World Cup Russia 2018 is underway as Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar and the rest compete for immortality, desperate to be remembered as the men who conquered the greatest competition of all.
They come, of course, on the shoulders of giants: players who will be remember forever for taking the World Cup by the scruff of the neck and dropping jaws in every corner of the globe.
Here we recall the biggest titans of them all, from Pele to Cruyff to Joe Cole. Just kidding on the last one.
Bobby Moore
Bobby Moore: a vignette. Scene: the bar of the hotel in Léon, Mexico, where England in the fierce heat and breathless height of noon were due to meet West Germany in the quarter-finals of the 1970 World Cup. Seated at the hotel bar, Bobby Moore is talking of the match. He is above all preoccupied with finding a hotel room for two of his London friends, Morris Keston, a devoted Spurs supporter, and Phil Isaacs, owner of a London West End club.
That over-used word “cool” might have been invented for Moore. Nothing troubled him. Only weeks earlier, he had been under house arrest in Bogotá, Colombia, falsely accused of stealing a bracelet. Released to rejoin the England squad in Mexico, he behaved as if nothing had happened.
As a player, it was his formidable strength. He had properly been chosen foremost player of the 1966 World Cup in which he had captained England to success. He was more impressive in 1970.
Yes as a player, 108-times capped by England, he was perhaps a triumph of mind over matter. As a young centre-half at his local club West Ham, he lacked pace and ability with his head. Ron Greenwood, the famously progressive West Ham manager, turned him into a defensive left-half, what might be called a second stopper. There, any lack of physical speed was compensated by supreme quickness of thought: he read the game impeccably. His long, sweeping passes began many an attack for West Ham and England. He led by example rather than exhortation.
Now and again, that supreme self-confidence could betray him, as it did in a costly defeat against Poland in Katowice in a qualifying match for the 1974 World Cup. Holding the ball too long, he lost it to the Polish attacker Włodzimierz Lubański, who ran on to score.
It was as a precocious 21-year-old right-half that he came into the England team against Peru in Lima in May 1962, en route to the World Cup in Chile. His subsequent relationship with Alf Ramsey, a dominant coach, was not always harmonious. In 1964, when England went on tour to the Americas, Moore led a brief players’ rebellion against Ramsey’s demanding training in New York before a game against the US. Not one easily to forget, Ramsey at the start of the following season, before a match against Northern Ireland, refused to confirm Moore as captain till the eve of the game. While just before the 1966 World Cup, Ramsey actually and briefly replaced Moore with the combative Leeds player Norman Hunter. “Pushed Bobby Moore,” one heard him remark with a smile. Pushed him to the heroics of the 1966 World Cup.
Ron Greenwood described Moore as an “occasion” player. The greater the occasion, the more he rose to it. His retirement proved a sad anti-climax: business enterprises failing, managership eluding him. But as a footballer, his career had been a triumph. His premature death from cancer saddened the game he graced.
Brian Glanville
Franz Beckenbauer
Franz Beckenbauer is universally known as “Der Kaiser”, but in Germany another moniker has found greater currency in recent years: they call him “Die Lichtgestalt”, the figure of light. And it only takes a second or two in the company of the former Bayern Munich sweeper and two-time World Cup winner (first as a player in 1974, then as a manager in 1990) to understand why this title, for all its over-the-top, quasi-religious reverence, is simply an accurate description of his charismatic appeal. Beckenbauer has that rare talent: he can shake your hand for the first time and make you feel that meeting you is the best thing that’s happened to him all day. You know it’s not true, and he knows that you know it as well, but somehow that reality is magically suspended for a fleeting moment.
