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ver since its launch in September 1994, FourFourTwo has been
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With all that in mind, narrowing our selection of FFT’s finest
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reminisce about World Cup icons, unearth the early years of a certain
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‘Sunderland’s’ biggest fan. If that wasn’t enough, you’ll step back to
a time when Jurgen Klopp’s Dortmund were staring at life in the
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 2 5 t h
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Part of the

bookazine series
72
8 The XI Best Covers
From a 90’s free-for-all to a certain Argentinian maestro via a raging Italian and a
bruised-but-unbowed French icon, these are the 11 best FFT covers of all time

20 Pelé at 70
 s the greatest player to ever don a football shirt turns 70, he reflects on his
A
incredible life exclusively to FourFourTwo

40 The Death and Rebirth of the Playmaker

 0 years after Milan seemed to kill off the penchant for an onfield conductor, the
2
game’s glamour figure is back with a vengeance...

44 Tickets, Please!
 hat’s what we’ve been asking FFT readers on Twitter, and hundreds of you
T
responded. From the Magical Magyars at Wembley to derby delirium at The Den, here
are the top stubs and stories...

50 The Best Football Fakes

F rom phoney phone calls to made-up midfielders, the following rundown is proof
that in football, as in life, everything is not always as it seems...
108 58 At Home with Maradona

130
Genius, madman, cheat: El Diez has been called all of these and more. But he’s never

cared what people think, leading to one of the great interviews: your questions put to
the beautiful game’s most brilliant berserker. In his own back garden...

66 The Greatest Football Trickery!

Now you see them, now you don’t! Unless of course you turn to page 66...

58

40
6 FourFourTwo.com
 CONTENTS

72 Sir Alex Ferguson at 70

Team faltering, injuries mounting, City looming - as Fergie turns 70, a happy
ending is looking increasingly unlikely for the game’s greatest gaffer... or is it?

84 Great Goals Retold

Four superb strikes that will stand the test of time

86 Jurgen Klopp

20
F ighting to save their season, Jurgen Klopp and Borussia Dortmund can, for
once, imagine a future apart. FFT reveals why football’s most charismatic
coach might fancy a fresh start

98 Xavi: Inside the Mind of a Footballing Genius

I n the Middle East and out of sight, but definitely not off the radar, Xavi
reveals to FourFourTwo his love of the English game, his coaching masterplan
and how he nearly left Barcelona at 19

108 The 25 Greatest Champions League Games Ever

134
I t’s 25 years since Europe’s holy grail got a total revamp, and to celebrate FFT
is counting down the best and most bonkers matches. All together now:
“THE CHAAAMPIONS...”

120 World Cup Icons

From a one-armed Uruguayan to a German full-back’s fitting farewell, via
Hurst’s hat-trick and Maradona’s magic, we honour 13 World Cup heroes
122 Pelé • 124 Sir Geoff Hurst • 126 Johan Cruyff & Franz Beckenbauer
128 Mario Kempes • 130 Socrates • 132 Diego Maradona
134 Paul Gascoinge • 136 Roberto Baggio • 138 Zinedine Zidane
140 Fabio Cannavaro • 142 Xavi & Andres Iniesta

86

66
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 7
XI Best covers

THe
XI BEST
COVERS
With 300 covers to choose from, selecting FourFourTwo’s finest 11
was no easy task. While some superstars just missed out on the
team sheet, we’re pretty confident we’ve formed a formidable
line-up. Disagree? Take it up with the bloke on page 14

8 FourFourTwo.com
 XI Best covers

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 9

XI Best covers

10 FourFourTwo.com
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FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 11

XI Best covers

12 FourFourTwo.com
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FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 13

XI Best covers

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FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 15

XI Best covers

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FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 17

XI Best covers

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FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 19

 H HHHH
As the greatest player to ever don a football shirt turns 70,
he reflects on his incredible life exclusively to FourFourTwo
Words Louis Massarella Portrait Shamil Tanna
“F
irst of all I’d like to say what
a big pleasure it is to be here
among friends to talk about
football,” says Pelé, and it’s hard
not to believe him. This may be
the billionth time The Greatest
Footballer Ever has spoken about
his extraordinary career, but if he’s
bored of telling the same old
stories, he’s doing a good job of
hiding it. One thing the 69 year old
does bemoan, though, is his lack
of match-fitness.
“Normally I train with kids at
my soccer school in Santos,” he
explains, “but this year – because
of the World Cup, all the interviews
that go with it, and then going to
Africa – I haven’t had time so I’m
a little out of shape. I’ve still got a
good touch – you never lose that.
Your mind still knows how to do
everything. It’s just if you lose
condition, your brain slows
down with your body.”
20 FourFourTwo.com
Edson Arantes do Nascimento,
to give him his full name, is in
London to help relaunch his
former club New York Cosmos, yet
he’s very much slipped in under
the radar. Few people – let alone
the media – know he’s in town, so
this is the exclusive of all exclusive
interviews for FourFourTwo, and he
doesn’t disappoint, happily
reminiscing in imperfect English
for over an hour in a hotel room
overlooking Hyde Park.
‘The King’ may now be pushing
70, but it is with the exuberance
of youth that he recalls a 20-year
playing career that began as a
15-year-old prodigy for Santos and
ended as the saviour of soccer in
the US, with a glut of goals and
glory sandwiched in between
(save of course for one miserable
summer in 1966 – sound
unfamiliar?). We start, though, at
the very beginning…
FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES:
November 2010
 The great man begins by taking us
back to the days before Pelé became
a household name – or even his own
Born in Tres Coracoes in Minas Gerais State
in the southeast of Brazil, Edson Arantes do
Nascimento grew up in near poverty in Bauru,
Sao Paulo State, one of several stops on his
father’s journey as a jobbing semi-professional
striker. While Joao Ramos do Nascimento (aka
Dondinho) supplemented his modest football
income with part-time jobs, his wife Dona
Celeste raised Edson and his two younger
siblings (Zoca and Maria Lucia) with the help of
her brother and mother, who also lived in the
ramshackle two-room house.
When the would-be ‘Pelé’ first kicked a ball
aged six – having previously kicked several
other objects around the favela near the family
home – he dreamed only of following his father
into the professional ranks of Bauru Athletic
Club (BAC), where young Edson was a youth-
team player. But a national disaster in 1950,
when he was just nine, made the talented
youngster set his sights a little higher…
How big an influence on you was your father?
Very big. My father was a big striker who scored
a lot of goals for the local team, Bauru Athletic,
and I always said, “One day, I’m gonna be like
my father.” That’s what I had in mind from a
young age. I never realised I would be what I
am now or achieve more than my father did, but
[puts his hand together and looks to the heavens]
thank God I did even better! I have one big
memory, and that’s the World Cup in 1950. First,
the United States beat England – that was a big
surprise. Then Brazil went to the final with
Uruguay and the whole country thought Brazil
were champions even before the game. But it
was a disaster: Uruguay won in front of 200,000
people at the Maracana. It’s so famous in Brazil
there is even a name for it: Maracanazo.
Anyway, my father started to cry. I was nine
years old and I said to him, “Father, why do you
cry?” He said: “Brazil lost the World Cup. I can’t
believe it.” So I said: “Don’t worry, daddy, I am
going to win a World Cup for you.” I promised to
my father to win the World Cup for him. Eight
years later, I was in Sweden and I won the
World Cup for my father. God gave me this gift.
22 FourFourTwo.com
You obviously had a lot of natural ability, but
did your great physical attributes – speed,
strength, aerial ability – come naturally too?
My father scored a lot of goals with his head. He
always advised me to work on things. When I
was young, I was always dribbling and I teased
the youngest boy in the neighbourhood, who
played with me, because I had more skills. My
father said to me, “This is not good for you. You
play football because it’s God’s present to you.
Now, if you respect people, are well prepared
and train how to kick with your left foot, and how
to head, then you are going to be a great player
– nobody’s going to stop you.” That is why I
trained more. Instead of going to the beach or
the movies, I was there to kick the
ball, to control, to jump – this was
the most important thing in my
whole life. Always, I was better
prepared than anybody else. People
don’t know, but I scored more than
100 goals with my head in my career.
In the 1970 World Cup Final in Mexico,
my goal was from my head, because I
used to train heading the ball with my
eyes open as well as on my physical
condition. That’s the reason people
could not stop me – that, and the gift Pelé’s was a
ily
from God. All of this came with my close-knit fam
father’s advice.
Like most Brazilian players, you began
playing in the streets. How did this
shape the type of player you became?
At that time the players had more ball
control and more skill than now because
in the street you play against four, five,
ten other players without much space, so
you learn to make quicker decisions. A lot
of great players came from Bauru
because of this. It is different there
today. There is asphalt on the streets;
the kids go to the gym; play indoors. In
my time we used to start on the street.
It took yo
ung Edso
Turn over for more of Pelé’s years to n
be wean
childhood memories... off the m ed
ilk bottle
“I trained on my condition
and heading – that’s why
people could not stop me"

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 23

Did he beat up kids for calling him Pelé? Could his brother have been a better player
than him? And why did he steal his mother’s socks? The King shares his secrets...

My nickname My heroes get tickets from when I was very young, so

“My father gave me the name Edson, because
he really admired the American inventor
Thomas Edison. I was very proud, because it
was the name of a very important person.
Then, when I moved to Bauru in Sao Paulo
State, where my father played football, my
sister Lucia starting calling me Dico, which
comes from Edson – Edinho, Edico, Dico!
Then, in Bauru, because they had a player –
a goalkeeper – called Bile, who was a friend
of my father, some people started to call me
Bile – which sounds like Pelé. So all the boys
started to call me Pelé, and I would fight with
them, because I was very proud of my name
Edson – I didn’t want to be called Pelé! But if
you tell kids not to do something…
so they called me Pelé all the time. But now
I love the name, because of what it means
around the world, and it’s what most people
call me. Some friends who I was with in the
army still call me Edson, though, and my
family call me Dico.”
“I had a lot of opportunities later on to see
some great players, but my hero before
I became professional was Waldemar de Brito,
who was responsible for taking me to Santos
for a trial when I was 16. He was an excellent
player who played in Argentina and Brazil and
for the Brazil national team. Then there was
Zizinho, who played for the national team,
a very skilful player who played in the 1950
World Cup Final. And, of course, my father.”
The first game I saw
“I can’t remember how old I was exactly, but
because my father played for Bauru I used to
Pelé often surprised
himself as well
as opponents
I never had to pay to go to a football match.
They were a revered team in Sao Paulo State,
and even more so to me because my father
played for them. Everybody knew him.”
My big break
“When I got to 12, 13 or 14, people started to
say, ‘Oh, the son of Dondinho is a good player.’
Waldemar de Brito was a friend of my father
and got me a trial at Santos and in the first
week they said, ‘OK, we’re going to sign you –
you’re going to stay here.’ That’s when I started
to realise that I must be quite good, because
Santos was a good team.”

My brother
“How good a football player was my
brother? He’s a lawyer now! Ha, ha! My
brother used to play in Santos when he
was younger, but he always said to me,
‘Listen, two great footballers in the
same family – it is not fair.’ So he
stopped playing to concentrate on
his studies. He is now my lawyer.”

My first ball
“When I first started to play, we couldn’t
afford a proper ball, so we used to make
balls with socks, and stuff the socks with
newspaper. And my mother got so mad
because I used to get her socks to make
a ball. We also used to make a little game
with a coconut, but we didn’t kick it – we just
did a lot of dribbling. So we had a lot of
practice with dribbling when we very young.
The first leather ball I played with was from
my father’s team Bauru, who used to give
their old balls to the kids, so my father used
to get them for me, but the condition of
them wasn’t very good.”

24 FourFourTwo.com
“All the boys would call
me Pelé and I’d fight
with them – I didn't
want to be called that!"

“Edson,
have yo
been ste u
aling yo
mum’s ur
socks a
gain?”
 It was a growing club on the outskirts of Sao Paulo when he signed. Two decades
later, a goal machine named Pelé had transformed the Peixe into a global force
To say Pelé’s potential was obvious from a young age
would be a huge understatement: when Waldemar de
Brito took him to Santos, he told the directors that the
modestly built 15-year-old would be “the greatest
football player in the world”. No pressure then. But Pelé
didn’t disappoint. When he arrived in the industrial port
city, 50 miles from Sao Paulo, the club was already on
the up. Pelé sent them into orbit. He was top scorer in
his first full season and Sao Paulo champions in his
second. Nine more state titles followed, along with five
national and two South American titles. When Santos
won back-to-back Intercontinental Cups against Benfica
and AC Milan in 1962 and 1963 respectively, Pelé scored
seven goals across two two-legged ties. Pelé didn’t make
Santos: Pelé was Santos. And he loved Santos too…
What kind of club was Santos when you joined in 1956?
Santos at that time started to grow. They had a very
good base and gave an opportunity to the youngsters.
That was why I played in the first team very early. We
had another player who played there called Colcinho,
who was in the national team at 17 years old too, but
he broke his knee. Then we had Edu, who played in the
national team of Brazil at 16 or 17. I had invitations
to go to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo to try and be
a professional with the big clubs there, but Santos was
the young team who started to bring through the big
names, and all of sudden there
was a lot of us because
everything started to
come together.
Was there a moment when you
knew you belonged in
professional football?
When I was in Santos for some
months we played against Corinthians –
not the team of the first division from Sao
Paulo but in the second division, from a town
called Santandre. I played after half-time
and scored my first goal. I will never forget it
– it was one of the most important moments
in my career.
Within a year or so you were a big star and
had won the World Cup. How much did life
change in such a short space of time?
After my second year at Santos, it was very
difficult to go out like before because I was
17 years old and had played at the World
Cup. My first game in the national team was
at 16; it was against Argentina in 1957 and I
scored in a 2-1 loss [becoming the youngest
player to score in international football]. Santos: Pelé’s
second family
26 FourFourTwo.com
People went crazy because it was not normal at the
time. Now, they are more used to seeing youngsters
because of television. They score one goal and all over
the world everybody sees it and knows the player. At
that time it was different; people were surprised
because I was so young. Every place I went, people
asked, “How could this young boy play for Brazil?” I
wasn’t too strong back then but I was intelligent. Things
have changed. Today, youngsters have more
opportunity, but they also have more support.
How did your Santos team-mates treat you when you
returned a world champion? Was there any jealousy?
No, no, they started treating me better! We had three
players in our team who were at the World Cup. There
was Zitho in midfield, and Pepe, who went but didn’t
play. Then the Three Musketeers were back together.
Is it true you joined the army for a year on
coming back from the 1958 World Cup?
Yes, when I turned 18 in October 1958 I went
to do national service and it was fantastic. If I
could I would tell my son and all the kids to go
to the army, because you learn a lot. For me, it
was a good experience because I had become
champion of the world, came back and said,
‘OK, now I’m gonna be free!’ But my friends in
Santos said, “No, you have to be an example for
the youngsters now – you have to go to the
army.” So I did. I learned how to cook,
how to respect people, how to wash
things, dress, iron, everything. It was
fantastic. A lot of work you do for
survival, in the jungle. But the most
important thing it taught me was
discipline, and that helped me in
football, no doubt. It was a good
time in my life.
You turned down a move to Europe several times to
stay at Santos. What was it about the club that made
you so happy that you never wanted to leave?
At that time we didn’t have too much exchange of
players – very few players went to play abroad. Then, we
were like a family: the same players together for three,
four, five years. Why would you want to change for
a little more money? After 1968, I had offers to go
to Europe, to Mexico… but I said, ‘No, it’s OK. I’m with
Santos. I don’t want to change.’ Even when I retired
from Santos I had proposals to go to Inter Milan, to Real
Madrid, to Juventus, because by the ’70s a lot
of players from Brazil had started to go to Europe, but
I always said no. I think to be as a family is the most
important thing. I knew all the players there, my family
was there – I never wanted to change. I only moved
to play with New York Cosmos.
nd
Maradona’s Ha
Go d had no thing
of
of Fury:
on Pelé’s Fist
os vs Milan , 1963
Sa nt
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 27
 My toughest opponent
“It’s hard to say. You see, whoever
I played against I had the best defender
marking me, but the best were Bobby
Moore and Franz Beckenbauer.
Beckenbauer was fantastic – very
intelligent, very tough to beat. And Bob
was the best centre-back I’ve seen – so
quick up here [points to his head].”
Picture Offside

28 FourFourTwo.com
 My 1000th goal
“You know, I scored a lot of good goals.
A lot of headed goals, a lot of bicycle
kicks, a lot of goals with a dribble. So
people say, ‘Why was Pelé’s 1000th goal
a penalty?’ Then a famous journalist in
Brazil wrote, ‘God said the world has to
stop and see this goal – that’s why it was
a penalty kick.’ So I like to say it was
God’s decision, and also God’s decision
where I scored the goal, in the Maracana.
There is a story that I played in goal the
week before so I could score the 1000th
goal in the Maracana, but it was just
coincidence. At the beginning of my
career I played as a reserve goalkeeper,
both for the Brazil national team and for
Santos, because you could not replace
the goalkeeper if he had a red card or an
injury. You had to choose one outfield
player who could also play in goal. So
I used to train as a goalkeeper, and I was
good. Then one game before I scored my
1000th goal, we go to play in the north of
Brazil and our goalkeeper got an injury.
I went in goal. People started to say I
went in goal because I wanted to score
the 1000th goal in the Maracana, but
three, four games before, we played in
Bahia in north of Brazil, Port Allegre in
south of Brazil and I wanted to score that
goal. I always wanted to score a goal
– I don’t care if it came in the Maracana!”

The moment people

ask me about most
“Even today, all over the world,
wherever I go, they show the save
of Gordon Banks when I headed it
in 1970. I scored a lot of goals in the
World Cup, but they show only this
header and save; it’s become the most
important moment in the World Cup!
I say, ‘I scored a lot of goals – why do
you show it?!’ They show it because the
play was so beautiful: the dribble by
Jairzinho, the cross, the header – it was
a fantastic header, one of my best –
and, of course, the save. Against Italy,
I scored a good header, but against
England, Banks saved. I’ll never forget
it, because nobody will let me! Am
I happy to be part of history in that
way? No, I want to score! I always want
to score. Maybe now I am not so upset
about it, but I would never be happy
not to score.”
Banks picture Getty Images

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 29

The biggest myth
“That I invented the bicycle kick.
In Brazil long before me there was
Leonidas, who was the first to use
the bicycle. When I was young,
I practised it and became good, but
it wasn’t rare. In Brazil all the kids
were trying it when I was young.”

30 FourFourTwo.com
My favourite player
“I’ve played with and against so many
excellent players in my career that it’s
hard to choose one. Some of the best
didn’t even get to play in the World Cup,
unfortunately: Di Stefano, for example,
who was an excellent player. We also
had Cruyff, Puskas, Zico, Bob Charlton,
George [Best]... there have been a lot.”
My greatest moment
“God gave me three. I always wanted to say goodbye as a
champion and in that way I have luck. When I came back in
1970 I knew it would be my last World Cup. With Santos it was
the same. In my last year, ’74, Santos won and I was the top
scorer in the league. Then, I was in New York for three years
and I knew ’77 would be my last season. So I said: ‘Oh God, I
cannot leave here without being a champion – we must win
this tournament!’ These were the best moments.”
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 31
1958 (SWEDEN)
“Even though I was only 17 years old,
I remember the 1958 World Cup very
well, first because I had a good World
Cup, but also because it was the first
time I’d travelled outside of Brazil.
“But although I scored three goals in
the semi-final and two in the final, the
most important game – one of the most
important games in my career, in fact –
was the quarter-final against Wales. It
was a very tough game, because if Brazil
didn’t win we’d go home. There was
terrible pressure. I just wanted to be on
the field, as I had only played in the final
group game. I was not yet the best
player and it wasn’t my responsibility.
The big players – Didi, Djalmar Santos,
Gilmar, Nilton Santos, Zito the captain –
had big responsibility and it was up to
them to decide if we went forward or
not. But I scored, we won the game 1-0,
we went to the final and, of course, we
won. The final was important, but that
game made it possible.
“After the final I was so excited and I
desperately wanted to tell my family, so
I said to the newspaper and radio men,
‘Where can I find a telephone?’ But they
didn’t have one so I had to wait until the
next day. I remember saying, ‘Hello! We’re
champions!’, and all the other players
were in a line waiting to call home. Back
then it was very, very different.”
Chasing the ball
in the semi-final,
in which Pelé
scored a hat-trick
32 FourFourTwo.com
 1962 (CHILE)
“In 1962, I made the first goal and
scored the second in the first game
against Mexico, which Brazil won.
But I was injured in the second game
against Czechoslovakia and missed
the rest of the tournament.”

Some rare time on

the pitch in the
1962 World Cup

Slinking off into “’Ere, weren’t

retirement when you good once?”
nobody was looking

1966 (ENGLAND)
“I’d have to say the injury against
Portugal in 1966 was my worst moment
in football. I was injured in the first
game, missed the second game, and
came back for the final group game, but
I wasn’t fit and we lost 3-1. At the time
I thought I’d stop playing for Brazil. I was
very low. I was so depressed. No more
World Cups: three was enough. If ’66 had
been my last World Cup, I would have
said goodbye to Brazil as a losing player.”

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 33

 As true purveyors of the beautiful game, the Brazilians brought the world to
its knees in Mexico – thanks in no small part to their magician wearing No.10
You retired from international football
after 1966. What made you return?
I did two or three interviews and said,
‘This is my last World Cup’, but I kept
playing with Santos and in 1969 I was in
good shape and I said, “OK, I’m gonna
play.” I played in all the qualification
games [Pelé scored six goals in six
games] and in four or five months
together we didn’t lose a single game.
Were you able to enjoy the experience
more and take it all in because you
were that bit older than in ’58?
No. It was tougher for me because the
responsibility was on my shoulders. We
had two or three players who had
already decided to stop after this World
Cup. Gerson and Brito both took me to
one side to say, “Listen, this is our last
World Cup – we cannot lose!” Every time
we went to training they said it: “We
have to prepare, we have to prepare.”
This started to get me a little tense and
nervous – and not just me but the whole
team, because of the political situation
in Brazil. It was very complicated: with
a military government in charge of the
country a lot was expected of us. In my
first World Cup, I was young: I wanted to
be there, but I didn’t have to be the
responsible player. In 1970, I had to be
the experienced player – the game
rested on my shoulders – but thank God
[looks to the heavens] we won.
So in terms of your own performances,
was 1970 better than 1958?
No doubt. 1970 was when I played my
best for Brazil. In my first World Cup
I was very good, but I didn’t play every
34 FourFourTwo.com
game. In Mexico, I played every game at
a high level. And no doubt, this World
Cup was one of the best if you think
about the quality of the teams. West
Germany were excellent, Italy were good
and England were great. The group game
against England was the most difficult
game of the tournament for us, and if
you look at it, the most even. The truth is,
we had luck. In the first half, England
had an opportunity to score two goals.
Later, we started to control the game.
But even after we scored [Pelé setting up
Jairzinho], England had a good chance.
That 1970 team is regarded as the best
ever. Just how good was it, and what
was it like to play in?
The thing is, nobody expected us to win
the World Cup. In Brazil, when it comes
to the World Cup everybody is very
demanding. For example, a lot of
newspapers started to fight against the
players. They used to say, “Pelé, Tostão,
Rivelino, Gerson: those players cannot
play together. They are all number 10s
– it isn’t going to work.” Then we went
there and played all those players – only
Jairzinho was a number 7 for his club,
Botafogo. But, for the newspapers, we
could not play together – and this was
the best Brazil team of all time! In Brazil,
they always complain about something.
So how were you able to play together?
Good players means it’s easier to play
together, but most importantly we were
a good ‘team’ and Zagallo a good coach.
He organised the team very well. It
turned out, fortunately, that ’70 was the
best World Cup, then I retired at my best.
 “The papers in Brazil
said we couldn’t play
together – the best
Brazil team of all time!”
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 35
At 33, Pelé played his last game for Santos having already
retired from Brazil, but one more chapter was to come...

Pelé certainly knew how to go out

with a bang. After three World Cup wins
and 77 international goals (12 at World
Cup finals), he retired from international
football in front of a packed Maracana in
a specially arranged farewell friendly
against Yugoslavia in July 1971. He was
just 30. Three years later, he announced
the end of his club career midway
through the first half of Santos’ State
Championship game against Ponte Elton John was
Preda by dropping to his knees on the a regular visitor to
centre-spot and raising the ball to the the Giants Stadium
heavens with his hands. Having scaled
every peak in the game, Pelé took his
father’s advice and bowed out at the “Damn it, Martha,
top. What could possibly tempt him out it’s meant to
of retirement? spell Peel!”
One final payday would certainly have
helped – anywhere between $2m and
$4m over three years according to
reports, a staggering amount at the
time, particularly for a player past his
peak. But this was no ordinary
assignment. And, as America would
soon discover, this was certainly no
ordinary player.

You came out of retirement in 1975 to

join New York Cosmos in the fledgling
North American Soccer League (NASL).
What, apart from the obvious rewards,
persuaded you to make the move?
Even when I retired from Santos, I had
proposals from big clubs in Italy and
Spain as it was becoming common for
Brazilian players to go to Europe. I also
could have gone to play in South Africa
or somewhere else in South America –
I had a lot of good proposals – but I
always said no. I only moved to

36 FourFourTwo.com
Skipping through
the challenges of
every Bobby
Charlton lookalike FourFourTwo.com
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection
November 37 [[1R]]
2010
play with New York Cosmos because I Top “I knew there was a reason I
went to the United States to promote came to the American league”
soccer, as our particular type of Bottom left Showing Henry Kissinger
‘football’ wasn’t popular there. And that, some appreciation
I think, was the right step – a beautiful Bottom centre The world’s greatest
step. In the United States it was meet: Pelé and Muhammad Ali
a different life. I had more opportunity Bottom right At a foam party with
to push more people to the game. Bobby Kennedy (no, really)

How did it feel, being expected to turn

Americans on to football almost
single-handedly?
It was a big responsibility but I did it!
Today, soccer in the United States is very
well known, the national team do very
well, the ladies are always among the
best in the world and they have more
children playing soccer between the
ages of eight and 18 than any other
Picture Getty Images

country in the world.

How much of a struggle was it at first?

The first season was really tough. I
remember when I arrived there, we
played on a small field – half grass, half
not grass, because it was used for Mick Jagger before
baseball. When the first game was on his days of ruining
television, they had to paint the bare England’s World Cup
patches green. I got paint on my boots
and I thought I had a fungus until they
told me it was paint. The team was not
so good – we had a lot of college players.
Then we went to play in Dallas, LA,
Tampa Bay and San Jose; those teams
were really well organised already and
we lost a lot of games in the first season.
At first, people said, “Oh, Pelé’s here,
we’re going to win the game”, and it was
a little difficult. But we changed some
things, signed more big names –
Beckenbauer, Neeskens, Chinaglia and
others – and moved to Giants Stadium,
where we got 45,000-50,000 crowds
minimum, sometimes 70,000.

Including several famous faces…

When we started to win, we had a really
big bunch of names in the crowd: movie
stars, sports stars, pop stars, politicians,
artists. Steve Ross, the boss of Warner
Communications, helped create the
Cosmos, so he encouraged a lot of stars.
Robert Redford, Muhammad Ali, Mick
Jagger, OJ Simpson all came; Andy
Warhol, Elton John, Henry Kissinger too –
every game there was somebody there.
It was fantastic. Even before Cosmos
I met John F Kennedy, who was a
fantastic person, and later I spent some
time with Nelson Mandela, the Pope, the
Queen. Even she knew who I was. That’s
the great thing about sport, particularly
football: it brings people together.

Despite the money and glamour, how

important was it to bow out a winner,
as you had done for Brazil and Santos?
I knew ’77 would be my last season, and
I said to God, “I’m gonna do my best,
prepare well, but I need help to retire
a champion.” And God gave it to me.

38 FourFourTwo.com
Pelé’s skills were
never in question
at any age

Keepy-uppy with
Johnny Carson:
check out the shoes

Andy Warhol: not

easily impressed FourFourTwo.com November 2010 [[1R]]
PLAYMAKERS

FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES:

October 2010
40 FourFourTwo.com
 PLAYMAKERS

S
o the cycle begins again. Just when it
seemed the playmaker had been
consigned to history, just when it seemed
even those areas such as Argentina and
the Balkans that had always idolised their
number 10s had begun to question their
devotion, so they emerged again at the World
Cup, different in form, reinvented for modernity,
but distinctly, undeniably there. There was
Mesut Özil, ­perhaps the most classical of the
new breed, sliding passes through for onrushing
colleagues. There was Wesley Sneijder, probing
and prompting, ever alert to a shooting
opportunity. There was Lionel Messi, jinking and
scampering, the latest incarnation of the pibe
ideal. And there, deeper-lying, was the scheming
Xavi Hernandez, the cerebral heart of the best
national team there has been in two decades.

‘The Point of the Lance’

In its classical form, the playmaker was the
No.10. Deeper-lying players such as Falcao,
Glenn Hoddle or Andrea Pirlo can be described
as makers of play, but here we’re talking about
the artist who ­operates just behind the front
two, equally capable of picking a pass or b ­ eating
his man, and preferably contributing his share of
goals as well.
Britain has never cared much for the
­playmaker, which is probably down to two
related issues: a general preference for effort
over skill, for pragmatism over aesthetics, and

the
the fact that the muddiness of pitches for most
of the season – at least until around 15 years
ago – has meant skilful players tended to be

death and
consigned to the firmer ground of the flanks. It’s
the reason why wingers were so lionised until
Alf Ramsey did away with them to win the
World Cup in 1966 (although they, too, have
returned in an evolved form).
Elsewhere, though, the playmaker was the
glamour figure: not merely technically gifted but
also the conductor of the rest of the team. In

REbirth
Brazil, he was the ponta da lanca, ‘the point of
the lance’ – typically an inside-left shunted
forward in the shift from W-M to 4-2-4 in the
late 1950s. Pelé played the role at the 1958
World Cup and probably remains the greatest of
a tradition including Tostão, Zico and Rivaldo.
In Argentina, the classic enganche – the ‘hook’
that joins the attack to the rest of the team –

of the
was a pibe, a kid from the slums who had risen
through his cunning. Maradona, the greatest,
was el pibe d’or, but he was part of a ­tradition

playmaker
stretching back as far as Alfredo di Stefano.
He himself always spoke fondly of the
Independiente enganche of the 1970s,
Ricardo Bochini, who was described by ­journalist
Hugo Asch as “a midget, ungainly,
imperturbable, without a powerful shot, nor
header, nor charisma” but who was still a
­wonderfully imaginative player. More recently,
there have been a host of new Maradonas,
for no country is so in love with the tradition
20 years after Milan seemed to kill off the as Argentina: Ariel Ortega, Pablo Aimar, Javier
penchant for an onfield conductor, the game’s Saviola, Andres d’Alessandro, Carlos Tevez,
Javier Pastore and, of course, Messi.
glamour figure is back with a vengeance... Europe had its tradition too. Hungary’s Ferenc
Puskas, an advanced inside-left in the Brazilian
Words Jonathan Wilson
style, was arguably the first, and through the
1960s and ’70s there was a great flowering

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 41

PLAYMAKERS
from Andriy Biba and Oleh Blokhin for the USSR
to Sandro Mazzola and Gianni Rivera in Italy,
Johan Cruyff in the Netherlands and Gunter
Netzer in West Germany.
It was the 1980s, though, that was the golden
age of the playmaker. There was Zico and
Maradona, of course, but it seemed ­
every nation – England excepted – had their
­equivalent: Michel Platini (France), Felix Magath
(West Germany), Michel (Spain), Giancarlo
Antognoni (Italy), Enzo Scifo (Belgium), Michael
Laudrup (Denmark), Gheorghe Hagi (Romania),
Dragan Stojkovic (Yugoslavia).
They grew especially common after the arrival
of 3-5-2 in the mid-’80s allowed sides to field
two defensive midfielders as a platform for their
“The players who would have been
playmakers had to find new roles"
playmaker (a 3-4-1-2), a shift that, by deploying
the wing-back to do the wide work that had
previously been done by two players, meant
that the centre could be ­bolstered so that
fielding a pure creator did not leave a side
­vulnerable to being overrun.
Milan kill the playmaker
It was Arrigo Sacchi who killed the playmaker
but, contrary to popular belief, it had nothing
to do with defensive football. Playmakers had
always been set up in opposition to defensive
football; that enmity was known. What hadn’t
been apparent until Sacchi’s AC Milan won back-
to-back European Cups was that it was possible
to play great, technically adept attacking
football without a playmaker.
The key game was probably the 1989
European Cup semi-final against Real Madrid.
Madrid had a playmaker in Bernd Schuster and
were probably unlucky only to draw the first leg
at home; in the San Siro, though, despite
playing quite well and outpassing Milan, Madrid
were torn apart. They lost 5-0, ­overwhelmed by
the relentlessness of Sacchi’s side.
Sacchi had taken the ideals of Dutch total
football – players interchanging position, hard
pressing, a high offside line – and magnified
them. He demanded that when his side
was out of possession there should be
no more than 25 metres from centre-
forward to centre-back, that the game
should be rigorously squeezed.
Opposing playmakers were stifled,
crushed between the back four
and the midfield four, denied
the space to receive a pass or
the time to make one. His
team, meanwhile, went
further than Ajax or the
Netherlands in its
egalitarianism, and eschewed
a leader, a controlling figure
as Johan Cruyff had been.
Sacchi demanded his players
think of themselves not as, say,
right-backs or left-sided
midfielders but determined their
42 FourFourTwo.com
positions according to four factors: the p ­ osition
of their team-mates, the position of the
opponent, the position of the ball and the space.
Everything became relative to the other
components within the system.
This universalism – the belief that all players
should be able to perform multiple functions –
was precisely what Valeriy Lobanovskyi and
Viktor Maslov had been practising at Dynamo
Kiev since the mid-’60s, but even they had their
Cruyff-figure, the on-field director. Sacchi took it
further, and by applying the principles at a
glamorous western European club that could
afford star players, popularised the theory.
“In my team, every player was a playmaker,”
Sacchi said. For AC Milan, that was just about
true, but it is an ideal available only to the most
highly skilled. As countless other pioneers have
found, once the theories that work at the
­highest level are introduced among lesser
­players at lesser teams, it is the negative aspects
that take precedence: anybody can
be organised to keep things tight, but it takes
a special football intelligence to identify and
exploit such space as it becomes available.
As pressing became increasingly common,
and as improved understanding of nutrition and
fitness increased the intensity of that pressing,
it became increasingly harder for
the classical playmaker to find a role. Roberto
Baggio was probably the greatest victim: not
only did Sacchi, Italy’s coach at the 1994 World
Cup, find it difficult to trust a player so reluctant
to fulfil his defensive duties, but the changing
mindset at Italian clubs meant he was often
seen as a luxury. By the late ’90s it was
­common even for those Serie A clubs who didn’t
embrace universalism to play what was known
as a ‘broken team’, usually with seven defensive
players and three attacking players and nobody
to provide a link between them.
The odd anachronism persisted, however.
Egypt have won the last three African Cup of
Nations using a 3-4-1-2 with Mohamed Barakat,
Mohamed Aboutreika and Mohamed Zidan
respectively in the playmaking role. And
then there’s Juan Roman Riquelme, who
kept alive the Argentine tradition, his
sharpness of brain and awareness of those
around him more than c­ ompensating for
his lack of pace. He needed players
running off him, though, and if they
didn’t, as happened in Argentina’s
2006 World Cup quarter-final
against Germany, he could be left
­redundant, which ­perhaps partly
explains the dismissive attitude
many in Europe have towards him.
Largely, though, the players who
would have been ­playmakers
found themselves in new roles or
forced to take on new
responsibilities. The quest for
space pushed many wide:

What makes THE perfect No. 10?
What skills should the perfect
­playmaker boast? Bobby Robson
answered the question superbly in
Richard Williams’ excellent book on
the art of the playmaker, Perfect 10.
His ideal model for the position was
Dennis Bergkamp. “What makes him
worth so much?” said Robson.
“He scores goals [but] he’s not
just a striker. He’s got good
movement, and he makes his runs
from deep in midfield. He’s strong,
too, so he can make a lot of these
Ronaldinho, for instance, often found himself
used on the left, whereas 20 years ago he would
have been a central puppet-master. As for Luka
Modrić, Andrei Arshavin and Messi, although
they ­usually play centrally for their countries,
they often play on the flanks for their clubs.
Diego and the rebirth
The seed of the playmaker’s reinvention was
sown at the height of Maradona’s powers.
Without settling on a system, Carlos Bilardo’s
Argentina had experimented at the 1986 World
Cup with a 3-4-1-2, with Maradona operating
behind an orthodox front two of Jorge Valdano
and Pedro Pasculli. Pasculli scored the winner
against Uruguay in the second round, but
Bilardo left him out against England, preferring
the midfielder Hector Enrique. “You can’t play
against the English with a pure centre-forward,”
he explained. “They’d devour him, and the extra
man in midfield will give Maradona more room.”
Liberated, Maradona dazzled in the new system
for the remainder of the competition.
The deployment of a playmaker as a second
striker was revelatory. Of course, skilful players
had been used just off a frontman before –
England came to use Peter Beardsley behind
Gary Lineker at that tournament, while Kenny
Dalglish had been playing behind Ian Rush for
Liverpool for years – but this was a step further,
for Maradona dropped far deeper: his second
goal against England, for instance, began when
he picked up possession inside his own half.
That subtle change of role facilitated the
major tactical shift of the past 20 years: the rise
of 4-2-3-1. It was, in a sense, a natural
­development from 4-4-2, pulling one forward
back and advancing the wide men, but
the first coach to use it c­ onsciously
seems to have been Juanma Lillo,
manager of Cultural Leonesa from
1991-92 in the Segunda B (Spain’s
third tier).
“My intention was to pressure
and to try to steal the ball high
up the pitch,” he explained. “It
was the most symmetrical way I
could find of playing with four
forwards. One of the great
advantages is that having the f­ orwards
high allows you to play the midfield high
and the defence high, so everybody
benefits. But the p
­ layers have to
be very, very mobile and they
AC T I O N R E P L AY
PLAYMAKERS
runs. He takes the ball easily on either
side, he’s got a lovely first touch, and
he’s a cool fi
­ nisher. He can hit it or he can
slot it, and he’s good at making the
choice. He can head the ball. He’s like
Maradona – you think you’ve got him
under control, and over 85 minutes
you have, but then he’ll give you the
slip and there’s nothing you can do
about it. And he’s a good team player.
He works for other people, not just
himself. Even when he doesn’t score,
his ­contribution was considerable.”
have to be able to play when they get the ball.
You have to remember that they’re pressuring
to play, not playing to pressure.”
For him, the system ­intensified pressing, so
the line of three players had not only to create
but also to fulfil a defensive function. As the
formation spread – Deportivo La Coruna used
it in winning La Liga in 2000 while Zinedine
Zidane and Manuel Rui Costa were ­liberated by
France and Portugal’s use of the system in Euro
2000 – so other advantages became clear.
Using two holders in midfield freed a side to
play three creative players and a centre-
forward; genuine attacking wide play returned
to the game, while that central player in the
trident became a blend of the old-style second
striker and playmaker, looking both to get
forward to support the centre-forward and to
feed those reborn attacking wide-men.
At the same time, the increasing liberalisation
of the offside law has effectively neutered the
offside trap. Opta stats show that in 1997-98
there were 7.8 offsides per game in the Premier
League, after which there was a fairly steady
decline to 6.3 in 2005-06. Since then, when the
new legislation came into force, there has been
a further decline, to 4.8 last season. What it has
done is to prevent sides pressing with a high
offside line; Sacchi’s 25-metre ideal is no longer
practicable, and so the effective playing area
has been stretched, from probably around
35-40 metres in 1990 to 55-60 metres today.
This means that the midfield in an orthodox
4-4-2 can be left dreadfully exposed if used as
anything other than a defensive tactic, and so
the tendency is increasingly to four-band
­systems, which is why this World Cup saw 4-4-2
supplanted as the default system by 4-2-3-1.
The examples of Spain, Barcelona, perhaps even
Arsenal, suggest that for sides that
­prioritise possession, the wide-men
may advance even ­further,
with the centre player
in the trident
dropping deeper into
more of a 4-2-1-3.
Either way, the logic remains
that of the 3-4-1-2: two holding
players protect a playmaker, who
has emerged again from Sacchian
­universality to become a specialist
player in his own right. Özil, Sneijder,
Messi and Xavi may look like
throwbacks – but they’re the future.
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 43
 TICKETS
PLEASE
Tickets , please!
That’s what we’ve been asking FFT readers on Twitter, and hundreds of you responded. From the
Magical Magyars at Wembley to derby delirium at The Den, here are the top stubs and stories...
Southampton fans had been made to
wait 91 years for a major trophy, and
few expected the Second Division outfit
to break their duck against top-flight
high-fliers Manchester United. But thanks
to Bobby Stokes’ 83rd-minute winner,
they pulled off one of the FA Cup final’s
biggest shocks – and Saints nut Wayne
Rogers has this souvenir from the day.
44 FourFourTwo.com
FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES: November 2014
England 3-0 Poland,
1986 World Cup
Tyler Jason, England fan
“My dad followed England in three World Cups,”
says Tyler. “He sadly passed away last year at
the age of 51, and being the only one in the
family who’s bothered about football, his ticket
stubs are now in my possession.
“He had a story about meeting Trevor
Brooking the night before our final group
game in Mexico. Dad was a massive West
Ham supporter and idolised Brooking. The
England squad came into their hotel, and
Dad and a few mates were asking, ‘What’s
going on here?’ We’ve lost our first game and
drawn the second – we’re not going to qualify.’
“Brooking [there as a pundit] just said,
‘Don’t worry, we’ll win tomorrow and it will
all be OK.’ My dad turned to his mates and said,
‘Right, boys, that’s settled. If Trevor Brooking
says England are going to qualify, then we’re
going to qualify.’ And we did.”
1983 FA Cup Final
Lee Virgo, Brighton fan
This final between Brighton and Manchester
United became famous for Peter Jones’
BBC radio commentary – “And Smith must
score!” – which later became the name of a
Seagulls fanzine. Smith didn’t score, the match
finished 2-2 and United won the replay 4-0.
“As a 14-year-old I don’t think I really
cared if we won or lost that day,” says Lee.
“After seeing my first ever cup final on TV
in 1975 it was a dream of mine to watch
Brighton play in a cup final at Wembley,
and until the eve of the game I didn’t have
a ticket. Then my uncle called to say I could
have his, as he knew how upset I was.
“It seemed to me as if I’d won a golden ticket
for the chocolate factory.”
 TICKETS
PLEASE

1991 European Cup

Winners’ Cup Final
Andy Mitten, journalist and
United We Stand fanzine editor

“In their first season back in Europe after English

clubs were re-admitted, Manchester United
reached the Cup Winners’ Cup final against
Barcelona in Rotterdam,” says Andy.
“School insisted I wasn’t allowed to go and
United said all fans needed to travel officially
with the club, but I booked an unofficial coach
trip that included three days in Amsterdam.
“United eventually relaxed their ticket policy,
and once I told the headmaster I’d been invited
because I edited a fanzine, he granted me
permission to go. Other students who went got
suspensions – I was made head boy on
my return! And United triumphed in the rain.”

