“I was twelve when I turned my back on you,” Gianluigi Buffon—one of the great goalkeepers of all time—wrote in a 2016 love letter addressed to his goal. As a child growing up in Italy, Buffon had learned that the glory of the game was in attacking the goal, trying to score against it. But then he made a fateful decision, going with his “heart” and “instinct.” He put behind him his past as a regular player in order to guarantee the goal “a secure future.” It was, he admits, a strange choice, a kind of curse. “The day I stopped looking at you in the face is also the day that I started to love you,” Buffon writes. “To protect you. To be your first and last line of defense.”1
It was not that he never looked at the goal. It was just that, when he did, it was because he had failed to defend it and thus had to fish the ball out of the back of the net. He had to promise the goal “that I would do everything not to see your face.” After all, he writes, it was “painful every time I did, turning around and realizing I had disappointed you. Again. And again.” This only deepened the “vow” that defines his life as a player: to protect the goal and act as “a shield” against all its enemies, even if that means putting its welfare above his own. Buffon presents himself as the gallant hero in a tragic, if slightly absurd, romance. “We have always been opposites yet we are complementary, like the sun and the moon. Forced to live side by side without being able to touch. Teammates for life, a life in which we are denied all contact.” Buffon ends his letter articulating his commitment. “I was twelve when I turned my back on my goal. And I will keep doing it as long as my legs, my head and my heart will allow.”
The goalie, writes philosopher Edward Winters, is often seen as “the guardian of honor.… The keeper’s job is to frustrate.” Goalies are there to stop the goals, to prevent the celebration. From the perspective of the opposing team and its fans, and maybe from the perspective of soccer itself, goalkeepers can be seen as the enemy of joy, the very antithesis of the game. Even Francis Hodgson, an amateur goalie who has written a spirited defense of the position, admits that the player is there precisely to “prevent the very thing that everybody present wants to occur.… At root, he is an anti-footballer. By being devoted to the prevention of goals he is set against the core of football.” In his history of the goalie, Jonathan Wilson offers an even more dramatic depiction. Soccer is rooted in old, sacred traditions in which games were part of fertility rites and harvest festivals, with the scoring of a goal auguring well for births and crops. Therefore, the goalkeeper is not just a “symbolic prophylactic” but “the destroyer of harvests, the bringer of famine.”2
What, then, goes on in the mind of the goalie? Buffon explains his existence by depicting himself as a tragic, chivalric hero. He stops players from scoring because he loves the goal, so much so that he is willing to spend his life next to it while making the ultimate sacrifice: turning his back, never looking, protecting it because that is the only way to truly show his love. Perhaps what stands out most about Buffon’s letter, though, is the loneliness it describes. This is the soulful truth of the position. Isolated from the game, the goalie hears the crowd roar behind him. The flowing pattern of the game unfolds ahead, the action going on—at least if he is lucky enough to have a good team—far in the distance, past the halfway line. Juan Villoro notes that as “the great loner” in the world of soccer, the goalie has also “more time than anyone to reflect.” That is why, he writes, “thinkers and eccentrics gravitate to the position.… All keepers know the rich interior life their profession entails.” The goalie must, Villoro suggests, learn to be particularly philosophical, living out a kind of “symposia” on the turf.3
Goalies mostly patrol what is known as the penalty box. It is an area around the goal, marked off by lines. Forty-four yards across and eighteen yards deep, the penalty box is slightly larger than a basketball court. Within it, the goalie can use her hands to catch and pick up the ball, and penalties committed within the box lead to a direct penalty kick on goal. The two penalty boxes at each end make up a significant part of the soccer pitch. The size of the field varies; the Laws of the Game stipulate it can be anywhere between 100 and 130 yards long and between 50 and 100 yards across, though the range is smaller for international matches. Most pitches in stadiums are around 100 yards long and 60 yards across. Still, in a game defined by constant movement of players up and down the pitch, the goalie is the most immobile, only rarely venturing outside the borders of the penalty box and almost never as far as the middle of the pitch. He spends his time in front of goal that, compared to him, is frighteningly large, usually twenty-four feet across and eight feet high. In front of the vast, yawning goal, the goalie faces an onrushing team. He can only cover the space by making just the right moves at just the right time.4
I was the goalie for my suburban American youth team, and there was a beautiful kind of peace to the role. I watched, from a quiet distance, as the pattern of the game played out in front of me, at ease when the ball was far off, gradually more and more alert as it approached. Then, of course, my defenders would screw up, the ball would come streaking toward me, and, in a gesture of complete irrationality and abandon, I would throw myself in its path. Then, often enough, after all that, as my face smashed into the dirt, the ball went into the net anyway. And it was all my fault.