The same incredible lightness of touch also made him Germany’s greatest-ever player. As a sweeper, he was freed from the rigid man-marking duties of the time to regally float through midfield; he dominated games with outside-of-the-boot passes, the accuracy of which was only matched by their sheer effortlessness. Beckenbauer was famously reluctant to head the ball, as he didn’t want to mess up his hair, and he never seemed to sweat, either. Opposition fans found this nonchalance enraging. Fußball was supposed to be a combination of running and fighting, not ephemeral art. They would throw knives at him and his all-conquering Bayern side of the mid-Seventies. By the time he lifted the World Cup as national captain, the “libero” had become a symbol of the new West Germany: a liberal, permissive, modern democracy.
His ease on the ball belied a strong work ethic, however. Beckenbauer, grew up as the son of a postal worker from Giesing, one of the poorest parts of Munich; it was known as the “Glasscherbenviertel”, the broken-glass quarter, after the war. He spent thousands of hours practising one-twos against a wall outside his house. “That wall was the most honest teammate,” he explained years later. “If you play a proper pass, you’d get it back properly, without the need to run.”
A spell with New York Cosmos alongside Pelé saw him rub shoulders with Liza Minnelli at Studio 54 and cemented his pop-star status at home. Ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev once propositioned him over dinner in Brooklyn; Beckenbauer laughed it off. “I told him I went to a different college,” he said.
After his football career, Beckenbauer’s likability helped him to develop into a successful operator at the highest level. He resided over the staging of the wonderful 2006 World Cup in Germany and became something akin to the country’s unofficial head of state in the process. He was also part of the Fifa committee that controversially awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar but, typically, he escaped without any meaningful censure. He was fined 7,000 Swiss francs by Fifa's Ethics Committee for failing to co-operate with an inquiry into the 2022 bidding process, and in 2016 an investigation was opened into allegations of corruption during the bidding process for the 2006 World Cup. However, he denied any wrongdoing. More than 30 years after he stopped caressing the ball, he’s still just as untouchable and impossible to tackle as he was on the pitch.
Raphael Honigstein
Johan Cruyff
Johan Cruyff only played in one World Cup, and he forgot to win the final. But despite this, he has a fair claim to being the father of modern football. Think Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life and picture the game had he never lived.
Holland’s Total Football and its Spanish tiki-taka variant would not have existed. We wouldn’t have known Gullit, Bergkamp and Guardiola. Barcelona and Bayern Munich would still play fighting football, and we would never have seen Arsenal’s Invincibles, Denmark’s “Dynamite” team of 1986 or Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan.
Reflection on Cruyff should send us running through snowy streets screaming with joy.
The greatest Dutch artist since Rembrandt grew up in the post-war Amsterdam suburb of Betondorp — “Concrete Village” — spending his formative years hanging out at the nearby amateur-based Ajax club where his mum was a cleaner. By the mid-Sixties, Mrs Cruyff’s bossy prodigy was the star player.
Meanwhile, sexual and cultural revolutions roiled Amsterdam. While proto-hippy Provos transformed the once-frumpy city, the same spirit drove Cruyff and his great coach Rinus Michels at Ajax.
Football had been a simple game of straight lines, now it became an arena for ceaseless creativity — Ajax saw the field as a space to be manipulated.
Dutch writer Arthur van den Boogaard called it the “metaphysical solution” to the problem of football and the totaalvoetballers became Holland’s equivalent of The Beatles with Cruyff in the John Lennon role. Ajax won three European Cups before Cruyff fell out with teammates and joined Barcelona. Happily, he, they and Michels reunited for the 1974 World Cup in Germany.
Re-watching Cruyff’s performances, I find myself astonished afresh by his whiplash grace. One minute the orange-shirted maestro is bursting from deep, the next he’s guiding teammates around the field like a chess grandmaster. Holland flummoxed Uruguay, Argentina and East Germany before swatting aside Brazil.
Then hubris intervened.
In the first minute of the final in Munich against West Germany, Holland kicked off and played 17 insolent passes before Cruyff danced into the box and earned a penalty. After the German keeper picked it out of his net, a rout seemed imminent. Instead, Holland foolishly played keep-ball to mock the Germans, who fought back. Holland lost 2-1.