1985-86 Bundesliga
play-off
Uli Hesse, German writer

“The stub doesn’t tell you who played

and when; it just says ‘Qualifying game
for the Bundesliga – play-off,” explains Uli.
“There was no time to print proper tickets.
“In ’86, Borussia Dortmund were involved
in the relegation/promotion play-offs. We
lost the first game against second-division
Fortuna Cologne 2-0 and won the second
3-1. Away goals didn’t count, so when we
made it 3-1 seconds from full-time, we
forced a third game on aggregate. It was
the birth of the club as we know it today.
“In the replay, Fortuna collapsed and we
won 8-0. Without that game, Dortmund
How much for a Clasico ticket?! And before you check the year, yes, that price is in euros, not pesetas... wouldn’t be what they are now.”

Understandably, Russell Ireland took good

care of his ’66 final stub before handing it to
his grandson... the editor of this magazine.

England’s last game at

the old Wembley, 2000
Dan Goodson, England fan

“It rained all day long – relentless rain,” says

Dan. “We were behind the goal at the other end
when Germany scored; even from there
I could see the worst wall ever assembled to
protect a free-kick. We sang the Dam Busters
theme for a solid 20 minutes but as the final
whistle went and a soaking wet Kevin Keegan
trudged past us, we knew his fate was sealed.”

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 45

 TICKETS
PLEASE

Tottenham vs Bolton,
FA Cup 6th Round, 2012
Beth Ranjit, first time match-goer

“My first and only experience of a professional

match was in March 2012, when Fabrice
Muamba collapsed,” says Beth Ranjit, who
hasn’t been to a game since and as such has
never seen 90 minutes of football played live.
“As a doctor, I found myself awkwardly
commentating to bystanders about what the
pitch medics were doing and what could be
wrong. It was so tense in the stands.”

Lowest Premier League

attendance: Wimbledon
vs Everton, 1993
Harry Foges, Everton fan

“Wimbledon were tenanting at Selhurst

Park,” explains Toffees supporter Harry,
“and this was the third time we had played
them in the space of a few weeks [and the sixth
time that season]. I doubt the record
low attendance of 3,039 will ever be beaten,
bearing in mind how the Premier League
has boomed since that formative year. It
was quiet, but at least we won the game.”

It’s no eye test chart, but Paul Murray’s

stub for Northern Ireland vs England. Now
shut one eye and tell us his seat number...

England 3-6 Hungary,

friendly, 1953
John Graveling, England fan
“It was a revelation to English football –
a wake-up call,” says John, who was present
at the match that showed England didn’t
own the beautiful game: the 6-3 defeat
to Ferenc Puskas’ Hungary. “It was a fantastic
exhibition of football by the Hungarians.
They were tremendous that day.
“Nobody believed England would be
beaten; all the papers just said, ‘Give the ball
to [Stanley] Matthews.’ But that wasn’t enough.
England didn’t play to any system.
“A couple of us, aged about 16, took the
day off school to attend the match. My father
worked on the railway so I got a free ticket,
then we went by Tube and walked up Wembley
Way. The match ticket cost ten shillings and
sixpence: 51p in new money.
“The atmosphere was tremendous until
half an hour in when we were three goals down.
Then we were a bit deflated.”

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2008 Champions
League Final Germany 1-5 England
Debs Coady, Chelsea fan Ray Casey, England fan

“My husband and I went on the ‘day trip’,” says “We were relatively confident, though the
Debs. “It was fine going out: 4am flight with atmosphere was fairly muted in Munich
2am drinks in the Gatwick bar, as you do. as we were surrounded by German
“After the game in Moscow, the pouring rain supporters,” remembers Ray.
reflecting our mood, we had real trouble finding “After England went 4-1 up, many
our coach to the airport. It was dark, wet, 1am German fans started leaving early – and
local time and we eventually found it parked on they were surprisingly gracious. Some of
a busy dual carriageway. We sat on the coach them even started congratulating us on
outside the airport for over an hour. their way out, long before the final whistle.”
“Inside, it was chaos – weary Chelsea fans
everywhere. There was no pre-booked flight;
just a case of finding the first one leaving. But
with no information provided, we had no idea
which were. Everyone dashed between gates
when we heard rumours of one leaving.
“We got back at 7am and my husband ended
up on Sky Sports News moaning about it all.”

Varteks Varazdin
4-3 Dinamo Zagreb,
Croatian League, 2007
Matija Matucec, Varteks fan

“It was the day Varteks became my club,”

recalls Matija. “Dinamo were one game
short of breaking the European record for
consecutive league matches unbeaten and
were ready to celebrate it. Not in Varazdin!
“We were struggling in the league at the time
but put in a heroic performance and took the
lead three times in the match. Dinamo’s Luka
Modric made it 3-3 just before injury time, then
Varteks’ local legend Miljenko Mumlek banged
the ball into the net from a free-kick some 30
yards away to win it.”

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Argentina 0-1 England,

2002 World Cup
Dan Goodson, England fan

“Everything about the Argentina game was

brilliant,” says Dan. “Everyone was in the main
park in Sapporo from breakfast, drinking and
singing in the sun. A group of local female fans
were singing, ‘We love Beckham!’ They were
asked if they liked Michael Owen, to which
they sang, ‘We love Owen!’ Then another
Reading 5-7 Arsenal, guy asked if they liked David Seaman...
2012-13 League Cup “In the ground, there were England flags
Fourth Round This stub is as gaudy as David Seaman’s shirt that day and as everywhere, the singing didn’t stop and the
Christopher Towers, dynamite as Gazza’s flick, volley and dentist’s chair celebration party ran into the night. Brilliant away day.”
Arsenal fan

“This came shortly after losing against

Norwich and Schalke, and the wounds of
selling Robin van Persie to Man United were
still pretty raw – he was scoring left, right
and centre for them – so a section of our
travelling fans were feeling disgruntled
to say the least,” says Christopher.
“The first half was remarkable. Yes, we
hadn’t played well for a while and we had a
mixed side out, but to go 4-0 down to
Reading... they play that music you hear
at the darts, and I was getting used to
hearing it. When Walcott scored, we
half-heartedly, sarcastically cheered it.
“At half-time we joked we’d win 5-4, as
you do, and Olivier Giroud made it 4-2 but
we were made to wait [until the 89th
minute when Laurent Koscielny scored],
their fans gleefully waving away increasing
numbers of leavers from the Arsenal
end. Then when we equalised in
injury-time through Walcott, out rang
the chants of “4-0 and you f***ed it up!” Having followed the Red Army to Turkey, Paul McDonald resisted the urge to screw this one up at half-time...

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Millwall 2-1 West Ham,

Division One, 1992
Jim Hesketh, Evertonian
moonlighting in
Cold Blow Lane
“I’m an Everton supporter from London, and
when I was younger, with Goodison Park
being a long way away for a teenager,
I used to watch Millwall every now and then
with my mate Harry – I had a soft spot for
them,” says Jim.
“Visiting the old Den was always slightly
hairy but there was added tension in the air
for this final derby [before Millwall relocated We wouldn’t
to their new ground]. We stood high up on have blamed
the terrace behind the goal in a spot where Tyler Jason’s
you knew there’d be a big surge every time father for
the ball went near the goal – slightly sobbing like
masochistic, but fun for a 15-year-old. Gazza at
“I remember being pinned against one of the Stadio
those large waist-high barriers they used to delle Alpi on
have after the Millwall goals went in and the 4 July 1990
ground swelling with noise.”
Italy 0-0 England,
When Becks World Cup
averted a Greek qualifier, 1997
tragedy in 2001, Harry Foges, England fan
Steve Marshall
was there – and “A mate of mine fell ill and gave me his ticket,”
judging by his says Harry of the goalless draw that secured
ticket he had France 98 qualification for England. “This was
a tasty view of before budget airlines, so I went down to my
that free-kick local train station and booked a one-way rail
ticket to Rome via the Eurostar, Paris and Milan. It
took 24 hours to get there and I had no hotel.
“At the ground we had our belts taken off
us by the Carabinieri, plus coins, lighters and
other stuff. Then we were showered with coins,
lighters and – yep – other stuff, including
a bottle of water that had been frozen. After
the game we were kept in for two hours, then
ferried back to the city centre on buses. I slept
on the floor of a hostel dorm after befriending a
Spurs fan on the bus. Eventually I got back
to England after buying a flight to Amsterdam,
where I spent a night with West Ham fans.”

Manchester United 2-1

Arsenal, FA Cup
Semi-Final, 1999
Tom McEvoy, Arsenal fan
“As a child I only went to five or six matches
a season but they meant the world to me, and
the magic was preserved by one amazing fact:
we won every game,” says Tom. “I went to
Highbury 15 times without even seeing a draw.
“After we drew 0-0 in the FA Cup semi-final,
my dad got tickets to the replay at Villa Park.
I was buzzing. We were the good guys, United
were the bad guys: Beckham had been sent off
at France 98, Keane was scary, Sheringham had
played for Spurs. And I was the lucky mascot.
“I knew, just knew we’d be in the final. But
when [Dennis] Bergkamp stepped up for his
penalty, something alien came over me: doubt.
“He missed, then Giggs had his moment of
genius. We were sat next to United’s fans, and
they showered us with abuse and a few coins.
“That penalty miss was a watershed moment
for me. I learned my team could fail and that it
could hurt.”

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FOOTBALL
FAKES

OTBALL
THE BEST FO

FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES:

august 2013
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From phoney phonecalls to Maradona’s cock
made-up midfielders, the and bull story
following rundown is proof that “Diego could do whatever he wanted,” claimed
in football, as in life, everything former Napoli president Corrado Ferlaino,
“but he had to be clean by Thursday.” By the
is not always as it seems... late ’80s, El Diez was snorting so much coke
that it was almost impossible to be ready for
Words Jon Spurling, Martin Mazur, Uli Hesse, Jonas Oliveira, the drug-testers ahead of weekend games.
Matt Barker, Ciaran Kelly
So the club, as well as turning a blind eye to
Illustrations David Semple
his habits, helped devise a way of beating
the system. When summoned for a sample,
Maradona would be given a small pump
containing someone else’s urine, which he
slipped into his tracksuit. Once in the testing
room, he would fill a specimen jar from the
concealed pump. “He was saved that way
many times,” admitted Ferlaino, but the rubber
penis ruse eventually failed in 1991 when
Maradona finally tested positive for the Class A
drug and was banned for 15 months.
Justice for Oggy!
“Here is our petition to Tony Blair and the
Kazakhstani government demanding the
release of footballing legend Steve Ogrizovic,”
announced the Free Steve Ogrizovic Group in
2003 after the ex-Coventry City legend had
reportedly been kidnapped while working
abroad for charity Over The Bar. Apparently the
former keeper had been raising money by
travelling around the world on public transport
but was forced to walk on his arrival to
Kazakhstan due to a lack of buses, where he
strayed into military land and was arrested
on suspicion of spying – a story so elaborate
you couldn’t make it up. Or so you’d think.
‘Oggy’ would later confirm in the Coventry
Evening Telegraph that the tale was a hoax –
FOOTBALL
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“I haven’t made any trips there recently, nor
am I planning to” – yet 600 people signed the
petition, with one entry reading, “Free Oggy,
he’s a bent-nosed hero to millions.”
“I thought you
were dead”
In the early part of the 20th century, British
newspapers ran a story claiming that
ex-Tottenham and Everton striker Alex ‘Sandy’
Young had been hanged in Australia for his
involvement with a gang of sheep rustlers.
A few weeks later, a separate story insisted
that Young had in fact gone mad and died
in an Edinburgh mental hospital. In fact,
neither story was correct. Young retired from
the game in 1914 and emigrated to Oz, where
he was later charged with the willful murder
of his brother over money. “In order to smear
my reputation, my family put out stories
about how I’d met with a gruesome end,”
he informed the judge at his trial, “but as
you can see, I’m very much alive.” Cleared
over the murder on the grounds of diminished
responsibility, Young made a go of it in the
outback and returned to his native Scotland
in the late ’50s, where he would often be met
with the words, “I thought you were dead.”
Houllier’s false No.3
In the late ’90s, The Times announced that
Liverpool boss Gerard Houllier was poised to
sign highly rated French under-21 international
Didier Baptiste for around £3.5 million. The
News of the World – whose editor claimed
to have seen Baptiste in action – positively
gushed about the Gallic golden boy, claiming,
“We think Didier Baptiste would be an ideal
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One local journalist wrote up a bizarre match
report despite a blizzard wiping the game out
addition to Liverpool’s back four. He’s a really
attractive player, and you’ll be seeing a lot
more of him in the News of the World!”
There was just one tiny glitch in the story: it
was a load of baloney. Baptiste was actually a
fictional character from the risible Sky One
soap Dream Team, where he starred for
Harchester United. “Never believe what you
read in the papers,” laughed Houllier. Strangely,
Baptiste was unavailable for comment.
“I play for Wimbledon
reserves, don’t
you know...”
It’s the stuff of boyhood dreams, playing for
your national team. The problem, of course, is
you need ability to make this dream a reality.
Either that or a load of chutzpah. In March
2013 21-year-old Bobby Shillinde achieved
low-level notoriety after a Twitter campaign
aimed to convince the Botswana FA to give
him his international debut. He had, according
to his tweets, a place in the Wimbledon
reserves, won a recent man of the match
award and been named in the League Two
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Team of the Week. Shillinde tweeted a snap of
his team hotel room, a man of the match ball
“signed by the lads” and a photo of the ‘team
of the week’, where his name was edited over
that of Wycombe Wanderers’ Joel Grant. His
ruse was made public when the Dons
announced they had never heard
of their supposed star player.
French by name…
but that’s it!
After serving a three-year prison sentence from
1970 to 1973 for his involvement in
a pub shooting, mercurial Luton Town forward
Graham French’s career appeared to fizzle out.
Yet a few years later in 1976, an eagle-eyed,
ground-hopping Hatters fan visited Southport’s
Haig Avenue and noticed an uncanny
resemblance between the ex-Hatters favourite
and the home team’s distinctly Gallic-sounding
frontman Graham Lafite. French, it turns out,
had tried to rebrand himself in Merseyside.
The Luton fan informed the local press about
their pseudonymous player, and Southport
promptly dismissed Monsieur Lafite. Mon dieu!
It’s the match
that never was
“It was a great game at Station Park on
Saturday,” claimed the Forfar Dispatch.
“Three seagulls and a dead sparrow occupied
Above Brian Clough the enclosure.” The tongue-in-cheek report
chats transfer fees of the ‘match’ between Forfar Athletic and
with the talking clock Stirling Albion during the big freeze of 1962–63
should have alerted readers that the article
was a spoof, but not everyone got the joke.
Despite the game being wiped out by
a blizzard, an enterprising local sports reporter
– backed by his editor – wrote a bizarre match
report detailing how “one player needed
a new piece of elastic for his shorts”, and how
another “hoofed his boot into an adjacent
field”. The club was immediately besieged
by irate fans demanding to know why
they hadn’t advertised the match.
Cloughie’s con trick
June 1967, and Derby boss Brian Clough is
indulging in a spot of haggling in his office with
Tranmere Rovers manager Dave Russell over
the fee for young centre-back Roy McFarland.
Russell demands £50,000. Clough offers
a paltry five grand. When Russell insists his
chairman won’t sell for less than £30,000,
Clough picks up the phone to speak to Rams’
chairman Sam Longson, who tells him he

won’t go a penny over £25,000. Except he
didn’t, because Clough had actually dialled
an empty office and was holding a one-way
conversation with himself. “I could have gone
higher, but I fancied a spot of penny-pinching,”
he explained years later. An hour later, the
browbeaten Russell agreed to sell McFarland
for Longson’s (or rather, Clough’s) asking price.
Quito saint turns sinner
Having won three league titles, Ecuadorian
midfielder Gonzalo Chila was firmly
establishing himself as a player of real promise
for his side, LDU Quito. Until, that is, a local
priest accused him of stealing his identity.
Angel Cheme – the player’s real name – was in
fact three years older than he claimed, a ploy
devised so he could play with the younger
youth-team prospects while coming through
the ranks. His scheme was only discovered
after the real Gonzalo Chila, a priest from his
local town, attempted to apply for a passport,
only to be told that someone else pretending
to be him had got there first. The story
then took a dark turn when the journalist
investigating the story, Guido Campana,
was kidnapped. “They threatened to kill
me if I kept asking questions,” he said in
December 2010. Cheme was eventually
suspended from playing for two years.
“Just bury the
evidence, Gunter”
In the early years of the Bundesliga, league
rules stated that no club could pay more
than 10,000 marks as a signing-on bonus.
For Hertha Berlin – based in a divided city –
this was a real problem. Not many players
Below Three seagulls wanted to live there, so they needed a financial
and a dead sparrow in incentive. So the club devised a way of paying
Forfar – but many more without the bonuses showing on their
didn’t get the gag books. Treasurer Gunter Herzog printed 55,000
extra tickets to Hertha’s games and sold them
privately – meaning they never appeared in
the books and Hertha never paid tax for them.
Herzog was a mortician by trade and famously
hid both the tickets and the ill-gotten gains in
coffins in his store until an auditor uncovered
the ploy. As punishment, Hertha were
demoted from the Bundesliga in 1965.
“Esteban’s an Italian
name, honest”
The fake passport scandal that first broke
during 2000 saw a number of red-faced
South American players turned back at
European airports. Edu’s transfer to Arsenal
from Corinthians temporarily hit the buffers
when his Portuguese passport turned out to be
false. Esteban Fuertes played eight games for
Derby County before it was discovered that his
Italian ID was fake. “We were informed that
the lad’s passport was a forgery and a very
poor forgery at that,” grumbled an
unimpressed Jim Smith. Italy was hit hardest,
with 24 Serie A stars implicated. The country’s
strict quota on non-EU players (five allowed
but only three in a starting line-up) prompted
clubs to find ways of circumnavigating the law.
Lazio midfielder Juan Sebastian Veron’s claims
to Calabrian ancestry were debated in
courtrooms for most of the last decade until
he was absolved of any wrongdoing in 2009.
Maria Elena Tedaldi, who helped Veron obtain
an Italian passport, was given a 15-month
suspended sentence.
FOOTBALL
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Schalke’s sneaky
double-deal transfer
When Schalke tried to sign Gunter Herrmann
and Hans-Georg Lambert from Karlsruhe in
the summer of 1963, they had a problem.
Bundesliga rules stated that the maximum
transfer sum for a player was 50,000 marks.
Herrmann, a German international, was worth
a lot more than that while Lambert, a clogger
who would only go on to play one game for
Schalke, was valued at considerably less.
The simple solution: pay 50,000 marks for
both, the extra for Lambert in effect making
up for the shortfall in the deal with Herrman.
The German FA, seeing through this tactic,
threatened the clubs with a fine and points
deduction. But having played by the rules,
both clubs evaded punishment. Sneaky.
You stupid twit!
In February 2012, a group of friends started
an exchange of tweets claiming that Brazilian
club Gremio were close to signing an
Argentine left-back named Enrico Cabrito.
What was meant to be a joke between friends
turned into a news sensation when a
journalist took the tweets for truth, publishing
a story as a result. Fans, seeing their make-
believe in the press, took it further, creating a
fake website for the player and
photoshopping a picture of a Gremio jersey
with Cabrito’s name on the back. Having
realised he’d been duped, the journalist in
question claimed his Twitter account had
been hacked. But it didn’t end there: news
channel RBS – a network affiliated
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A student sent saucy pictures of herself to a
pharmacy assistant, believing it was Neymar
to giant Brazilian broadcaster Rede Globo –
not only reported the story, they got the
detail wrong, claiming Gremio were about to
sign Uruguayan full-back Cabrito. Oh dear.
Skills include: passing,
shooting, making
things up
Rodrigo Souza was 26 years old, with an
impressive CV: victory in the 2003 under-17
World Cup with Brazil, winning the Brazilian
cup with Vasco in 2011, plus playing time with
Palmeiras, Gremio, Atletico Paranaense,
Flamengo and even Dutch giants Feyenoord.
That’s according to the press release sent to
Brazilian media in February 2013, the missive
adding that a leading agent had acquired his
economic rights and was about to facilitate
a move to Italian side Genoa. Questioned by
reporters, the PR who sent out the release
(who said he had just started to work with the
player) decided to have a closer look at his
client’s documentation. Souza had no records
at the CBF and had never played for any of the
clubs mentioned. But perhaps most
remarkable was that the lie got as far is it did,
despite Souza using a picture of Flamengo
54 FourFourTwo.com
striker Deivid, to whom he bears a slight
resemblance, on his documentation.
Enter Cavani, stage left
Aurelio de Laurentiis made his name producing
saucy cinematic romps, usually featuring a
busty showgirl, hapless male lead and an
uncomplicated narrative arc. When he took over
Napoli in 2004, the club had been declared
bankrupt, with debts approaching €70 million,
and demoted to the old Serie C1. De Laurentiis
transformed them into financially secure,
genuine title challengers. He also brought a
touch of showmanship to proceedings,
sometimes cringingly so. In August 2012, during
the final hours of the summer transfer window,
il Presidente called a press conference amid
excited media chatter that striker Edinson
Cavani could be leaving the club. “He wants to
go to England, to be in the cold of Manchester,
and he’s leaving tonight,” a solemn De
Laurentiis revealed. Suddenly Cavani appeared,
stage left. “But I’m happy here – let’s sign a
contract straight away!” the Uruguayan cried
rather woodenly, before signing a new extended
deal, apparently keeping him at the club until
2017. Oh, how the assembled hacks laughed.
Luv u. Pay 15k. Neymar x
In February 2013 Neymar began dating
Brazilian soap star Bruna Marquezine. Up until
then, however, Barcelona’s latest recruit had
a string of on-off girlfriends. For almost two
Above Cavani stars years, a 23-year-old law student from the
in film producer southern Brazilian city of Florianopolis believed
owner De Laurentiis’ she was one of them. The girl maintained
latest production a virtual relationship with the player via MSN
and Skype, Neymar apparently claiming that
he didn’t want to meet up as he wanted to
preserve his public image. Falling for the story,
she shared some saucy pictures of herself. She
realised her long-term admirer wasn’t Brazil’s
most famous face but in fact a 28-year-old
pharmacy assistant when he attempted to
blackmail her, asking for £15,000 not to
make the pictures public.
Knee-nack arsonist
How do you contend with a long-standing
knee injury that is keeping you from
playing? If you’re Brazilian defender Breno,
you burn down your house. In 2011, a fire
destroyed the home of the Bayern Munich
player in the leafy suburb of Grunwald, just
outside the city. His wife and two children
weren’t in and no one was hurt, but firemen
started to suspect that it might not be an
accident when they arrived on the scene
and saw he had three lighters in his hands.
A few days later Breno was arrested on

suspicion of arson. At first he denied it
before revealing that he was depressed at
not playing and had drunk a huge cocktail
of beer, wine and whisky that evening. In 2012
the centre-back was convicted and received a
three-year prison sentence.
Come to Kolo’s Cars!
A footballer can pretend to be many things,
from a victim of an imaginary elbow to
a loyal club servant. But when Kolo Toure
claimed he was a local car salesman, it was
almost certainly a first among player fakery.
Liverpool’s summer signing – who is married
with two children – first took on this unlikely
role in September 2010 after starting an
affair with 22-year-old student Kessel
Kasuisyo. Wanting to keep his real identity
from his secret beau, the former Arsenal
and Manchester City defender claimed
his name was Francois, one of Manchester’s
top car salesmen. The jig was up when
Kasuisyo shared a picture of Kolo/Francois
in the shower with a close friend, who
recognised the Ivory Coast star.
“We’ll be playing 4-4-3”
“A strapping, fair-headed fellow came out of
the mist, with no warning that he was entering
the fray,” insisted writer Bernard Joy after
a notorious Cold War clash in November 1945.
When Arsenal took on the touring Dynamo
Moscow at White Hart Lane on a real
pea-souper afternoon, the Russians allegedly
spent a good deal of the second half taking
Below Dynamo advantage of the thick fog by fielding 12
Moscow fight through men. The match, which ended up abandoned
London’s smog to with the visitors leading 4-3, was described
beat the Gunners by The Mail the next day as “the most
farcical match ever played.”
Footballer, my arse
Having found his way into The Times’ Top 50
Rising Stars list in 2009, and with a big-money
move to Arsenal in the offing (according to
the tabloids), young Bulgarian Masal Bugduv
appeared to have the world at his feet.
Yet Bugduv was merely the figment of an
Irishman’s fevered imagination, who’d written
false blog posts, posted stories on various
forums and even created a Wikipedia page
on the player. Inevitably, some of Fleet Street’s
finest bit and Bugduv was hailed as one of
football’s next big things. One of the false
stories about Bugduv included a quote from
a fake Moldovan newspaper titled Diario
Mo Thon, which in Gaelic loosely
translates as ‘Diary, My Arse’.
Northern Ireland’s
very own Ali Dia
An Italian gracing the IFA Premiership: it all
seemed too good to be true – and it was.
Midfielder Alessandro Zarelli, then 20, arrived
at Northern Ireland’s Lisburn Distillery in
October 2005 after an apparent Italian FA
chief, Matteo Colobase, contacted the club.
Such was the ‘coup’, Colobase even offered to
FOOTBALL
FAKES
eventually pay the club £1,000 for the player’s
expenses. Zarelli’s impressive CV included
alleged stints at Rangers and Sheffield
Wednesday, which were curtailed only by the
unfortunate combination of homesickness and
a broken leg. Following a disastrous display for
Distillery in a friendly against Finn Harps,
Zarelli was released. “He was rubbish. Even
in training he couldn’t play,” said Distillery’s
then manager, Paul Kirk. Remarkably, Zarelli
resurfaced in Wales three months later at
Premier League sides Bangor City and
Connah’s Quay, but he was quickly released.
Now living in Nottingham, Zarelli was last seen
on the books of the mighty Dronfield Town.
For sale: French chancer.
Once scored for Swindon
If you’re going to try and blag your way
into a side, not many players would opt
for Bulgarian outfit CSKA Sofia. Not unless
you’re events promoter and uber-chancer
Greg Akcelrod. Arriving on a trial after
supposedly training with Tigres in Argentina
in 2007, Frenchman Akcelrod had a bizarrely
imbalanced fake profile. On one hand, he
claimed he was an ambassador for Lance
Armstrong’s Livestrong charity, yet, on the
other, he cited scoring for Swindon Town as
his career highlight. Having failed to make
the grade at Racing Club de Paris in 1999,
Akcelrod spent the next decade attempting
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Akcelrod’s imbalanced fake profile claimed
scoring for Swindon was a career highlight
to connive a career. But after a charity match
with Bournemouth and the near-miss with
CSKA, he eventually managed to secure
a three-year contract with Canadian
side Mississauga Eagles.
“Oh, we forgot that
you were here!”
Dwindling crowds and economic woes have
long been a feature of Serie B, Italian football’s
second tier. In 2010, miffed at having to watch
his team play in front of a near-empty
stadium, Unione Triestina president Stefano
Fantinel took action. A whole stretch of
terracing was covered in a photo of a packed
crowd, blown up and printed on a huge vinyl
sheet. The actual image was taken from
a crowd shot during a 2007 game between
Triestina and Juventus, when the latter
spent a season in Serie B. It was, Fantinel
proudly told the press, the first virtual terrace
56 FourFourTwo.com
in football. And, if you squinted a bit, it sort
of worked. Plans were announced to cover
another section of the Stadio Nereo Rocco
(capacity 30,000, though with an average
gate closer to 3,000) and, in troubled times,
it made sense to cut down on the costs of
keeping empty sections of the ground open.
Sadly, it was all to no avail. Within two years,
Triestina were declared bankrupt and in
November 2012 a new club was founded,
playing down in the amateur regional leagues
– this time, however, with the help of some
very real supporters.
“Gin and tonic, please
– but hold the gin”
Arsenal boss Herbert Chapman was always
a wily fox when it came to signing players, but
when Bolton demanded a whopping £13,000
in 1928 – practically double the British transfer
record at the time – for striker David Jack,
Chapman deployed all his devilish cunning to
try to reduce the fee. At the London hotel
where the deal was to be struck, Chapman
instructed the barman to supply the Bolton
directors with doubles of everything, but
reminded him that “my gin and tonic will
contain no gin, and Mr Wall’s [his assistant]
whisky and ginger will contain no whisky”.
The stage was set for one of the era’s most
underhand deals. The subterfuge succeeded,
and a few hours later, the befuddled Bolton
contingent stumbled out, having sold their
Above “And for star player to a stone-cold sober Chapman
my next trick, for a considerably reduced £10,890.
cardboard fans”
Worst. Togo.
Side. Ever.
Although Bahrain were pleased to have cruised
past Togo 3-0 in a September 2010
international friendly, they nonetheless
raised concerns with the Togo FA about the
poor quality of the opposition and the
unfamiliar names on the Togo team sheet.
The Togo FA responded that they’d never
sent a representative team to Bahrain
(“We had never been informed of such
a game,” explained one mystified official),
and claimed that a fake agent had assembled
the fake Togo team. Bahrain coach Josef
Hickersberger blasted, “The Togo side were not
fit enough to last 90 minutes. The whole game
was very boring, in fact.” Unsurprisingly, no
one’s heard from the agent or his clients since.
 FOOTBALL
FAKES

Introducing Agent 49
“I am not a football agent. I am, in fact, an
18-year-old and have been fooling all you
gullible idiots with my fake stories for the
past two months,” confessed ‘Agent 49’
in August 2012. Via his Twitter account
(@FootballAgent49), the teenage sham club
had built up a following of over 38,000, which
included employees of Sky, The Guardian
and the Football Association. One of his
several ‘scoops’ was that Manchester United
were poised to take Kaka on loan from Real
Madrid. Several newspapers penned a piece
with Agent 49’s revelation at the centre.
Another tweet claimed that Falcao was
poised to move to Chelsea. But it was all
one big tissue of lies; a bit like a lot of tabloid
transfer gossip, some might suggest.
The Condor has his
wings clipped
Facing Brazil in the Maracana in late 1989,
Chile knew that if they lost to their hosts
their 1990 World Cup dream was all but over.
After 70 minutes, and 1-0 down to a Careca
strike, a firework was thrown from the crowd,
landing a foot away from Chile keeper Roberto
‘The Condor’ Rojas. Rojas promptly slumped
to the deck, clutching his face. He was then
Below “Yes, of course surrounded by his team-mates, and with blood
Andrew Cole, I’m playing in the streaming down his face, carried off the pitch
Roy Keane and game, sweetheart” in apparent agony. The Chile team refused to
er… Karl Power
re-enter the fray, citing fears for their safety –
prompting the referee to abandon the game
and demand the match be awarded to
La Roja. That night the Brazilian embassy in
Santiago was stoned by a mob. Then the truth
emerged: Rojas had actually cut his own face
open with a razor which had been concealed in
his glove. His deception saw him banned
for life (though it was lifted some years later),
Brazil were awarded a 2-0 win, and Chile were
suspended from the 1994 tournament.
Taking one (or more)
for the team
Back in the 1970s, conspiracy theories
abounded when it came to the Copa
Libertadores – rivals would do anything to get
the upper hand. So when Boca travelled to
Colombia to play the second leg of the 1978
final against Deportivo Cali, manager Juan
Carlos Lorenzo was prepared for the
opposition’s chicanery, which in this case was
a gaggle of prostitutes stationed in the lobby of
the team hotel, designed to keep the players
occupied the night before the game. Sensing
danger, Lorenzo took the injured Jorge Ribolzi
aside with one intention: “He told me that I
was important for the team,” revealed Ribolzi.
“So if I saw suspicious women offering free
services, it was my job to take them to
my room as they all believed I was going
to play the next day.”

A close friend of Manchester band The Happy

Mondays, Drolysden prankster Karl Power
snuck his way into Munich’s Olympic Stadium
prior to Bayern’s Champions League clash
with Manchester United in 2001 with a film
crew. Then, donning a full white away kit, he
nonchalantly sidled up next to striker Andy
Cole to pose for the official pre-match snap. A
host of players, including Gary Neville and
Ryan Giggs, shot him odd looks, and Roy
Keane gave him a full demonic glare, but
Power remained ramrod straight as the
shutters clicked, before finally strolling off to
take his place in the stand. Two years later,
after invading the United pitch with some
mates to recreate Diego Forlan’s goal against
Liverpool that season, he was banned from
Old Trafford for life.

Canned crowd noise

In May, Swiss broadcaster SRF decided

to spice up a distinctly tame-looking
Zurich derby clash between FC Zurich
and Grasshoppers by adding fake noise to
proceedings. TV viewers were mystified by the
apparent racket from the stands, as the
stadium was virtually deserted in the early
stages of the match due to both sets of fans
agreeing to enter the ground ten minutes late
in protest at tighter police controls outside
Swiss grounds. The TV station was instantly
rumbled and faced a deluge of complaints.
“We were under pressure and it was wrong.
We apologise,” grovelled an SRF spokesman.