I was spared this experience much of the time only because an Icelandic wunderkind named Yakko had miraculously descended into the precincts of Bethesda, and, even more incredibly, ended up on our second-rate team. My job mostly consisted of watching him leave a trail of opposing players lying on the ground; he would score one goal after another, then run back to us, all smiles and high-fiving me as if I had contributed somehow by standing inert in goal.
I do remember well, though, the brief period when my Bolivian coach (who, he always reminded us, had once “played with Pelé”) decided I should be a striker. I’d apparently dribbled better than anyone (save Yakko) during a drill. Plus, I was Belgian, which I think he hoped conferred on me some special skill in the midst of the desert of talent that was late 1970s suburban Maryland. My career as a striker was relatively short, but I do recall the incredible freedom I felt, the lightness of trying to score rather than attempting to stop others from doing so. It was sometimes my fault if we didn’t win. But it was never my fault if we lost, the way it was when I was a goalie.
Years later, in 2010, I was in South Africa for the men’s World Cup and watched a game alongside the retired Cameroonian goalie Joseph-Antoine Bell. For years, he played for Olympique de Marseille, where he became a favorite of many of the team’s fans of immigrant background, and he also played internationally for Cameroon. That night, we watched an exciting German team trounce England, 4–1, giving Bell ample opportunity to comment on the failures of the English goalie David James. After one goal, Bell noted that if James had just stayed in position, closing down the angles of the onrushing German forward, he would have blocked the ball. Instead, James had tried for a more dramatic save and in the process left part of the goal unguarded. “The problem is that human beings are programmed to try and be heroes,” Bell told me with a smiling wisdom that I sensed had been earned through many mistakes. For goalies, he went on, this is dangerous, because in many cases the dramatic diving save is less effective than just moving incrementally to be in the right place at all times. The latter, of course, is much less likely to be noticed and celebrated. But to be a real hero as a goalie, Bell suggested, may mean not being recognized as such.5
Winters notes that the most celebrated move for a goalie is “the fingertip save,” when a goalie stretches out, flying, and manages to keep the ball out of the net with the very tips of his extended fingers. “The fingertip save,” Winters writes, “is the utmost frustration, as it prevents the anticipated climax of the game: a spectacular goal.” And yet, like a goal, it “makes the game more beautiful.” The goalie, Winters notes, has perhaps the most “dangerous job” on the field, since the goalie places his body in the way of the “raw, unbridled ambition of the goal-hungry striker who slides in stretching his foot out, studs first.” There is some consolation in the fact that goalies are, among all the players, the most likely to talk with their team’s fans, who traditionally gather behind the goal on one end of the field. When the goalie is in front of his team’s supporters, he will sometimes engage in friendly banter with them, and as a result “there grows an unparalleled affection between the keeper and the fans.” On the other hand, of course, when the goalie is positioned in front of opposing fans, he is more vulnerable than any other player to a constant barrage of insults, not to mention the occasional bottle or rock or coin thrown from the stands.6
The loneliness of the goalie is perhaps most poignantly captured in an anecdote from Christmas 1937. About half an hour into a game between the English teams Charlton Athletic and Chelsea, a fog descended onto the pitch so thick that it was impossible to keep playing. The two managers walked onto the field and told their players the game would have to be abandoned, and the crowd of forty thousand dispersed. The goalie for Charlton, Sam Bartram, couldn’t see any of it through the fog. He stayed on the pitch. As he later recounted, while he stood there alone, he thought “smugly” that his team must be giving Chelsea “quite the hammer” at the other end of the field. But clearly they had not scored, for no players were coming back to the halfway line to restart the game. “Time passed, and I made several advances towards the edge of the penalty area, peering through the murk,” he recalled. “Still I could see nothing. The Chelsea defense was clearly being run off its feet. After a long time a figure loomed out of the curtain of fog in front of me. It was a policeman, and he gaped at me incredulously. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ he gasped. ‘The game was stopped a quarter of an hour ago. The field’s completely empty.’” When Bartram finally got to the dressing room, the rest of his team, “already out of the bath, were convulsed with laughter.”7
The policeman’s question—“What on earth are you doing here?”—has gone through many goalies’ heads at one time or another, as they stand alone in the box, wondering what is to come from out of the fog of the game. Yet the goalie is vitally important to any team: the last line of defense, often the only hope for a team at those moments when everything might go wrong. Never at the center of the pitch, the goalie is still often at the center of the most pivotal moments of the game. At her best, of course, the goalie can actually form the root of a team, serving as the foundation for plays, passing the ball forward in the hope that others will score, setting the game in motion again and again, hectoring and encouraging the players who, unlike her, get to streak forward toward the other end of the pitch. That is why the most important quality of a goalie is not her physical size, but the size of her personality, her ability to inspire confidence and strength in her teammates, even when they have their backs turned, as they often do, focused entirely on the other goal far across the pitch.
