assembled the tallest team in Europe) and now they had a secret weapon to unleash on their unsuspecting league companions.

It gained such notoriety that opposition teams would try to disrupt the throw preparations and some would even try to prevent Stoke from winning throws. This resulted in a famous moment in November 2008 when Stoke were playing Hull City. Their keeper, Boaz Myhill, had the option to put the ball out of play when a Stoke attacker was closing him down. Myhill shaped to kick it out over the sideline but then remembered the Delap threat and he awkwardly turned his body and vigorously put it out for a corner instead of a throw. It was such an odd sight seeing a goalie boot the ball over his own end line as if this was salvation.

Stoke knew the power of the throw and went as far as stitching towels into the inside of their shirts so Delap could fully clean the ball for a better grip. If you graph Stoke City’s league positions throughout their history, the Delap long throw period perfectly maps onto the highest sustained place they’ve ever held in English football. Since those days they’ve fallen out of the Premier League.

Football is entertainment and this long throw was amazing viewing. What was even more fun was watching the opposition; the panicked preparations, the pointing and shouting, then the resultant remonstrations when the ball was inevitably glanced in. The style of the execution was a large part of the joy. Delap having his one focused purpose, and then cramming all of his physicality and effort into just flinging the ball as hard and as far as he could.

It was entertaining, anything so drastically different to the usual fare generally is, but it was also inherently funny and I think this is the main appeal. That Tony Pulis and Rory Delap combined to unleash this repetitive and undefendable routine on apoplectic better funded clubs, over and over and over, was hilarious. The fact it was so basic only added to the impact, it feels like the sporting cousin of Finchy being able to throw a kettle over a pub in The Office. It forced the other clubs to be the straight guy in a type of slapstick routine and who better to be the straight guy than tall, reserved and studious Arsene Wenger? It got under his skin to the extent that he suggested a rule change where throw-ins would be abolished, which was also hilarious. And all the while Delap was still flinging these bombs into opposition penalty boxes, season after season, unanswered.

It was the essence of comedy; they say a good comedian does funny things but a great comedian does things funny. Rory Delap flinging a ball at goal while people are irate he’s doing it is funny top to bottom, back to front.

At the time it was seen as a tactical curiosity and when Delap moved on, it faded into the mists of time. Until this season, when long throws rocketed back into the zeitgeist. It’s like Delap took a throw in 2013 that sailed over the intervening years, hurtling through space and time like a cultural meteorite, only to land with devastating impact in this season of the Premier League, once again upsetting the odds and also the managers who don’t agree with it.

Next in the series…

Zlatan has a genuine claim to being the biggest personality in the game over the last thirty years. Such is his magnetism, he’s part of the small group of players that could engage with their own myth while their playing careers were still active. His bluster was tornado sized and generally he would back up wild claims with equally wild exploits on the pitch. He’s scored some of the most acrobatic goals in the entire catalogue of football, he’s won things everywhere, he’s tried a multitude of leagues and never been a failure.

Being so famous allied with having such a rare body type made him literally and figuratively larger than life. Early in his career his skills and goals were the main draw but as he got older and perhaps more comfortable in himself, his ego managed to pull alongside and then overtake the physical achievements. Upon moving to Paris Saint-Germain he entered a phase where he comported himself like some emperor of football, descending on matches in Ligue 1 with as much cultural weight as the teams taking part.

His autobiography, I am Zlatan, was released in 2011, just before the move to Paris, and received much attention and praise. It acts as a kind of warping device, presenting Zlatan’s words through the filter of the ghost writer David Lagercrantz who openly admitted to fabricating some of the quotes and events in the book. There’s a noticeable shift in Zlatan himself after this period, he embraces the exaggerated tone and begins to speak about himself in the third person much more and the brand of Zlatan begins to amplify. The persona of the conceited god emperor, now fully realised, stepped forth from the book and into reality, ready to take up the slack whenever the limelight beckoned. Whenever his words will be captured for publication, the conceited god emperor is there, waiting with a comment. He quips about having the Eiffel tower replaced with a statue of himself, he says he can’t help but laugh at how perfect he is, et cetera et cetera, ad infinitum.

Illeism or speaking about yourself in the third person is a technique that can be used to gain distance from one’s actions. The goal could be to evade personal pressure or even ignore guilt as it enables you to view your deeds in a more objective manner. It could be seen as a coping device, a way to give some distance from events, room for the subject to take a breather.