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 57

maradona

FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES:

January 2011
58 FourFourTwo.com
 maradona

WORLD EXCLUSIVE

AT HOME WITH

DIEGO
Genius, madman, cheat: El Diez has been called all of these and more. But he’s never
cared what people think, leading to one of the great interviews: your questions
put to the beautiful game’s most brilliant berserker. In his own back garden...
Interview Martin Mazur

O
f all the days to interview Diego Maradona, we
couldn’t have picked a much worse one than this.
Less than four hours before we’re due to arrive at
his house in Buenos Aires, it’s announced that
former Argentina president Nestor Kirchner has
died. Maradona is a close family friend. Then we get
wind that the Argentine FA have chosen Diego’s 1986
team-mate Sergio Batista as the new national team
coach. Clichés about raining and pouring spring to
mind, but we plough on, ringing the doorbell at Diego’s
mansion in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of El Trebol
(‘the clover’) at the pre-arranged time.
“Diego is not here,” says the man on the gate. Some
news sources are even reporting that Maradona is
already on a flight to El Calafate in southern Argentina
to offer his condolences to Cristina Fernandez de
Kirchner, who succeeded her husband as the
country’s leader in 2007.
The two police cars parked outside the front gate
suggest otherwise, though, and the arrival of Fernando
Molina, the boyfriend of Maradona’s daughter Dalma,

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 59

 maradona
confirms that Diego is inside the house and will
be welcoming us, despite his personal grief.
Puma have just launched the Diego Maradona
King collection to celebrate his 50th birthday,
and the man himself is eager to get his hands
on some samples. The full collection lies outside
one of the gates, in three canoe-sized bags, next
to an even bigger bag containing a big boot-
shaped birthday cake.
The feeling that FFT hasn’t picked the best
day to interview ‘El Diez’ persists, though. The
Maradona that we witnessed every day at the
World Cup was full of vim and humour, stealing
the show in his packed press conferences. But
after effectively being sacked as Argentina
coach following a derisory offer to stay at the
helm minus his entire coaching staff, Maradona
is still brooding. And today his successor is
revealed. In what has been seen by some as a
veiled attack on Diego, Batista has already
stated his desire to make Lionel Messi “happy”.
“The only way for him to make Messi happy is
to dress like Pinon Fijo,” said Diego, referring to a
well-known Argentinian clown.
After half an hour, Maradona finally
emerges from his house sporting the
same beard he had at the World Cup
and looking trim. He seems slightly
perturbed to find so many people in
his back garden but greets
everybody individually before
sitting down for his chat with
FFT. “OK, let’s do it,” he says,
looking relaxed.
He’s an animated, articulate
interviewee, gesturing with his hands
(something he picked up in Italy)
throughout. He looks away when
he’s thinking about a question,
returning eye contact when he has
the answer. He smiles often, laughs
occasionally. Even when his
girlfriend, Veronica, comes out to listen, he
60 FourFourTwo.com
Winning the
World Youth
Championship, 1979
seems engrossed in your questions. “One
more, one more,” he says, when Molina
reminds FFT that our time is up. One turns to
two, three… The only thing that can drag him
away are his new boots. As he disappears
inside, holding them, admiring them,
suddenly Maradona is 13 again. He may
have reached a half-century of years,
but when it comes to his raw love of the
game, some things will never change...
Did anyone ever tell you you
wouldn’t make it as a professional
– that you were too small, perhaps?
What would you tell kids that are
told they’re not good enough for being
too small?
James Little, via email
No, because everything happened so
fast. But you have to work hard, being
small or being tall, and you also must
have a tough character to prove people
wrong. My dad would take me to the
training sessions when I was a kid, and
Battling with Ancelotti:
“The Italians were the
best markers in the world”
Picture Getty Images
he made me understand the importance of
accepting responsibilities and hard work,
because so many times I just preferred not to
go, but he always reminded me it takes sacrifice
to succeed. I personally believe that we, the
small ones, have a number of advantages,
because we are more shrewd, we have better
balance. When I played in Italy, I found the
world’s best one-on-one stoppers. I had to learn
to live and cope with constant man-to-man
markers. If I didn’t work, I could have never
overcome the marking. That happens in every
stage of the game. You find new challenges, you
find doubters, and it’s up to you to overcome
the difficulties. As I said, Italian defenders were
the best man-to-man markers in the world, but
as soon as you dribbled past one, the whole
defensive structure collapsed, because they
didn’t know what to do.
Football must not be understood by height or
physique; football must be judged by the inside
“Damn it, I can’t
feelings – passion. And technique. If a footballer
find World In
doesn’t know how to kick a ball, he won’t ever
Motion anywhere”
be able to learn and his shots will always end up
in the stands. And he who does know how to
direct it will be the one in charge of free-kicks
and corners, and will be able to make a
40-metre pass. He will become the leader.
We small ones know how to make a
difference, but this is not a rule favouring only
us, either. Zidane is big and had an incredible
touch. It’s the quality that really makes the
difference. Don’t forget that.
I know you were only 17 but don’t you think
you should have been in the squad for the
’78 World Cup? If you’re good enough, you’re
old enough, as my dad always says…
Arnold Talkin, via email
Yes. I played with Argentinos Juniors the first
day after the World Cup and we beat Chacarita
5-3 – I netted three. I did see a couple of games
in the stadium: they invited me for the game
against Italy and I went with my brother. I also
attended the final against Holland. I was happy
for the lads, for Argentinian football, and I
celebrated in the Obelisco like everyone else, but
I was convinced I deserved to be in that squad.
I couldn’t believe it when I heard my team
Sheffield United put in a bid for you while you
were young, only for your club Argentinos

Juniors to reject it. Did you know anything
about this bid at the time?
Jamie Hamilton, via email
Yes! Not only was it a real offer, it seemed that
the transfer was about to happen – Carlos Fren
and me. We were both going to travel: I think
we even had our flights bought. I think you’re
not going to sleep well today, but I swear, we
were really looking forward to it. But then, the
transfer collapsed and we couldn’t go. Sheffield
and Arsenal, they both tried to sign me. It would
have been a pleasure to play in England.
Tell us a secret that no one knows
about Diego Armando Maradona!
Philippa, via Facebook
I’m a big fan of 24. Kiefer
Sunderland [sic] – I’m a big
fan of him. I never miss an
hour from Jack Bauer. He’s my
idol. He’s top of the top.
Is it true you played with two
different-sized boots at Mexico 86
because one of your feet was badly
swollen through persistent injury?
Sheridan Bird, via email
“Feel guilty for the Hand of God? Never! And
it wasn’t the only goal I scored with my hand”
No, it’s not true. It wasn’t in the best
condition but not as bad as to use different
sizes. What I can tell you about boots,
though, is that I’ve always played with
brand-new boots. Always. I never wore
boots previously used for training sessions.
As they came from the factory, I wore them
in matches. I just changed the studs, from
the plastic ones to the aluminium ones,
to have better stability.
Inside the dressing room it was
very easy to find where I sat,
because you’d see five pairs of
new boots all lined up. I’d pick a
pair depending on the condition
of the ground.
What I realised being in Europe
is that the Italian defender, or the
European defender in general, would
play with six studs. I only wore five.
With that extra stud, they had more
maradona
stability. So I said to myself, “You must
Leaving home adapt. If you play with the same ones
at 16 to seek they are using, you’ll kill them.” And I
his fortune started using six studs. In the Argentina
dressing room in South Africa, I saw
players using 12, 14 studs. I only played
with six. And I did well, no?
Do you ever feel guilt over the Hand of
God? I blame the officials, not you!
Alyson Lloyd, via Twitter
No, guilt for that? Never. Absolutely not.
I don’t know how the English think or
how they behave, but I definitely know
the Argentinian way of feeling football.
And when we play here, in the
neighbourhood, we always try to take
advantage in the slightest situations,
using your hand, the elbow, pushing someone
behind the referee’s back, because the winners
take the sandwiches and the Cokes. In that
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 61
 maradona

“So long, Thermos

Head!” Running rings
round England in ’86

moment, I knew I was playing for my national

team, I knew I was playing a very serious World
Cup game, but I felt that I was playing in the
neighbourhood too, and I felt that I could use
my hand. And if the referee didn’t see it, so
much the better. But you know what? That
wasn’t my only goal I scored with my hand. I
also netted one for Napoli at Udinese. After
scoring, Zico comes running over to me and
says, “Diego, you must tell the referee that you
scored with your hand. Otherwise, you’re not
being honest.” So I answered [makes handshake
gesture], “Nice to meet you, Zico, I’m Diego
Dishonest Maradona.”
“I started wearing this beard only because
the dog bit me and made a deep cut in my lip”
You spoke of ‘the Hand of God’ when you
scored against England and refer to God as
‘the beard’. What about your beard: what
brought that on? Do you believe in God?
And do you think he has a beard?
Brendan Malone, Dublin
No, no! I started wearing this beard only
because the dog bit me and made a deep cut
here [points to his upper lip]. Poor dog, she was
sick: she had to take lots of medicines because
she had renal failure, and at that moment
I grabbed her from behind, she reacted
instinctively. That’s why, after getting treated,
I started sporting this beard. I always refer to
God as ‘The Beard’, but God doesn’t exist on
Earth. And it’s better if God doesn’t come here,

Gary Lineker says the pitch in Mexico was

dreadful, making that second goal against
England all the more amazing. Do you
remember what the surface was like that
day? Talk us through what you were thinking
as you went on that run and scored…
Craig Philips, via email
Oh, he was right. Right, right, right. I give him my
full support on that one. The grass of the Azteca
Stadium was a disaster – it was a potato field.
We had to make a great effort just to give a ten-
metre pass.
Perhaps God helped me a little on that run,
because if I had to do that again, I don’t think I
could have. At that moment of the game it was
already unplayable. But it wasn’t just during
Argentina-England.
We played other games at the Azteca and
every time we had to adapt, because the grass
was never in good condition. On the run, the Aguero, his wife “Hands up if
thing I was thinking is that I’d seen Valdano and the future you’re the king
coming on the left and I was checking if there Diego Maradona of Naples!”
was a chance to pass the ball to him.

62 FourFourTwo.com
 maradona

Another of
Diego’s many
hidden talents

because if he sees what’s going here on Earth,

he would immediately go back to Heaven for
all the bad things that happen here. It’s better
to believe in the God that we all believe in. When
people call me God, I understand it
only has a football meaning.

In your book you described Peter Shilton and

various other people who annoyed you in your
life as a ‘Thermos head’. What exactly
is a Thermos head? And who’s the biggest
Thermos head in the game today?
David Kyle, via email
A Thermos head today is Carlos Bilardo.
Thermos head means dumb, stupid, ugly… it’s
one of my expressions. I use it generally when
I’m really mad at someone, and I say, “This is
a Thermos head!” And when I say it, it never
means something good. That’s why today,
a Thermos head would be Bilardo. I don’t want
to comment further, but I believe I was pushed
out of the Argentina team unfairly. But this is
a very good moment in my life and I don’t
want to focus on the bad things or start
speaking about people that don’t deserve me
wasting my time talking about them.
With Sergio Aguero as his dad and you
as his grandad, your grandson Benjamin
was surely born to be a No.10! He’s almost
two now: have you spotted any signs of a
future playmaker?
Ricardo Monte, via email
How to stop
a genius, by
South Korea
When I speak about him, I feel honoured. Really.
I’ll give you just one example to understand
what I mean. I had the chance of being with
him recently for a whole week, and I took him to
the park. He already has football in his veins. He
likes football as I do and as his father does.
Imagine: he has plenty of toys, Ferraris,
motorcycles, but he always picks the ball… And
what really struck me is that while most of the
kids kick the ball with no direction, he has a very
fine touch, he takes it close to the tip of his right
foot… oh, well, he’s right-footed!
That’s the only thing that he has from his dad.
In the rest, he’s similar to his grandad! [laughs]
Seriously, when he shoots, he says “Grandpa”,
then he aims and bam – the ball always comes
between my feet! It’s an amazing level of
accuracy for a 21 month old. He comes from a
football family, so I wish that he becomes a
footballer too. But if everyone expects him to
score three goals per game just because he has
a football dad and grandad, it will become a
pressure very difficult to carry. I wish Benja can
be better than me and his dad, but the
important thing for him is to have fun. He’s not
going to be a basketball player, that’s for sure!
What’s the craziest thing a fan’s ever done
to get close to you?
Ed Connell, via email
A couple of years ago, I was with my friend and
former team-mate Salvatore Bagni, who had
invited me to set up a series of football camps
for kids in Italy. A Neapolitan woman called us
to find out the dates [for the camps]. “I’d like to
send my son to play with you,” she said. “How
old is your son?” we asked. “28,” she answered.
He only wanted to meet me.

Star question Gianfranco Zola

“When and why did you decide to hand me the Napoli No.10 jersey
against Pisa in the Italian Cup – the day you wore the No.9 shirt?”
Oh! [Laughs] I like to motivate my ‘kids’. That’s the way
it always was. Gianfranco was about to be sold to Lecce
for two lires, so I went to talk to Luciano Moggi, the boss.
I said, “You can’t sell him, he has great qualities and
he’s very hard-working.”
Everything I did for Gianfranco, like that day I gave him
the No.10, was from my heart, because I really had faith
in him. Franco was someone who would ask, “Diego,
would you mind staying after the training session
practising free-kicks with me?” So we would stay and put
up the wall and start shooting. We trained a lot. Today, I
can say that from the original shooting technique of 40
per cent he had, he ended up striking the ball almost
as good as me. Almost! [Laughs]. He’s much shorter than
me, eh? [Laughs again]. His right foot was awesome:
that’s why he scored so many goals from free-
kicks and was chosen as Chelsea’s greatest
player of all-time.
I’m really glad that Gianfranco achieved
so many things in his career, because at
Napoli he always fought for himself and
worked a lot. He only found someone that
stood up for him when he was about to be
unfairly off-loaded to Lecce.

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 63

 maradona
Diego’s favourite...
The goals, the games, the players – who and
what made Maradona the man he is today?
My favourite player
Ricardo Bochini
“I was never a fan of Independiente, where
Bochini spent his whole career, but my brother-
in-law would take me to the stadium to see
them play in the Copa Libertadores, which he
won four times. To me, leaving Villa Fiorita where
I lived and arriving in Avellaneda was like going
to Manhattan. Bochini was my idol, because he
was a small playmaker like me. We played
together briefly when he came on in the 1986
World Cup semi-final against Belgium.”
My best game
vs Uruguay, 1986 World Cup Second Round
(Argentina won 1-0)
“This was my best game at the
World Cup, better than against
England. I won every ball, every
dribble, every duel. I also scored
a goal but the referee
disallowed it for a foul. Of
course he did, he was Italian!”
My most enjoyable game
vs Italy, 1990 World Cup Semi-Final
(1-1 aet; Argentina won 4-3 on penalties)
“I enjoyed the game so much because of all the connotations
it had [even if it cost me a lot later]: because I lived in Italy; because
La Gazzetta dello Sport published their ‘Maradona is the devil’
headline; and because we knocked them out. You can’t possibly
know what a pleasure that was! They not
only sent the invoice to me but also to
Caniggia [the latter scored the equaliser;
both later tested positive for cocaine
while playing in Italy]. But even if I knew
how the story ended today, I’d do it
again. There’s no doubt about that!”
My toughest opponent
Pietro Vierchowod, Sampdoria
“I don’t know how many studs he wore but he was
so difficult to pass. He was a natural-born marker. Every
time we faced Sampdoria, I knew it was him and me.
You have to get used to the players you face; know
how they play. Vierchowod would buy every
one of my dummies, but even so, he would
recover himself in a flash and come for
more. You couldn’t give him the
chance of recovering, you couldn’t
give him a second opportunity,
because he had incredible fitness and
was physically strong. After the first
dribble, you had to take the ball ahead
and start running. If you waited a second,
he was already in position again, either to foul
you or to steal the ball from you.”
64 FourFourTwo.com
Happier times with
ex-wife Claudia
Villafane
On bail for a drug
charge; Bilardo
is in the back
Diego, you’re obviously partial to food.
But can you cook yourself?
Dan Boswell, Edinburgh
God, I can’t cook anything – not even a fried
egg. And for a good reason. I’m the fifth child
after four sisters. So at home, when I wanted
a coffee, my four sisters would battle to see who
prepared it for me.
If you were Sepp Blatter (God forbid), what
would be the first thing you changed about
the game?
Jim Evans, Pontypool
What I would change is that football has to be
run by footballers. It’s as simple as that. We
footballers must have the dominant voice; not
people who have never kicked a ball in their
lives, and who have never been through the
critical moment of playing a final, not even a
neighbourhood final. These people can’t decide
for us, those who are willing to leave our lives in
a World Cup final. This is my dream. I wouldn’t
like to die without knowing that a football player
has finally become the president of FIFA.
What’s the most bonkers rumour you’ve ever
heard about yourself?
Steven Moss, Glasgow
Lately, I’ve read some rumours about being in
talks to become a manager here and there and
I understood them as a journalists’ game. But I
felt really bad when I heard the Mexican FA
or the Aston Villa guy saying that those
rumours weren’t true. Of course they
weren’t true! I’ve never spoken to
any of them, so I don’t understand
why they have to talk about it in the first place. I
was doing my mourning process after my exit
from Argentina, and in my mourning days the
right thing to do was not to talk to anyone else,
neither a club nor a national team.
The only meeting I had in these months was
with Argentinian FA president Julio Grondona
when I parted company with the national team.
“You do know I
almost signed for
Arsenal?” Ardiles’
Spurs testimonial
So I’d like all the rest to be respectful towards
me as I am towards them, because I simply
don’t go there and offer myself to see if I take
the bench from another football manager. If I
am ever spotted in a stadium it’s simply because
I absolutely love football and I want to keep
improving as a manager.
Of course, I would like to manage in the
Premier League. It’s a tournament that has
great teams and even greater players. And the
thing that shocked me the most was the
seriousness of the competition and how players
are taken care of. Clubs do everything so
footballers don’t have to worry about anything.
And if you have happy footballers, you don’t
need anything else – the board, the fans, the
manager… everything goes smoothly. I was
there visiting some clubs: I’ve been to Chelsea,
I talked to Kevin Keegan too. The only problem
is, all the clubs I like have very good managers!
Who is the greatest player of all time?
John Bowen, Caerphilly
The best player of all time… I beat Pelé 65 per
cent to 35 per cent in a poll. My mum says that
I’m the best, so perhaps I really am. But there is
also a bunch of great players that could be like
me or better than me. Ah, the Brazilian [Pelé],
I won’t name him… But I’ve enjoyed Van Basten,
Gullit, Zidane, Romario, Cristiano Ronaldo,
Messi… Ronaldo the fatman. There were lots of
players that made the ball smile. And that’s
what football is all about. We have to do what
we like on the pitch and make the people smile
off the pitch. That’s what I always tried to do.
Have fun and make the people have fun.
What does the future hold for you?
Andy Steen, via email
Right now I want to wait and see. If a good job
opportunity comes up, I will certainly analyse it.
If there’s a possibility of going to a competitive
club, where I can get to the players’ hearts as I
did in the Argentina national team, I will take
 maradona
“Who is the best player
of all time? My mum
says that I’m the best,
so maybe I really am”

Shy as ever, Diego

shrinks away from
the limelight

With daughter
Giannina in 1989

it. I like to transmit to my players everything I

achieved and learned in so many years of my
career. But one day I’ll be back coaching
Argentina again. And it will be a quiet wait.
I know that it will happen – it’s something that
I need. I miss it. I imagine it will happen with an Elation on the
older Benjamin [Diego’s grandson], who will be sidelines in
able to come and play with me in the training South Africa
sessions, or to sleep with me before a game. The
day I’m back, I want to have more experience
than I did at the last World Cup. the one I left as a player. I’m 50 but I feel 20,
with the same desire and wishes as a 20 year
How would you like to be remembered? old. I know you have to be lucky, but luck always
Shane Brown, Leeds needs help. And I’m confident that I will help it
Picture Getty Images

I don’t want to think about legacies. As a by taking advantage of every chance I’m given.
football player, I already left a legacy that was
very beautiful. Now I have to make my career as For more exclusive Maradona content, visit
a coach, hopefully to leave a similar legacy to the website of El Gráfico: www.elgrafico.com

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 65

 ut
FOOTBALL

“N
TRICKERY

Whether it’s b
etween the le
shoulder or a gs, over the h
shuffle of the ead, with a dip
seats quite lik shins, nothing of the
e a bit of trick gets the dans
moves come ery. But where off their
from? FourFo did football’s
urTwo lifts th sexiest
e lid on 20 of
the best...
Words Lo
uis Massa
rella

FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES:

april 2014
66 FourFourTwo.com
ts!”
FOOTBALL
TRICKERY

Nutmeg
The oldest and most enduring item in football’s
box of tricks is also the most argued over. There
is no definitive explanation as to where the term
came from: some say ‘nuts’ refers to the
gentleman’s testicles the ball passes beneath,
others believe ‘melts’ is simply Cockney rhyming
slang for (between the) ‘legs’. A more likely story
is that it’s a Victorian saying derived from the
seed of the nutmeg tree itself, which
unscrupulous exporters replaced with worthless
wooden replicas in the 1870s. To be nutmegged,
ergo, is to be tricked.
What we do know is that there are umpteen
names for the move around the footballing
world, many of them variations of ‘bridge’ and
‘tunnel’, while in Panna - Dutch street football of
Surinamese origin - nutmegging an opponent
counts as a goal.
The first well-known exponent of the nutmeg
is believed to have been Garrincha, who, in a trial
game for Botafogo in 1953, passed the ball
between the legs of Brazil’s legendary left-back
Nilton Santos - “Something that no one had ever
done,” according to Alex Bellos in his book
Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life.
Few have used the move as prolifically or
successfully as Uruguay’s favourite pantomime
villain, Luis Suarez - it’s been said he could
“nutmeg a mermaid”. The likes of Robinho, Ryan
Giggs, Juan Roman Riquelme and Santi Cazorla
(type in ‘Cazorla Seitaridis’ on YouTube for a
special treat) have each given it their own
elaborate twist.
But for pure impudence - because, let’s face it,
a nutmeg is ultimately about humiliating your
opponent, whether in the playground or the
Premier League - step forward Jack Langley.
According to reports in the late noughties, the
Gloucestershire student nutmegged his PE
teacher during a lesson. His reward? A week’s
detention. Nice.
Showboat rating: 6

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 67

 FOOTBALL
TRICKERY
Stepover
Have you heard the one about the Englishman,
the Dutchman and the Australian? Not to
mention the German, the Brazilian and the
Chilean? All six, and others, claim to have
invented the stepover. Little wonder FFT
regulars Paul Simpson and Uli Hesse named
their book about football conundrums Who
Invented the Stepover?
Much as we’d like to believe that the ‘Glenn
Roeder shuffle’ in the 1980s was the first time
anybody had clapped eyes on such brilliance,
not for the last time in our rundown the move
can be traced back to Buenos Aires – and the
son of Genovese immigrants, Pedro Calamina,
who was wowing crowds with the ‘bicicleta’ as
early as 1910.
The Brazilians, as usual, also have their own
name, the pedalada (meaning ‘to pedal’), as
do the Dutch, thanks to their stepover king of
the 1930s, Law ‘the Scissors Man’ Adam, who
got the idea from watching speedskaters. Most
confusing, given these are all names used for
our next trick...
Showboat rating: 7
Overhead Kick
Bicycle kick, scissor kick - call it what you like,
few things are more likely to get South
Americans squabbling than the origins of
O V E R H E A D
KICK
68 FourFourTwo.com
Diving
header
this gravity-defying number. Peruvians claim
they invented it while having a kickabout with
English sailors in the 19th century. Chileans
insist Basque-born Ramon Unzaga first rolled
out the `Chilena’ in 1914, with countryman
David Arellano showcasing it in Europe on a
1927 tour with Colo-Colo. Brazilians,
meanwhile, will tell you that the bicicleta
was pioneered in 1932 by Leonidas `The
Rubber Man’ Da Silva , who himself says a
contemporary, Petronilho De Brito, was
responsible. Less likely is Italy’s claim that
one of theirs, either Silvio ‘Got’ Piola or Carlo
Parola, invented the rovesciata (‘reversed’) in
1939 or 1950 respectively. Less plausible
still is former Aston Villa chairman ‘Deadly’
Doug Ellis’ boast that he came up with it
during World War Two.
An Englishman certainly had a hand in
perfecting it, mind you. While a German, Klaus
Fischer, made the fallruckzieher (‘tolling
backwards kick’) his own in the late ‘70s and
early ‘80s, and a Mexican junior gymnast
turned Real Madrid legend,
Hugo Sanchez, unleashed
his ‘windmill’ with such
frequency he made it look
like a tap-in, arguably the finest
overhead kick of all time belonged to Queens
Park Rangers’ Trevor Sinclair in 1997. Yes, yes, it
was only in the FA Cup against Barnsley, but
rarely has such difficulty been met with such
perfect execution. Take a bow, son.
Showboat rating: 8
The Marianela
Juan Evaristo is widely credited with
inventing the ‘volleyed backheel’ in the
1920s, but this vague description
barely does la Marianela
(or Marianella) justice.
For a start, it’s the only trick on our
list that was invented by a defensive
player for a defensive situation. In
one balletic movement, Evaristo
Above The Matthews would step beyond the ball with one foot, turn
Cut is now a winger’s his body 180 degrees, then scoop - rather than
stock in trade volley - the ball away with his other foot. It’s
called la Marianela because... well, we’re not
exactly sure. Answers on a postcard.
Showboat rating: 4
Diving Header
Heroic in defence, dramatic in attack, there are
few more satisfying sights in football than a
player flinging himself full stretch at a ball he
might otherwise fail to reach, particularly when
the result is a bulging onion bag. Just as,
according to Klaus Fischer, “Every cross that
leads to a bicycle kick goal is not a good
cross”, on account of it being played behind
its intended target, so the majority of diving
headers come from balls not quite delivered on
The the proverbial sixpence. While some require
neck-bending superstrength and agility, the
Rabona majority - think Keith Houchen for Coventry in
the 1987 FA Cup Final and Henrik Larsson’s
against Bulgaria at Euro 2004 - are all about
timing and bravery. Pablo Bartolucci is credited
with creating the ‘dove’ in 1929, when the
Argentina midfielder, head bandaged, was
photographed soaring through the sky against
touring Italian champions Bologna. Not
necessarily the trickiest of tricks but one of the
most aesthetically pleasing.
Showboat rating: 3
The Matthews ‘Cut’
Football’s first knight wasn’t known as the
Wizard of the Dribble for nothing, his
combination of speed, skill and balance so
rare for a footballer in the 1930s, due in no
small part to early morning jogs with lead in
his trainers. The genius of Matthews’
signature move lay in its simplicity. Running
at full speed and with a dip of the left
shoulder, he would take a small touch with
the inside of his right foot - always his right
foot - then take the ball past the defender
with the outside of the same foot, all in the
blink of an eye. This ‘in-out’ remains one of
the key weapons in a winger’s armoury.
Showboat rating: 5
The Rabona
Like many of our tricks, the Italians claim to
have invented the Rabona (a Spanish word
meaning to ‘skip school’), a pass, shot or cross
around the back of the standing leg, used
primarily by one-footed players and show-offs.
While Ascoli winger Giovanni Roccotelli

Ibrahimovic
Pigeon Wi ’s
ng
brought it to the masses in the 1970s - “In
every game, the fans begged me to do it,” he
recalled modestly - when it was merely called
the ‘crossed kick’, it was first performed in
1948 when Ricardo Infante scored for
Estudiantes against Rosario Central. “That goal
didn’t get the recognition it deserved,” he
moaned in 1998. Instead, the likes of Roberto
Baggio, Rivaldo, Diego Maradona and Cristiano
Ronaldo have been happy to take the plaudits.
Showboat rating: 7
The Puskas
Drag-back
“[Billy] Wright rushed into that tackle like a fire
engine racing to the wrong fire,” wrote
Geoffrey Green famously in The Times after
witnessing the England captain, one of the
finest defenders in the world, completely
flummoxed as Ferenc Puskas’ dragged the ball
away from him using the sole of his boot “with
the art of a bullfighter” to score Hungary’s third
goal in their seminal victory at Wembley.
Subsequently called the ‘pull-back V’ because
of the imaginary shape the ball makes on the
ground, the drag-back has been adapted and
incorporated into other tricks. Lionel Messi,
among others, is a fan.
Showboat rating: 6
Ibrahimovic’s
Pigeon Wing
“I don’t feel that it’s difficult to do the
backheel,” said Arsene Wenger in 2004, and
maybe he’s right, which is why the backheel in
its most basic form - a skill perfected in the
1950s by Alfredo di Stefano - doesn’t make
FFT’s Top 20. Backheeling the ball at head
height into the top corner while flying through
the air away from goal, on the other hand, is
nearly impossible. Only someone forgot to tell
Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
The same year The Professor poo-pooed the
backheel, Ibra’s last-gasp Aile de Pigeon for
Sweden sent Italy out of the Euros. Helped by
martial arts training as a teenager, the giant
Swede has scored many variations of
this goal, including several already for The
Paris Saint-Germain, leaving the
Garrincha
French with no choice but to come
up with a name for it. Turn
They also billed the more bog-
standard backheeled goal ‘Line
Madjer’, after the Algerian Rabah
Madjer’s nonchalant flick won the
European Cup for Porto against
Bayern Munich in 1987. Ooh la la.
Showboat rating: 6
The Garrincha
Turn
Feints, flicks, turns... Garrincha probably
pioneered several of them. Not that the ‘angel
with bent legs’ would have known much about
it, so naturally did dribbling come to the
Brazilian in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Coaches
tried to curb his dribbling, a referee sent him off
for dribbling too much, and he once dribbled off
the pitch without the ball, just to see if his
marker would follow him (he did). Out of
boredom, he was even known to dribble round
the goalkeeper on occasion, allow the keeper to
recover, then beat him again. Such moves
prompted some of the first shouts of ‘Ole!’ from
a football crowd.
Plus, he almost certainly invented a turn
made famous by Maradona, Zinedine Zidane et
al (and known variously as the Marseille Turn,
the 111 Roulette, the Gringo and the Rocastle
360). This combination of two drag-backs - one
with each foot - enables the fleet of foot to
pirouette away from their opponents.
Showboat rating: 8
The PelÉ
Runaround
Football’s ultimate selling of a
dummy was made even more
memorable by Pelé’s agonising
miss after he’d made a mug of
Uruguayan keeper Ladislao
Mazurkiewicz at the 1970 World
FOOTBALL
TRICKERY
The
Cruyff
Turn
Cup. Future Manchester United winger
Jesper Blomquist updated it at Gothenburg
by way of a feint and body swerve, but the
Blomquist Shuffle, like its ancestor, is still no
more than a flash variation of kicking the
ball past a flat-footed opponent and running
around the other side of him, something
Ryan Giggs made a habit of in his younger,
speedier days.
Showboat rating: 3
The Cruyff Turn
There is a popular myth surrounding the
game’s most famous trick. History would have
us believe that Jan Olsson was the first public
victim of the Cruyff turn - which, as you know,
involves faking to pass or cross then using the
instep of the same foot to bring the ball back
through your legs, swiveling your body 180
degrees, leaving the defender in another
postcode. Indeed, the Sweden defender called
it “the proudest memory of my career”. But in
fact, Cruyff performed the turn in Holland’s
previous game at the 1974 World Cup against
Uruguay’s Baudilio Jauregui, the difference
being Olsson’s humiliation was caught up
close and at the perfect camera angle, making
it much more obvious and, well, a better story.
Showboat rating: 7
The Rainbow Kick
Few have been brave enough to attempt this
over-the-head flick, a street soccer/freestyle
favourite, in the professional game. Also
known as the Carretilha (Portuguese for
‘roulette’), the Lambretta (Italy) and the
Sombrero (er, France), the trick’s finest
exponent was arguably Jay-Jay Okocha, who
The Pele used it for Bolton against Arsenal, having
previously merked a mulleted defender with a
Runaround rainbow in the Bundesliga for Eintracht
Frankfurt. It was first seen in 1981, however,
when Ossie Ardiles’ character, Carlos Rey,
stuck it to the Nazis in Escape to Victory.
Honorable mentions should also go to
Brazilian nutjob Djalminha, who once
rainbowed the whole Real Madrid defence to
find Deportivo La Coruna team-mate Roy
Makaay (who missed), and Turkey’s Ilhan
Mansiz, who made Roberto Carlos look silly at
the 2002 World Cup.
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 69
 FOOTBALL
TRICKERY

The
Scorpion
Kick

But the final word must go to the brilliantly The SCROPION KICK Above You try doing because, while trapping the ball between your
British reaction of QPR’s players in 2008, who “That day in England [in 1995], I was given the this with that hairdo feet and taking a leap forward might not look
“piled in threatening to lynch” Cameroonian ball that I’d waited five years for,” said Rene that hard, it’s certainly not the most efficient
winger Frank Songo’o after he (successfully) Higuita, who was inspired by watching kids in way of getting between two defenders,
attempted the trick for Sheffield Wednesday in the street in his native Colombia trying particularly as you have to do it standing still.
the dying moments of a Championship game. overhead kicks and told them “it would be That didn’t lessen the wow factor when the
What’s French for ‘sore losers’? good to do it in reverse”. What sets Higuita’s Mexican first unveiled the Bunny Hop at France
Showboat rating: 9 perfectly executed ‘reverse’ overhead kick 98, or the Doh! factor when he fell over trying
apart, other than it being the first known it against Italy four years later. Not that
The Okocha example, is that he’s the only goalkeeper to Blanco, still going strong at 41, cared. “You’ve
Dribble have risked it in a game. His modest claims got to enjoy yourself out on the pitch,” he
Yes, that man again. The Nigerian was a one- that he only attempted it because he saw the says. “You’ve only got a couple of seconds to
man YouTube compilation, an excellent linesman’s flag go up seem unlikely; judging decide what you’re going to do whenever you
player in the ‘90s and noughties who would by his eyes and body shape, the Colombia have two defenders in front of you... and I feel
probably have been a great one in keeper clearly knows what he’s going to do as that skill is part of me.” Hear hear.
the ‘50s and ‘60s. This was his soon as the misdirected cross leaves England Showboat rating: 8
The
Blanco p
most oft-used trick, a sideways midfielder Jamie Redknapp’s foot. Outfield
drag with the sole of one foot players have come up with the best THE ‘SEAL’
and elaborate feint and
stepover with the other,
replicas, including a goal from
Edinson Cavani for Napoli against Bunny Ho
requiring snake hips and Juve, but in truth there’s only one
unerring balance. Scorpion Kick.
Denmark’s Soren Showboat rating: 10
Colding was Okocha’s
most famous victim The Blanco
at France 98, Bunny Hop
although Brazilians will Surprisingly for a move he used
tell you that the original many times, you’d be hard pushed to
Ronaldo was perfecting find anybody else attempting
the move at around the Cuauhtemoc Blanco’s cuauhtemiña
same time. (Stephane Sessegnon for PSG
Showboat against Lens in 2009 a notable
rating: 7 exception). Perhaps this is

70 FourFourTwo.com

DRIBBLE
The ultimate showboat. Or, as the architect of
the dribble ‘la foquinha’ Kerlon discovered,
the most surefire way of getting a kicking
from oppo. Twice for Cruzeiro, the young
Brazilian was brutally wiped out while running
with the ball on his head - and we’d normally
have some sympathy for him. But this wasn’t
a case of a sublimely gifted player controlling
a bouncing ball in the quickest way possible.
Quite often, including several times for
Brazil’s U17s, ‘The Seal’ would flick the ball up
onto his head from the ground before
unveiling his party piece. He was, in short, just
showing off, although we take no pleasure
from the fact that Kerlon is now a free agent
following a succession of knee injuries.
Showboat rating: 10
Elastico
There are few more dazzling sights than
Ronaldinho getting his snake on. However, the
Elastico, or flip-flap - a defender’s worst
nightmare, which involves moving the ball one
way with the outside of your foot then the
other with the instep without ever losing
contact - doesn’t belong to Ronnie at all.
Neither was it invented by Rivelino, as most
informed observers would have us believe. “I
learned the move from Sergio Echigo, who
played with me in the Corinthians youth
team,” admits Brazil’s 1970 World Cup winger.
“I saw him do it and said, ‘Hey, Japanese,
Kerlon’s what’s that trick?’” “It’s easy, Rive,” said
Echigo, whose parents were from the Land of
‘Seal’ the Rising Sun. Easy? We beg to differ.
Dribble Showboat rating: 7
The Ronaldo Chop
Cristiano, that is, whose agile ankles have
enabled him to change direction by 90
Above The Seal is degrees when in full flow by sideheeling the
pursued by several ball in a kind of chopping action. It doesn’t so
killer whales much beat defenders as wrong-foot them,
buying Ronaldo and his imitators more time
and space. Johan Cruyff and Roberto Carlos
were also known to be partial to a chop, but
never with the speed and frequency of CR7,
who is man enough to admit that he learnt it
from a friend in Portugal.
Showboat rating: 6
The Aurelio
No, we’d never heard of Rodrigo Taddei either,
but his signature move is quite something: a
Rabona/Elastico crossbreed that the Roma
utility man rolled out in a Champions League
match against Olympiakos in 2006, leaving
Polish defender Michal Zewlakow tackling
fresh air. The Brazilian-Italian named the
move after much-travelled coaching guru
Aurelio Andreazzoli, who was then Roma’s
assistant manager.
Showboat rating: 8
Elastico
FOOTBALL
TRICKERY
SET-PIECE
SKULLDUGGERY
Introducing football’s
dead-ball daredevils...
The Somersault
Former FC Dallas coach Schellas Hyndman
claims his son invented the ‘flip’ throw-in
when he was 12 with the help
of his gymnast mum. Around
the same time, in March
1991, a teenage Steve Watson
unveiled the move for Newcastle
against Middlesbrough. Chances
are he saw it in TV series The
Manageress the year before. Its
rarity is down to its difficulty rather
than its legality - FIFA say it breaks
no laws.
The Knuckleball
This term was first coined in the early 20th
century after baseball pitcher Eddie Cicotte
discovered that releasing the ball between
the knuckles avoided its normal rotational
spin and made it more susceptible to
movement in the air. The same principles
apply to football; contact is made on the
‘equator’ with the big toe. Juninho
Pernambucano, then Cristiano Ronaldo and
Gareth Bale, are credited with perfecting it in
the noughties.
THE DRY LEAF
A precursor to the Knuckleball, the ‘folha
seca’ was first demonstrated by Didi at the
1954 World Cup. Partly down to a kicking
style he developed after an injury as a boy,
the Brazilian magician was able to impart
unprecedented swerve and dip on a ball that
was much heavier than today’s.
THE DONKEY KICK
The BBC’s goal of the season for 1970 was a
real collector’s item - by the following season
it had been banned. Ernie Hunt’s well-
rehearsed volley for Coventry, from Willie
Carr’s flick-up using the inside of both heels,
subsequently deemed a ‘double’ touch, only
found the net once in competitive action,
against Everton.
THE PANENKA
Impudent,
nerveless and,
according to its
inventor, just
plain common
sense. Antonin
Panenka’s
dinked penalty
down the middle of the goal past a diving
and helpless Sepp Maier to win the Euro 76
final was two years in the making. The
Czechoslovakia playmaker decided it was
“easier” to beat a keeper from the spot this
way than by conventional means.
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 71
FERGIE AT 70

FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES:

February 2012
72 FourFourTwo.com
 FERGIE AT 70

Retirement?
Imagine
that…
Team faltering, injuries mounting, City
looming - as Fergie turns 70, a happy
ending is looking increasingly unlikely
for the game’s greatest gaffer... or is it?
Words Oliver Kay Portraits John Wright

A
s it approaches midnight on a frozen night in November 2005, an ill wind
is blowing around Old Trafford. Hours earlier, it had been a mass of
humanity - 67,471 souls, most of them groaning with frustration and
anxiety - as Manchester United played out a grim goalless draw with
Villarreal in the Champions League. By now the ground is empty, save for
the last few remaining stewards, journalists, club officials and one very
concerned-looking Knight of the British Empire. Appearing from a tunnel

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 73

 FERGIE AT 70

outside the Stretford End, Sir Alex Ferguson

peers out into the night. His car has been
brought around to the front for him by some
lackey, but he looks beyond to where two United
fans are huddled together, shivering, waiting.
“Sir Alex, we’ve come over from Ireland,” they
call. Ferguson looks tentative at first, but he
strides over in that brisk, businesslike way of his
and signs a couple of autographs - one of them
on a shirt bearing the name of Roy Keane,
whose acrimonious departure from United four
days earlier has made him a cause celebre for
the club’s increasingly disenfranchised support.
At that moment, face-to-face with the
United manager and quite rightly ignorant of
the eavesdropping journalist who happened
to be passing by, those supporters could ask
him anything - perhaps most temptingly about
why he allowed his inspirational captain to leave.
But they say only two more words before sending
him on his way. Those words are “Keep going.”
Keep going? That was the kind of sentiment
Ferguson would have seized upon gratefully in
his arduous first few years at Old Trafford, but
on the 20-minute drive back to his home in
Wilmslow that night, he must have reflected
on how times were changing. Chelsea, enriched “Nice place, I’ll take it”
by Roman Abramovich and emboldened by But Fergie is now facing
Jose Mourinho, were nine points clear at the an even bigger challenge
top of the Premier League and looking certain
to win a second successive title. United were
well adrift, beaten 4-1 at Middlesbrough a few transpose itself onto the screen in front of me: like a huge achievement, up there with his

weeks earlier, and would crash out of the
Champions League group stage with defeat to
Benfica a fortnight later. There was serious
discontent in the dressing room, with Keane
driven out after an outburst at team-mates on
the club’s television station (which censored
the interview) and Ruud van Nistelrooy taking
out his growing frustration on a cowed Cristiano
Ronaldo. The supporters were in uproar at
seeing the club bought by the Glazer family,
who had turned the world’s most profitable
club into the most indebted.
In short, Old Trafford was an unhappy place.
And it was around that time that, with a large
gulp, this correspondent put fingertips to
keyboard and saw a shocking sentence
“There will be no happy ending for Sir Alex
Ferguson at Manchester United.”
We all know what happened next. Just 18
months later, on a Monday morning in May
2007, United called an impromptu press
conference and, on arrival, journalists were
handed plastic cups of champagne, which had
never been seen before. Having won back the
Premier League title the previous day with a
team built around Ronaldo’s youthful brilliance,
Ferguson was applauded into the room. That,
too, had never happened before. In the past,
ever since 1993, winning the championship had
seemed habitual and would not have been
worthy of such reverence, but this time it felt
34
greatest managerial triumphs.
When the applause died down, he feigned
anger and asked: “Who told you you could
stop?” Then he joked about how he had been
written off. “You lot are so bad,” he said with a
grin. “You really aren’t the best judges, are you?”
Number of domestic A few apologetic, uncomfortable smirks were
and European trophies offered in return and, as he touched upon the
won (not counting inevitability of criticism when things are not
Community Shields going well at a club such as Manchester United,
and Supercups) it actually seemed, so good was his mood, that
he might be laughing with, rather than at us.
When he was asked if this might represent an
ideal opportunity to bow out on a high - perhaps
wishful thinking by the journalist concerned,
whose liking is for a rival club - he replied that
stepping down had not crossed his mind since

FERGIE’S CHALLENGES… his precarious brush with retirement in 2002.