Back home, where memories of Nazi occupation were still raw, the defeat was as traumatic as the death of Kennedy had been for the US.
Cruyff refused to play in Argentina in 1978, where Holland again reached the final. Instead, mostly with Ajax and Barcelona, he acted as player, coach and, later, unofficial guide. Three years ago, he led the coup which saw ex-players take control of Ajax.
Cruyff’s faith in Michels’ “conflict model” made for an uneasy life, but his championing of open, attacking, creative football never wavered.
David Winner
Diego Maradona
Whatever doubts endure about the character of Diego Maradona, the goal he scored against Bobby Robson’s England in the 1986 World Cup stands as one of, if not the, best in the history of the game.
I am talking here not of his first goal in that quarter-final, a clear piece of mischief helped by abysmally poor refereeing, but that second winning goal of sublime craft and execution.
It began with Maradona picking up the ball inside his own half and keeping it so close to his boots that it seemed glued to them. He then proceeded to carve his way through the English side before finally beating Shilton with the effortless movement of a slalom skier. As Maradona’s teammate Jorge Valdano put it later, “It was Diego’s personal adventure, one that was totally spectacular.”
Both goals against England epitomised man and legend. The first showed Maradona the urchin born of Buenos Aires not only cheating but getting away with it — an Argentine artful dodger. The second showed Maradona the naturally gifted player, whose low sense of gravity, acceleration, control and accuracy translated into unrivalled greatness on the field.
His performance in leading Argentina to ultimate conquest in the World Cup in Mexico earned him the Golden Ball award as the best player title of the tournament. Standing at 5ft 5in, and yet, at his peak, with the strength of will and balance in body to withstand an extraordinary catalogue of physical abuse, some of it self-inflicted, Maradona combined the skill and vision of a Pelé — with whom he shares the title of Fifa’s Player of the Century — with the versatility of Johan Cruyff, the inspiration behind the best of Dutch and Spanish football.
Maradona’s helter-skelter life provides a fascinating story of a failed genius who constantly courted controversy in his rise to fame. The legend begins with the boy Maradona showing off his remarkable ball control in the dusty playing field of the shanty town where he was born.
In his formative years, Maradona played memorable matches for FC Barcelona and Napoli, gaining a reputation as the best player of the Spanish and Italian leagues. But he later hit headlines because of his developing cocaine addiction, culminating with his dramatic expulsion from the 1994 World Cup after a positive drugs test.
Despite some short-lived comebacks as a player in his native Argentina and an unsuccessful spell as manager of the Argentine squad in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Maradona never regained the pinnacle he reached in Mexico.
Amid continuing off-field controversies, Maradona, an overweight 53-year-old, has spent the last year as “spiritual coach” and part-time player in a fifth division Argentine club, Deportivo Riestra. He has struggled to perpetuate the myth of his own godlike status, without assuming responsibility for his failings and the way he has squandered his talent. It remains his ultimate flaw.
Jimmy Burns
Pelé
Even though Pelé scored more career goals than any other footballer, his most memorable World Cup moments were his misses. In the first minute of his first appearance against the USSR in 1958, he hit the bar — announcing to the world that even though he was only 17, the youngest player at the tournament, he was destined to be its star. Brazil’s joyful, attacking style of play eventually led them to the 1958 title, and captured the hearts of football fans everywhere. Thus began the country’s first period of international dominance, when the Seleção won three World Cups in 12 years. Pelé was the team’s talisman, ambassador and icon; a personification of what was best not just in Brazilian football, but in all of football.
In 1970, his final World Cup, again it was Pelé’s misses that we remember. The audacious chip from the halfway line in the opening game against Czechoslovakia. The mesmerising dummy in the semi-final against Uruguay. It doesn’t matter that the ball went narrowly wide in both cases. His playfulness and creativity were intoxicating. Pelé was an artist, whose vision of the game and technical skills enabled him to rise above his peers. Hence his nickname, The King.