Zlatan has spoken about having a tumultuous childhood. His parents, immigrants to Sweden, divorced when he was two years old and he and his siblings were always moving between their parent’s latest apartments. This over and back echoed the dominant feeling of the family being stuck culturally somewhere between their adopted home and the homes of their parents. When the Yugoslav war broke out in his father’s homeland, he would drink heavily most evenings and listen to music that reminded him of home. Being an insecure kid, Zlatan felt self conscious about his looks and his voice as he spoke with a lisp. He was assigned a special needs assistant in school and felt mortified as a result. There were so many factors demanding his attention from so many sides, he must have felt constant pressure. Any kid would want to ease this claustrophobic feeling and maybe this period of his youth bred a need to achieve a mental distance from the daily stress.

This God Emperor persona is an effort to become synonymous with omnipotence, with the victor, the achiever. It’s a swipe at inadequacy and a delayed riposte to feelings that pierced him like a lance throughout his youth. There’s a triumph in it; the kid that actually made it as a superstar, exorcising his demons. I believe that most fans can understand his struggle on a gut level, just by observing him. This could be an explanation for why the guy isn’t universally disliked. He is of course lambasted for his outlandish claims and egotism but I’ve never felt like people actively hate him. There’s an affection to the annoyance. People are attuned to other’s behaviour and witnessing a swagger as outlandish as his communicates it as some form of compensation.

The persona he has created; larger than life, invincible, a warrior with a quick wit, is like a young boy’s ideal of masculinity learned from action films, which he watched with his father when he was young. It’s on a par with the tone of professional wrestling, when The Rock asks if you can smell what he’s cooking, that feels like the same arena of communication as the memorable quotes, apocryphal or not, attributed to Zlatan. It’s bombastic, one dimensional, effective as something writ large for consumption in snippets, a billboard placed in front of something to direct attention away from the personal frailties hidden behind.

In mysticism inspired by Tibetan Buddhism, with enough spiritual practice and intense concentration, a single thought can be willed into existence and gain human form. This is known as a tulpa, a coalescence of this intense thought or need and acts like a copy of the person who willed it into existence. Zlatan has, unknowingly I must assume, mirrored this practice by separating himself from his public persona and allowing this variation of himself to take centre stage.

He’s willed this version of himself into existence, perhaps fuelled by the feelings of inadequacy he felt as a child. This version is a form of armour, a comfort blanket, granting distance from the pressures of the game and the spotlight. In a fortuitous twist of fate it also helps him cultivate his brand and keeps him firmly in the public eye.

Such is his instinct to provide interviewers with sensational quotes, on the spot Zlatan will come up with lines about being God or never having known doubt or being a lion in human form. His mouth is running ahead of his mind and spouting lunacy that he’ll have to live up to. It reminds me of the multiplying brooms in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, sentient beings keep materialising and marching away with intent, all springing from an original splintered source. How many personas has Zlatan sent off into the world?

There’s himself, the player, then there’s the Zlatan he relayed to the author of his book, then there’s the version the author warped and got published, this version in turn inspired the original Zlatan so much that he then ascended to God Emperor of Football level, and past that we have the political version who is now an unofficial director of AC Milan and stars as himself in UEFA Champions League draw videos. We wear many masks in daily life, Zlatan as is his way, has one upped this notion, dramatically.

After his last game for Ajax he was interviewed by the Dutch journalist Joep Schreuder. From the off there is considerable tension in the air. Zlatan appears surly and Joep, off camera, is forcefully following up with a particular line of questioning. He’s chasing an explanation for Zlatan’s apparent erratic performance in previous matches and this burrowing has Zlatan completely ill at ease. Having an analytical presence closely examining his facade on camera would be unsettling to him on a base level.

After some tetchy back and forth, Joep compares the previous match day behaviour with the consummate pro he’s seen in that day’s match by saying ‘there’s so many Zlatans. Who is the real Zlatan? It’s like there’s a twin brother’.

Ibrahimovic is trying to maintain an intimidating posture but starts fidgeting with a necklace and looking away. He does not make eye contact and starts adjusting his tie. He begins to answer by droning on with media speak about playing normal in this game but he ramps up the delivery of his speech to finish with a flourish. He strongly renews eye contact, then smirks with a summation of ‘there’s only one Zlatan’. To which Joep responds in a flat, unimpressed tone ‘are you sure?’. He grins ‘Yeah. You know Zlatan?’.