“Why should I give up?” he said. “It’s easy to
FourFourTwo solves the four dilemmas facing Ferguson retire. I decided to retire a few years ago and I

Coping with United’s Getting the Glazer

apparent injury crisis
Michael Cox, editor of zonalmarking.net
“Despite injuries, United have enough options
to challenge for the title and the returning
Tom Cleverley - a revelation earlier in the
season - is key. Ashley Young, Wayne Rooney
and Nani all have great movement, but the
catalyst for fluidity is quicker distribution from
midfield. The youngster could slot in alongside
Michael Carrick in the absence of Anderson. If
more steel is required in midfield, Phil Jones
can clearly play there, allowing Chris Smalling
to move from right-back into the centre
alongside Ferdinand. More injuries could leave
them short, though.”
to spend big
Jordan Kobritz, sports management
and baseball franchise co-owner
“The success of Man City may make it easier
for Sir Alex to get the funds he needs to
improve his side, because if he doesn’t the
Glazers are going to become increasingly
unpopular due to the perception that City’s
owners want success more than they do. If
they don’t spend, they will face the
accusation that they care more about their
American concerns than United. Finally, the
Glazers want to make the Tampa Bay Bucs a
big name in England - and they can’t do that
unless United stay at the top.”

74 FourFourTwo.com

regretted it within days. I feel invigorated by our
young players. Last season I was tired and I
wanted to get on my holiday. But this season
I’ve just felt invigorated.”
But he then took the conversation in a
different, perhaps unexpected direction. “Age,”
he said wistfully. “It creeps up on you quickly. I
still think I’m 58. And then all of a sudden you
look in the papers and see that you’re 65 and
you think: ‘Hang on, I can’t be that old.’ Jesus
Christ - somebody wrote that I was 66. It
happens with age. You wonder where the years
have gone. You wonder how you compare with
five or six years ago. I don’t notice any dramatic
changes in me, although there must be some.”
Someone pushed him on whether, at 65, he
could imagine continuing as far as the 2011-12
season, in which he’d turn 70. He had always
dismissed the idea of “doing a Bobby Robson”
and managing into his seventies. He took a few
seconds and then said “No, no.”
2007: Ferguson’s
greatest title
triumph to date
Proof that modern
managers go on
for longer
“Age creeps up on you. You
wonder how you compare
with five or six years ago”
69, he was asked? He said nothing, preferring
to smile benignly and happy for once to leave us
to draw our own conclusions, which of course
have been proved incorrect. As have his own.
Ferguson turned 70 on New Year’s Eve. Age is
just a number, but that is extraordinarily old to
be so committed to a job as all-consuming as
managing Manchester United. Even Sir Matt
Busby, whose records for longevity at Old
Trafford took so long to break, retired at the age
of 60, briefly taking the reins again as an
Keeping up with
Manchester City
Gary Pallister, four-time Premier
League winner with United
“Sir Alex has all the knowledge and
experience to rise to the challenges because
he has done it all before. He has so much
experience when it comes to title races, and
although this is a massive challenge, he has
been here before with Arsenal and the
Invincibles and Chelsea and all their money.
This is slightly different given that City seem
to have a bottomless pit of cash, but he’ll do
what he has always done, because that’s
what keeps him in the game and gives him
the energy to carry on.”
FERGIE AT 70
emergency measure after Wilf McGuinness was
sacked. Bill Shankly retired at 60 and spent the
rest of his life regretting it. Bob Paisley, Shankly’s
successor at Liverpool, went on to the grand old
age of 64. Brian Clough retired at 58. Modern life
is more accessible for those wishing to work
beyond pensionable age - and managers do
work for longer these days, with Fabio Capello,
Arsene Wenger, Kenny Dalglish, Harry Redknapp
and Roy Hodgson all in their sixties, while
Giovanni Trapattoni is nearly 73 - but for a
70-year-old to remain in charge of one of the
world’s biggest clubs after a quarter of a century
is incredible.
In winning four of the last five Premier League
titles, as well as reaching three Champions
League finals and winning the giant trophy once
over that time, Ferguson has proved every last
doubter wrong. Even those who laughably seek
to split hairs over his incredible record have
finally conceded that he is, at the very least, one
of the greatest managers of all time. Greatness
was achieved when he won his first European
Cup in 1999 on that dramatic night in the Nou
Camp, if not before. He has since, in football
terms, joined the ranks of the immortals.
But at the risk of seeking to reinforce a point
that seemed to be disproven by United’s
powerful resurgence, there is - to put it in
slightly more cautious terms this time - no
guarantee of a happy ending. Six years on he
finds himself thrust back into a similar, if not
quite so severe-looking, predicament, with
United sent crashing out of the Champions
League at the group stage and under serious
threat from another rival whose fortunes have
been transformed by foreign wealth at a time
when he is trying to rebuild a squad that has
been carrying too many 30-somethings. And
this time the newly enriched, empowered,
emboldened rival is Manchester City, for so long
United’s poor relations.
The wealth of Sheikh Mansour has
transformed City, a club Ferguson previously
looked upon with varying degrees of pity and
contempt, into every United supporter’s worst
nightmare. Ferguson used to refer to the City of
Manchester Stadium as “the temple of doom”
and snort derisively when the ‘Manchester
Evening Blues’, as he called it, would attempt to
portray the two clubs as equals. When City were
bought by Mansour in September 2008 - and
Becoming a force in
Europe again
Patrick Barclay, author of Ferguson
biography, Football - Bloody Hell!
“Even before Wembley he knew that the
players he had were never going to get within
touching distance of Barcelona. What he’s
done since is bring in youth, which is what he
has always done. He is going to do it by
moulding a unit; the only problem is that
Barcelona do that too, and do it better.
Tactically, Ferguson will never change from
his belief in width and attacking football. I’m
convinced he’ll go back for Luca Modric,
possibly in the next transfer window, because
he needs someone to run midfield.”
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 75
 Fergie at 70
FERGIE AT 70

when the new regime’s first public

pronouncements, via the quickly discredited
Sulaiman al-Fahim, were about trying to buy
Cristiano Ronaldo and others the following
January - Ferguson pointedly drew comparisons
with Sunderland’s ‘Bank of England’ team in the
1950s, who ended up relegated. I asked one of
his staff at United whether, secretly, Ferguson
might be a little more concerned than he was
letting on. “Concerned?” came the reply. “He
thinks it’s hilarious. We all do.”
In that first season under the new owners,
City finished nine places and 40 points behind a
United team who won their third successive
Premier League title and reached the
Champions League final, where they were
beaten by Barcelona. The following campaign,
after United lost Ronaldo and saw Carlos Tevez
move across town to City, the gap was cut to
three places and 18 points. Last term it was
just two places and nine points, with
Roberto Mancini’s team beating
United en route to winning the FA
Cup, the club’s first major trophy
since 1976.
This season, with Vincent
Kompany, Yaya Toure and David
Silva joined in Mancini’s squad by
Sergio Aguero and Samir Nasri, it
has only been a question of whether
that once-vast gulf will shrink to
infinitesimal size or whether City will
begin to establish a gap of their own. On
the European stage, United have already
been overshadowed this season - as indeed
have City, some might say a little more
excusably after their maiden Champions
League campaign pitted them against Bayern
Munich, Napoli and Villarreal rather than
Benfica, Basel and Otelul Galati. Ferguson
reacted to questions about their European form
Prem title number 12 after their penultimate group game, a 2-2 draw
in 2011 , but will it be at home to Benfica, by saying, “Struggling?
lucky 13 this season? We’re not struggling.”
But quite clearly they were. And while they
created enough chances in their final group

WHO’D BE A MANAGER AT 70? game in Basel to have merited better than the
2-1 defeat that knocked them out, not even
This select group of septuagenarian schemers, that’s who Ferguson tried to call the campaign a hard-luck

Dario Gradi MBE
Finally stepped down as boss of
Crewe Alexandra - where he’d
overseen their top youth system
- in November 2011, four
months into his 71st year.
Sir Bobby Robson
The former England manager,
who died in 2009 aged 76, holds
the record for the Premier
League’s oldest gaffer (71). Will
Ferguson soon overtake him?
Mario Zagallo
Now 80, his last job ended in
2006 as assistant of the Brazil
national side, who ‘the little ant’
had also managed four times
including, famously, in 1970.
Otto Rehhagel
After a successful Bundesliga
coaching career that began in
1972, the now 73-year-old
German famously led Greece to
Euro 2004 glory.
Giovanni
Trapattoni
Still going strong at 72 with the
Republic of Ireland, who he led
to the Euros after a stellar club
career, winning trophies galore.

76 FourFourTwo.com
 FERGIE AT 70

The gulf in class

separating
Barcelona and
United is getting
bigger by the
year, not smaller
story. It was a shambles from start to finish,
from a team that had performed superbly in
reaching four Champions League semi-finals
and three finals in the previous five seasons.
That other gulf in class, the one separating
United from Barcelona, is getting bigger by the
year, not smaller.
In some ways it feels like 2005-06 revisited.
Then, as now, Ferguson finds himself overseeing
a transitional period having replaced some of
his most trusted servants with youngsters who
are not yet fully attuned to the standards
required of a United player. Then, as now, there
was a growing feeling in the Premier League
and in Europe that his team were no longer a
team to be frightened of. Then, as now, they
were under threat from a rival whose fortunes
had been transformed by oil money and who
were suddenly building up momentum.
And then, as now, there is an unmistakable
feeling - rightly or wrongly - that United’s
outlook would be very different were they not
under the ownership of the Glazers, whose
regime, as far removed as possible from the
benefactor model, seems to have cost the club
almost £500 million in six-and-a-half years just
to sustain it.
Supporters of rival clubs ask why the same
questions about Ferguson are not being
asked now as they were six years ago. But
the reasons, quite apart from the many
lessons that have been learned and the
additional credit that Ferguson has since
gained, are fairly straightforward.
City are no longer
looked upon with
contempt and pity
By the end of 2005 there were genuine doubts
about Ferguson’s judgement. Between August
2002 and the Glazer takeover, the players he
had bought were Ricardo Lopez, Lee Martin,
David Bellion, Eric Djemba-Djemba, Tim
Howard, Kleberson, Cristiano Ronaldo, Louis
Saha, Dong Fangzhuo, Gabriel Heinze, Alan
Smith, Liam Miller, Giuseppe Rossi, Gerard
Pique and Wayne Rooney. Given that, by
the end of 2005, only Rooney was
looking a safe bet, while Chelsea were
Pique: one of many adding players such as Petr Cech, Michael
pre-Glazer signings Essien and Arjen Robben, questions about
that didn’t work out the nature of this transition were inevitable.
Then there were the less comfortable
questions. For a six-month period from
September 2003 to March 2004, when results
were not bringing any solace, Ferguson had
been locked in a legal wrangle with Irish
horseracing tycoons JP McManus and John
Magnier over the stud rights to Rock of
Gibraltar, the prize horse in which he had a
share. By the final month of that damaging
saga, Magnier and McManus were United’s
biggest shareholders and were using their new-
found influence to ask some awkward
questions of Ferguson, in particular relating to
the regular involvement in the club’s transfer
negotiations of Elite Sports Management, an
agency run by the manager’s son Jason.
For a time Ferguson started to look his age, a
little unwell even. On one of his Friday press
conferences he turned up looking weary,
shattered, almost beaten and spoke of a
“distressing week for the Ferguson family”. A
few weeks after that he admitted he’d had a
pacemaker fitted for a minor heart condition.
For a short time even the most hardened hacks,
with whom he had clashed many times down
the years, started to worry for him and wonder
if he might have been better advised to proceed
with his initial plan to retire in 2002, or at least
to do so after another Premier League triumph
the following year.
But to think like that is to have no
understanding of the kind of animal Ferguson
is. If ‘going out on a high’ was really a
consideration, he could have done it after the
2004 FA Cup Final or any of the four Premier
League titles United won between 2007 and
2011. A mutual friend told me in the build-up
to the 2008 Champions League Final that “it

Luis Aragones
The controversial Spaniard hung
up his clipboard a year after
leading Spain to Euro 2008 glory
weeks before his 70th birthday,
then managed Fenerbahce.
Craig Brown CBE
The longest-serving Scotland
manager of all time is currently
the oldest top-flight manager in
the UK, aged 71. Moved from
Motherwell to Aberdeen in 2010.
Helenio Herrera
The Argentine is widely credited
with inventing catenaccio, with
which he won two European
Cups at Inter. Retired as boss of
Barcelona in 1981 aged 71.
Bela Guttman
The pioneering, nomadic
Hungarian had 25 managerial
jobs in 40 years, the last of
which came at Porto in 1973
when he was a sprightly 74.
Otto Pfister
Still going strong at 74 as
manager of Trinidad and
Tobago, 50 years after the start
of a coaching career that has
been most successful in Africa.

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 77

 FERGIE AT 70
“My father retired on his 65th
birthday... a year later he was dead”
would not surprise me one bit” if Ferguson
stepped down in the event of victory in
Moscow. He also told me the Scot admitted to
being exhausted during the post-match victory
party. But then, when Ferguson got back to
Manchester, he told reporters he would be
back on the touchline in August.
Ferguson also attempted that day in 2008 to
again put a time limit on his career. “I won’t be
managing at 70, I can assure you of that,” he
said. “I won’t be managing here any more than
three years at the very most. That’s without
question. You have to think about time for
yourself. I think my wife deserves a bit of my
time. The older you get, the more you feel guilty
about it.”
It’s not just as a husband that Ferguson feels
guilty. He feels he owes more time to his three
sons and to his grandchildren, the oldest of
whom is only two years younger than Phil
Jones. But the family knows, appreciates and
supports his position. “I can’t do it at the
moment,” he said back in 2008. “I know I
would find it hard. What I would really like to
do in life is travel to places I’ve never been to. I
would love to spend three or four months in the
States. But you do that once. What you are left
with is the time when you wake up at six in the
morning and go to get out of bed and you
suddenly say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m finished. I don’t do
that anymore.’ That’s going to be hard.”
That’s what Shankly, for one, found
impossible to deal with. He felt so shattered by
the end of the 1973-74 season at Liverpool that
it seemed like it was time to go. But he
regretted it almost immediately. Soon enough,
he was regularly making the short walk to the
club’s training ground and his players - now
Paisley’s players - were addressing
him as “Boss”. It became
awkward, to the point where
he was made to feel
unwelcome at the club he had
built and instead started
to show up at
Everton’s training
ground, which was
Age caught up
barely a throw-in
with fellow Scot
from his home.
managers Stein
Shankly felt in
and Shankly
1974 that he had
nothing left to give.
But look at
photographs of the
60-year-old Shankly and
the 70-year-old
Ferguson. Look at
photographs of Busby,
Paisley and Gough in their
later years. Ferguson not
only looks fitter at 70; he
actually looks leaner and
healthier now than he did six or
seven years ago. He tries to get
to the gym at United’s
78 FourFourTwo.com
Carrington training ground every morning. He
14
does not exert himself as he once did, but he Number of managers
gets his heart pumping on the treadmill and to have occupied the
the exercise bike for 40 minutes or so, and then Manchester City
he gets down to work. dugout during
There was a point, that mutual friend says, Ferguson’s time at
when Ferguson began to drop strong hints Old Trafford
about retiring at the end of the 2009-10
season. But then he snapped back to reality
and the subject has not come up again since.
Occasionally he slips into a reverie about what
he will do in retirement (“I’ll even read history
books, I’ll study new languages, I did four years
of German at school, I’ve been studying French
for years, I could take on Italian, I need to find
a piano tutor...”), but those romantic notions
are quickly snuffed out by his growing sense of
fatalism. In an interview with La Gazzetta dello
Sport in April, he said, “My father retired on his
65th birthday and a year later he was dead. The
worst thing you can do is put your slippers on.
People say, ‘I’ve worked for 45 years: I have the
right to rest.’ Not at all. You have the duty to
keep active and in good shape.”
One of Ferguson’s few confidants told me last
May, when I asked whether there was any
danger of a sudden retirement after the
Champions League final against Barcelona,
that the Scot had begun to talk of three more
seasons. Three more seasons at 69. That would
take him to 2014, by which time he will be 72.
For a man who came perilously close to retiring
at 60 - not indicating his desire to carry on, at
the behest of his family, until after the United
board were closing in on appointing Sven-Goran
Eriksson as his successor - this has been ‘Fergie
time’ and then some. But the thinking behind
the phrase ‘Fergie time’ is that, in matches
when United are in need of a late
goal, the match officials will
give as long as it takes to get
a satisfactory result and then
blow the whistle. If Ferguson
were simply waiting for
the right moment to Ferguson has
retire, he would have bemoaned the rise
of ‘player power’
gone long ago. But
that – is not his raison
d’etre. He does not danger of over-commercialisation, in particular
want to bow out on with the inflation of players’ salaries”. That was
a high. He wants to a few months before Roy Keane engaged in a
go “on and on and on”, spot of brinksmanship with the United board
as Margaret Thatcher, and ended up with a jaw-dropping salary of
who was not exactly his £52,000 a week. Little could Ferguson have
favourite politician, might imagined back then that one day one of his
put it. players would pressurise the club into paying
There must be times him more than three times that sum. Plus
when modern football and image rights.
modern footballers leave With money comes a sense of entitlement
Ferguson cold. In August 1999, and an appetite for self-promotion. At the
the Treble triumph of that May height of the Rooney saga last season he
already a distant memory, he lamented how players no longer look up first to
found himself bemoaning “player their parents and then to their manager but
power” and in particular “the instead to their agent. He has had more success

Rooney proves
that he can’t beat
Barça on his own
than anyone in keeping his players focused on
the job in hand, but when retirement first
loomed for him in 2002, when he was
becoming agitated with David Beckham’s
commercial and celebrity profile, he couldn’t
have imagined that he would be powerless to
prevent players such as Rooney and Ronaldo
becoming brands in their own right.
Ferguson has spoken of players being
“cocooned by agents, even their own image at
times, with their tattoos and their earrings”. He
has voiced his distaste for the phenomenon of
players rushing to the corner flag to celebrate
goals in front of the TV cameras (“that self-
glorification thing”) rather than with their
team-mates or the supporters. As he has said
many times down the years, “It is a different
world for me, so I have had to adapt.”
Nobody has adapted better than Ferguson.
Maybe evolving is easier when you remain in
the same environment, becoming so
fundamental to your ecosystem that it adapts
to you. But there is nothing easy about what
Ferguson does. If there have been times
during his tenure when United have been so far
ahead of the competition that they have been
able to function on auto-pilot, they have been
scarce. His great success has been not just in
establishing dominance but in repeating it year
after year and then dismantling the squad,
0.54
starting again and succeeding again.
In November, as he prepared to mark the
25th anniversary of his arrival in Manchester, he
repeated that he would continue “as long as I
feel healthy enough”. Someone asked him
what keeps him hungry and whether City’s
Goals per game emergence had helped keep the fires burning.
average during his “The challenge is always here,” he said. “It’s in
career as a striker this place, no matter who you are up against.”
You can take that as a yes. The challenge of
replacing Liverpool as England’s top team, of
fighting off Kenny Dalglish’s big-spending
Blackburn, of wrestling the title back from
Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal - they consumed
him. As did the challenge of matching
Juventus, Barcelona and Bayern Munich and
finally winning that first European Cup. So,
too, the challenge of winning a second. The
challenge presented by Abramovich’s
Chelsea consumed him. The challenge of
seeing off Rafael Benitez’s Liverpool and
then winning that record-breaking 19th title
consumed him. And now, quite certainly, he is
consumed by the challenge of quelling the
City uprising.
Right now, and for the foreseeable future,
Barcelona - and Real Madrid - look out of
reach. Ferguson has more than enough on his
FERGIE AT 70
plate with City. Even if he succeeds in
stemming the blue tide this season, he does
not want to leave United in a position where
they are at risk of being toppled, even in the
short term, by their local rivals. But we should
not focus too heavily on Ferguson’s
considerations for his legacy. As much as he
would loathe retiring with regrets, the main
point is that he simply does not want to retire.
That insatiable appetite for success is what
has defined Ferguson. It is his greatest
strength. Yet it is also the factor that makes it
so much harder to achieve the happy ending
his career deserves at some point over the
coming years. So does the brilliance of
Barcelona and, closer to home, the emergence
of City. Even if he and United beat City this
season to what would certainly be among the
most satisfying of all his domestic triumphs,
would he really see it as the ideal opportunity
to head for the exit?
It goes back to what those supporters said to
him after the match in late 2005 at what was
one of the lowest points of his professional
career. “Keep going,” they said to him.
Ferguson knows no other way. It is his life.
Oliver Kay is The Times’ football correspondent.
He has covered Manchester United for 11 years
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 79
 FERGIE AT 70

FERGIE IN PICTURES
Wrinkles may appear but that winning smile hasn’t
changed a bit. His old cohorts share their memories...

Roy Barry
Team-mate at Dunfermline in the ‘60s
“Few people talk about Fergie the player, but he
was some striker. In one season he scored 45
goals in 51 games for Dunfermline. I’ve never
known anyone who took such delight in scoring.
He’d celebrate like a madman, even during five-
a-sides. His type is a dying breed. Winning was
everything to him - at football, cards, dominoes,
whatever - and he was very opinionated. He was
adamant in everything he said, even when he
knew he was wrong.
What people don’t know is that he was a
serial prankster - he would have fitted in well
with Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang. One night in
Zagreb before a European game, he accidentally It was this hat-trick
ran through a glass door trying to throw a Causing carnage in the for St. Johnstone in 1963
bucket of water over someone. We had to wake ‘69 Scottish Cup Final. that first caught the eye
the doctor to patch him up! He binned his loser’s medal of Scotland’s big clubs
When I arrived at the club we kept getting
into fights in training. I was the hardened
defender and he was the physical striker. We Winning the 1980
both got sent off in one kick-about and the Scottish title as
manager, big Willie Cunningham, offered us Aberdeen boss
both a square go. We declined. After that we
were made to share a room together and
became close.”

Willie Miller
Aberdeen captain under Ferguson
“At Aberdeen, Sir Alex wasn’t the sophisticated
figure he is now! He’d ruffle feathers - subtly or
with that famous hairdryer. It was ‘win at all
costs’, and it took us to the Cup Winners’ Cup,
Super Cup and eight domestic trophies.
There was humour too: he sent Archie Knox to
scout Real Madrid without a ticket and he ended
up watching them on a pub TV.
Then there was the time he had a bit of fun
with our partners before the Cup Winners’ Cup
Ferguson shows off
Final, telling them they had to take an overnight
his new purchase. Bling
bus trip to Gothenburg with sleeping bags and
headphones not included
flasks of tea. He’s a one-off!”

Eamonn Bannon
Played for Scotland at Mexico 86 under
Ferguson, who stepped in after the death
of his managerial mentor, Jock Stein
“When Fergie took us to the ‘86 World Cup he
wasn’t the colossus he is now, but he still had a
fearsome reputation. My brother travelled from
Australia to see us in Mexico, but I was nervous
about telling Fergie I’d invited him to the hotel.
He couldn’t have been more welcoming. My
brother had a trial for Dundee and had played
against Fergie’s Rangers team years back. To his
astonishment, Fergie remembered him and
every minute detail about the game. He’d be
“If we have to talk
everyone’s dream Scotland manager; we were
tactics, can you at
lucky to have him for just one tournament.”
least get me a towel?”

80 FourFourTwo.com
 FERGIE AT 70

Although never fully

capped, he represented
a ‘Scotland XI’ on a 1967
tour of Asia and Oceania

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 81

 FERGIE AT 70

Mark Hughes
On Ferguson’s early days at Old Trafford
“Alex Ferguson had replaced Ron Atkinson –
there had been a tidying up of discipline and
everybody knew which way the club wanted to
go. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but in one
instance, I nearly got taken off after 15
minutes. We were playing Leeds in a cup game
and I had a couple of throw-ins thrown at me,
which I knocked straight out of play. Apparently
Sir Alex came running down the stairs to get me
off because he thought I was a bit sloppy. Brian
Kidd had to calm him down and say, ‘He’ll be all
right, he’ll get into the game in a minute.’ I
ended up scoring a goal and we won the game
so I got away with it, but I was definitely
coming off after 15 minutes.”

Ryan Giggs
On the first time he got on the wrong side
of Fergie
“I’d made 20 or so appearances, so I went up
and asked him if I was eligible for a club car,
and as I asked I could see his face turning
purple. He said something like, “Club car? You’ve
got more chance of getting a club bike!” Under early pressure in
“Er, the bike shed’s 1987 as United laboured.
Lee Sharpe that way, Ryan” Just give the man time...
On being on the receiving end of Fergie’s
infamous hairdryer
“He caught me and Giggsy having what looked
like a full-blown party at my house one
weeknight. He kicked everyone out, clipping
them all round the head and calling them
obscenities as they left - even the girls - then he
nailed me and Giggsy for half an hour. He was
so mad with us that we were s***ing ourselves
too much to laugh - we both thought we were
going to get sacked. It was the biggest How to ruin a His new £1.2m
bollocking I ever had... it took him a while to treasured photo - man - not a bad
calm down.” by Edward Sheringham bit of business

Andrew Cole
On Ferguson’s half-time words of wisdom
in the 1999 Champions League Final
“The manager had a very simple message at
half-time in the Nou Camp. He didn’t need to
ask for quiet. He told us to take a long, hard
look at the European Cup as we went back
out. ‘And don’t come back in here knowing
that you haven’t given 100 per cent trying to
win, because you might only get one chance,’
he added.
He was calm, sober and heartfelt. I’d seen
him spitting and fuming in the past, but not
now. Uptight before the match, he seemed
relaxed. We were desperate to win it, but our
manager had been in football a lot longer and
had yet to win the European Cup. I duly looked
at the trophy, but we weren’t playing well. I was
willing a return to the United who’d won in Turin
or put six past Barcelona over two games.
The manager had his Churchill moment at
half-time in Turin. That’s where he told us that if
we scored one more goal we’d be going to
Barcelona. He just told us to carry on doing
what we were doing. He couldn’t say that in the
Nou Camp because we weren’t playing well. You On the climb;
know what happened next: we won the Treble. Ferguson’s new-
And one man deserved more credit for that look side starts to
than anyone else.” take shape in 1988

82 FourFourTwo.com
 FERGIE AT 70

Sparky gets sloppy

once more as Fergie’s
Prem champs don the
green and gold, 1993

Sun, Souey and scant Nou Camp, 1999:

success as he leads his “No one deserved
country to Mexico 86 more credit than him,”
says Andrew Cole

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 83

 GREAT GOALS
RETOLD

GREAT GOALS RETOLD “I lived a week in Van Basten’s shoes,” says

a joking Christian Maggio about the events
of 24 January 2010 – when the Napoli wing-
back scored “the best goal of my life”.
His life, or almost any other player’s.
Maggio’s astonishing strike against Livorno
bore close resemblance to Marco van
Basten’s for the Dutch in the Euro 88 final;
from less of a tight angle, perhaps, and a
smaller occasion, certainly, but just as
perfect in its execution.
“We were at the end of the first half,”
recalls Maggio, “and Livorno’s keeper cleared
the ball quickly. Unfortunately for him, it
went to my team-mate, [Salvatore] Aronica.
Illustration German Aczel

“He hit it long into the box, because the

Words Simone Stenti

speciality of our forward, German Denis, was

his heading. But when I saw the ball flying
high I instantly decided I would shoot.”

AN
After his sumptuous strike, Maggio could

CH R I S T I share his pride with his team-mates… right?

“Actually, they asked me how I could think of

GG IO010
taking such a foolish shot!” he laughs.

MivA
For days afterwards ‘Maggio van Basten’
understood how the Dutch striker felt in ’88.
2
orno, Serie A,
“For a whole week they spoke only about
vs L Marco and me. It got quite embarrassing.”

ARCHIE L
GEM MIL
erlands,
vs Neth 78
World Cup, 19
He’d just scored one of the greatest World
Cup goals, but there was no shirt over the
head or Elvis dancing for Archie Gemmill.
Instead, he simply raised his arm and then Words Chris Sweeney Illustration German Aczel

ran back to the centre circle.

It was an amazing show of restraint
considering he’d just slalomed past Wim
Jansen, turned Ruud Krol into a mannequin
and put Jan Poortvliet on his backside with a
nutmeg before beating Jan Jongbloed.
“The only thought in my mind was if
we could get one more goal, there was
a chance we were going to qualify,” Gemmill
tells FFT. Scotland had to win by three goals
to make it out of their group – Ally MacLeod’s
team were unable to avoid elimination,
however Gemmill’s sublime strike lives on. some highly of people will come over to talk about it and
“I was most definitely not thinking goal,” charged sex while get a photograph taken with me. It’s much
explains the 71-year-old of the moment he Archie’s iconic goal plays out in the different in England – I just get on with my
received the ball near the touchline. “I was background. Renton roars, “I haven’t felt that daily life.”
just thinking, ‘There’s a man in front of me, good since Archie Gemmill scored against Despite scoring the Scot’s greatest ever
can I get past him? And then can I get past Holland in 1978!” goal, Gemmill says he never sneaks a look at
the next one?’ In the space of a few seconds, “Being in Trainspotting, and the number of it in admiration. “No, I’m not that way
I was there on my own with the goalkeeper.” times you watch it on TV when the World Cup inclined,” he says. “At that moment in time
The stunner later featured in box-office comes round, I wish I had ten per cent of the it’s a job, simple as that.”
smash Trainspotting as Renton – the takings,” smiles Gemmill, who now lives in That particular day’s work is still
character played by Ewan McGregor – enjoys Derby. “When I go back to Scotland, quite a lot celebrated, 40 years on.

84 FourFourTwo.com
 GREAT GOALS
RETOLD

Zico
vs Tohoku, Emperor’s Cup, 1
993

Words Felipe Rocha Illustration German Aczel

It may not have been scored for
Brazil at the World Cup, but Zico is in
no doubt about which one of his 476
career goals was the finest.
Two years before Rene Higuita’s
famous scorpion kick save at Wembley,
Zico was using the skill in sublime
fashion at the other end of the field for
Kashima Antlers.
Sure, the opponents were only lowly
Tohoku and the competition Japan’s
Interview Chris Flanagan
Illustration German Aczel
Emperor’s Cup, but even the finest
defence in the world would have
struggled to stop the Brazilian’s finish.
‘’It’s a rare goal, and the difficulty of
the movement makes it the most
beautiful one of my life,” Zico tells FFT.
“I passed the ball to Alcindo on the
left and he gave it back to me, but I
dummied and ran into the penalty
area. Carlos Alberto provided the assist
I was waiting for, but I realised the ball
was just behind me. I had no option
but to try this acrobatic movement.”
Acrobatic it certainly was, as Zico
flicked the ball over his head and over
the stunned goalkeeper using the heel
of his right foot. Not bad for a man who
had hit 40 a few months earlier.
“Franco Baresi was also in Japan with
Milan for the Intercontinental Cup and
he called me to congratulate me on
the goal,” says the Brazilian. ‘’I’d tried
something similar in a friendly against
Uruguay at the Maracana in 1979 and
only missed the target by a few inches.
I also scored a scorpion kick while
playing beach soccer after I’d retired.”
Zico was a trailblazer in Japan,
arriving in 1991 – two years before the
formation of the J-League. He filmed
tutorials for aspiring players, featuring
a range of tricks, including, of course,
the scorpion kick.