As a player, Pelé had it all. Small but with an athlete’s perfect physique, he could shoot with both feet, use his head, dribble, pass and defend. He was even a good goalkeeper, despite his size, and was the reserve keeper for Santos, his club side, for whom he played in goal four times. Pelé also had timing — not just on the pitch but also in the sweep of history. The 1970 World Cup may have been his swansong, yet it was also the first World Cup to be broadcast in colour. Football as a televised spectacle was born with Pelé and his golden-shirted teammates. They provided an indelible first impression — a glamour and romanticism that no subsequent team has attained.
Pelé’s legend is also enhanced by his name, a nickname of disputed origin, that sounds like it was an international brand name thought up to be pronounceable in all languages. It is both child-like and an intimidating nom de guerre. A brand name it did become. Pelé was one of the first footballers to use sporting fame as a commercial launching pad: he registered his name as a trademark, sponsored products and invested in business ventures. In the Seventies, a survey showed his was the second most recognised brand name in Europe after Coca-Cola.
Pelé had talent; he also worked hard. Despite being the most famous footballer in history, he never went off the rails. In retirement, he has never stopped. He advertises many products — some would say too many — and spends his life semi-permanently on tour. It helps that he has aged well. Well into his seventies now, he still looks like the 17-year-old who dazzled the world in 1958. Even though he stopped playing more than 40 years ago, his face remains one of the most widely recognised in world sport.
Alex Bellos
Zinedine Zidane
In Argentina, it is common sense that if you revere the second goal that Maradona scored against England at the 1986 World Cup, then you must revere the Hand of God. The explosive intricacy, the impish daring, the lethal finish of the second goal, all spring from the same life of tough peripheral poverty that extols trickery and recognises the necessity of gamesmanship. The same can be said of France and Zinedine Zidane.
In France’s second game of the 1998 World Cup, Zidane was sent off after raking his boot over the thigh of Saudi player Fuad Anwar. Three weeks later, after scoring two of the three goals that won France their first World Cup, the face of a Franco-Algerian, a Muslim of Berber ethnic stock, raised in the banlieues of Paris and Marseille, was beamed onto the side of the Arc de Triomphe in the midst of the biggest party in Paris since the liberation. A team decried by France’s far right as inauthentically French was now celebrated as proof of the new multicultural France.
Having announced his retirement, the 2006 World Cup was always going to stage Zidane’s last games as a professional footballer. I was lucky enough to see France vs Spain in the round of 16. Zidane had already won the game for France, controlling the midfield and making a goal for Patrick Vieira. Then he scored his own.
Running at full tilt, he received a waist-high spinning ball and without breaking step cushioned it off the top of his thigh. It fell so softly into his path that a tiny touch of his extended toe brought it perfectly under control. How do you top that? A sharp right-angled turn, brilliantly disguised by his impassive eyes and an impossibly late shift of weight, then a pirouette spinning at lightning speed on a thimble, cut short by an immaculate shot that rendered the flailing efforts of defender and goalkeeper almost ludicrous.
By the time of the final, Zidane had already been made the player of the tournament and in the 108th minute of the game against Italy, his header seemed bound for goal. The chance was saved and two minutes later, after an exchange of words, Zidane headbutts Marco Materazzi and walks off the pitch forever. France lost the penalty shoot-out.
David Beckham came home from his red card in the 1998 World Cup to burning effigies and a nationwide hail of abuse. Zidane, meanwhile, was not simply forgiven but venerated — his act variously interpreted as a blow against racism and a statement of the importance of pride over victory.
In England, we immortalise our footballers as ephebic youths and Athenian heroes. Outside Wembley, Bobby Moore stares imperturbably into the middle distance; at Stamford Bridge, Peter Osgood is a picture of serenity. France cast Zidane’s headbutt in bronze 16ft high and put it outside the Pompidou Centre. We have forgotten, if we ever knew it, that heroes have their flaws, the gods have feet of clay, and they are no less divine for it.
David Goldblatt