The solitary goalkeeper was a relatively late development in the game. In the old English folk games that helped inspire modern soccer, hundreds of villagers divided into two teams and tried to get the ball to one goal or another—sometimes separated by miles. In these messy, chaotic events there could be lots of goalies, often a string of younger kids, not tough enough to survive the brutal fray but a little helpful if they lined up in a last-ditch effort to stop the onrushing attackers.8
Because so many different styles of ball games had developed, schools and universities in England decided in the mid-nineteenth century to come up with shared sets of rules to make it easier to play against each other. This was not always easy, so, at what turned out to be an epochal meeting in 1863, a group of captains from various teams in and around London met at London’s Freemasons’ Tavern. They were alumni of different schools and universities, with different traditions of play, but they managed to hammer out a shared set of rules. They called them, ponderously and ambitiously, the Laws of the Game. And they went further, deciding to create an organization: the English Football Association, which would become the model for the associations that now exist in every country in the world and a few places that aren’t countries too.9
Because the rules of the game spread outward from England, these original “laws” established the most important features of soccer as it is still played today. The most important of these laws was that players were not allowed to use their hands or carry the ball. This set the game apart from what came to be known as rugby, as well as from Gaelic football, Australian Rules football, and American football. The game was officially known as association football, because it was governed by the rules of the Football Association. This gave rise to the term “soccer,” a colloquialism probably developed by English university students, who shortened “association” to “soc-er.” That term became standard in the United States because it distinguished the sport from American football, but it was also still used regularly in England as late as the 1960s. In most of the world, the game is known through local versions of the word “football”—fútbol in Spanish, futebol in Portuguese, fußball in German.10
The game conquered the world more rapidly than any other cultural form in human history. By the late nineteenth century, it was being played all over the world, with clubs and competitions proliferating on six continents. In contrast to American football and basketball, which have both seen many significant rule changes since the nineteenth century, soccer’s Laws of the Game have been remarkably stable. In the decades after 1863, the Laws of the Game were expanded and cemented. Since then, there has been some tinkering here and there, but the core has never changed. In a sense, it is the most conservative of sports; those who govern the game and many fans and players have consistently resisted any major changes to the rules. While there are occasional suggestions in the United States that the rules should be changed to make the sport more appealing to audiences used to the high-scoring games of basketball and American football, in most of the world, people seem pretty happy with soccer as it is. Why, after all, change something that is so beloved in so many different places and cultures? What is there to be improved, when it is already the most popular form of leisure and spectacle on the planet?