“A few minutes before that I had run at

them and won a penalty, so they’d dropped
off. I built up a head of steam and it was
only at that point did I think, ‘I’ve got a great
chance of scoring here’. The defender had a
standing start, and when someone is
running at you like that, you’ve got
absolutely no chance.
“I had pushed the ball to the side of him
but then spotted Scholesy in the corner of
my eye trying to come in and steal it! I
nipped in ahead of him and thought, ‘The
goalkeeper’s spreading himself – I’ll need to
clip-finish it’. I was quite far out, so height

MICHAEL
was the best way to go. When it flew into the
top corner, I ran away in total euphoria.”
Owen has never specifically sat down to

EN
watch the goal back again, though he

oW
rld Cup, 1998
rgentina, Wo
vs A
It is one of the most iconic England goals
of all time, and Michael Owen still
remembers every split-second of it. “It’s
etched in my brain,” the former Liverpool
and Real Madrid frontman laughs.
Owen was only 18 when he collected the
ball on halfway in Saint-Etienne and put
England ahead in the most dramatic fashion.
“David Beckham passed me the ball and I
was facing my own goal, so I had no idea
what was in the opponents’ half,” the BT
Sport pundit explains to FFT. “I took a touch
on the outside of my foot, wriggled free from
my marker and just remember lifting my
head up and seeing the next Argentina
player – he seemed miles away!
doesn’t exactly complain when someone
shows him the historic footage. “My kids go
on YouTube and say, ‘This was a good one,
dad’, so I have to reluctantly agree to watch
it!” he chuckles. “The goal announced me to
the rest of the world – I’ve met the likes of
Pelé who’ve mentioned it. It really was the
goal of a lifetime.”
Make BT Sport your home of the Premier
League, Champions League, Europa League
and the FA Cup. Head to www.btsport.com

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 85

JURGEN KLOPP

Calamity BROKEN
Pressure Jaded

Injury crisis
Stress
MalaIse
NEGATIVE
Rotten luck
I HEAR MANCHESTER’S
NICE THIS TIME OF YEAR…
Fighting to save their season, Jurgen Klopp and Borussia Dortmund can, for once, imagine
a future apart. FFT reveals why football’s most charismatic coach might fancy a fresh start
Words Uli Hesse

O
n 14 December 2014 Jan-Henrik Gruszecki
walked towards the door of his Dortmund
flat with a heavy heart. The 30-year-old
was returning from Berlin, where he had
watched his team, Borussia Dortmund,
put in yet another depressing and by-and-large
inexplicable Bundesliga performance.
The same players who not very long ago
came close to winning the Champions League
and thrilled an entire continent with daring
attacking football, turning spectators into fans
wherever they went, had stumbled across the
pitch like shell-shocked soldiers. Jurgen Klopp,
their iconic coach, had watched from the
sidelines with the body language of a man
who was rapidly reaching his wits’ end.
A rather pedestrian Hertha team had won
the game 1-0, sending Dortmund back into
the relegation zone.
Relegation. As Gruszecki grabbed the door
handle, this most unthinkable of scenarios
was no longer out of the question. In fact,
Dortmund had been in last place a couple of
weeks earlier, for the first time in almost three
decades. But back then, following another
stinging setback in Frankfurt, most observers
still felt that Borussia were merely unlucky.
Ridiculous injury woes and a string of bad
breaks had conspired against a team that
was doing many things right. They played
well, they put in the requisite effort, they
created goalscoring opportunities.
But now that was no longer the case.
There had just been too many unlucky defeats
and too many bad breaks for the players.
Now they had begun to play as the table
said they were – candidates for the drop.
Gruszecki turned the handle and wondered
how you could stop such a downward spiral.
At every other club, the solution would have
been obvious: sack the coach and bring in what
Germans call a fireman – a manager

86 FourFourTwo.com
Change
JURGEN KLOPP

Relegation
HELPLESS

DOUBT Frustration
NO JOY

FORM

END OF AN ERA
FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES:
May 2015
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 87
JURGEN KLOPP
who specialises in hopeless situations. But in
Dortmund, this was not even a theoretical
possibility. Gruszecki wondered if he could think
of a precedent in Bundesliga history. Had there
ever been a team that was supposed to
challenge for the title and then hit rock bottom
without eliciting calls for the manager’s head?
No, he concluded, this was a first. It made him
proud of his club, but it didn’t make the
situation any less desperate.
Gruszecki opened the door to his flat and
squinted. He turned his head to shield his
eyes from the light. Then he looked again. There
were heavy wooden tables, littered with beer
stains, in the middle of his living room. There
were stag antlers on the walls. Cigar smoke
hung in the air. And there were 18 young
men in dark three-piece suits and stiff collars
milling about. Gruszecki knew what these
men were doing in his flat. They were forming
Borussia Dortmund. But that doesn’t mean it
didn’t still blow his mind.
“I was literally stepping from December 2014
into December 1909,” he recalls. “When I’d left
my flat to go to Berlin, they had only just begun
building the set. But when I returned, I walked
straight into a faithful reconstruction of the pub
room in which Borussia were founded.”
Gruszecki is not a normal Dortmund fan.
Two years ago, he started a crowdfunding
project together with two friends. Their aim was
to raise at least 120,000 euros to finance a film
about Borussia’s formative years. During the
initial research, Gruszecki learned that the
actual room where the club came into being
would soon be auctioned off by court order.
He put in the winning bid and now lives in what
is literally his club’s birthplace.
88 FourFourTwo.com
“If we go down, so what?
This club is about much
more than football games”
The three film-makers eventually collected
259,000 euros, a national record for such
ventures. The money came from close to 3,000
individuals, among them Dortmund forward
Marco Reus, who sold one of his match-worn
shirts, and Jurgen Klopp, who held an
autograph session and then donated the
revenue. The club was very supportive, too,
which is why director of marketing Carsten
Cramer was present when Gruszecki returned
from Berlin to stumble into the filming of the
actual moment when Borussia were founded.
At one point, Cramer turned towards
Gruszecki and said, “This makes you realise how
big the club is – and how fleeting the presence.”
Gruszecki had a similar thought. “I was
watching the filming and realising that our
problems in the league were nothing to worry
about. I said to myself, ‘If we go down, so what?
This club is about much more than just winning
or losing a few football games.’”
“The reason the Dortmund
supporters have been so patient
is the personality of the coach
– he is still immensely popular”
It’s one of the many perplexing side issues in
the mysterious tale of Dortmund’s fall from
grace that even die-hard fans such as Gruszecki,
whose entire life revolves around the club,
watched the decline with the serenity of
Tibetan monks. Actually, it almost seemed as if
the support grew more understanding and
forgiving the worse the results became. After
the Berlin game that had left Gruszecki so
depressed, the Dortmund fans chanted
“Borussia, Borussia!” until the players, their
Above Klopp was just heads bowed, walked over to the curva.
as fired up as a player And then the entire away stand sang
Below “Yes, Marco, a popular terrace song that states that the club
of course you can be is everyone’s pride and joy. It gave even the
Batman next time” neutrals at the ground goosebumps.
“I think there are three reasons why the fans
were so patient,” Gruszecki says. “The first is
they haven’t forgotten that this very team has
given them so much to celebrate. The second is

the personality of the coach. He is still
immensely popular. And the third is the skill
of the coach. The fans knew that Klopp had
been in many relegation fights with Mainz.
So the feeling was that someone like Pep
Guardiola might not be able to cope with
a situation like this, but Klopp could.”
Truth be told, though, he didn’t always look
the part. In fact, Klopp sometimes wore such
a pained expression on his face during the
first half of the season that his former player
Patrick Owomoyela, now a pundit, remarked on
television, “At the moment he comes across as
quite helpless and defensive. I don’t think he
would be above saying, ‘Well, maybe I’ve done
all I could do here, and now somebody else
must come and help.’”
Many supporters, however, interpreted
Klopp’s distress differently. They’d always
loved him for his emotions, for wearing his
heart on his sleeve. When things went well, this
meant he would be celebrating wildly and
cheering the team, just like any regular fan. But
of course it also meant that when things were
going wrong he would be visibly frustrated,
just like the people in the stands.
And so it wasn’t until a home defeat in early
February, at the hands of an Augsburg team
reduced to ten men, that the fans finally
Below Immobile
rues the missed
reached the end of their tether. For the first
time, boos and catcalls rang around the ground
penalty that so forcefully that after the final whistle the
arguably began players kept a respectful distance from the
Dortmund’s decline, terrace – the Sudtribune – and sent their two
before Weidenfeller captains, goalkeeper Roman Weidenfeller and
and Hummels hold defender Mats Hummels, over to the fence to
a Q&A with the fans discuss the team’s performance with the ultras.
Interestingly, this game marked the end of
Borussia’s rough patch. Three days later the
team scored three goals without reply away
at Freiburg. It was Dortmund’s first league
victory in 64 days and the starting point of
a four-game winning streak highlighted by
an impressive 3-0 derby triumph over fierce
rivals Schalke. An incredibly emotional
afternoon was capped by Pierre-Emerick
Aubameyang and Marco Reus celebrating
the first goal by donning Batman and
Robin masks, prompting predictable
headlines proclaiming the ‘Return of
Dortmund’s Superheroes’.
What is much harder to pinpoint,
though, is when the rough patch began –
and why. Gruszecki reckons Borussia
started to unravel away at Mainz on
matchday four. With Dortmund a goal
down, the visitors were awarded a
penalty. In-form attacker Aubameyang
was ready to take it, but Italian centre-
forward Ciro Immobile, a new signing
understandably eager to prove himself,
grabbed the ball and placed it on the spot. His
shot was saved and Dortmund went on to lose
a game they should never have lost – for the
first but certainly not the last time this season.
However, it wasn’t Dortmund’s first defeat of
the campaign. And so there are others who
JURGEN KLOPP
You don’t
have to
be mad to
manage
here...
...but it helps. So Klopp’s
bonkers? Meet this lot
The motivator
Luis Aragones
“See this?” Luis Aragones asked
his Atletico Madrid players
before the 1992 Copa del Rey final against city
rivals Real, pointing at the tactics board. “Well,
it’s irrelevant. If you don’t win, I’ll stick this
Coke bottle up my arse.” They won 2-0.
Master motivator Aragones – a manager in
a record 791 La Liga matches – also ended
Spain’s 44-year wait for a trophy at Euro 2008,
crossing a hitherto goal-shy Fernando Torres’
forehead in the tunnel and saying: “You’ll
score today.” Guess who netted the winner.
Though his comments about Thierry Henry
should never be airbrushed from history, no
one could inspire quite like El Sabio (‘The Wise
Man’). His football philosophy? “Win, win and
win. Win, win, win and go back to winning and
win and win.” Can’t argue with that.
The religious
zealot
Giovanni Trapattoni
One of only four coaches to
have won league titles in four different
countries, Trap attributes his managerial
acumen to one secret – Him upstairs.
He was raised in a strict Catholic home, and his
older sister Maria is a practising nun.
A member of Opus Dei, an unofficial branch
of the Church so conservative some describe
it as a cult, the former Republic of Ireland
boss has sprinkled holy water over every
dugout since taking the Italy job in 2000.
The Spanish
Ian Holloway
Manolo Preciado
Resembling an ageing
Groucho Marx but without the glasses,
Preciado always had a way with words.
Whether describing former Valencia
winger Joaquin as “about as dangerous as
a monkey with a gun” or huffing while under
pressure at Sporting Gijon, “If I lose all of the
next three games, I’ll shoot myself in the head,
but I’m not thinking of losing”, the chain-
smoking former Racing Santander, Levante
and Sporting manager mixed his metaphors
with Holloway-pleasing regularity.
He also ended Jose Mourinho’s nine-year
unbeaten home record with a 1-0 win at
the Bernabeu in April 2011, saying,
“Sometimes, when you spit upwards,
it comes back down on you.”
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 89
 JURGEN KLOPP

say that the drama really began to unfold

during the first eight seconds of the season. On
opening day, Bayer Leverkusen travelled
to Dortmund, scored the fastest goal in
Bundesliga history and deservedly bagged three
points against a Borussia side that
never recovered from falling behind so quickly.
Some claim the seeds of struggle were in fact
sown way back in the summer. Dr Jeannine
Ohlert, a sports psychologist, told Sky Austria
that things went wrong as early as the
pre-season preparations, when “some players
came back from the World Cup exhausted
and struggling to find motivation”.
The second bit may sound improbable, but
it’s not a far-fetched theory. Over the previous
four seasons, Borussia Dortmund and Bayern
Munich had become so dominant in Germany
that most observers considered the top of the
league table a foregone conclusion. And if one
of the two giants should slip up really badly
then the worst that could happen to them,
many fans felt, was that they dropped to third
or fourth place. Bearing this in mind, it’s not
inconceivable that the players themselves
subconsciously felt they might get by with
giving only 95 per cent on a few occasions.
Not that you should ever dare to mention this
theory in Klopp’s presence though. In October
he frostily told a reporter, “If this was our
problem, I’d be the first to give the players
a kick up the backside each day of the week.”
Then he angrily added, “Whoever says that this
team has motivational problems suffers from
Alzheimer’s disease.”
“Whoever says this team has motivational
problems suffers from Alzheimer’s disease”
But it was a tempting argument. How else
could you explain the discrepancy between
Dortmund’s league form and their Champions
League performances? In mid-September,
Klopp’s side played Arsenal off the park in
a commanding manner. Four days later, they
lost at Mainz and then didn’t win another
Bundesliga game until November.
At the press conference following the home
defeat against Hamburg, Klopp was asked
to give his own explanation for the striking
difference between the fine results in Europe
and the poor showings in the Bundesliga.
Wearing his trademark Borussia hoodie and
looking as if he’d aged five years over the
previous five months, the coach furrowed his
brow. “Form, that’s all,” he said. “We have
players who can summon their form on
some days, but on some others they cannot do
Above Dortmund this.” He went on to explain that there
have rarely hit the were several reasons for this but that the
heights of their most important one was an almost absurd
European demolition number of injuries. “We have players who are
of Arsenal this term coming off lengthy layoffs but who can’t be
eased into the side now – they immediately
have to be on top of their game,” he said,
meaning someone like Ilkay Gundogan, who
had been sidelined for no fewer than 430 days
with back problems. Klopp added, “We also
have players who had only a very short
pre-season preparation but need to play in
every game now.” He was referring to players
like Hummels, who had come back from the
World Cup with a nagging injury.
So it takes just a few injuries and some rotten
luck to turn one of the best teams in Europe
into a bunch of donkeys? In January, with
Bayern in first place, Dortmund in last and 29

90 FourFourTwo.com

points separating the two pre-season
favourites, Pep Guardiola said: “What happened
to Dortmund can happen to us, too. In football,
you can never relax. At any given moment,
anything can happen.”
What happened to Borussia was that
a simple run of bad results slowly but surely
turned into a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you ever
wondered how important the mental aspect of
the game is and how quickly a player can lose
confidence, all you had to do was watch
Henrikh Mkhitaryan. The Armenian playmaker,
one of the most naturally gifted footballers in
the whole of Europe, gradually became so
consumed by fear – fear of another stray
pass, another wasted chance, another
defeat – that Klopp finally had to bench him.
Because make no mistake, even if the
fans were totally behind the team and trusted
their beloved coach with finding a way out
of this mess, he had to do something – fast.
On the club’s 105th birthday, 19 December,
Jan-Henrik Gruszecki told a club representative,
“If we lose tomorrow, in Bremen, we are in
serious trouble.” They did and they were.
“If Kloppo quits,
I’m jumping”
Lewandowski has been
missed in Dortmund
Hoodie – standard;
despair – not so much
“All I can say is I wouldn’t write us off,” Klopp
said after this game, standing on the pitch in
Bremen and having to explain his team’s 10th
league defeat. He defiantly added, “At the
moment we look like complete idiots, and it
serves us right. But we’ll be back, looking
different.” He was right. But what ultimately
saved him was that great German football
invention – the winter break.
“Dortmund feels as
dependent on Jurgen
Klopp as Apple used to be
on Steve Jobs”
Hummels’ triumph Another perplexing aspect of Dortmund’s
in the World Cup mysterious fall from grace was that the
came at a cost men who run the club were apparently
prepared to go down rather than part
company with their coach. During the winter
break, the magazine Sport Bild asked the club’s
chairman, Hans-Joachim Watzke, how safe the
manager’s job was. “We will never dismiss
Jurgen Klopp,” Watzke replied. “The services he
has rendered to Borussia are exceptional. No
JURGEN KLOPP
Preciado’s tragic death from a heart attack
in June 2012, just 24 hours after being named
the new Villarreal manager, saw Spanish
football lose its biggest character.
The artful
contract dodger
Bela Guttmann
As a survivor of the Holocaust,
nobody knew their own worth quite like
the legendary Benfica manager. “The third
season,” Guttman once said, “is fatal.”
With Europe ravaged by post-World War II
hyperinflation, he insisted on being paid in
food by Romanian side Ciocanul before
reacting to a director trying to interfere in
team affairs by leaving, grumbling, “OK, you
run the club – you seem to have the basics.”
His departure from AC Milan – after again
clashing with the board, this time with the
Rossoneri top of Serie A – was equally
tempestuous. Thereafter, Guttmann had
a clause inserted into every contract that
he couldn’t be sacked while top of the league.
Amazed he didn’t get a bonus for winning
consecutive European Cups with Benfica in
1962, he left. “Not for 100 years will Benfica
be champions of Europe without me,” he
proclaimed. They’ve played in eight European
finals since and lost the lot. Spooky.
The ‘enlightened
despot’
Guy Roux
A 22-year-old Roux became
Auxerre player-coach in 1961 when the
Burgundy-based amateurs were no-hopers in
the fourth division. Over the following
44 years the self-proclaimed ‘enlightened
despot’ transformed the club into 1996
double-winners, Champions League
regulars and UEFA Cup semi-finalists.
He ruled by fear, like a strict grandfather
with a lived-in face trying to keep his family in
check. “I have a network of informers,” he
once said, including one at every toll booth on
the motorway to Paris. “But, with security
cameras in nightclubs these days, it’s easier.”
“It was like a paramilitary regime,” his
greatest success, Eric Cantona, once moaned.
“Having said that, I learned how to make
my bed. My wife certainly appreciates it.”
Roux fined ‘Le Roi’ so often he was able
to buy a pool table for the whole squad.
The ‘crazy’
journalist
Pepe Pena
Commentator Pepe Pena
decided he’d had enough of simply talking
about Argentine football, so, in April 1961, the
40-year-old became manager of
Primera Division side Huracan instead.
He then boasted that “at least six” members
of Argentina’s World Cup squad would follow
him the next year. As you do.
Pena’s trademark was a method for dealing
with free-kicks on the edge of his own team’s
box. If Huracan were winning, his players
should shoot at their own goal (for practice),
with the keeper under instruction to let it in.
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 JURGEN KLOPP
Nobody can accuse
the Yellow Wall of
only singing when
they’re winning
confrontational situation will ever arise.” Four
weeks later, after the Augsburg debacle and
with the team still in last place, Watzke
renewed his promise, adding that the club’s
faith in Klopp was “beyond debate and doubt”.
Saying that this was a most unusual state
of affairs would be an understatement.
Only once before in league history had
a reigning runner-up sunk as far as last place
this deep into a season. That team was
Alemannia Aachen in 1969-70. Needless to say,
they sacked their coach as early as December
(and still went down).
The only fairly recent comparable case that
comes to mind concerns Bayer Leverkusen.
Under coach Klaus Toppmoller, the team
reached the 2002 Champions League final and
the domestic cup final and finished second in
the league, playing tremendous, entertaining
football along the way. Months later, in February
2003, Leverkusen found themselves in a
relegation spot – and the club’s then-business
manager Rainer Calmund announced that to his
92 FourFourTwo.com
Only once before had a league runner-up
sunk as far as last place this far into a season
“greatest regret” he “didn’t have a choice” but Borussia to a sect. “A crisis calls for an honest
to fire the coach. analysis,” he said. “But that’s not possible in
Watzke could have done the same without Dortmund, because seeing the
losing face – or a friend – coach as the cause of the crisis is
because everyone, not taboo.” He added, “I have spoken
least Klopp himself, with many Dortmund fans, and
would have understood Dortmund CEO the general thrust is we cannot
that football clubs can’t Watzke’s stood imagine the club without Klopp.
afford to be sentimental. by his man Dortmund feels as dependent on
That Watzke stood firm Klopp as Apple used to be on
regardless wasn’t met with Steve Jobs.” Eilenberger then
universal admiration. drew a comparison with Arsenal,
In a much-publicised saying the Gunners were
interview in late January stagnating because
the columnist and Arsene Wenger had become
philosopher Wolfram unsackable The philosopher,
Eilenberger compared who also holds a German FA

coaching badge, offered a simple solution:
“Klopp to Arsenal; Wenger to Dortmund.”
Perhaps Watzke viewed things differently
because he had learned the hard way that
bringing in a new coach may indeed put an end
to stagnation, but that you can’t be sure in
which direction you’ll start moving. Watzke
became the club’s chairman in early 2005,
when Borussia were on the verge of going
bankrupt. The following year, a week
before Christmas 2006, he fired the
popular Dutch coach Bert van
Marwijk, despite the fact that
Borussia were in a perfectly
respectable ninth place. The
dismissal threw the club into
turmoil. Van Marwijk’s
successor, Jurgen Rober, lost
six of the next eight games.
Suddenly Dortmund were
only one point above the
drop zone. It took another
sacking and another
coach – Thomas Doll, to whom fans never
warmed – to avoid relegation at the 11th hour.
And so the board wouldn’t sack Klopp, and the
fans wanted him to stay. However, that didn’t
automatically mean he would last the season.
As Owomoyela’s comment on television
suggests, the longer the drama lasted, the more
people could imagine that there would come a
day when the coach himself felt he had taken
this as far as he could and that now “somebody
else must come and help”.
Klopp himself fuelled such rumours after the
Frankfurt game on the last day of November.
Dortmund lost the match partly because of yet
another unfortunate mishap at the back.
A week earlier, Stuttgart coach Armin Veh had
stepped down, saying that luck had deserted
the club and he somehow felt responsible for
this. Klopp was asked if he would follow Veh’s
example, whereupon the Dortmund coach
replied, “If it’s only about luck and if changing
the coach brings this luck back, then just give
me a call and a guarantee that it’s going
to work – I won’t be standing in the way.”
However, reading jadedness or even
helpessness into such a comment was taking
things too far. Because all through that almost
comically terrible run, Klopp was very much
aware that there was one powerful ace still
up his sleeve. Gruszecki is right: although the
circumstances of this one were highly unusual,
the coach had been in relegation fights before,
in the first division and the second. He knew
that what you needed first and foremost was
defensive stability. He also knew that all it
took to restore that was time.
When Klopp was standing on that pitch in
Bremen a few days before Christmas, he could
promise the fans that, although all signs
pointed to the contrary, his team would be
back, looking different, because he knew he
would now have six precious weeks to take the
players’ minds off the league standings and
work with the team on their problems. Not to
mention that the physios would have time to
get the injured players back into shape. If ever a
Bundesliga team desperately needed the
winter break, it was Borussia Dortmund.
Below “I know, they For the fourth time in a row, the club set up
can’t fire me either!” their winter training camp in a slightly remote
resort near Murcia, in southeast Spain. It may
be just a coincidence that in each of the
previous three seasons, Dortmund had played
better and with more success after the winter
break. But if you’ve ever watched Klopp conduct
one of those training sessions under the
Spanish sun, you know there is a connection.
The coach may have a reputation as a master
motivator, but his aggressive pressing
game is based on supreme
organisation and he simply has
more time to work on it during the
quiet winter weeks than he has in
the summer – especially
a summer following
a big international
tournament.
During the
winter break,
Klopp must have
come to the
JURGEN KLOPP
Rules state this ploy results in a corner, rather
than an own goal. This, Pena believed, gave
his team a good chance to start
a counter-attack, as his defenders were tall
and would clear the set-piece.
Did it work? Not really, no. They were 5-0
down after 50 minutes of his first game
against San Lorenzo, eventually losing 5-2.
They then drew 2-2 at home to Velez before
being defeated 4-2 at Atlanta. Pena resigned,
reverting back to the microphone before
becoming head of PR for Adidas.
“People always called me crazy,” he once
observed. “But they’re just scared of living.”
The welly-wearer
Egil Olsen
A committed Marxist who
memorised the height of every
mountain on the planet basically for fun,
Olsen seemed the perfect fit for Wimbledon:
eccentric, but a sports science evangelist who
had taken Norway to No.2 in FIFA’s world
rankings. The welly-wearing Norwegian
seemed the perfect man to modernise
the Crazy Gang’s outdated ways.
However, his attempts to install order and
stop the all-day binges were as successful
as his attempts to curb SW19 of smokers
(he tried to stub out any lit cigarette he
came across on Wimbledon High Street).
The nadir came at Bradford. The Dons
lost 3-0 and after the game Olsen didn’t even
realise John Hartson had been sent off.
In later years, he was sacked by Iraq after
five games for “being too nice”. Poor soul.
The attacking
mentalist
Zdenek Zeman
FFT may not be the greatest
military strategists, but we can’t help
imagining the Charge of the Light Brigade
when a Zdenek Zeman team is about to 
kick off. Eight players line up on the halfway
line, ready to spring forward; two sit behind
the centre circle, backed up by the keeper.
The Czech-born manager’s ridiculously
attacking 4-3-3 is about as close to football
poetry as you get, and it took unfashionable
Foggia from the third tier to Serie A in 1994.
His teams might not win (the Serie B title is
his highest honour as a coach), but the former
Roma and Lazio boss’ style and verve had
football hipsters drooling before the sport’s
learned analytical types began sighing their
way around East London in organic flip-flops.
The torturer of
groundsmen
Uwe Klimaschefski
Kloppo inspired this list, so
it’s only fair we include another mad German:
a quote-spewing gaffer who once attributed
his second-division Homburg (yes, Homburg)
side’s disappointing draw to that week’s
death of Chinese leader Chairman Mao.
Later in September 1976, after another
defeat, he ordered his players in for extra
training. As they trained, the groundsman –
drunk, naturally – staggered out, screaming
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Portrait Thomas Rabsch / Laif / Camera Press


Klopp had time to work
on Dortmund’s pressing
game in the winter break
conclusion that the situation called for
another form of stability as well.
Having experimented with various
formations and line-ups during the first half of
the season, he went back to the 4-2-3-1
system he had used almost without exception
from October 2009 to May 2014. Shinji
Kagawa was put in his old position, in the hole
behind the lone striker. And this striker was
Aubameyang. As much as Klopp liked the two
forwards he had signed in the summer to
replace Robert Lewandowski and provide extra
options (Immobile and the Colombian Adrian
Ramos), both now had to accept they were
going to be subs at least until the worst of the
crisis was over.
The same team that had kept only two clean
sheets in the first half of the league season
racked up five in the first eight games after
the winter break. Dortmund conceded only
five goals in those seven matches and climbed
from last place to 10th in a little more than
three weeks. While some fans took a furtive
glance at the table to calculate if there were
enough games left in the season to bridge
the gap to the Champions League slots,
Klopp said, “Even after four wins on the trot,
we’re only five points above the relegation zone.
That shows you in what kind of situation we
were – and still are.”
It is conceivable that Klopp will
leave at the end of the season
The final perplexing facet of Dortmund’s
season in Hell was made public on the morning
of 10 February. With his team in 16th place in
the 18-team Bundesliga, Marco Reus extended
his contract until 2019. As the club later
confirmed, the new contract didn’t include a
get-out clause and was valid for the second
Above Shinji division as well. When Reus walked into the
Kagawa’s return dressing room an hour later to prepare for
to playing ‘in the that day’s training session, the rest of the squad
hole’ has helped dig gave him a round of applause.
Dortmund out of one For the general public, this contract extension
– later described by Klopp as “an extraordinary
act” – came as a massive surprise. It was also
deeply significant for the club’s support. A few
months earlier, Bayern Munich chairman
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge told a newspaper the
much-coveted Reus could leave Dortmund in
the summer “for a rumoured 25 million euros”.
Ever since that disclosure, many fans feared
Reus would be tempted to ‘do a Lewandowski’
(or Mario Gotze) and leave Borussia for Bayern.
And even if he didn’t, the chances appeared to
be slim that he’d stay in Dortmund if the club
failed to qualify for the Champions League.
When asked about his motivation, he said all
the things a player should say. He mentioned
that Dortmund was his hometown and how
important his family and his friends were to
him. Reus, who joined the club in 2012 after
their back-to-back Bundesliga titles, also said
that he dreamed of one day winning the league
with Borussia just to see “what the city will be
like then”, which echoed a point of view many
fans take – that signing with Bayern to win
silverware is the easy and therefore less
satisfying route. But most important of all
JURGEN KLOPP
at the team to get off his land, unaware of the
dictat. Klimaschefski promptly tied his green-
fingered foe to a goalpost and ordered his
squad to shoot footballs at him. Fifteen
minutes later, the groundsman’s bread knife-
wielding wife came running from the canteen,
screaming they desist. “I was always very nice
to him,” Uwe winked.
The stats
obsessive
Valeriy Lobanovskyi
Even as an individualistic
left-winger, Lobanovskyi was always looking
for perfection. “Yes, we have won the league,”
the future Dynamo Kiev legend once huffed.
“But so what? Sometimes we played badly. We
just got more points than other teams who
played worse than us.”
Alongside right-hand man and statistician
Anatoliy Zelentsov, football became
a self-perpetuating statistical eco-system
cooked up in the pair’s Kiev laboratory.
Through his training as a heating engineer,
Lobanovskiy became obsessed with the
efficiency of the collective (the antithesis of his
playing style). His players had to complete a
minimum number of ‘actions’, from runs with
the ball to interceptions and passes – short,
medium and long – or face the axe.
Red-faced and taciturn, Lobanovskiy
demanded ‘universality’ from his
multi-functional players, producing
Oleg Blokhin, Igor Belanov and Andriy
Shevchenko. Across 21 years as Kiev boss,
the forefather of statistical analysis
won 30 honours, including two Cup Winners’
Cups. “Don’t think!” he once spat at Aleksandr
Khapsalis as he offered an opinion. “I do the
thinking for you. Play!”
The mentor
of Magath
Ernst Happel
Yes, the crazy former Fulham
boss learned his managerial ethos from
another chain-smoking Austrian Happel.
Fond of women and wine nearly as much as
his three-pack-a-day habit, Happel was
a nightmare as a Rapid Vienna defender
who seldom trained. “If you ever go into
management,” ranted one former coach,
“I hope you’ll have a bastard like yourself
as one of your players.”
Incredibly, Happel the coach turned
into a slave driver, obsessed with fitness
and zonal marking. His players trained
until they vomited. Then trained some
more. Like Magath, he wasn’t exactly
communicative. “If you want to talk,” he once
told Hansi Muller at Swarovski Tirol, “become a
vacuum cleaner salesman.”
But, unlike Magath, he was successful in
Europe. Along with Ottmar Hitzfeld and
Mourinho, Happel is one of only three
managers to have won the European Cup with
two clubs – Feyenoord in 1970 and Hamburg
in 1983, with Magath his midfield star – and
introduced the 4-3-3 to Holland before Ajax.
Plus, he never used a block of cheese to cure a
muscle injury.
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JURGEN KLOPP
Reus has signed
a new deal – with
no get-out clause
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, Klopp
will offer a fresh perspective on the game
was what Reus didn’t say, because he didn’t have
to: that, like many other people in Dortmund, he
didn’t have the slightest doubt the coach would
not only find a way to turn things around and
avoid relegation, but that he would stay to build
a new team – a new title contender.
Whether this is really the case remains to
be seen. Eilenberger’s claim that Dortmund’s
fans can’t imagine the club without Klopp
was certainly true a few months ago, but
no longer. For most supporters, there was
at least one point during this cataclysmic
season – maybe the Berlin game, probably the
Bremen game, certainly the Augsburg game –
when they simply had to entertain the thought
that the pressure could become so strong
that the coach might have to step down.
In other words, they had to realise that the club
is truly bigger than any one person.
In fact, in early February the tabloid Bild
reported that the club had set themselves
“an internal deadline” that said that Klopp
would resign if the team was still in the
relegation zone at the end of the month,
meaning the coaching staff’s winter-break
magic would have failed to improve morale and
organisation. Borussia denied this report, but of
course it fired people’s imagination.
Money will be tighter next year if Borussia
96 FourFourTwo.com
fail to reach the Champions League
(Watzke has estimated that this will cost
the club about 15 million euros). Combined
with Dortmund’s recent spending spree –
at least 60 million euros was paid in
transfer funds this season – therefore
making it likely that the coach won’t be
allowed to add star players to his squad in
the summer, a situation Kicker magazine
labelled “an investment freeze”.
So is it conceivable that Klopp, following a
season that must have drained even his
outstanding energy resources, follows the
example of Guardiola – or that of another
former Mainz coach, the highly touted Thomas
Tuchel – and goes on a sabbatical to recharge
the batteries? Or that he rereads the Eilenberger
interview and takes up the philosopher’s well-
intended piece of advice about Arsenal?
Conceivable, yes, but an outcome that was a
near-impossibility at the start of the season.
Over the past few years, Klopp has been linked
with numerous English clubs not only because
he is rousing, engaging, entertaining and
successful, but also because just when you think
you’ve heard it all when it comes to football, he
will suddenly offer a fresh and different
perspective on an aspect of the game. And he
did this again during Dortmund’s horrific run.
A few days after the team had first dropped
into last place and most fans had begun to
seriously fear for the future, he opened one of
his regular press conferences by letting his gaze
wander over a packed press room. Then he
cracked a grin and said, “It hasn’t been this
crowded in a long time. Is there a new rumour
I don’t know about?” A few minutes later, he
told the journalists, “One day, when we look
back on this, we’ll find that the whole thing
has brought the club closer together. We have
the great chance to come out of this crisis
stronger than we went in. But only if –
perhaps for the first time in football history –
we do it without allowing a wedge to be
driven between us while we’re in the crisis.”
They say that you don’t truly know who your
Above Rummenigge’s real friends are until the going gets tough. When
plan for Reus to the going got tough in Dortmund, Klopp
follow Lewandowski discovered that he had a lot more friends than
and Gotze to Bayern he might have thought possible – in the stands,
has been foiled in the boardroom, in the team. This will
strengthen his emotional bond with the club.
Then there’s this theory he has to prove – about
the team coming out of it stronger. He isn’t the
only one in Dortmund who believes it.
“Sometimes I think this whole thing
might turn out to be a blessing in disguise,”
Gruszecki says. “We’ve been punching above
our weight since 2010. Maybe it’s good that we
got this wake-up call; that we all realise how
quickly it can all change.”
Then he excuses himself. He has to attend
the premiere of his film about Borussia’s
founding fathers.
 JURGEN KLOPP

LOOK OUT, LADS, KLOPP’S COMING!

If the 47-year-old swaps Germany for England, he’s tailor-made for several teams

1 1 1
He brings a tactical ideology He brings Champions His intensity levels
Klopp isn’t one to flit between formations in the League experience Even the most hardcore Wengerite must
way Louis van Gaal has this season, and a more Like Fergie’s early United outfits, who struggled to occasionally experience meltdowns over the
settled tactical identity would serve United well turn domestic dominance into European progress, Gunners’ lack of intensity. This would never be
as they continue to adapt to life without Alex City have looked like tottering baby foals in the a problem under Klopp, whose favourite word
Ferguson. Klopp is still capable of switching things Champions League. Klopp, who got Dortmund to the is kampfen: fight. “[Wenger’s sides] are like an
up and would deploy United’s multi-talented final in 2013, would surely improve the orchestra,” he once said. “But it’s a silent song. I like
squad cannily, but he’d have a plan in mind. side’s performances in this tournament. heavy metal.” Time to turn it up to 11?

2 2 2

He’s a media maestro He maximises ability He’s ‘mindgame-proof’

Van Gaal has mithered and moaned about
commercial pressures on his players, but Klopp
openly embraces “media opportunities”. After all,
he’s the man who got Dortmund’s players to
pose for FourFourTwo’s giant feature on the club
in 2013. That’s an extra asset at a side such as
United, who trade heavily on their global brand.
If there’s one area where Klopp is a bone fide genius,
it’s in milking the very best out of every player at his
disposal. Manuel Pellegrini seems to have struggled
lately with getting his superstars to blend into
something bigger than the sum of their shining
parts. Klopp demands everything from his players –
and they respond.
Wenger has been KO’d time and again by Jose
Mourinho’s mental meddling – eventually snapping
and shoving the Portuguese provocateur last
autumn – but Klopp is a master in this arena.
“Mourinho will return home with reports that will be
useless to him,” he deadpanned back in 2013 after
the then-Madrid manager came to assess his side.

3 3 3

He’s Mr Personality He can build a new team He has defensive savvy

There’s one part of the United job upon which
Van Gaal cannot be faulted: he has a sense of
self-confidence bordering on the absurd. Moreover, a
key failing of David Moyes was his lack of exactly
that. Klopp’s assurance level – charming with just
the right amount of cocky – is undoubtedly high
enough to occupy the Old Trafford hot seat.
City’s squad is in need of an overhaul. The
average age of the team that was knocked out
of the Champions League last month was just
shy of 30 – comfortably the oldest of the sides
in the last 16 – with Sergio Aguero the youngest
at 26. A major injection of energy is required.
Klopp can provide that and an emphasis on youth.
A former defender himself – he started out as
a forward during his 12-year Mainz career, but
switched midway through to become a smart,
combative stopper – Klopp sure knows how to set up
a rearguard and, of course, get his whole team to
defend as a unit. He’s also got Mats Hummels on
speed-dial, which is handy.

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 97

 XAVI

Inside the mind of a

football
genius
In the Middle East and out
of sight, but definitely not
off the radar, Xavi reveals to
FourFourTwo his love of the
English game, his coaching
masterplan and how he
nearly left Barcelona at 19

Words Andrew Murray

Photography Shamil Tanna

X
avi looks confused. It’s probably
because he’s never seen a rattle before.
“And people actually take these to
games in England?” the perplexed
playmaker asks. Then he screams, as a
ratcheting cacophony fills the plush
confines of the Torch Hotel in Doha, Qatar.
“Bloody hell, that’s loud! It makes a much
better noise than those damn vuvuzelas in
South Africa.” What you might be thinking,
however, is why. Why the rattle? Why has
FourFourTwo travelled more than 3,000 miles
to the Middle East to interview a player who
admits he’s in semi-retirement in Qatar?
In leaving Camp Nou last May, albeit as a
Champions League-winning captain, Xavi also
left European football behind. So is the
Catalan conductor still relevant?
Put simply, yes. Xavi is footballing
royalty; the key to a team that has

FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES:

MAY 2016
98 FourFourTwo.com
 XAVI

FourFourTwo.com May 2016 99

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 99
 XAVI

dominated club football for a decade (and

continues to do so in his absence) with a
philosophy and style he embodies like nobody
else. And it isn’t just Barcelona: Spain’s
triumphs at three successive international
tournaments would be unthinkable, even
impossible, without this modest metronome
of 5ft 7in.
Yet there’s more to Xavier Hernandez Creus
than 17 seasons with Barcelona, 28 major
honours that include four Champions League
titles, two European Championships and a
World Cup, and being the poster boy for tiki-
taka. Perhaps more than any other player, he
feels football. And we want to find out what Xavi (bottom row,
makes football’s deepest thinker and part- centre), lines up
time historian tick. for Barça aged 18
If you want to know what’s next for
football’s most prodigious brain, and exactly
what he’s thinking, read on – especially if
you’re Adam Lallana. Or Danny Drinkwater.
Or, er, Craig Gardner.

“Our Whole house was obsessed with

Matt Le Tissier. He was outrageous”
Playing football has always been part of Xavi’s
life, and you get the impression that talking
about it has been as well. To this erudite
36-year-old, giving an interview represents an
opportunity to talk about football, rather than
the ordeal it is to many of today’s more
cosseted stars. The lines between an informal
chat over coffee and actual magazine
interview are blurred.
Greeting FFT in the hotel lobby with an
almost embarrassed apology that an
overrunning training session has delayed our Playing against Bayern in
meeting by less than half an hour, the first the Champions League
thing he does after enquiring about our
journey (seat, comfy; chicken pasty, sweaty) is
ask what England thinks about Leicester City’s
title challenge.
“My dad and brothers said
“Did you see that volleyed backheel from
Riyad Mahrez last night?” he asks, cooing over
I should go to Milan; only World Cup woe: not
the way Xavi wanted
the Algerian’s outrageous assist in the Foxes’
2-2 home draw with West Bromwich Albion.
my mum told me to stay” to bow out of the
international game
“Pffft, outrageous. I flicked over from La Liga
just to watch it. It was an awesome free-kick
from Craig Gardner, too. five, probably younger. It was an evening thinking tactically about football before I was
“Can you imagine if Leicester won the kick-off and everything was lit up. It was at school!”
league? Let’s hope they don’t blow up and get perfect. I went out of my mind seeing the Not even Joaquim – himself a professional
ahead of themselves, because it’s easy for pitch – totally delirious.” for Terrassa and Sabadell briefly and later a
perceptions to change. With older brothers Oscar and Alex as well coach – was spared the analytical
“The thing is, Leicester have a good team,” as sister Ariadna, Xavi and the family soon treatment. “We used to sit in the
he continues, after being briefly mobbed by a settled into life on Carrer de Galileu, a crowd at his games, discussing what
Costa Rican youth team hunting autographs. long, straight residential street in substitutions we’d make,” laughs
“They’re very compact, Jamie Vardy is so Terrassa, approximately 45 minutes Xavi. “Before each match, we’d
quick on the break and Riyad Mahrez has north of downtown Barcelona. Not a analyse the team-sheets, saying,
great quality. N’Golo Kante is a phenomenon day went by without little Xavier ‘Bloody hell, why’s he not
in midfield and Danny Drinkwater and going out to join his brothers for playing?! He’s great and this
Christian Fuchs, the left-back, are very solid, a kickabout. guy’s average!’ It was our
too. Robert Huth is huge at centre-back.” One day, Joaquim life.” That passion
This fixation on football was inevitable, ever went along to keep an extended to the front
since his mother Maria Merce first met his eye on his five-year-old room’s designated
father Joaquim over games of table football son. “He came up to me ‘football couch’, from
at her parents’ bar in the early 1970s. “Our and said, ‘Why don’t you Drinkwater and which the family “must
house was fanatical about football,” recalls join in the attack? You’ll Mahrez have have watched thousands of
Xavi. “Me and my brothers used to collect score’,” says Xavi, a smile enveloping his impressed Xavi games”. It was here that
stickers, especially around the World Cup. whole face. “Apparently, I responded, ‘But Xavi’s love of English football
“My first memory is being taken to Camp dad, if I go up there, who’s left in defence developed, thanks to one man
Nou for the first time. I must have been about to protect the keeper?’ I was already in particular.