He’s doing his best to deflect any line of questioning that results in self reflection and wears his grin throughout as a form of defence, allowing the expression to congeal into a barrier. Whenever he is not grinning he stares at the interviewer with near hatred. This questioning, straight to the point, has him cornered, he’s struggling to maintain his facade as Schreuder reaches out and attempts to poke past the bluster, to the core Zlatan, the original Zlatan, to the insecure kid at the centre of the persona orbit.

Next in the series…

Name: The Thierry Touch
Player: Thierry Henry
Period: 1999-2007
Club: Arsenal
League: Premier League

We all know the famous silhouette of Michael Jordan used as the logo known as ‘Jumpman’. In one shape it encapsulates the man and the cultural phenomenon that sprang up around him. The Thierry Touch; Henry frozen in mid air, his body contorted in landscape orientation as the ball rests perfectly atop his toe, is the ‘Jumpman’ of the Premier League. He hasn’t played in the league since 2007 and this is still the most resonant image it has produced.

His first touch was always setting up something better. Take his goal against Manchester United, with his back to goal he stabs his right foot under an approaching pass and before the ball has reached the apex of its vertical flight, he has twisted and whipped a volley with the same foot. It all happens in one movement, a movement so smooth that it feels right to count it as one thing rather than a touch and turn shot. There’s no gaps in the approach, it’s executed in flow state. He’s so syrup smooth the entire execution feels like one continuation of his first touch.

Pairing his solemn demeanour with these outstanding feats of grace made them easier to appreciate and understand in the physical space. Absence of effort was his trademark, although he had no lack of output, it was just his way of doing things. Sweat didn’t appear to stain his brow, he wouldn’t sprint, he’d glide. His lack of writhing to execute a movement or gurning to reach the space he needed allowed the motions themselves to be the centre of attention. He could pluck a hurtling ball from orbit with a gigantic leap and balance it in mid-air. The movement would be so graceful that it appeared to happen at half speed.

The Thierry Touch was effective because any manner of ball could be hurtling towards him, from a descending goal kick to a driven cross field pass, and the team could move as one and push into higher positions because they knew that possession would be retained and an attack could then form. This immaculate first touch was a device that allowed on field movement before it was carried out.

It’s such a great example of team dynamics, a cohesive group can communicate and move without eye contact or verbal agreement, everything is predicated on existing knowledge of team members physical capabilities. Granted, this is how all teams work but in this case we had Henry operating with a supreme ability that afforded so much leeway to the rest of the players to move without fear of counter attack.

I’ve read that Zlatan Ibrahimovic gave attacks CPR. It’s a fun way of saying that a ball could be fired at him and he’d manage to take it under control, and in a show of ultimate target man play, hold defenders off till reinforcements arrived. The Thierry Touch was a version of this but its execution had an effect on the opposition too.

There are so many photos of Henry in flight and I’m always drawn to the faces of the markers he has soared above. They’re looking up, wide eyed like men who’ve been plucked from the stone age and are gazing at a plane. Football takes place on a pitch and in the mind, no one has ever won a match without winning the physical battle first, and no one has ever won the physical battle without winning the psychological one. The regal acrobatics of Henry would deal a blow to opposition morale, a reminder they were playing the unstoppable.

The Premier League has been a fixture of world entertainment since 1992 and in those 34 years of existence many stars have plied their trade under the PL banner, but none have been as celebrated or as closely associated as Thierry Henry. He was the first superstar of the Premier League and is still the high watermark. Ronaldo came to prominence there but performed at his highest level when he moved to Madrid. Henry’s highest level was found in London and no one has yet surpassed him in terms of talent or cultural impact.

He played for Arsenal between 1999 and 2007, a period when the league was emerging from its formative years and beginning to rival the continental leagues in a cultural sense. Its personality had been formed, the shorthand for what it represented was set - a hard tackling war of attrition, an end to end game with no let up, less tactical than other leagues. Fans would pride themselves on seeing it as more of a physical test than European counterparts. More physical players would be on a level playing field with more cultured players, there was nowhere to hide.

Henry could handle the physicality but anger was lacking from his approach, there were no bared teeth like a dog in a fight, everything was executed under a stiff upper lip. This gave the viewer the feeling he had other levels he wasn’t bothering to activate and if he found himself in a tough enough contest he could go higher through the gears. It also elevated him away from the early years of the blood and thunder Premier League.

Henry, an Olympic level sprinter with the grace of a ballet dancer and the flourish of a showman, bestowed a sense of class on the league as a whole. He legitimised the entire operation and to this day remains its most potent protagonist.

Next in the series…