100 FourFourTwo.com

“In Catalonia there used
to be a half-hour
programme every Monday
where they’d show the
best goals from the Premier
League,” Xavi recalls, delivering
his memory like a bedtime story
to a child. “Every week, Matt Le Tissier
would be on the show. Every single
week. I’m talking outrageous, sickening
goals, too: PUM, straight into the top corner;
PAM, left-foot flick and then right over a
defender to score against Newcastle; PUM,
incredible free-kick.
“We used to say, ‘This guy, Le Tissier, is
outrageous and he never goes to a big team.
He stays at Southampton. It’s incredible. He
could play for anyone!’ Our whole house was
obsessed with him.”
It wasn’t just Le Tissier, either, but English
football in general.
“I remember watching John Barnes at
Liverpool – wow, what a player he was – and
also the Manchester United
teams with David Beckham,
the Nevilles, Ryan Giggs and
Nicky Butt. In the same way
that this Barcelona team is a
reference point for Europe, Alex
Ferguson’s Man United were
worldwide references for years.
“Going further back, there was Bryan
Robson, who I admired as a great fighter,
and the legendary Eric Cantona. English
football has always been in Spain’s
retina. England breathes football in a
way Spain doesn’t. In England, a
footballer is like a god.
The reason “The English game is an example of
Xavi loves the how to act, because you never cheat.
Premier League You’re noble, even in defeat. Look at
Bobby Robson as Barcelona coach:
a true gentleman. No one has a
bad word to say about him.
You’re an example of the
game’s traditions.”
XAVI
The Spanish press dubbed Xavi ‘The
Windscreen Wiper’, because all he did
was pass from side to side
Xavi’s parents worried about their young son’s
petite physique, delaying his first Barcelona
trial until July 1991, when he was 11.
“I’ll never forget my dad driving me to the
game,” Xavi recalls, smiling while tapping the
side of his head. “He said, ‘Not many people
get this opportunity, so just do your best. If it
goes well, maybe they will sign you’. I was so
very nervous.
“I’d played most often just off a centre-
forward. They played me as a pure No.9. We
won a penalty and nobody else wanted it,
and as I was the centre-forward I thought I
should take it. I scored a hat-trick that day –
the only one I’ve ever scored, I think. I was
so happy.
“Then my dad told me the truth. The deal
was already done for me to sign, but he
hadn’t told me anything. He just wanted me
to play.”
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 101
 XAVI
On the other team that day was a
midfielder who was transfixed by what he
saw. “No one could get the ball off him,” that
lad said years later, by which point he was a
defender. “I just thought, ‘They’re never going
to sign me if there are kids this good!’”
For the record, Carles Puyol didn’t have a
bad career either. Commuting back to
Terrassa every evening for dinner (his mum
wouldn’t let him stay as a boarder at La
Masia), Xavi would never wear his Barcelona
tracksuit, so he could avoid the attention of
his peers. While his friends would stay out
late, he’d sit on the football couch with dad
Joaquim or indulge his other passion of
mushroom picking.
His first purchase with a youth-team pay
packet of 4,000 pesetas (about £20) was a
toaster, bought on Las Ramblas for his mum.
By 1997, he was a Barcelona B regular. A
year later he made his official first-team
debut under Louis van Gaal, against Mallorca
in the Spanish Supercopa, and scored in a 3-1
aggregate defeat.
Despite a disastrous start, losing four
consecutive games in December, Barcelona
won the league, and Xavi was voted Spain’s
breakthrough player. In April 1999, he
excelled as Spain won the FIFA Under-20
World Cup in Nigeria.
Yet despite being the world’s most
promising 19-year-old, Xavi was worried –
worried about the comparisons to his idol Pep
Guardiola and even taking his hero’s place.
Impressed by what he’d seen in Nigeria, Milan
vice-president Adriano Galliani was prepared
to pay Xavi’s release clause.
“Pep was 27 or 28 and in the best condition
of his life,” Xavi recalls. “My dad said, ‘It’s
better you go, because here they’ve got a
ready-made team’. There didn’t seem to be a
place in the team for me, while Milan said I’d
play with Demetrio Albertini in midfield.”
It feels incongruous to hear Xavi talk about
the mere possibility of playing in another
European team – yet it very nearly happened.
“My brothers said I should go, too,” he adds.
“My mum was the only one who thought I
should stay. Ultimately, it didn’t feel right. The
legend goes that she stopped it, but the
decision was mine.”
However, Xavi’s Camp Nou life would get
worse before it got better. Van Gaal used him
sparingly, and it took Guardiola’s departure
for Brescia in 2001 for his diminutive
successor to cement a first-team place. Yet
Xavi was tacitly blamed for his idol saying
goodbye. From that 1999 Liga title, Barcelona
went six years without a trophy.
“Barcelona weren’t even in the running for
any titles in that spell,” says Xavi, wearing a
disappointed expression for the only time
during our conversation. “The press looked for
a scapegoat, and I was the best target. I was
slow. I was ‘out of date’. I should be put
down. Barcelona couldn’t play at Europe’s top
level with me in midfield and had to look for
taller, stronger players.
“We had a philosophy, but they wanted a
change because of three or four years without
a trophy. I understand criticism, but they were
102 FourFourTwo.com
Guardiola’s exit
paved the way
for Xavi
“Clap, lads – it’s
what the English do”
“Foreign coaches took the
English game – long ball,
No.9s – and improved it”
really strong. Some became
personal, which affected my
home life and hurt me a lot. It
was like ‘Xavi has no merit’.”
The Spanish press had even
dubbed Xavi Parabrisas, or ‘the
windscreen wiper’, because
supposedly all he ever did was
pass the ball from side to side.
“You have two roads with
critics: you get depressed or you
fight,” he says, heartache
replaced by iron-willed
conviction. “I’m stubborn and
pig-headed and this hardened
me to prove what I can do. Bit by
bit, I reached the top of the
game. I’m very proud of that.”
At one point, Barcelona even sounded out
potential suitors for his sale. What helped
keep Xavi sane were European trips to
England. He made his European debut –
before his Liga bow – coming off the bench at
Old Trafford in September 1998, to spark a
love of English fandom that persists to the
present day.
“There’s no comparison between the
English football fan and the Spanish one: the
respect there is for the players, win or lose,”
says Xavi. “I remember winning 3-1 at Anfield
in November 2001, playing incredible football
against Liverpool. The fans remained for the
whole game and never stopped applauding
their team. I mean, we couldn’t have played
better, but in the
90th minute they
were still applauding
Liverpool. I couldn’t
believe it. I was
speechless.”
Warming to the
theme, he skips
forward to the
present day. “I
spoke to
Juan Mata and
David de Gea at
the end of the
season before last.
Manchester United finished seventh, but after
the final game at Old Trafford, the fans
applauded the players off. That’s unthinkable
in Spain. You’d have to flee to the dressing
room as quickly as possible, because
otherwise they’ll lynch you.
“It’s a family occasion. Son, father,
grandfather, nephew – they all go together.
It’s a spectacle you don’t get anywhere else;
everyone has the shirt and feels part of the
club. You’re the game’s inventors – the
essence of football.”
It took a change of manager for Xavi to feel
part of Barcelona again. When Frank Rijkaard
arrived in 2003, along with new president
Joan Laporta, Barcelona reconnected with the
past. And the pass.
“It was like we’d returned to [Johan] Cruyff:
a 4-3-3 with the focus on possession,” Xavi
admits. “For four years, we’d bought players
that were too young to make the
difference in games. Then we signed
Deco, Ronaldinho and Samuel Eto’o –
players who were already
internationals. We got back our
dream. Ilusion.”
League runners-up to Rafa Benitez’s
Valencia in Rijkaard’s first season,
Barcelona then won consecutive
domestic titles and the 2006
Champions League with trademark
attacking football. Though Xavi
remained on the bench for the latter
through an untimely injury, he had
been freed from his role as the lone
defensive pivote, which had limited
his creativity. Alongside Deco, and
backed up by Edmilson or Thiago
Motta, Xavi had licence to attack.
To assist. To make a difference.
 XAVI

“For me, the assist is more important
than the goal. It’s As good as it gets”
The Barcelona romance had reignited, but
it was in the summer of 2008 that it was
definitively consummated as, following
Euro 2008, Pep Guardiola returned to Xavi’s
daily life, seven years after his Camp Nou exit
as a player. Rijkaard’s final months in charge
had been defined by an increasingly
unmotivated squad filled with far too many
inflated egos. Not any more.
“Pep wrings you like an orange,” Xavi says,
performing the action as he talks. “It’s
fantastic when your coach does that. He was
a master in every training session, meeting
and team talk. He’s a perfectionist and a born
leader who always takes you to the edge.”
It all began with a July chat between the
former team-mates at the squad’s St
Andrew’s training base in Scotland. Bayern
Munich were sniffing around.
The former Barcelona captain recalls: “I said
to Pep, ‘Do you count on me for this season?’
He replied, ‘Xavi, I can’t imagine this team
without you in it’. I didn’t need to hear
anything else.
“I remember thinking after the first session
in Scotland – always with the ball, great
pressure, intensity from Pep – ‘things are
going to go well for us’. I wouldn’t say I
predicted that we’d go on to win six trophies
in that first season, but he excited me. He
transmits his ideas perfectly to you and has
an incredible idea of how to play football –
pretty much perfect.”
That 2008-09 season Xavi scored nine goals
and made 27 assists – the best figures of his
career – as Barcelona swept all before them
to an unprecedented sextuple of La Liga,
Champions League, Copa del Rey, Supercopa,
UEFA Super Cup and FIFA Club World Cup with
a short, fast passing style that still endures.
“Nothing compares to that season and I
don’t think anything ever will again,”
beams Xavi, this Doha hotel meeting
room positively aglow with pride. “It’s
the best football I’ve ever seen from a
team. Incredible.
“We had practically 80 per cent of
the ball in every game. We dominated
matches from the first minute. We had
20 to 25 chances every single game.
We won everything. Six titles! We were
almost unbeatable.
“Four years earlier, that was
unthinkable – I’d been Barcelona’s
problem, but now I was the key. Had
my football changed? No chance – I
was playing in the same way as when I
was 11. The results had changed.
That’s the effect.”
The trophies kept on coming (title
wins in 2010 and 2011 completed a
Spanish league treble), with Xavi still the
poster boy of the Guardiola revolution. In the
brilliant 3-1 Champions League final win over
Manchester United at Wembley in 2011, he
gave nothing short of a recital – later
described by Sir Alex Ferguson as “like being
on a carousel” – in setting up the opening
goal for Pedro.
“For me, the assist is more important than
the goal,” begins Xavi. He would say that, of
course, but the dizzying blur of hand signals
that accompanies his mid-air sketch of that
Wembley opener is proof of the difficulty of
that pass.
“I saw the United players running to
pressurise me. Pedro lost his marker
brilliantly. He came inside, stopped, then
reversed out between two defenders to
receive the ball. I’d already seen him, but I
had to wait, wait, wait… then PUM, with the
outside of the foot.

Legendary player, future coach?

Xavi isn’t the only legend being tipped to return to his former club as manager

Martin Palermo
Boca Juniors
The Buenos Aires side recently
appointed Guillermo Barros
Schelotto as their new coach,
but their all-time record scorer
Words Louis Massarella
Henrik Larsson
Celtic
What’s Swedish for ‘no-brainer’?
Having already turned down the
Hoops’ hotseat in 2014, Larsson –
who has admitted he’d like to
Philipp Lahm
Bayern Munich
“The most intelligent player” Pep
Guardiola has ever trained retired
from international football
because he felt leading Germany
John Terry
Chelsea
Liverpool greats Robbie Fowler,
Steven Gerrard and Jamie
Carragher are all doing their
coaching badges, but no English
Dennis Bergkamp
Ajax
Bergkamp has worked his way
up to assistant manager at the
club where he made his name.
But if his path at Ajax becomes

was also in the frame. With spells
in the Argentine top flight already
under his managerial belt, it’s
only a matter of time before
Palermo gets the nod.
manage the club one day – is
currently learning his trade at
Helsingborg in the Allsvenskan,
guiding them to a mid-table finish
last season.
to World Cup glory was as good as
it was ever going to get. Maybe
he’ll do likewise at club level and
take up coaching once Pep leaves
this summer...
club legend is more cut out for life
in the dugout than the Chelsea
captain. Despite being a
‘sleeves-up’ player, JT says he’ll be
a ‘shirt and tie’ gaffer.
blocked, could he one day fight it
out with former strike partner
Thierry Henry – who has just
completed his A Licence – for the
top job at Arsenal?

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 103

 XAVI
“Those three or four seconds between
making the pass and Pedro scoring gave me
goose bumps – pure elation. That through-
ball inside, to cut out an entire defensive line
in a major final, is as good as it gets. It was
thrilling under Pep.”
Luis Aragones would frequently
knock on Xavi’s door at 2am
It’s to be expected that Xavi reserves such
praise for Guardiola, his playing idol and the
coach with whom he is most associated
because of those four gluttonous seasons
from 2008-12. But Guardiola benefited from
having Xavi at the height of his considerable
powers during that campaign. The reason was
simple: Xavi’s other great coaching
inspiration, Luis Aragones.
“Only under Pep and Luis have I ever come
out of every team meeting or talk with the
feeling of... I don’t know…” Xavi begins, before
pausing to buy time to think, then breathing
in heavily to puff out his chest and
concluding, “...I suppose being so pumped up
from what he said. I’ve learned a lot under
the rest, but the sensation of taking
something from every word they said? Just
those two. Aragones changed everything.”
Aragones’ comments on Thierry Henry
should never be forgotten, but his four-year
104 FourFourTwo.com
spell as Spain boss from 2004 laid the
foundations for modern football’s greatest
international side. Much like pre-Pep
Barcelona, La Roja were struggling to turn a
talented squad into consistent winners.
Aragones made Xavi his conductor, frequently
knocking on his door at 2am to tell him, “I
want you to touch the ball more than anyone
else”, and Spain won Euro 2008.
“Luis was like an English ‘mister’ – actually,
it was all about his mentality,” Xavi recalls.
“He used to say, ‘You’re the best in the world’,
poking us individually in the
chest. ‘I’ve seen them all,
and I don’t tell lies’.”
Buoyed by a tense quarter-
final shootout victory against Italy, Spain
dispatched Russia 3-0 in the last four, but the
nerves returned for the final against
Germany. Thankfully, Aragones had one more
plan up his sleeve.
“He had the ‘quality’ of forgetting people’s
names,” Xavi smiles, trying and failing to stifle
a laugh. “Just before going down the tunnel,
he called us all around.
“He said, ‘Lads, I’ve got some news. Wallace
hasn’t trained’. Er, who the hell’s Wallace,
boss? ‘Wallace, the No.13, their playmaker’.
You mean Ballack. ‘Pah, Wallace, Ballack – it’s
all the same’. We all just fell about laughing
and suddenly we were no longer nervous for
the most important game in our careers.”
A relaxed Spain won 1-0, Xavi setting up
Fernando Torres for the winner. It was at Euro
2008 that he became christened ‘Maki’, short
for maquina, or ‘machine’.
“That tournament was the trampoline to
me becoming a big name in European
football – people woke up to me, I suppose,”
says the pass master. “It’s understandable. I
was 28 and I’d already played a lot of league
and Champions League games, but the
trophies hadn’t quite arrived. We weren’t
references for the world game like we were
about to become. Luis sent us on our orbit.”
The belief continued under Aragones’
successor, Vicente del Bosque, even after
losing the first game of the World Cup two
years later, 1-0 to Switzerland.
“I couldn’t sleep that night, so I watched
the whole game on repeat in my room,”
recalls Xavi. “In the morning I went to see
Del Bosque. He looked at me and said, ‘Xavi,
I’ve watched the game over and over and I
don’t think we should change a thing’. I was
so happy. ‘Boss’, I said, ‘it’s incredible we
lost that game. It’s pure f**king chance
they won. It’s an accident’. We carried on
the same road, knowing we’d be criticised,
but every game became a final.”
 XAVI

Honduras, Chile, Portugal, Paraguay, every game to qualify, but against We’re going to win everything, I know it’.
Germany and the Netherlands all Chile in the next game it was Life smiled on me that day.”
succumbed en route to La Roja’s first different. Real pressure. They wanted In January 2015, however, the dream was
World Cup before Euro 2012 was won revenge. And bang – 2-0, and that’s going sour. Barcelona trailed Real Madrid in
with embarrassing ease. your World Cup.” the league amid rumours of squad
By the 2014 World Cup, however, That premature exit weighed heavily in-fighting. “I was worried,” Xavi admits,
something had changed. All great on Xavi. He sensed the changing of the puffing out his cheeks. “I knew I’d be
teams’ spells atop football’s summit guard for both Spain (and promptly leaving at the end of the season. We were in
are cyclical, and by Brazil, Del Bosque’s retired from international football) and a bad way, not playing well, with problems
side was on its last legs. Barcelona. Carles Puyol had hung up his around the club. I was thinking, ‘Please, just
“Ultimately, we weren’t good boots, Victor Valdes had been one trophy – just one, to say goodbye to the
enough,” admits Xavi, sounding discarded and, much like Guardiola as fans, lifting a trophy as captain’.”
resigned, perhaps accepting the manager in 2012, Xavi felt tired. With Xavi as elder statesman knitting the
hand dealt by fate. “It was tough He admits that in July 2014 “the deal squad together, while picking up minutes as
having the Dutch first up, to leave was practically signed”. Then an the perfect controlling substitute to turn
Champions
determined for revenge from the old friend intervened in leads into victories, Barcelona’s season slid
League: check
final four years earlier. We were the name of dressing- through the gears and into history.
poor and didn’t room harmony. “The stars aligned for me in those last
pressure the ball “I’ll forever be in Luis three or four months,” he smiles, drifting off
enough, but losing Enrique’s debt because slightly as if recalling each of the 12
5-1 was too much. he convinced me to victories in Barcelona’s last 14 league
That affected us. stay,” admits Xavi of games that secured his eighth league title,
“I’d never seen us the then-incoming or every match en route to the Copa del Rey
play like that. We were Barcelona boss, a and Champions League finals.
making errors, both team-mate 17 years “I couldn’t believe the homage I got from
individually and as a previously. “He said Camp Nou in the last league match of the
team, that we hadn’t to me, ‘Xavi, stay one season against Deportivo La Coruna,” he
made in three more season. You recalls, his usually deep voice now crackling
tournaments together. can really help us. with emotion at the thought of the
We’d won practically
Copa del Rey
with my BFF:
check
 XAVI

Catalan football cathedral’s mosaic that
evening. “I got quite emotional.
“Then the Copa del Rey final was at home as
well, and I lifted the trophy with my great
friend Andres [Iniesta], the two of us in the
presidential box.
“Best of all, though, your last act in a
Barcelona shirt is to lift the Champions
League trophy as captain? Pffft, there can be
no better goodbye than that.”
“My ultimate objective is to coach
Barcelona. I’m not hiding that.
i consider it home”
Sat some 3,000 miles away in his new Qatari
base, Xavi smiles broadly at the memories,
without a trace of regret. So, what next for
the most successful Spanish footballer of his
generation? “Football’s still a hobby,” he says.
“That’s the secret. If I didn’t have training
every day, I’d play five-a-side with my mates.
“Listen, I’m playing in Qatar. It’s a
professional league – you can’t just coast
through games because everyone is well-
prepared physically and the teams are evenly
matched – but it’s not like Europe. Tactically,
it’s not that well developed. But I love playing
football and Al Sadd play a possession game,
so I touch the ball over 100 times per game.
“I’m here for football and I want to leave a
legacy for the 2022 World Cup.”
Life in the Middle East is good, barring the
traffic. After spending much of the previous
two days in horn-honking taxis that crawl to
“I’m a romantic and I hope
their destination, FFT knows how he feels.
In January, Xavi’s wife Nuria gave birth to
my career shows that. It’s
Nothing, however, stirs the Xavi blood quite
like his beloved Barcelona, who dominate the
new football couch.
“Barcelona are at another level,” he
says. “They don’t let the opposition breathe.
And those three up front… Wow. They
can score from anywhere. I’ve never seen
three players of such a high level in the same
team. Never. Messi, Suarez and Neymar are
just spectacular.
“But the whole team is too. Sergio Busquets
does everything in midfield, and yet he’s
never in the running for the Ballon d’Or. Come
“You’re thinking of on – that’s scandalous. Do people not watch
leaving Barcelona for football at all? Do you not understand that
Chelsea? Good one, Cesc” football isn’t about dribbling?”
The passion with which Xavi talks about the
game’s minutiae is all-consuming. He cares
for football’s past, present and future and
even offers up improvements.
“The first thing I’d do is create a set of rules
for the quality of the playing surface,” he spits
at one point, becoming ever more vociferous
by outlining his plan with a thump of his left
hand onto an open palm.
“Look, if I played tennis against Novak
Djokovic, he’d definitely beat me because he’s
better than me. What can I do to stand some
M-S-N made chance of winning? Go round his side of the
Xavi go W-O-W net and dig up the court.
“Well, the equivalent is allowed in football.
Teams intentionally worsen a pitch against
better opposition. It’s 2016 and that can’t be.
It’s bad for your knees and ankles – and what
about the spectacle?”

daughter Asia. “Being a father has changed

my life in the best way imaginable – she’s
incredible,” says Xavi. The family live on
Doha’s outskirts, in the same house that Raul
inhabited when he played for Al Sadd
between 2012 and 2014.
Just down the road is the Aspire
Academy, where Xavi’s next chapter has
already begun. Working with the Under-23
team, the 36-year-old is determined to put
the best football brain of his generation to
good use.
“I have no doubts,” he says, staring straight
and true at FFT. “I want to stay in football,
being close to the pitch. I would hate being
stuck in an office.
“I want to do something properly or not at
all. My ultimate objective is to coach
Barcelona. I’m not hiding that. I want to work
again for that house I consider a home.”
While studying for the necessary coaching
badges to do exactly that, Xavi will retreat to
his natural habitat: studying football.
“Whenever I have ten minutes to myself,
bang – the football goes on the TV. My wife
knows that, and she hates football,” he
laughs. “For example, tonight at 10pm, I’ll put
on La Liga and keep an eye on
the Premier League games, too. I’ll study the
line-ups, and who’s scored, on my phone.
“The Premier League’s new television rights
deal is great because everyone earns pretty
much the same. In Spain that doesn’t
happen. The difference between Real Madrid,
Barcelona and the rest is too much. No one
been all about the pass” “I think England could be an outside
bet at the Euros”
The time creeps towards 10pm
and football-watching and late-
can match the big two. night parenting await him at
“But in England, it’s not home, but you get the sense Xavi
so. For example, Stoke City, could talk all night as our
with good players like conversation again sways back to
Ibrahim Afellay, Bojan, English football.
Marko Arnautovic and “The standard is much higher
Xherdan Shaqiri, are able to now,” he explains. “In the past,
beat Chelsea no problem, there wasn’t as much natural
because the budget is more talent – just Rooney, Lampard,
or less the same as England’s
big teams.”
Xavi even takes in
Championship
games: “I’ve watched
Middlesbrough a
fair bit because of the former Espanyol
striker, Cristhian Stuani, and obviously the
coach, Aitor Karanka, who has had them
playing great football. I’ve seen a bit of
Brentford too.
“Lower-league football in England is
another world. The other day, near where
I live, a little English kid came up to me
asking for an autograph. I asked him
who he supported, expecting to hear
Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool,
Tottenham... ‘I’m a Sheffield United fan,’
he said. They’re in League One. League
One?! And this kid doesn’t care about
any other team other than Sheffield
United. Fantastic.”

106 FourFourTwo.com

Gerrard, and the rest were physical. Now you’ve got
Raheem Sterling; the guy [Adam] Lallana, quality; Eric
Dier, quality; [Dele] Alli, quality; [Jack] Wilshere,
quality. Then you have natural goalscorers – Vardy,
Kane – plus Rooney and physical guys at the back. I
think England could be an outside bet at the Euros.
“Foreign coaches going over there has undoubtedly
helped, taking the typically English game – direct, long
ball, second ball, typical No.9 to bring down the ball,
crosses into the box – and improved it.
“Mauricio Pochettino is doing a brilliant job at
Tottenham with that model. Pep going to Manchester
City will raise the league’s quality – he’s a game-
changer. Jurgen Klopp is a phenomenon. Jose
Mourinho, who they say is going to Manchester
United, is the same.
“I remember when he came to coach us at Barça B as
Louis van Gaal’s assistant. You could see he wanted to
be a coach, though I didn’t think he’d go so far in the
game. He’s a demanding winner, even if I do disagree
with the way he wants to play football – it’s all about
transitions and counter-attacks, not keeping the ball.”
If the last hour in the company of this most cerebral
of footballers has taught FFT anything, it’s that this is
what Xavi is determined to leave by way of legacy. All
that matters is the ball. And talent.
“Your physique is important, of course, and more so
in every era, it seems, but it’s the most talented
players who make the difference,” he says. “I’m a
romantic and I hope my career, which has been all
about the pass, has shown that. What does Cristiano
Ronaldo have? Talent to score. Neymar? Talent to
XAVI
dribble. Messi? The most talented player in history. The
day that stops, that’s the end of spectacle in football.
We should pack up and go to live by the sea, because
what’s the point?”
With that, hands are shaken, but just before Xavi
heads home to enjoy an evening’s La Liga and Premier
League football (tonight it will include a man-of-the-
match Adam Lallana display in a 3-0 win for Liverpool
at home to Manchester City) there’s just about time
for a FourFourTwo first.
We came to Qatar with a present.“Bloody hell!” Xavi
screams, barely able to contain himself as we present
English football’s No.1 fan with a signed Matt Le
Tissier shirt we happened to have lying around the
office. “Can I really keep this? It’s incredible. Do you
know him?!”
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 107
 FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES:
OCTOBER 2017

The

greatest
Champions League
games ever!
It’s 25 years since Europe’s holy grail got a total revamp,
and to celebrate FFT is counting down the best and most
bonkers matches. All together now: “THE CHAAAMPIONS...”

Words Andrew Murray, Nick Moore, James Maw


25
Dinamo Zagreb 1
Lyon 7
Group stage, 2011-12
Hands up if you can tell us who
scored the Champions League’s
fastest hat-trick. Hands up if you
were at a freezing cold Maksimir
Stadium that December night to
watch Lyon frontman Bafetimbi
Gomis put hosts Dinamo Zagreb
to the sword 7-1.
Needing a second-placed Ajax
to lose against Real Madrid and
a seven-goal swing to reach the
knockout stage, Lyon trailed to
Mateo Kovacic’s rebound before
all goalscoring hell broke loose.
“L ook what
it means!” Goal-fest
Gomis tapped in on half-time,
Maxime Gonalons scored in the
47th minute and then the former
bagged another two in the 48th
and 52nd to secure his hat-trick.
Lisandro Lopez, Jimmy Briand
and a fourth effort from Gomis
completed the massacre. Ajax
lost 3-0 and so Lyon progressed.
Dinamo sacked boss Krunoslav
Jurcic afterwards, apologising to
fans “for the embarrassment”.
FFT’s poor fingers have only just
recovered, six years later.
Handbags
24
Leeds United 4
Stuttgart 1
First round, second leg, 1992-93
The rebranded competition got
off to an inauspicious start when
Leeds and Stuttgart had to face
a ‘replay’ of their first-round tie
after drawing 4-4 on aggregate.
Confused? Well, so were the
Bundesliga champs, who won
the first leg at the Neckerstadion
3-0 before being trounced 4-1
back in Yorkshire. That should
have put them through on the
away goals rule, but in throwing
on Yugoslavian defender Jovo
Simanic as an 83rd-minute sub,
Stuff of champions Underdog
FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 109
GREATEST
CHAMPIOnS
LEAGUE GAMES
Stuttgart coach Christoph Daum
had unwittingly used more than
the three foreign players allowed.
Leeds were awarded a 3-0 win,
levelling the score on aggregate.
UEFA decided the solution was
a replay on neutral territory – the
Camp Nou – but the German side
weren’t impressed, claiming that
Leeds’ Welsh-born Gary Speed
was not a ‘home-grown’ player.
UEFA disagreed, and Leeds won
a play-off 2-1 thanks to Gordon
Strachan and Carl Shutt (far left).
Great comeback
 GREATEST
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23
Inter Milan 2
Schalke 5
Quarter-final, first leg, 2010-11

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope, it’s Manuel Neuer

heading clear a through-ball with a Superman
dive 27 seconds into a Champions League tie.
Unfortunately for the Schalke goalkeeper, Dejan
Stankovic was lurking on the edge of the centre
circle and fired a first-time volley over Neuer’s
head. The 89 minutes that followed were no less
enthralling, a 33-year-old Raul rolling back the
years thanks to awful defending by the holders.

22
Borussia Dortmund 3
Juventus 1
Final, 1996-97

“You go on and score the decisive goal,” coach Ottmar

Hitzfeld instructed Dortmund’s midfielder Lars Ricken
just before replacing Stephane Chapuisat in the 1997
final. It took the one-club man 16 seconds to follow
his manager’s orders, his delicious chip – with his first
touch – securing a famous 3-1 win.
It had been a game of substitutes, Alessandro Del
Piero replacing Sergio Porrini at the break to re-energise
the Old Lady after Karl-Heinz Riedle’s first-half double.
Riedle (left) had his own premonition, waking at 3.30am
on the day of the game in a cold sweat. “I just dreamt
that I’ll score two goals,” he panted.

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21
Hamburg 4
Juventus 4
Group stage, 2000-01

List all of the essential ingredients
for a group-stage classic. An early
goal? A keeper scoring? A thrilling
comeback? A late and contentious
equaliser? Tony Yeboah?
Just five reasons why Hamburg’s
4-4 draw against Carlo Ancelotti’s
Juventus deserves mythical status.
Igor Tudor’s sixth-minute header –
and maniacal celebration in which
the Croat ran half the length of the
pitch – set the tone for a see-saw
encounter with former Leeds hero
Yeboah in the thick of it. When the
home Hamburg keeper Hans-Jorg
Butt levelled from the spot for 3-3
with 18 minutes remaining – after
a bizarrely stuttering run-up for
19
a man who had scored nine times
in the previous campaign – still the
game was not done.
Nor when Niko Kovac tapped in
from six yards in the 82nd minute.
Luckily for Juventus, gravity failed
Filippo Inzaghi inside the penalty
area with two minutes to go after
a shirt pull. The frontman dusted
himself down and secured a first
4-4 draw in the Champions League.
Hamburg boss Frank Pagelsdorf
Inter Milan 1
said at full-time, “It’s not often that
you are in a position to overturn
a 3-1 scoreline against a club like
arsenal 5
Juventus. But the players put in
Group stage, 2003-04
a great performance and they
won’t forget that one in a hurry.”

Arsenal fans could have been forgiven for arriving

at the San Siro with some trepidation. True, they
had won ten of their opening 13 league matches,

20
but defeats to Inter (3-0) and Dynamo Kiev (2-1)
and a goalless draw with Lokomotiv Moscow left
the Gunners bottom of their group with only four
points from as many encounters.
On the plus side, they did have Thierry Daniel
Henry. 26 and at the peak of his powers, the

Barcelona 0 French forward tore apart an Inter defence that

contained future World Cup winners Marco
Materazzi and Fabio Cannavaro.

Dynamo Kiev 4 Beginning with a first-time side-foot from the

Group stage, 1997-98
In 1986, a nine-year-old child had to be evacuated
from his home in Kiev’s suburbs after the Chernobyl
nuclear reactor 80 miles north exploded, spewing
a radioactive cloud into the atmosphere.
11 years later, Andriy Shevchenko was scoring
a hat-trick against a Barça side that featured Rivaldo
and Luis Figo. “In Kiev, we had beaten Barcelona 3-0
and a friend said, ‘Let’s see how you do in the return,’”
Sheva later laughed. “He bet me that I wouldn’t score
three goals. He ended up buying dinner.”
Kiev reached the semi-finals the following season
before Shevchenko moved on to Milan.
edge of the area, Henry was unstoppable, also
setting up Freddie Ljungberg four minutes after
the interval to fire the Londoners into a 2-1 lead.
Henry’s movement and probing proved far too
much for a shattered Nerazzurri rearguard, who
allowed Henry, Edu and Robert Pires to each find
the net in the last five minutes.
“Some players, when they have got the will,
are uncontrollable,” wrote Italian paper Gazzetta
dello Sport the day after Arsenal’s emphatic win.
“Yesterday, Henry had all the will in the world. He
massacred Inter. Nothing controversial, no sorrow,
only applause for Mr Attack.”
“The only performance I can compare this with
was England’s 5-1 in Munich,” said Ashley Cole at
full-time. “But this was even better.” So good, in
fact, that the Gunners won this game comfortably
despite Pascal Cygan’s presence at centre-back...

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18
Croatian forward Dado Prso benefited most
from a staggeringly open game, netting four
times in the competition’s highest-scoring
match until Dortmund’s 8-4 win over Legia
Warsaw in November 2016.
Deportivo were certainly no mugs, having

Monaco 8 finished second in La Liga in 2001-02 above

Real Madrid and Barcelona, but this was a day

Deportivo 3
they’d wish to forget.
It was only once the score reached 7-3 on
52 minutes that the teams seemingly chose
Group stage, 2003-04 to play a little more cautiously. Monaco went
on to make the Gelsenkirchen finale, where
their own defensive fallibility ultimately cost
them against Porto.

Ajax 5
16
Bayern Munich 2
Semi-final, second leg, 1994-95

The Amsterdam side were of course dominant
in Europe in the 1970s, but their mid-90s vintage
was almost as iconic. It was an incredible team
featuring Edwin van der Sar, Clarence Seedorf,
Marc Overmars, Edgar Davids, Patrick Kluivert
After a goalless first leg in Germany, Louis van
Gaal’s side took an early lead courtesy of a Jari
Litmanen header only to get pegged back by
Marcel Witeczek. But with half-time approaching,
the Dutch giants took a stranglehold, with Finidi

17
and the De Boer twins – a collection of starlets
easily as exciting as Man United’s Class of ’92.
They may not have won three straight
European Cups like Cruyff & Co. had
done 20 years before, but they did
manage to secure one. The most
George rocketing one in from just outside the box
and Ronald de Boer netting for 3-1. A minute into
the second half, Nwankwo Kanu (below) threaded
through Litmanen, who walloped home number
four. Mehmet Scholl got one back from the spot
but the Germans were buried. Overmars scored

Manchester city 5 devastating performance of that

run was their demolition of Bayern
at Amsterdam’s Olympic Stadium.
a fifth in the final two minutes to put the icing on
a phenomenal display and ensure Ajax’s place
in the final, where they would defeat Milan 1-0.

Monaco 3
Last 16, first leg, 2016-17

This see-saw thriller at the Etihad Stadium witnessed

the ‘arrival’ of Leonardo Jardim’s dynamic young side
despite defeat. An unexpectedly open match - the first
time eight goals had been scored in the opening leg of
a Champions League knockout tie – swung to-and-fro,
with the Ligue 1 upstarts leading 2-1 and 3-2 before
City came on strong with efforts from Sergio Aguero,
John Stones and Leroy Sané. The Blues thought they’d
had a lucky escape, until a 3-1 loss in the return leg
three weeks later sent Pep Guardiola’s men packing.

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15
Barcelona 1
Inter Milan 0
Semi-final, second leg, 2009-10

“The players left their blood out on the pitch,” Jose

Mourinho proudly announced after a narrow defeat
at the Camp Nou that was enough for his Inter side
to scrape into the 2010 final. Their performance was
typically Mourinho: dogged, defensive and decisive –
a plan borne of necessity due to the early red card
for Thiago Motta (top).
A terrific 3-1 first-leg win had put the treble-chasing
Italians in control, but with the likes of Lionel Messi,
Xavi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic among their ranks, the
reigning Spanish and European kings were more than
capable of recovering.
Motta’s dismissal – for appearing to catch Sergio
Busquets in the neck – was farcical, thanks to the
Barça midfielder’s comic overreaction. Busquets hit
the deck clutching his face before peeping at the
referee through his fingers. Inter were not amused.
Even Cameroonian striker Samuel Eto’o mucked in
defensively as the Nerazzurri clung on for dear life.
Gerard Pique scored late on, but it was not enough.
When the full-time whistle finally sounded, Mourinho
maniacally sprinted across the pitch, windmilling his
arm like an Iberian Mick Channon. His celebrations
were only halted when a Camp Nou groundsman
turned on the sprinklers.

14
In an era when all-English clashes were
ten a penny, this encounter was surely
the pick of the bunch. Chelsea had won
3-1 at Anfield, but appeared in danger
after a cheeky Fabio Aurelio free-kick
and Xabi Alonso penalty brought the

CHELSEA 4 Reds level by the interval.

Second-half strikes by Didier Drogba,

LIVERPOOL 4
Quarter-final, second leg, 2008-09
Alex (a bullet of a free-kick) and Frank
Lampard turned the tide, only for Lucas
and Dirk Kuyt to quickly put the visitors
back ahead on the night. Lampard’s late
strike settled Blues nerves and ensured
a semi-final showdown with Barcelona
(and Tom Henning Ovrebo).

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13
The birth of two rivalries – Chelsea vs Barcelona and

12
Jose Mourinho vs football. After a 2-1 first-leg defeat
at the Camp Nou in which Didier Drogba was sent off,
Chelsea gaffer Mourinho accused Barça counterpart
Frank Rijkaard of entering the referee’s room during
half-time for a cosy chat with Anders Frisk. The Swede
subsequently received death threats and would soon

Liverpool 3
quit the game. UEFA referees’ committee chairman
Volker Roth labelled Mourinho “the enemy of football”.
Chelsea flew out of the blocks in the return leg with
Eidur Gudjohnsen, Frank Lampard and Damien Duff
firing Chelsea into a 3-0 advantage after 20 minutes.
Ronaldinho halved the aggregate deficit from the spot
Olympiacos 1
chelsea 4 ten minutes later, then provided the most incredible
moment of the tie.
Group stage, 2004-05

Barcelona 2
Last 16, second leg, 2004-05
Andres Iniesta shifted the ball into the Brazilian’s
path, then burst towards the box expecting a return
pass. Ronnie instead poked the ball with the outside
of his boot beyond a jungle of players into the bottom
corner. Chelsea now trailed on away goals, but a John
Terry header sent the Blues through on a night that
ended in chaos with Barça involved in a tunnel scrap.
Liverpool’s other European miracle of 2004-05.
The Reds entered the final group match three
points behind the Greeks, needing a win by two
clear goals to sneak through on head-to-head
having lost 1-0 away. Rivaldo put Olympiacos
1-0 up, but the unlikely duo of Florent Sinama
Pongolle and Neil Mellor made it 2-1. With the
minutes ticking down, Jamie Carragher lobbed
the ball into the box for Mellor, who nodded it
down for Steven Gerrard to wallop home (top).

11
Barcelona 3
Manchester united 1
Final, 2010-11

It is hard to imagine a team ever playing quite as

well as this again. This was surely the pinnacle for
Pep Guardiola’s Barça, who wiped the floor with
United in trademark tiki-taka style. Pedro’s cool
finish put the Catalans in front at Wembley, only
for Wayne Rooney to sweep home the equaliser.
But then Pep’s men started to move up several
gears. Lionel Messi surged forward to regain the
lead before David Villa bent a glorious third past
Edwin van der Sar from distance. A masterclass.

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10
Real Madrid 4
If ever a contest came to define the destinies of
two participants, then it was the 1974 European
Cup Final. When Bayern Munich equalised with the
last kick of the game – winning a replay two days
later 4-0 – they went on to retain the trophy twice
and become a European superpower.
Atletico Madrid, on the other hand, became el
Atletico Madrid 1
Pupas, ‘the jinxed one’, doomed forever to be the
bridesmaids. Diego Simeone’s men may have just
won the La Liga title for the first time since 1996
Final, 2013-14 and taken four points from six against their city
rivals Real domestically, but the hangover from
a 14-year winless streak (ended only the season
earlier) over Los Blancos remained.
9
Werder Bremen 5
Anderlecht 3
Group stage, 1993-94
GREATEST
CHAMPIOnS
LEAGUE GAMES
Diego Costa lasted only eight minutes – having
failed to recover from a hamstring injury picked up
in Atletico’s title-winning draw against Barcelona
the weekend before – but Los Colchoneros were the
epitome of a Simeone team, Diego Godin opening
the scoring, having also netted at the Camp Nou.
Heroic in defence, Atletico kept Real at bay until
92 minutes and 48 seconds when Sergio Ramos
repeated history to equalise. Shattered and out of
substitutes, Atletico were battered in extra time as
Real clinched their 10th European Cup with goals
from Gareth Bale, Marcelo and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Because if there had been one thing inexplicably
missing from this game, it was CR7 with his top off.
His side 3-0 down with 24 minutes to play against
the Belgian champions, things weren’t looking too
rosy for Bremen’s manager Otto Rehhagel. But he
always believed, mainly because he had Wynton
Rufer in his ranks. The New Zealander (left) may
not be a household name, but so impressed was
Rehhagel with the forward’s technique in his first
training session, the coach asked him, “Why aren’t
you playing for Real Madrid?”
Rufer’s dinked 66th-minute effort offered hope,
a Rune Bratseth header six minutes later genuine
belief. Panic duly infected Anderlecht’s rearguard,
the goal avalanche ending with Rufer’s second.
The Miracle of the Weser, the river that runs
through Bremen, was born.
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LEAGUE GAMES

Borussia Dortmund 3
Malaga 2
Quarter-final, second leg, 2012-13

Having breezed through a group that featured
Manchester City and Real Madrid and waltzed
past Shakhtar Donetsk in the last 16, Jurgen
Klopp’s men were faced with the Champions
League newbies, Malaga. His opposite number
Manuel Pellegrini had been well backed by the
La Liga club’s Qatari owners and could call on
experienced campaigners in Jeremy Toulalan,
Joaquin and Roque Santa Cruz but also a wily
young schemer called Isco.
The opening leg in Spain had ended goalless,
but the second one certainly didn’t disappoint.
Joaquin fired the Anchovies ahead, then Robert
Lewandowski levelled shortly before the break.
The second half was end-to-end, and with BVB
pushing for the victory, the visitors broke away
and Eliseu’s 82nd minute tap-in looked to have
won it. Thanks to the away goals rule, the hosts
needed to score twice in eight minutes. Well, eight
minutes and injury time.
Marco Reus netted in the first of those added
minutes before Felipe Santana’s bundled winner
(right), with Malaga furious he was not flagged
offside. Klopp, as you’d expect, absolutely lost it.

7
Juventus 2
Manchester united 3
Semi-final, second leg, 1998-99

To describe Roy Keane’s display as Keano inspired the Red Devils into
among his best in a United shirt is the Camp Nou final through sheer

like saying that the Sistine Chapel
has a pretty ceiling.
When offside’s Filippo Inzaghi
put the Old Lady 2-0 up inside 11
minutes (and 3-1 on aggregate),
6
force of will. The captain scored,
got booked and played a key role Modern football protocol dictates you
in Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole’s don’t celebrate goals against former
goals to reach a showpiece that employers, especially if you’re on loan
he would miss due to suspension. and your parent club are paying 65 per
cent of your wages.

Monaco 3
Not if you are Fernando Morientes...
With Monaco 5-2 down on aggregate
to a side including Raul, Ronaldo and

Real Madrid 1 Zinedine Zidane and with 45 minutes

left, Morientes led an epic comeback.
First he set up Ludovic Giuly (above),
Quarter-final, before his header – and celebration –
second leg, 2003-04 gave the hosts genuine hope. When
Giuly scored again, Real were finished.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” Morientes
said at full-time. We’re sure he did.

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5 Barcelona 0
Deportivo 4
Milan 0
Quarter-final,
second leg, 2003-04
No team had ever managed to overturn
a three-goal first-leg deficit in the history
of the Champions League, as Deportivo
tried to overcome a 4-1 mauling by
holders Milan at the San Siro.
Manager Javier Irureta, however, had
a dream. Literally, becoming convinced
of his players’ success on the morning
of the match. ‘El Rifle’ Walter Pandiani,
Juan Carlos Valeron (far right) and Albert
Luque gave Depor a 3-0 half-time lead.
Fran’s winner on 76 minutes left Carlo
Ancelotti looking like he’d seen a ghost.
“The game turned out exactly the way
I dreamt it,” Irureta said at full-time. “It
was almost mission impossible, but we
gave a sensational first-half display to
get the three goals that we needed.”
GREATEST
CHAMPIOnS
LEAGUE GAMES
Milan 4
4
Final, 1993-94
“You’re better than them,” Barça coach Johan Cruyff
told his team as they took to the field. “You are going
to win.” His players, who’d won the trophy two years
earlier and four consecutive La Ligas, took him at his
word. “We had far too much confidence,” right-back
Albert Ferrer told FFT. “We thought it would be easy
and if we played to 60 or 70 per cent, we would win.”
Centre-back Miguel Angel Nadal recalls the squad
thinking they were “guaranteed” to win, especially
with Europe’s deadliest forwards – Hristo Stoichkov
and Romario – upfront.
Fabio Capello had got other ideas, though. Able to
“relax” because Cruyff didn’t select Michael Laudrup,
having reached UEFA’s foreigner limit, the Rossoneri
nullified Barcelona’s supply line with Marcel Desailly
a midfield destroyer. He also scored the last goal in
an emphatic victory. Daniele Massaro netted two but
it was playmaker Dejan Savicevic who stole the show.
“Without question, Dejan is the player with whom
I had the most rows,” admitted Capello back in 2008.
“He hardly trained, and whenever he was on the pitch
everybody else had to work twice as hard, but he was
an exceptional talent.”
The Yugoslav’s 47th-minute lob was the sort of goal
that Barcelona would score. Cruyff’s Dream Team were
never the same again.
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3
MAnCHESTER UnITED 2
Bayern Munich 1
Final, 1998-99

Close your eyes and try to remember
as much as you can about the first 90
minutes of the showpiece that inspired
what’ll undoubtedly be Alex Ferguson’s
epitaph: “Football, bloody hell.”
Bayern’s early strike might vaguely
ring a bell: Ronny Johnsen upending
Carsten Jancker for a free-kick, which
was swerved into Peter Schmeichel’s
net by Mario Basler. But beyond that?
You have probably forgotten the Red
Devils playing quite crisply but creating
very little; Bayern hitting the woodwork
twice; some weak efforts at goal from
both Ryan Giggs and Jesper Blomqvist.
Injury time, however, is now seared
into the brain. David Beckham’s corner
and a mishit Giggs effort turned in by
substitute Teddy Sheringham looked
to have ensured extra time... but then
another corner was headed down by
Sheringham and poked home by the
impishly ecstatic Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
A memorable knee-slide, a mobbing
and a noise recalled by Italian referee
Pierluigi Collina as a “lion’s roar” would
follow. As Samuel Kuffour sank to the
turf and thumped it in despair, United
toasted the greatest three minutes of
their storied history.

Barcelona 6
2
Paris Saint-Germain 1
Last 16, second leg, 2016-17

“This is a sport for crazy people,” said
Barça coach Luis Enrique afterwards.
“I’d like to cry, but tears do not come
out.” Dumbfoundedness seemed like
the appropriate response in the wake
of the most preposterous game of
football in recent Champions League
memory. Barça were playing only for
pride, really, having been flagellated
4-0 in the French capital three weeks
earlier, and yet they raced into a 3-0
lead within 50 minutes thanks to Luis
Suarez (who was at his devious and
divey best), an own goal from Layvin
Kurzawa and a Lionel Messi penalty.
The swell of hope around the Camp
Nou was brutally punctured, however,
when Edinson Cavani’s 62nd-minute
strike left the Catalans needing three
more to go through. And in the last
five minutes, they somehow got ’em.
Two Neymar goals and a late Sergi
Roberto winner prompted scenes of
delirium on an industrial scale. Only
Gerard Pique seemed to know how
to respond. “There will be a lot of love
made tonight,” the central defender
laughed at full-time. Shakira, Shakira.

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1
“You couldn’t write the script” is sport’s stupidest unbearably, but there were still many snapshots
cliché – it would be relatively simple to write the to enjoy: Jerzy Dudek’s point-blank save to deny
script – but the Miracle of Istanbul, as it must be Shevchenko, Gerrard’s demonic drive and Jamie
legally referred to at all times, remains European Carragher’s cramp-ravaged warfare.
football’s most implausible and cinematic smash. Following Dudek’s Bruce Grobbelaar-inspired
It could not completely be billed as an underdog spaghetti-leg nostalgia, and his saving of that
story: Liverpool were well-drilled and had talent final spot-kick at 12.29am local time, the script
in their XI. But this was a side with Djimi Traore at was complete. The volume of the travelling Kop
left-back against a side who had Paolo Maldini at was insane. Liverpool had their fifth European
left-back; a gleaming Milanese XI containing Pirlo, Cup and a local hero in Gerrard to beatify. The
Nesta, Gattuso, Seedorf, Cafu and Shevchenko up Champions League had its greatest ever game.
against Steve Finnan, Harry Kewell and Milan Baros
– in a Liverpool squad that had finished 37 points
behind Chelsea that year.
What truly set this showdown apart was the raw
shock of the comeback. After Maldini had scored
from Milan’s opening attack, Hernan Crespo added
two more and Kaka ran amok. The humiliation of

Milan 3
the Reds and the elation of their detractors during
half-time appeared total (just imagine if Twitter
had existed). They were toast: the extraordinary

liverpool 3 rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone at the interval

(2-3 pens) – Final, 2004-05
was defiance, not hope.
But then the madness kicked in: Didi Hamann
muffled Kaka, Steven Gerrard galloped forward,
and in six minutes – thanks to Gerrard, Vladimir
Smicer and Xabi Alonso – Liverpool were level.
As the shootout neared, the tension ratcheted

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WORLD CUP
ICONS

WORLD CUP From a one-armed Uruguayan

to a German full-back’s fitting
farewell, via Hurst’s hat-trick,
Maradona’s magic and Spain’s
dynamic duo, we
honour the heroes
and headline
moments from all
20 World Cup finals

Words James Eastham, Alec Fenn,

Uli Hesse, Martin Mazur, Steve Morgan,
Andrew Murray, Gary Parkinson,
Alison Ratcliffe, Paul Simpson

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 WORLD
WORLD CUP
CUP
FROm THE FFT ARCHIVES: may 2018 ICONS
ICOnS

Your

WORLD
CUP
STARTS HERE
WORLD CUP
ICONS

1958
PELÉ
“Pelé is obviously infantile. He lacks the necessary fighting spirit.”
That was Brazil team psychologist Joao Carvalhaes’ stark verdict on the
17-year-old striker who, averaging a goal a game in his first full season
at Santos, had forced his way onto the fringe of the Selecao’s 1958
World Cup squad.
The verdict must have shaken Pelé, who was, in his own words, just
a “skinny little black boy” rigorously applying boiling hot towels to his
injured right knee as he struggled to get fit. All his hopes now rested on
coach Vicente Feola. Would he dare defy the psychologist?
Losing the 1950 World Cup on home soil to Uruguay had felt, Pelé
recalled, “like the end of a war, with Brazil the loser and many people
dead”. The only way to erase the stain on Brazil’s honour was to win
the Jules Rimet Trophy in 1958, and the only way to do that – newly
elected Brazilian FA president Joao Havelange determined – was to
micromanage the squad.
Havelange’s technical commission subjected players to a battery
of physical and psychological tests. Almost every member had some
intestinal parasites and many suffered from long-term malnutrition,
anemia or syphilis. More than 500 teeth were extracted from players,
many of whom had never visited a dentist.
Carvalhaes then profiled Feola’s squad. Convinced that fair-skinned
players helped to make a team emotionally stable, he concluded that
Garrincha, a tiny, mixed-race winger from the favelas, was mentally
unfit to represent Brazil. Invited to draw the first thing that came to
in the first mundial to be
shown live, his genius was
beamed around the world
mind, the player sketched a sphere with spokes emerging. Assuming
this was the sun, assessors were nonplussed when Garrincha said he
had drawn Botafogo team-mate Quarentinha.
As Brazil began their campaign with a 3-0 victory over Austria, Pelé
and Garrincha, two players who would epitomise Brazilian football’s
golden age, waited on the sidelines. A 0-0 draw against a well-drilled
England left the Selecao needing to beat favourites USSR.
Depending on which story you believe, the players urged Feola to
ignore Carvaelhes and select Garrincha and Pelé, or Feola, confident
that Pelé had recovered, made the change himself. We do at least
know that Feola told the psychologist, “You may be right. The thing
is, you don’t know anything about football.”
The match began with what French football legend Gabriel Hanot
described as the “greatest three minutes in the history of football”.
In the first minute, Garrincha bamboozled the Soviet defence before
hitting the crossbar. In the second minute, Pelé hit the crossbar too. In
the third minute, Didi slid the ball past three opponents for Vava
to shoot past Lev Yashin. It took 74 minutes for Vava to score again,
but the outcome was never in doubt.
Brazil had found their winning formula. In Feola’s variant of 4-2-4,
Pelé operated just behind centre-forward Vava, while Mario Zagallo was
trusted to push forward or track back into midfield as required.
Despite being the youngest player to appear in a World Cup – and
setting up Vava’s second goal – Pelé’s performance was affected by his
increasingly sore knee. He departed the celebratory dinner early, vowing
to do better in the quarter-final.
In a tight game against Wales, Pelé received the ball with his back to
goal, chested it onto his right foot and prodded it into the corner. It
was, he said, “perhaps the most unforgettable goal of my career”.
In the semi-final against France, Pelé played with the audacity of
a schoolboy and fighting spirit of a veteran. After Just Fontaine had
equalised for France, Brazil’s No.10 grabbed the ball, ran back to the
centre circle and shouted at his team-mates, “Let’s get started.” He
scored a second half hat-trick that sealed a 5-2 victory.
The 1958 Mundial was the first to be screened live on television, so
Pelé’s genius was beamed around the world. After his second goal in
the 90th minute of the final – another 5-2 win, against Sweden – he
blacked out and team-mates had to revive him. Brazil had won their
first World Cup. Pelé wept with joy – and disbelief. Seven years before,
he’d stolen peanuts from a warehouse in a desperate, unsuccessful
attempt to swap them for football boots.

Hector castro 1930

When Uruguay striker Peregrino
Anselmo was taken ill before the
first World Cup final, the hosts did
not worry. They just selected their
one-armed forward Hector Castro
to play instead.
El Manco Divino (The One-Armed
God) headed an 89th-minute goal
in Montevideo to clinch a 4-2 win
against Argentina.
It was quite the tournament for
Castro, who also scored Uruguay’s
first World Cup goal, against Peru,
and reportedly snubbed a massive
bribe before the final that secured
his place in history.
Castro was a legendary figure in
Uruguay. Aged 13, he accidentally
amputated his right forearm while
using an electric saw to chop some
wood, and he would regularly use
his stump to whack any defender
who got in his way when
challenging for a header.
A notorious womaniser, gambler
and chain-smoker, Castro bagged
1928 Olympic gold with Uruguay in
Amsterdam and went on to lift
eight league titles at Nacional as
player and coach.

Luis Monti 1934
Argentina were winning 2-1 and
cruising at half-time of the 1930
World Cup Final, yet their totemic
midfielder Luis Monti was in tears.
“If you win,” two shady-looking
characters had told him as he left
the pitch, “we will kill your mother
and your sister.”
Monti faded during the second
half – some say because of a thigh
injury, not the death threats – and
Uruguay recovered to triumph 4-2.
Four years on, as a Juventus player
who had been granted immediate
Italian citizenship, Monti lined up
for the Azzurri in the final against
Czechoslovakia in Rome.
The hosts’ 2-1 win brought Monti
untold fame. The only footballer to
appear in two World Cup finals for
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different nations said, “After that
match, by the decision of Il Duce
[Mussolini], we were all allowed to
ask for whatever we wanted: cars,
houses, money, jewels, women...”
He later recalled of his differing
World Cup final experiences, “In
Uruguay they’d have killed me if we
won, and in Italy they’d have killed
me if I lost.”
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1966
“No one could imagine Jimmy Greaves not playing.” So wrote Geoff
Hurst of his friend and fellow England striker, reflecting on the
selection dilemma facing Alf Ramsey ahead of the 1966 World Cup
final. “No one admired him more than I did. But to be honest,
I wasn’t going around saying, ‘Poor Jimmy’. I was thinking to myself,
‘Thank God I’ve got this chance.’”
The inescapable truth – one that lends sport such captivating
poignancy – is that for every winner there is a loser; every fairytale strut
on the grand stage masks a what-might-have-been weep in
the wings. Has any footballer grabbed an opportunity with greater

HURST
aplomb than Hurst, the man whose Wembley hat-trick in the final
against West Germany made good on Ramsey’s winning pledge?
Hurst’s entrance, for the quarter-final showdown with Argentina, was
only his sixth international appearance.
He had watched the group stage from the bench before replacing the
stricken Greaves, injured in the third game, against France.
Although he had been banging in the goals freely at club level –
inspiring West Ham United to FA Cup and Cup Winners’ Cup success
in the previous two campaigns – the 24-year-old was by no means
a shoo-in to keep his place, even after scoring the only goal in the
ill-tempered last-eight tie with Argentina.
But the goal that propelled England to a semi-final meeting with
Eusebio’s Portugal changed everything in the ever-whirring cogs of
Ramsey’s perception.
Straight off the Hammers’ Chadwell Heath training ground, Martin
Peters’ perfectly weighted cross was met at the near post by Hurst’s
glancing header. The image is beautifully frozen on camera, Hurst’s
gaze tracing the ball’s path as it arcs over the Argentine goalkeeper. “I
knew where it would go,” he recalled. “I was running to meet it before
the defence could react.”

GIUSEPPE MEAZZA 1938

“Win or die!” As motivational
telegrams go, it’s quite a good
one. Significantly, Fascist dictator
Benito Mussolini’s famous note
before the 1938 World Cup Final
against Hungary was addressed
to Italy’s Giuseppe Meazza.
Il Duce held the Azzurri captain
in such high regard that he would
turn a blind eye to his notorious
womanising. The Inter icon once
said, “I have two loves: my mother
and my goals. There’s no room for
a third.”
A versatile attacker well known
for his dipping foglia morta (dead
leaf) shot, Meazza dropped deep
during the 1938 finals to load the
bullets for Silvio Piola. The Lazio
frontman bludgeoned five goals
in France to secure a second title
under coach Vittorio Pozzo.
Meazza’s sole tournament goal
was no less memorable, after the
elastic on his shorts snapped as
he prepared to take a semi-final
penalty against Brazil.
He held them up with one hand,
with keeper Walter still chuckling as
the ball hit the net.
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Ironically, given the handwringing that had followed England’s 6-3

Wembley savaging by Hungary 13 years earlier, this was a move the
innovative West Ham gaffer – and future Three Lions manager – Ron
Greenwood had half-inched off the Mighty Magyars. And it was also
Greenwood who’d painstakingly converted Hurst from a left-half into
the muscular, combative striker who, despite his relative greenhorn
status, had become a serious contender for Greaves’ starting place
alongside Roger Hunt. Full-back George Cohen noted that Hurst was the
perfect foil for Hunt.
“[Roger] was a terrific, marvellous player and terribly brave in those
days when defenders didn’t think twice about kicking forwards from
behind,” he explained. “When Geoff came in it worked beautifully –
they worked off each other. Two strong boys, bloody effective.”
Ramsey had options: revert to the 4-3-3 with which he had begun the
tournament, or proceed with the 4-4-2 ‘wingless wonders’: Hurst and
Hunt in front of Alan Ball and Peters, right and left respectively, with
Nobby Stiles to sit and snarl in front of the backline and Bobby Charlton
as the playmaker. Hurst duly retained his place for the 2-1 semi-final
victory over Portugal – then the tournament favourites – and put in
another solid performance, laying the ball off for Bobby Charlton’s
howitzer second.
With Greaves restored to full health, the sweat was on as the clock
ticked round to the eve of the game. “I remember wondering for two or
three days whether I would be picked for the final,” Hurst wrote in
1966 and All That. “Jimmy was fit again, and having scored 43 goals in
54 matches for England had every right to expect a recall. I think most
of my most team-mates that day thought I was the one most likely to
be left out.”
The rest, as we know, is history. Hurst got the nod ahead of Greaves.
With England behind after 12 minutes, another West Ham move led to
“i just wanted to get through the 90
minutes without embarrassing myself”
the equaliser. Captain Bobby Moore, instinctively knowing where his club-
mate would be, took a quick free-kick, finding Hurst with pinpoint
accuracy to nod past Hans Tilkowksi. With Germany playing only one
genuine central defender – full-back Horst-Dieter Hottges had to mark
Hurst – the forward was certain that his and Hunt’s physicality would
cause plenty of problems. Not only that, his intuitive awareness and
movement – picked out by Jimmy Hill on Match of the Day two years
earlier using a 15-minute montage of decoy runs, lay-offs and sprints –
were a constant menace.
Hurst’s father-in-law had told him before the game he would score a
hat-trick. “Ridiculous, I thought,” wrote the striker. “I’d scored two
goals in my previous seven England games. A single goal would be an
achievement but, essentially, I wanted to get through the 90 minutes
without embarrassing myself. How different it turned out to be.”
Hurst later recalled his first training session, at which Ramsey took
him aside and said, “I’ve got no use for blushing violets – I’ve picked
you for what I know you can do. It’s now up to you.”
Hurst completed his hat-trick in extra time, via that infamous shot off
the underside of the bar and the smack-it-anywhere screamer as
Kenneth Wolstenholme delivered English football’s most fabled line of
commentary. For a player who thought his World Cup was ‘all over’
before it had even begun, Hurst did pretty well.

OBDULIO VARELA 1950

It’s impossible to think of
Uruguay winning the 1950
World Cup without the broad
shoulders of captain Obdulio
Varela, who simply refused to
accept defeat.
On the morning of the final –
the last group match, which
happened to be the deciding fixture
– against hosts Brazil, Varela went
to the hotel lobby to buy a
newspaper. “These are the world
champions,” proclaimed the front
page of O Mundo, above a shot of
La Celeste’s opponents.
Varela purchased all the copies,
took them upstairs and ordered
every player to urinate on them.
When Uruguay went 1-0 down
Varela didn’t flinch. Claiming
a non-existent offside – and asking
for a translator to remonstrate with
the officials – he silenced a baffled
200,000 fans in the Maracana as
the game restarted, then shouted,
“Now we’re going to win!”
And win they did, Juan Schiaffino
and Alcides Ghiggia inflicting a loss
from which Brazilian football is still
to recover – the Maracanazo.

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Fritz Walter 1954
Olympic champions Hungary were
unbeaten in 31 games before the
1954 World Cup Final, and when
the Magical Magyars quickly went
2-0 up as a storm raged, there was
surely only one winner.
The more it rained, however, the
better West Germany captain Fritz
Walter played. So legendary was
the 33-year-old’s ability on sodden
pitches, in revolutionary screw-in
studded boots, that Germans still
call rainy conditions “Fritz Walter
weather” today.
Inspired by their skipper, West
Germany were soon level, before
Helmuth Rahn sealed the Miracle of
Bern in the 84th minute.
That Fritz was playing at all was no
less a miracle. The forward only
escaped the Gulag when a guard
told Soviet forces liberating his
Ukrainian prisoner-of-war camp
at the end of the Second World War
that he was from Saarland, not
Germany, because the officer was a
football fan who’d clocked
Kaiserslautern’s greatest player.
And the nationality of the guard
in question? Hungarian...
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CrUyff & BeckenbauEr

Of all the scenarios that could unfold in Russia later this summer, club’s arch rivals (Cruyff at Feyenoord and Beckenbauer at Hamburg).
among the less likely is Argentina and Portugal meeting in the final. And they even went into coaching within just a few months of each
Not just because neither side are among the hot favourites, but also other, in 1984-85.
because it would mean Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi – the two Since neither man had bothered to acquire coaching badges, new
best players of their generation – facing off for the game’s biggest titles were invented for them – Cruyff became technical director at
trophy. And that almost never happens. Ajax, while Beckenbauer was the national side’s ‘team leader’. Their
You could perhaps argue it did in 1998, when Zinedine Zidane and managerial careers were successful, but not especially long. Both
Ronaldo went toe-to-toe in the Stade de France showpiece, though the last coached a club side in 1996 before concentrating on roles that can
Frenchman blossomed into a truly world-class player only in the wake best be described as football’s guardians and admonishers.
of that match. So you’d say the exception that proves the rule was the Cruyff was known (and feared) for his scathing public comments,
1974 final – when the Kaiser met the King. though his German counterpart wasn’t too far behind. In June 2000
That Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff came up against each Beckenbauer even mocked the German national team – who came
other on the grandest of all stages becomes even more improbable bottom of their group at that summer’s European Championship – with
when you consider a surprising fact: these two giants of the game an expression that has entered the game’s parlance as a term for
faced each other in only four competitive matches. One year before lumbering play – ‘Rumpelfussball’.
the World Cup final, they captained their sides in the first leg of the The King and the Kaiser did in fact twice appear on the same team.
European Cup quarter-final between Ajax and Bayern Munich (Cruyff Cruyff agreed to join the Cosmos once he left Barcelona and played
missed the return match through injury). And then there were two two friendlies alongside Beckenbauer, against the World All-Stars in
NASL clashes years later, in 1979 and ’80, which pitted Beckenbauer’s August 1978 and against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge a month later. In
New York Cosmos team against Los Angeles Aztecs and Washington the end, he moved to Los Angeles because the NASL did not want all the
Diplomats sides starring the iconic Dutchman. That’s it. big names in New York.
Perhaps strangest of all is this: although West Germany’s victory in On Beckenbauer’s 70th birthday in 2015, Cruyff told the German
1974 led to a simmering resentment in the Netherlands and was the magazine 11Freunde, “I can’t say exactly when we became friends. But
starting point for one of the fiercest rivalries in world football, the two even when we were playing, we instinctively had a great respect for
men who led these teams not only respected each other before and each other and that organically grew into a friendship. We often saw
after that fateful day in Munich but became good friends. When the each other, because I always went skiing in Kitzbuhel, where he was
Dutchman passed away in March 2016, Beckenbauer tweeted: “I am living. We did sport together and, in the evenings, sat together. Over
shocked – Johan Cruyff is dead. He was not only a very good friend, the years the connection became stronger and stronger.”
but also a brother to me.” Apart from maybe Pelé and Diego Maradona, nobody could begin to
‘Brother’ is not a far-fetched word when you analyse imagine what it’s like to be Johan Cruyff or Franz Beckenbauer. As Cruyff
the similarities between the two players, put it, “We both know that life at the top is lonely.”
starting with the three European Cups
they won on the trot. Neither played
in the 1978 World Cup, though
they were still active. They
both left Europe for the “even as players, we instinctively had
United States before
finishing their careers
with their hometown
great respect for each other and that
organically grew into a friendship”
FEREnC Puskas 1954
Ferenc Puskas was the best player Liebrich with the score at 5-1 left only hobble around as the Mighty
in the world in 1954, and that the Galloping Major in a heap and Magyars got stuck in the Bern mud.
summer’s World Cup was expected nursing an ankle fracture. Nevertheless, he thought he had
to be his consecration. Puskas sat out the quarter-final equalised with the last kick of the
He began the tournament in and semi-final against Brazil and game, but Welsh linesman Sandy
Switzerland with three goals in Uruguay respectively, but insisted Griffiths flagged for offside.
two group-stage wins against on his inclusion for the showpiece “I will never forgive him for that,”
South Korea (9-0) and West with a revenge-seeking Germany. Puskas said in his autobiography.
Germany (8-3). In the latter, Barely half-fit, Ferenc opened the “We hung our heads. What could
however, a hack from Werner scoring after six minutes but could we do? We couldn’t beat him up.”

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ICOnS

1978 Playing a World Cup finals on home soil is generally seen as an

Kempes
advantage, but for some players it’s proved more of a burden.
The seemingly ever-relaxed and affable Mario Kempes may not
have given the impression he was feeling the pressure of being the
poster boy for Argentina in 1978 – he finished the tournament as
top goalscorer and with a winners’ medal round his neck – but, as
he confesses, the reality was rather different.
“The problem was not the pressure of the fans’ expectations, but
the pressure we put on ourselves – we felt that we had to win,” he
recalled. “After we lost to Italy in the first group stage at Estadio
Monumental, it seemed that the expectations boiled over. We were
shocked. We had to leave Buenos Aires, but in the end that proved
to be a very good thing, because Rosario is one of the places where
football is felt more intensively.”
To help quell the nerves, Kempes admits he was smoking. “Not
many, maybe ten to 12 cigarettes per day. Many of us did. We would

JUST FOnTAIne 1958

Sometimes, the stars align at
a World Cup. Everything clicks.
Right place, right time.
Just Fontaine appeared in only one
finals tournament. In 1958
the France forward played in six
matches and scored a scarcely
credible 13 goals. And he did it
all wearing boots borrowed off
his team-mate Stephane Bruey.
“My big advantage was that I’d
had a knee operation in December
1957 and came back in February,”
Fontaine later said. “That gave me
a little winter break which meant
that I was fresh.”
Both Fontaine and Reim’s Rene
Bliard were told they’d be starting
for Les Bleus, but the latter’s ankle
injury gave the former his chance.
Just grabbed it, firing a hat-trick
in a win over Paraguay, two more
against Yugoslavia and Northern
Ireland, one against Scotland and
one in the semi-final loss to Brazil.
He needed a brace against West
Germany in the third-place match to
tie Sandor Kocsis’ record haul of 11.
He hit four... Best of luck trying to
beat that.
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share, as a superstition, one cigarette with [third goalkeeper] Hector

Baley at the back of the team bus on the way to the stadium.”
The then 23-year-old striker was plying his trade at Valencia at the
time, making him the only member of the Albiceleste squad to play
as el matador played in spain he was,
his club football overseas – and this was more than just a curiosity.
Kempes was the last player to escape the transfer lockdown imposed in the eyes of the argentine public,
almost obliged to be the savioUr
by Argentina’s military junta at the request of national team coach
Cesar Luis Menotti, who wanted to keep his squad close in the run-up
to the tournament. From September 1, 1976, players under the age
of 28 could not be transferred away without his authorisation. It was
El Matador’s exit to Spain that prompted this law.
Therefore, in the eyes of the Argentine public, Kempes was almost
obliged to be the saviour, given it was he who played in the stronger “It was the shortest talk ever,” said Kempes. “He said ,‘Whatever
Spanish league week in, week out. happens today, you have won the title for me. You’re all champions.
“I started every match knowing that this could be my day,” he said. Thank you’.
“It’s like in life; you can have a bad business idea, but then you have “We were all fired up after that. Whatever happens? After all this
a new one the next day and you just go for it. In one game I’d have effort? No, we will win.”
defenders completely wiping me out, but three days later I’d have my After beating the Netherlands 3-1 in the final and scoring two more
chance to get revenge. What had happened a few days earlier would goals, Kempes returned to his hometown of Cordoba for a little rest
never affect my confidence.” and relaxation. His method? Fishing, of course.
The tension from a de facto government that needed a World Cup
victory to extend its cruel reign, which included torturing and killing
citizens, will always be an issue players are reticent to discuss openly.
‘We didn’t know anything, we were locked down, we were the last to
know about the disappeared,’ is the usual formulaic response.
Rumours that Argentina’s second-round win over Peru was fixed
persist to this day, but even giving their South American rivals a 6-0
shellacking and securing their place in the final was not enough to
adequately relax the host nation’s squad.
In fact, a small group found an unlikely way to unwind on the eve of
the biggest match of their lives. “Not many people know this, but
before the final, Hector Baley wanted to go fishing,” said El Matador.
“I didn’t even like fishing, but he still sent me to ask Menotti for his
permission. [Midfielder] Americo Gallego also came with us.
“In the end, it was a good way to lower the anxiety,” continued the
striker. “We left in the middle of the night. Baley had managed to get
some rods and pastries.”
The trio found an abandoned ship in the Parana River from where
they fished for a couple of hours. “Nobody saw us,” said Kempes. “It
was very cold because it was 5am in the middle of winter.
“We went back to the training camp with a handful of fish that we
passed on to the cook. Our table had a special menu before the final.
All the other players couldn’t believe it. It’s not something that could
have happened today!”
It’s certainly hard to imagine Lionel Messi or Sergio Aguero nipping
away from Argentina’s Russian base this summer for a bit of angling,
that’s for sure.
Despite the unexpected seafood on offer, the tension among the
players on the morning of the final was so great that, in his pre-final
briefing, Menotti decided to broach the possibility of his side losing in
an attempt to ease the self-imposed pressure.

GARRInCHA 1962
One day, Manuel Francisco dos
Santos came home from school
cradling a small bird.
“It’s just like you,” said his sister
of a younger brother whose spine
was so deformed and legs so bent
that doctors said he would never
walk unaided. “It flies around a lot
but it’s no good for anything – it’s
a Garrincha [little bird].”
She could not have been more
wrong. Garrincha became Brazil’s
“joy of the people”, beloved in his
homeland more than Pelé. This was
the most flawed of geniuses, an
alcoholic who reportedly lost his
virginity to a goat.
Put a football at Garrincha’s feet,
though, and ‘The Angel with Bent
Legs’ entranced everyone.
Crucially, the Little Bird soared
when his nation needed him the
most. With Pelé injured after the
second game of the 1962 World
Cup, Garrincha’s four strikes and
incredible wing play were vital to
Brazil defending their crown.
Sportswriter Eduardo Galleano
wrote: “In the history of football, no
one made more people happy.”

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1982
SOCRATES Vincent van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. A few months after
Belgian art collector Anna Boch paid 400 francs (about £700)
for The Red Vineyards near Arles, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest and
died a penniless alcoholic with only one ear. His impressionist
masterpieces, however, would go on to fetch millions and inspired
Picasso, Matisse and Munch to re-imagine what art would mean in the
20th century.
Chain-smoking, beer-loving Socrates never went beyond the last eight
of a World Cup. The Brazil team he captained at Spain 82 did not even
make it out of the second group stage after defeat to the Italians. Yet
the indelible image of that finals is a rangy playmaker wearing
impossibly tiny shorts, whose effortless grace, close control and vision
were ethereal.
Socrates had three childhood heroes, none of them footballers.
Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and John Lennon - revolutionaries who
wanted to change the world. Magrao (the Big Skinny) took such
iconoclasm and placed it at football’s heart. Imagine Keith Richards
obsessed with Hungary’s Magical Magyars instead of Chuck Berry.
“I smoke, I drink, I think,” is hardly the average football player’s
philosophy, but there was nothing average about Socrates, who
became a left-wing agitator hell-bent on bringing democracy to
a country ruled by military dictatorship.
The eldest son of a tax inspector, he turned professional only in 1974,
aged 20, after finishing a medical degree, applying the same effort to
his studies as he did on a pitch: almost none. Outrageous natural talent
trumped effort.
“Anyone who runs doesn’t think,” he once said. “And anyone who
thinks doesn’t run.”
The primary reason he chose football over medicine was to play
at the World Cup. For the only time in his life, he gave up the fags
and cut back on the booze that would ultimately take his life at the
tragically early age of 57. Having put himself on a strict five-month
fitness plan to turn fat into muscle, he shed nearly two stone.
The first day the squad assembled, Socrates’ team-mates could
not believe what they saw. He was the quickest, strongest and had
the hardest shot of the lot.
“What’s this? Magrao at the front of the group doing laps!” Zico
shouted, to the sound of laughter from behind. “What’s going on?”
“He always talked about how hard it was to look after himself and stay
in shape,” Zico said years later. “He trained and he set a really strong
example. At that World Cup he was focused on being in top form. He
proved that there was an athlete inside him.”
This was also the original incarnation of jogo bonito, in an almost
position-less system thst Socrates had dubbed “organised chaos”, to clip
the wings of Dutch Total Football.
“Everyone has the freedom to play how they wish as long as they
perform certain basic functions,” the skipper said shortly before the
finals. “As amazing as that might seem, it works. I play on the wing, I’m
a centre-forward, a sweeper, holding midfielder – it depends on how the
game is going. Even if we don’t win the title, we will have altered the
traditional schemes of 4-2-4 and 4-3-3 and whatever else [the
Netherlands] have invented.”
It did not start well, however. With 15 minutes left of Brazil’s opening
game against the USSR, they were 1-0 down. The ball fell to Socrates on
the edge of the area – “a wall of red shirts ready to spill their own blood
to stop me”. He feinted to shoot, turned twice more and unleashed

Eusebio 1966
Albert Einstein, Barack Obama,
Vera Duckworth – you’ve got to
be a big deal to be immortalised
in wax at Madame Tussauds.
In 1966, there were few more
famous footballers in Britain
than a former truant who had
skipped school in Mozambique
to play football barefoot with
spheres made of stuffed socks.
Eusebio had already lifted the
European Cup with Benfica and was
an all-in-one centre-forward before
such a thing existed.
His nine goals in England that
summer seemingly came from
another galaxy. Three-nil down
to North Korea in the last eight, the
Black Pearl scored four in 32
minutes in a 5-3 comeback.
The 2-1 defeat to hosts England
in the semi-finals was called Jogo
das Lagrimas, Game of Tears, with
Eusebio inconsolable at full-time.
Portugal wouldn’t play in another
World Cup knockout clash for four
decades, in 2006.
“For me, he’ll always be the best
player of all time,” said the great
Alfredo Di Stefano.
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a ferocious shot into the top corner. “And the scream came:
‘Goooooal,’” he later said. “No, not a goal. An endless orgasm.”
Socrates was no less brilliant against Scotland (4-1), New Zealand
(4-0) and Argentina (3-2). Then came Italy in the Second Round (which
in 1982 featured four groups of three teams, with the team finishing
first progressing to the knockout round), an encounter that offered
a semi-final place to the victor. For the third time in five
matches, Brazil went behind, Socrates’ 12th-minute equaliser
a goal so perfect in its intricacy of passes with Zico that it
deserves its own ballet. Yet Brazil lost 3-2. Looking back, the
Selecao’s defensive slackness – two of the Azzurri’s goals
came from individual errors – remains jaw-dropping.
It was the day on which many believe football lost its
soul. The day the immovable object killed the irresistible
force – dead.
Paolo Rossi, who scored a hat-trick in Barcelona on
that day, was the ‘killer’ Brazil did not possess.
Yet nor did they want him either.
“To win is not the most important thing,” stated
Socrates. “Football’s an art and should be showing
creativity. If Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas
had known when they were doing their work
the level of recognition that they were going
to have, they would not have done them the same.
You have to enjoy doing the art and
not think, ‘Will I win?’”
The words of a serial loser. Just like that
painter with one ear.

“I smoke, I drink,
I think... anyone who runs
doesn’t think, and anyone
who thinks doesn’t run”

Bobby Moore 1966

“Uncapped, pedestrian, not up to
much in the air, suspect stamina,”
wrote Ken Jones in the Daily Mirror
while questioning the inclusion of a
21-year-old West Ham defender in
England’s 1962 World Cup squad.
Four summers later, Bobby Moore
held the Jules Rimet Trophy aloft –
his country’s only national honour
– as captain.
Bobby Charlton was England’s
Ballon d’Or-winning best player
in ’66 and Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick
provided the most memorable
moment, but Bobby Moore was
the team’s beating heart.
“My captain, my leader, my
right-hand man,” said manager
Alf Ramsey. “A cool, calculating
footballer I’d trust with my life.”
Ramsey relied on his captain’s
ability. England reached the last
four on defensive solidity, with
Eusebio’s goal the first they had
leaked in more than 700 minutes.
“There should be a law against
him,” Celtic and Scotland gaffer
Jock Stein once remarked, “as he
can see what’s going to happen
20 minutes before everyone else.”

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GERD MULLER 1970
“And what,” enquired Bayern
Munich coach Tschik Cajkovski
when presented with his new
recruit in 1964, “am I supposed to
do with this weightlifter?”
Short, squat and with tree trunks
for thighs, 19-year-old Gerd Muller
didn’t have a typical footballer’s
build. Nor did he particularly have
the skill set.
The only thing Muller could do on
a football pitch was score goals. He
fired 564 for Bayern and a scarcely
credible 68 in 62 matches for West
Germany, including ten at the 1970
World Cup to bag the Golden Boot.
Only Poul Nielsen (52 goals in 38
games for Denmark from 1910-25)
has a better international scoring
rate than Muller’s 1.10 per game.
His mid-air volley in the 1970 win
over England was typical of Muller’s
instinct, sensing indecision from the
Three Lions’ stand-in shot-stopper
Peter Bonetti. Right place and right
time. Always.
“That tournament was even more
important for me than 1974,” the
striker later recalled. Der Bomber
had arrived.
 1986 Boca Juniors to River Plate, scored a crucial late
leveller against Peru, sealing Argentina’s place at
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MARADOnA
the finals at the expense of Los Incas. Ironically,
Gareca is now Peru manager and this summer
will lead them to their first World Cup finals since
that dramatic strike in Buenos Aires.
In those qualifiers, Diego managed to score
only against Venezuela. None of his goals were
match-deciders. He had been man-marked by the
Peruvians, preventing him from shining in the
way Bilardo knew he could.
The month before the World Cup, Maradona
wasn’t among the names being touted to take the
finals by storm. “He can be even better than Platini,
Rummenigge or Zico”, Bilardo insisted, continually
In Argentina, ‘Maradona’ is no longer a surname. It’s a quality, defending his star pupil while the international media continued to
an adjective. Maradonear has also become a verb: on the pitch, it overlook him.
means to dribble mazily past opponents; in wider life, it means to have When the World Cup started, Maradona channelled the criticisms
a knack for dodging whatever obstacles cross your path. and lack of faith into a deadly mix of rage and positive energy.
Naturally, these neologisms took root after Mexico 86. Before the World Against South Korea in the group stage and Uruguay in the last 16,
Cup he single-handedly secured for Argentina, those terms would not Diego suffered man-marking as restrictive as that he had endured
have made much sense to the man on the street. against Peru in qualifying, yet this time he couldn’t be stopped.
True, Diego had made his debut for first club Argentinos Juniors There were still a few lingering questions about his weight, but in the
nearly ten years earlier, in October 1976, but when you think about summer of 1986, Bilardo was actively encouraging him (as well as all
Maradona the icon and folk hero, his displays for La Albiceleste at of his team-mates) to scoff chocolates and knock back fizzy pop. “I
the 1986 World Cup were the big bang. wanted them to be two or three kilos overweight,” he said.
His reputation as a wonderkid had long preceded him, but in the first “It had been proven that every match at noon in Mexico would see you
decade of his professional career Maradona managed to win only one lose at least three kilos.”
league title: in 1981 with Boca Juniors, where he was not even the best Then, with Maradona’s blessing, Argentina’s kit man was assigned an
player on the team. In Spain, with Barcelona, he had been able to important task ahead of the now infamous quarter-final against
celebrate only domestic cup glory, too little for a man England: to buy new blue Le Coq Sportif jerseys, as the ones they’d
of his quality. With Argentina he’d lifted the 1979 Under-20 World worn against Uruguay retained too much sweat. “After the game, each
Cup in Japan but had been overlooked for the 1978 World Cup and was kit weighed about a kilo,” Bilardo later revealed. “We needed
more of an embarrassment than a hero at the 1982 finals in Spain. to do something. We needed lighter cloth and V-necks.”
He received a red card in Argentina’s final match against Brazil The new shirts, found in a Mexico City sports shop, were
following a lacklustre tournament in which his only highlight enhanced with the crest of the Argentine FA thanks to the
was a brace against Hungary. needlework of volunteers from local outfit Club America.
When Carlos Bilardo was appointed Argentina manager All that was missing was shirt numbers. The only ones
in 1983, one of his first decisions was to name Maradona they could find were meant for American Football tops,
as captain. This quickly aroused the attention of his critics, and as such were large – and silver. “I really like them,
many of whom thought Diego would be unable to handle with those numbers we will beat England,” Maradona told
the pressure of being the team’s leader, unlike the existing Bilardo the night before the match that would mark his career
“great captain” Daniel Passarella. It certainly wouldn’t be forever. As you’ve probably heard, he had a big hand in ensuring
the last time that Bilardo and Maradona went into that prediction came true.
battle alongside one another.
Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn’t Diego
who provided the key moment for
Argentina in a difficult qualifying
campaign, but rather Ricardo
Gareca. The striker, who caused
diego channelled the criticisms
uproar in his homeland in 1985
by moving from and lack of faith into a deadly
mix of rage and positive energy
GRZEGORZ LATO 1974
Not many people turn down Pelé, and compatriot Andrzej Szarmach His match-winner against Brazil
but when O Rei insisted Grzegorz – were a refreshing change to the in the third-place play-off was the
Lato sign for his New York Cosmos same sides dominating the world’s perfect distillation of Lato’s talents.
side in 1982, the Pole plumped best football tournament. Picking the ball up inside his own
for Mexican club Atlante instead. As Only a barely playable pitch in the half, the follicly challenged flanker
you do. de facto semi-final with hosts West tore past full-back Alfredo and slid
A speedy winger with a scoring Germany – the kick-off was delayed coolly underneath keeper Leao, in
touch, Lato’s seven goals to land and some standing water removed the same ground where he’d been
the Golden Boot in ’74 – ahead of – bogged down the 24-year-old’s an unused substitute in the final of
the Netherlands’ Johan Neeskens frightening acceleration. the 1972 Munich Olympics.

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1990
GAZZA Paul Gascoigne’s professional career lasted from 1985 to 2005,
but he will always be remembered for one month in mid-1990.
By Italia 90 he was already 23 but had not started a competitive
international. A central midfielder with Glenn Hoddle’s eye for a pass
and Bryan Robson’s love of a tackle, Gascoigne could be inconsistent
and positionally suspect. But England manager Bobby Robson could
not ignore his fellow Geordie’s gifts and took a punt on a swaggering
player who possessed “a sort of impudence” and “great confidence”
according to Gary Lineker. “You could see he played completely for
the love of the game.”
Full of love and devoid of fear. Against the Dutch, winners of the
European Championship two years earlier, he tugged Ruud Gullit’s
dreadlocks and even Cruyff-turned Ronald Koeman. To Pete Davies,
author of the seminal Italia 90 account All Played Out, the new man
on the scene represented “the joy of playing football, what we all
dream football can be”.
Gascoigne was no smoke-and-mirrors showboater: his creativity
was crucial in deciding deadlocked matches. He had floated in the
free-kick for Mark Wright’s group-game winner against Egypt, then
did it again for David Platt’s against Belgium in the last 16 – after
drawing the foul. In the quarter-final struggle against Cameroon,
he slalomed through the middle of the park to set up Lineker, who
was duly tripped for the decisive penalty.
This playful love of the game struck a chord that swelled to an
operatic crescendo, perfectly matched by the BBC’s use of Nessun
Dorma as the theme tune, with his emotional reaction to being
booked in the semi-final against West Germany. Realising he would
miss the final, Gascoigne was in tears. So were England’s fans at
home and in Turin’s Stadio Delle Alpi, where they serenaded him,
trying to soothe the crying man-child they’d taken to their bosom.

Teofilo Cubillas 1978

Latin Americans love strutting
their stuff at the World Cup,
but few players have lit up the
finals with a moment of genius
quite like the Peru icon.
Teofilo Cubillas hit five goals
at Argentina ’78 – only one shy
of the tournament’s top scorer,
the hosts’ Mario Kempes – and
his first of the competition is
right up there as a contender for
the best ever.
In Peru’s 3-1 first-round victory
against Scotland in Cordoba, the
midfielder lined up a free-kick to
the left of the penalty area.
The set-piece appeared perfect
for a curler around the right-hand
side of the Scots’ defensive wall,
but Teofilo had other ideas...
After wideman Juan Munantes
had made a dummy run, Cubillas
stepped up and caressed the ball
into the top-left corner using the
outside of his right foot.
The mesmeric shot bamboozled
goalkeeper Alan Rough, broke the
hearts of Scotland fans and etched
the 29 year old’s name into World
Cup history. Great kit too.
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“Weep,” Salman Rushdie wrote about the incident, “and the world
weeps with you.”
As the shootout loomed he was comforted by Bobby Robson and
senior players. Clearly too distraught to take a penalty, he watched
on as his friend-come-minder Chris Waddle stepped up and missed,
and England went out. Gascoigne didn’t know it, but he would never
play at the World Cup again.
His career continued, but not at the same trajectory: how could it?
Never the same after the 1991 FA Cup Final, he peaked before his
24th birthday. Injury-enforced time away only increased the off-field
problems: domestic violence, alcoholism, mental struggles, fodder
for tabloid muck-raking. Euro 96 proved his final England triumph:
Hoddle decided he didn’t need him for France 98.
And so Gascoigne the icon is remembered as a young man, forever
frozen in the infinite potential of beautiful youth. As with rock music’s
‘27 Club’ – Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain, Winehouse – the question is, what
might have been achieved?
The 1990-model Gascoigne is as close as the English ever got to the Gascoigne’s inner adrenaline-seeker was always destined to be
sort of bravura brilliance by which Diego Maradona had dragged the in trouble after football. Those who are most successful in recovery
Albiceleste to World Cup glory four years earlier. As Brian Glanville put from addiction come to an accord with life: they don’t replace the
it, the Geordie displayed “a flair, a superlative technique, a tactical highs, which are definitively irreplaceable, whether their origins lie
sophistication, seldom matched by an England player since the war”. in chemistry or circumstance. What they find is a lower-level but
There are cultural reasons for this distrust of the anarchist, or what lasting contentment with the ordinary run of life. It’s difficult but
Henry Winter has called “the institutionalised suspicion of flair in this millions have managed it, and hopefully Paul – not Gazza, but Paul
country”. In the Academy era, many fans see footballers as soulless – can do so too.
robots, highly polished media-trained charisma vacuums. To Stuart He will always be wished well. A flawed human, like the rest of us,
Pearce, “the modern game is so sanitised and exposed to the media he played with an infectious adoration of the game, and memories
that it almost suppresses personality”. of Italia 90 will outlive him even if he makes it to his 100th birthday.
That couldn’t happen to the irrepressible Gascoigne – a man of the As Philip Larkin wrote in An Arundel Tomb, describing a memorial
people. Although the tabloids hounded him, they could never quite six centuries old: “What will survive of us is love”. Gascoigne loved
destroy his popularity. Can you imagine the reaction if Dele Alli told football, and for that, football fans love him.
Norway to ‘f**k off’, just as Gascoigne did when asked to ‘say hello to
Norway’ by a reporter in 1992?
That typically unguarded episode revealed the hyperreal cartoon

1990 gascoigne is as close as england

personality: not Gascoigne, but Gazza, the clown prince with the
painted smile. Look, there he is, stealing and driving a London bus.
Here he comes, bringing an ostrich along to training. Now he’s
yellow-carding the referee. He’s even got a yet more cartoonish
sidekick, Jimmy Five Bellies, as if he’d stepped off the pages of Viz. ever got to the bravura brilliance
of diego Maradona four years earlier
PAOL0 ROSSI 1982

The Italian media were furious
when Paolo Rossi was selected
in Italy’s 1982 World Cup squad,
having spent two years sat on the
sidelines over his involvement in
a betting scandal.
In his opening three games of
the tournament, Rossi’s displays
justified their rage, as he ambled
around the pitch.
But something suddenly clicked.
Italy faced a Brazil outfit strongly
fancied to win the competition in
their decisive second group stage
clash, and the Juventus frontman
hit a stunning treble.
His first was a bullet header, the
second a rifled finish one-on-one
with the keeper and the hat-trick
strike a close-range finish from six
yards out, sealing a famous 3-2
victory in Barcelona.
Rossi didn’t look back, bagging
both Azzurri goals in the last-four
success over Poland.
West Germany awaited in the
final but couldn’t deny Rossi his
fairytale ending – he netted the
opener in a 3-1 win to clinch the
cup and Golden Boot.

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1994
BAGGIO
Less than three weeks after his infamous penalty miss in the final
of USA 94, Roberto Baggio was asked about the incident that would
be seen as the defining moment of the competition. “The murder of
the Colombian player was the most upsetting thing during that time,”
he said of the assassination of Andres Escobar. “An incredible, chilling
incident, which unfortunately will mark the tournament forever. And
all for an own goal... Shocking, to die like that.”
By way of surreal coincidence, it was among guns that Baggio had
been seeking refuge from the whole ghastly post-final brouhaha. With
a yearning to indulge his childhood passion for hunting, he headed to
his newly acquired 900-acre ranch in La Pampa, one of Argentina’s
most sparsely populated provinces, deep in the heart of the country’s
vast, empty grasslands.
Suddenly, La Chiquita ranch sprouted a scourge of cameras and
spotlights. Baggio was reduced to returning from hunting parties via
a side entrance, two hours after his father and friends, to dodge the
press. Not to mention the class of primary school kids whose teacher
thought a trip to the Baggio residence would be educational.
Then there were the Jesuits and animal rights activists. An Italian
Catholic magazine insisted Baggio be excommunicated for taking up
Buddhism, while Italy’s Anti-Vivisection League demanded to know
what a Buddhist was doing shooting ducks.
Answering rumours that he had shot at journalists, Baggio replied
to the “great fat lie” by quipping, “I’m a good shot. If I had [shot at
them], the journalists I took aim at wouldn’t be doing so well.”
Who knows why Baggio thought he’d fare any better at his home in
the upper-class Tuscan tourist destination of Forte dei Marmi, with its
regiments of beach umbrellas. Besieged by fans at the thermal baths,
the restaurant, and under his windows, he bundled his family into his
blue Mercedes and fled south to Maremma, where the rich go to be
low key amid the vineyards and cattle pasture. Depending on where
the family filled up, they would have been greeted by Baggio’s own
Gary Lineker 1986
England suffered a frustrating
quarter-final exit at the 1986
World Cup thanks to the genius –
and cunning – of Diego Maradona.
But it was still a tournament to
savour for Gary Lineker.
Long before he was flogging
bags of crisps, Gary was filling
onion bags, scoring six goals to
win the Golden Boot in Mexico.
face plastered on some of the petrol pumps – the Divine Ponytail still
beaming with pre-tournament anticipation.
As Italy awoke to its grinding disappointment each morning, every
conversation sooner or later turned to the forward. “It’s as if we never
switched off after the World Cup,” he said in September, seemingly
surprised that a country that can cogitate on a Serie A incident for
days should still be preoccupied by losing the first penalty shootout
in a World Cup final.
Baggio was already succumbing to his first injuries of a new season,
following those that dogged his World Cup and his early career and
preceding those that dogged the remainder of his career. There was
a perception that they were almost psychosomatic.
In September 1994, Italian daily La Repubblica penned, “Around
Roberto Baggio there is the tinkle of crystal shattering. Inside Roberto
Baggio, there is still something cracking – it could be the dream of
winning a cup, or the tired shiver of a missed penalty. Perhaps even
a muscle... And so old and new weaknesses return – the physical and
psychological limits of a young man used as a totem and a talisman,
of a champion of whom too much has to be asked, and if it’s not all,
it’s nothing… Every cure, now, seems like a palliative, an aspirin given
to a dying man.”
In his autobiography, the attacker described his battle to overcome
self-pity. He frequently points out that with Italy pair Franco Baresi
and Daniele Massaro having both missed their penalties, Brazil would
still have won the World Cup if their last spot-kick was scored, even
if Baggio had converted his. “They had to choose one image from the
finals and they chose my mistake,” he wrote, seemingly unconscious
of the irresistible dramatic tragedy he had served up.
“It’s the same sense of bitterness as in 1994,” he said last year. “It
hasn’t diminished and I don’t think it will ever go away.” When he sat
down to record a video interview with FourFourTwo, he referred to the
miss repeatedly, despite our efforts to steer him elsewhere.
If, like a lucky Argentine duck, Baggio had dodged that bullet, how
would we remember him? Might he share a pedestal with Maradona
and Pelé? Surely he wouldn’t have been left out of Euro 96, or drifted
to Bologna. But then, Baggio has often seemed happier away from
the glare. He scored a goal every other game during the twilight of
his career at Brescia. When asked about the best team he’d played
in, he used to say, “The Vicenza youth team. On the left wing we had
Gianni Bonfante, who was much better than me.”
Bonfante never made it above Serie C. The old pals were reunited
as a surprise for Bonfante’s 50th birthday. Asked about his unfulfilled
potential, Bonfante sighed deeply. “I can’t deny it. I have my regrets.”
He might not be the only one.
“it’s the same bitterness
now as in ’94, and I don’t
think it’ll ever go away”
His hat-trick in a 3-0 group-stage send Bobby Robson’ side through to
win over Poland ensured the Three the quarter-finals.
Lions’ progression to the knockout The Argentines stood in the way
phase of the competition, finishing of a semi-final berth, and Lineker’s
second behind Morocco. second-half goal – his sixth of the
Paraguay were the opposition in event – could not deny Maradona
the last 16, and Los Guaranies had one of his finest hours. After that
no answer to Lineker’s goalscoring handball, Diego’s iconic individual
savvy as he netted twice – either strike sealed a 2-1 win that sent
side of a Peter Beardsley strike – to England and Lineker packing.

TOTO SCHILLACI 1990
Italian strikers have a habit of
starting major tournaments in
a haze of controversy and Toto
Schillaci was no different, after
being attacked by a 3,000-strong
mob as he arrived at the Azzurri’s
pre-World Cup camp.
It wasn’t the Juventus forward’s
fault, mind. He was simply in the
wrong place at the wrong time.
A riot had kicked off after Roberto
Baggio’s controversial decision to
swap Fiorentina for Juve.
Thankfully, Toto was unharmed
and proceeded to show no mercy
to opposition defences. At 25, the
competition was his first taste of
international football on the back
of his debut season in Serie A. But it
didn’t show.
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Schillaci was only a substitute in
Italy’s opening two games, but still
scored five times to help the hosts
reach the semis, where they were
beaten on penalties by Argentina.
He didn’t depart empty-handed,
though. A penalty against England
in the third-place play-off procured
the Golden Boot in addition to the
Golden Ball as best overall player.
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ZIDAnE Late on the evening of 12 July 1998, a million people poured onto
the Champs-Elysees in Paris. The world’s most famous avenue was
a flurry of tricolore flags, the sound of car horns and cheers of fans
revelling in sporting glory filling the night sky.
As the throngs partied, an image of Zinedine Zidane was projected
onto the Arc de Triomphe, along with two words: ‘Merci Zizou’. The
masses roared in appreciation and, in that moment, Zidane’s status as
the foremost cultural icon of his generation in France was sealed.
A couple of hours earlier, the then 26-year-old Juventus playmaker
had scored two headers in the 3-0 win over Brazil that meant France
were crowned world champions for the first time. He’d had a mixed
tournament and not even been France’s best player – that was Lilian
Thuram – yet those two goals in the final meant he emerged as the
post-tournament face of the team.
Use of his image was about a lot more than football. It was about
cultural identity, race, ethnicity and immigration – all massive talking
points in host nation France before, during and after the finals.
During Euro 96, far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen had
sparked outrage when he criticised the multiracial nature of the squad,
describing France as a team of foreigners. To anybody with even a
passing knowledge of Les Bleus’ history, his comments were both
ignorant and bizarre. The best-known members of the France team who
1998
reached the 1958 World Cup semi-finals were Raymond Kopa, the son of
Polish immigrants, and 13-goal tournament top scorer Just Fontaine,
born in Marrakech to a Spanish mother. 1980s legend Michel Platini had
an Italian father. Defender Marius Tresor was born in Guadeloupe.
Midfield lieutenants Jean Tigana and Luis Fernandez were born in Mali
and Spain respectively.
Le Pen was a powerful figure who had turned the National Front from
a fringe party into a major political force. His remarks threw open a
debate about what it meant to be French at the end of the 20th
century. The ’98 squad included several players born outside
metropolitan France (Bernard Lama, Christian Karembeu); others, such
as Zidane, Youri Djorkaeff and Marcel Desailly, were children
of a parent or parents who’d emigrated to France. The team were
known as ‘Black, Blanc, Beur’ (Black, White, Arab) – a wordplay on
the red, white and blue colours of the French flag – and victory
was seen as the perfect riposte to Le Pen.
At the centre of it all was Zidane, not only a fantastic footballer
but a hugely popular figure. Several times in subsequent years he
was voted France’s best-loved personality. As the star player and
a boy born into a working-class family in Marseille to parents who had
moved to southern France from Algeria, he came to stand for everything
that Le Pen opposed.

HRISTO STOICHKOV 1994

Heading into the 1994 World Cup,
Bulgaria had never won a match
in the history of the competition.
But that was all about to change,
largely thanks to the brilliance of
Hristo Stoichkov.
After a nightmare opening game
in which they were walloped 3-0 by
Nigeria, Bulgaria bounced back with
a thumping 4-0 victory over Greece.
Stoichkov was the architect of the
success, converting two penalties,
and The Dagger repeated his magic
by notching in their next contest – a
staggering 2-0 defeat of a Diego
Maradona-less Argentina.
They were on a roll and knocked
Mexico out on penalties after the
Barcelona star had netted in a 1-1
draw. And Stoichkov wasn’t done,
despatching a free-kick during a 2-1
quarter-final upset over defending
champions Germany.
The Lions were one match away
from the Rose Bowl final, only for
Roberto Baggio’s brace to end their
unlikely run.
Still, Stoichkov headed home as
joint top-scorer with Oleg Salenko,
his name inked in history.
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On wider matters, however, Zidane had virtually nothing to say. He

sidestepped questions about identity and immigration as deftly as he
did ill-timed tackles from off-balance defenders. The old adage about
letting his football do the talking had never been more apt. He wasn’t so
much a reluctant figurehead as a silent one.
Cynics argue there was something calculating about Zizou keeping his
counsel: by being disengaged with more important topics, Zidane was
then able to cash in on the many advertising opportunities that came
his way. In a similar manner to future Real Madrid team-mate David
Beckham in England, Zidane was the one player whom brands
clamoured to be associated with, a blank canvas who was capable of
enhancing any product.
And yet perhaps there was a simpler truth behind Zidane choosing to
hold his tongue. He seemed to realise from the outset that he was just a
football player and that lending his voice to broader issues was fraught
with danger. He also appeared to grasp that the supposedly positive
impact of the 1998 World Cup-winning side on French society as a
whole would be fleeting or even illusory.
Whatever hesitations Zidane may have had proved well-founded. For
several years there was talk of the country unifying around the ‘Black,
Blanc, Beur’ generation, but life carried on as normal. In 2011, then-
France manager Laurent Blanc was caught up in scandal when he was
secretly taped criticising dual-nationality players who opted to
represent countries other than France. In 2017, Le Pen’s estranged
daughter Marine outstripped her dad’s achievements when she took 34
per cent of votes in the final round of the presidential election.
For the French, Zidane and 1998 will always be about much more
than football. 20 years on, however, that period has taught us that
use of zizou’s image was about more
football may reflect society, but it cannot change society quite as much
as we would like. than football. It was about cultural
identity, race, ethnicity, immigration
DAVOR SUKER 1998
There’s nothing like an underdog Suker wasn’t exactly an unknown over the helpless Ulf Kirsten, cut
story to help warm your cockles, quantity, having scored ten league inside to beat Jorg Heinrich and
and the 1998 World Cup found the goals for Real Madrid in the run-up fired through the legs of keeper
perfect protagonists in Croatia and to the tournament, but that didn’t Andreas Kopke.
their talisman Davor Suker. stop him filling his boots. The 85th-minute strike set the
The forward smashed six goals The pick of Suker’s super six was seal on an emphatic 3-0 Croatia win
to collect the Golden Boot as the a stunning effort against Germany before hosts France ousted the
seven-year-old nation upset the in the quarter-finals. The frontman Vatreni in the last four.
odds with an astonishing charge latched onto a diagonal ball from Suker then bagged the clincher
to the semi-finals. Aljosa Asanovic, flicked the ball up in the third-place play-off.

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 139

WORLD CUP
ICONS
2006
CAnnAVARO
Oliver Khan 2002
It’s not often that a goalkeeper
steals the headlines at a major
tournament, but that’s exactly
what Oliver Kahn did at the 2002
World Cup, staged in South Korea
and Japan.
The competition might be best
remembered for the mercurial
trio of Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and
Rivaldo weaving their magic for
winners Brazil, but the displays of
the Bayern Munich stalwart in the
Germany goal meant he became
the first gloveman ever to win the
Golden Ball – the prize awarded to
the tournament’s top player.
The 33-year-old had conceded
just one goal en route to the final in
Yokohama, when Robbie Keane’s
last-minute strike for the Republic
of Ireland earned them an unlikely
group-stage point.
The four-time Bundesliga winner
went on to produce a string of fine
saves in 1-0 wins against Paraguay,
the USA and co-hosts South Korea,
but a rare fumble allowed Ronaldo
to open the scoring in the final as
Rudi Völler’s Mannschaft came up
short against the Selecao.
 WORLD CUP
ICONS

The press, crammed into the amphitheatre of Coverciano’s lecture world.” Pessotto had played alongside Cannavaro for Italy and Juve
hall, had one thing they wished to discuss with Fabio Cannavaro. and had been in the stands for Italy’s final group game against the
The 2006 World Cup was a fortnight away, but Italy’s hopes were not Czech Republic.
what was on their minds. Alessandro Del Piero and Gianluca Zambrotta flew straight to his
The media had finally stumbled across the labyrinthine threads of Turin hospital bedside while Buffon, in his blog the next day, wrote, “It’s
a nefarious web of influence, spun by the Juventus general manager difficult, almost impossible at the moment to talk about football, about
Luciano Moggi through the 400-odd phone calls he made every day. matches and about the emotions of a World Cup.”
Into this s**tstorm, Cannavaro dumped some dismayingly ill-judged Two days later, he kept a clean sheet as Italy dispatched Ukraine 3-0
remarks. “I think the methods exposed by the phone-taps concern in the last eight, with Zambrotta scoring a sixth-minute opener
everyone, the whole of [Italian] football,” he claimed. “Only Moggi’s in Hamburg. After the match, Cannavaro and the Juve contingent
phone was under surveillance… other clubs were not tapped.” paraded an Italian flag painted with the message “Pessottino, we
This was regarded as the classic retort of the red-handed culprit. are with you” (he eventually made a full recovery from his injuries).
Cannavaro failed to condemn Moggi and made vaguely supportive Perhaps noting how well the Azzurri played after every twist of the
comments about his boss. knife, the Italian FA’s prosecutor Stefano Palazzi recommended his
Italy’s financial police had searched Cannavaro’s house earlier in May punishments for the clubs involved in Calciopoli on the day of Italy’s
but come away empty-handed. Fabio now declared, “I won’t give up semi-final against Germany. Juve, Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio were
the captain’s armband. Why should I?” to be relegated (all but Juve would be reprieved) and the Old Lady
The Italian FA unfurled its fire hoses. The day after the disastrous stripped of her 2005 and 2006 titles – the only two Cannavaro won.
press conference, the official World Cup photography session was in The defender has always denied Italy won the World Cup because
full swing, replete with blue Dolce & Gabbana suits, and the World Cup they were inspired by adversity, preferring to dwell on Lippi’s careful
song by veteran rockers Pooh was being presented. In the midst of it construction project. “Barely a month after the final, the media had
all, the Juventus defender was shoved back out in front of the media in stopped talking about that historic victory,” Cannavaro complained.
an attempt to atone. But he wasn’t forgotten. The football family awarded him the 2006
Six days earlier, an even more senior head had been on the block. Ballon d’Or and FIFA World Player of the Year, while the Italian postal
Italy coach Marcello Lippi was cleared by magistrates of bowing to service put him on a stamp. A fitting tribute for Italy’s captain, who
Moggi’s requests to make sure fewer Juve players were selected for the delivered when his country truly needed him.
World Cup in Germany so that they might remain wrapped up
in cotton wool over the summer.
With the entire Italy squad playing for Italian clubs, the atmosphere
was febrile. For Gianluigi Buffon, yet to be cleared of illegally placing
sporting bets, it must have been toxic.
After a brief respite, playing in Italy’s final warm-up game against
Ukraine in Lausanne, Cannavaro went to Rome to be questioned as
a witness in the Moggi affair. Then on 7 June he travelled with the
team to their grandiose lakeside hotel in Duisberg, but the rapturous
welcoming fans turned angry when the players avoided them. Lippi
wouldn’t make the mistake of hiding again. “The official programme
required that two of our players attend a press conference every day,” he
later wrote. “Before presenting themselves in the press room in front of
the TV cameras and notebooks, every one of them asked me, ‘But Mister,
do we have to go?’”
Lippi would respond, “Certainly, you have to go. Let’s front up, at all
times, above all because we have nothing to hide and nothing to be
ashamed of.”
Halfway through a press conference the day after Italy had beaten
Australia 1-0 in the last 16, a press officer told Cannavaro the news that
Gianluca Pessotto, newly appointed Juve sporting director, had fallen
from a fourth-floor window at the club’s headquarters in an apparent
suicide bid (Pessotto was not involved in Calciopoli but had been
suffering from depression). A shaken Cannavaro quickly excused himself
in the midst of calciopoli, he was
from the room, saying, “I’m stunned. Pessottino is the best man in the
told juve’s sporting director had
fallen from a fourth-floor window
MIROSLAV KLOSE 2006
Prior to his retirement in 2016, A six-yard box specialist – rather Italy lay in wait in the semis, and
there were few more certain than a scorer of stunning strikes – dramatic efforts from Fabio Grosso
things in life than a World Cup the Werder Bremen marksman and Alessandro Del Piero near the
goal from Miroslav Klose. powered the hosts into the semis end of extra time thwarted Jurgen
The former Germany forward thanks to doubles in group-stage Klinsmann’s men in their bid to go
is the tournament’s greatest ever wins over Costa Rica and Ecuador all the way.
goal-getter having fired before finding the net in the last Still, it didn’t stop Miroslav from
16 across four competitions, with eight with a late equaliser against bagging the Golden Boot, and he
five of them coming at the 2006 Argentina. Germany prevailed on went on to hoist the trophy at the
finals on home soil. penalties, obviously. grand old age of 36 in 2014.

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 141

WORLD CUP
ICONS
2010
XAVI & InIESTA
LUIs SUAREZ 2010
Type ‘Luis Suarez 2010 World Cup’
into Google and you will find
around 750,000 articles
about his infamous handball, which
denied Ghana a certain goal
in extra time and historic spot
in the semi-finals.
But before the controversy,
the Uruguayan forward had
helped fire La Celeste into the
latter stages. Suarez first found the
back of the net in a 1-0 group win
against Mexico, although it was in
the knockout phase where he truly
announced himself.
Two goals, including a delightful
curler into the top corner, secured
a 2-1 win over South Korea.
However, the hero turned villain
in the quarter-finals when Suarez
flung himself at Dominic Adiyiah’s
close-range header at the end of
extra time, punching the ball clear.
The striker saw red but couldn’t
contain his delight when Asamoah
Gyan hit the subsequent spot-kick
against the bar.
Uruguay advanced on penalties
but got their comeuppance in the
semis by losing 3-2 to the Dutch.
 WORLD CUP
ICONS

first team a decade earlier as an impossibly shy 16-year-old. Iniesta was

so nervous that he’d got lost en route to the dressing room and Luis
Enrique was sent to find him.
“You might retire me,” Pep Guardiola whispered to his heir apparent
Xavi that day, “but this lad will retire us all.”
Iniesta started the group-stage decider against Chile as a narrow left
midfielder, beginning and finishing the move that secured a 2-1 win.
Like the Euro 2008 triumph that had given the squad such belief,
Neither Xavi nor Andres Iniesta slept a wink on 16 June 2010. World confidence was restored. Maki and Cerebro provided the staccato
Cup favourites Spain had just lost 1-0 to Switzerland in their opening soundtrack to calm all nerves.
group game. The latter was distraught. It was happening Belief, too. After Carles Puyol scored the semi-final winner against
to him again. A year earlier, Iniesta had played injured in the 2009 Germany, the squad gathered for a meal, many congratulating the
Champions League Final against Manchester United. Advised not perma-permed defender for heading home the most important goal in
to shoot, he knew he was doing more damage to his right thigh. Spanish football history.
He’d spent much of the 2009-10 season recovering not just from that “Let’s hope only until Sunday,” laughed Puyol.
– coach Vicente del Bosque had waited until the last moment “Relax, Carles,” said Iniesta. “I’ll take care of that. Don’t you worry.”
for Iniesta to prove even the remotest fitness – but also the death The whole room fell silent. The man who had been running laps of
of his close friend, Espanyol captain Dani Jarque, during pre-season. the hotel corridors at 4am to prove to himself that he had recovered
“It was,” he wrote in his autobiography, “like nothing was right.” from injury believed in destiny.
Now, 77 minutes into the World Cup, his thigh had broken down He had his friend with him on the pitch. “Dani Jarque, siempre con
again. Spain’s physios attempted to console Iniesta, lying to him nosotros,” read Iniesta’s handwritten undershirt, which he revealed
that the prognosis was not bad and that the 26-year-old would be after coming good on his promise to Puyol in extra time against the
ready for La Roja’s next game against Honduras. Netherlands. Dani Jarque, always with us.
Defeat to the willing but limited Swiss and their best player now Xavi was among the first to congratulate his long-time team-mate.
on the sidelines – things could hardly have looked more bleak. “They have a special relationship, they always have,” said Giovanni van
On the other side of Spain’s Potchefstroom training base, around Bronckhorst, a former Barça team-mate of both and the Dutch captain
an hour from downtown Johannesburg, Xavi sat upright in his room. that night. “They just seem to know where the other one is. They have
“I watched the whole game on repeat that night,” the vice-captain got absolutely everything – technique, the ability to score goals and
later told FourFourTwo. “I couldn’t sleep. We had played really well. play the killer pass. They are just complete midfielders – they never
Seriously. All of the ball, and great chances. They wanted a goalless lose the ball.”
draw and somehow won 1-0.” Ultimately, the pair just love playing football. “If I didn’t have
At dawn – an emotionally exhausted Iniesta having succumbed to training, I’d go and play five-a-side with my mates day or night,”
slumber – Xavi, captain Iker Casillas and sporting director Fernando Xavi tells FFT. “If we were playing now, and you had the
Hierro met in Del Bosque’s room. ball, I would suffer because I want to drive, not be the
“He looked at me and said, ‘I’ve watched the game over and over passenger. I’m a football romantic. I’m not quick or
and don’t think we should change a thing’. I was so happy because strong. All I’ve got is the pass.”
I was thinking the same thing. ‘Boss,’ I said, ‘it’s incredible we lost that A simple doctrine, adopted by his great partner
game. It’s pure f**king chance they won.’ in crime. Iniesta recently overtook Xavi as the most
“Every game meant death. We carried on the decorated player in Spanish football history. “What
same road, knowing we’d be criticised.” I do in the stadium, I did on the school playground,”
‘Tiki-taka’, first coined as an insult, had says Barcelona’s current captain.
reverted to its original interpretation amid “What I did at 12, I still do now.”
mistrust in the Spanish media, but the endless It just so happens that it won
‘carousel’ that had so dizzied Alex Ferguson’s a World Cup.
United the year before would remain.
Del Bosque not only trusted the system but the
two players who could best deliver it. The two players
whose nicknames within the squad were instructive:
Xavi was Maki, short for maquina, or machine; Iniesta
was Cerebro, the brain.
“They just seem to know where the
The first time Xavi and Iniesta had shared a pitch was
the latter’s maiden training session with the Barcelona other one is. they are the complete
midfielders. they never lose the ball”
PHILIPP LAHM 2014
As Hollywood endings go, few Lahm was key to group-stage position for the last-eight game
footballers will top the manner in wins over Portugal and the USA, against France with ease, making
which Philipp Lahm brought the plus the last-16 defeat of Algeria, as the team a more cohesive unit.
curtain down on his glittering Die Mannschaft progressed to the A Mats Hummels header gave
international career. quarter-finals. them victory before Brazil were
Germany’s skipper kicked off But his ability to switch from demolished 7-1 in the semis and
the 2014 tournament in central midfield to defence during the Argentina beaten 1-0 in the final.
midfield, having thrived in that knockout phase gave Joachim At 30, Lahm lifted the World Cup as
role the previous season under Löw’s side another dimension. captain, before hanging up his
Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich. Lahm slotted into a full-back Germany boots for good.

FFT 25th Anniversary Collection 143

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At home with maradona pelÉ at 70

El Diez on World Cup glory, super fans and From Santos to Stateside, football’s finest
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Discover how different the end could have Relive the most memorable ties in the
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