There were a few refinements made to the goal in the years after 1863. The original laws had set the breadth of the goal at twenty-four feet across, but it had no top. The ball simply had to pass “over the space between the goal-posts,” as high as you wanted. A player could kick the ball high, the way a kicker does for a field goal in American football. This made stopping the ball from going over the goal line difficult. Three years later, the goal got an upper limit eight feet high. This was marked at first by string or tape, and soon after by sturdier crossbars. By the end of the 1860s, then, the standing rectangle that is the goal—a shape that populates the entire world—was set.11
It took a bit longer for the position of goalie to come into existence. In early versions of the game, the final defender just did what he could to stop the ball from going in, using his feet or body. In 1871, the Football Association updated the rules and allowed for a team to have a player who “shall be at liberty to use his hands for the protection of his goal.” This player could use his hands anywhere on the field. The position, then, was a sort of one-player relic from the earlier versions of the game that allowed players to carry the ball, as rugby and American football continued to do. In 1887, the rules were changed so that the goalkeeper was limited to using his hands only in his team’s half of the field. In 1912, the goalkeeper was limited to doing so only in his own box. From then on, the penalty box became what Wilson calls a “virtual cell for the keeper,” and their role in the game became “psychologically circumscribed.” The goalie’s advantage over other players only exists in this limited space, which makes venturing outside it potentially dangerous.12
The goalie’s formal role—in all its loneliness and occasional glory—was essentially established by the early twentieth century. The only other significant change in rules about the goalie came many decades later in 1990. The modification was made after a European Cup that was widely criticized for its defensive, and often boring, style of play. In that tournament, teams who were ahead and wanted to run out the clock repeatedly used the technique of passing the ball back to their own goalie, who would then hold on to it—in one case for a full six minutes. So, a new back pass rule was promulgated: if a defender passes the ball back to their own goalie, the hands cannot be used, thus forcing a more rapid return to play. This change had a significant impact on the game, making it easier for the offense to pressure the other team because a defender no longer has the option to simply pass the ball back to the safety of the goalie’s arms. It has also meant that goalies have had to get better at handling the ball with their feet when facing opposing forwards after receiving a back pass.13
There are different names for the position—goalkeeper, goalie, keeper—that are all basically interchangeable. Yet goalies themselves have widely different personalities and styles of play. One of the most influential early goalies was an Englishman named Leigh Richmond Roose. A Welsh preacher’s son, Roose was born in 1877 and started playing in goal when he was studying medicine. Goalies, Roose explained, didn’t need to play the position according to the “stereotype” and could “cultivate originality.” He stood out from other goalies at the time because of his willingness to wander far away from the goal, sometimes even bouncing the ball all the way up to the middle of the field. This was not an easy task. At the time, referees allowed players to tackle one another much more violently than they do today. Roose had to dodge around defenders who were intent on knocking him down hard enough to make him drop the ball. His ability to hold on to the ball with his hands throughout his team’s half of the field was frustrating to other teams, and directly inspired the Football Association’s 1912 rule limiting the keeper’s use of his hands to the penalty box. Roose left his mark on the game in another way, however, because he was a master at setting up his team’s attacks. He was extremely good at “clearing” the ball: kicking it far up field from the goal so that his players could rapidly move toward the opposing goal. A goalie, Roose explained, had to be creative and unpredictable, using “a variety of methods in his clearances” in order to “confound and puzzle attacking forwards.” A failed clearance that gave the attackers the ball, of course, could be a disaster for a goalie, noted Roose. A strong clearance that passed the ball ahead to attacking players, however, could lead to a goal for his team. Roose’s playing style was successful and popular among the crowds, helping him redefine the position. Roose joined the British army at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He was decorated with the Military Cross in 1916 after continuing to fight even after having been badly burned with a flamethrower, but died a few months later at the Somme. His playing style, however, had transformed the position of goalie. One of his Sunderland teammates claimed that he was the “mould from which all others were created.”14
In part thanks to Roose’s influence, the goalie became an object of fascination and, sometimes, adulation in the early twentieth century. “God himself stood in goal,” one newspaper declared in 1929, celebrating the success of the German keeper Heinrich Stuhlfauth in a game against Italy. Stuhlfauth became a star in the 1920s, playing on the Nuremberg professional team and on the German national team. He perfected ways of patrolling and defending the goal from within the penalty box. Stuhlfauth had a powerful presence, and he emphasized the importance of timing and placement to success in the position. “A good goalkeeper does not throw himself about,” he claimed. “Crash landings and panther-like jumps” were only necessary when he had not calculated things correctly. Part of the key was knowing how to “leave the goal at the right moment.” Stuhlfauth knew that, from the stands, it often seemed like he wasn’t going to make it to the ball when he ran out toward an approaching attacker. He noted, however, that the goalie had a crucial advantage, as he could “get to the ball more quickly because the ball comes towards the goalkeeper while the opponent has to run after it.” By running out from goal, he could almost always “nullify the attack.” He was good at this partly because, before being a goalie, he had played for many years in an attacking position. This experience gave Stuhlfauth a better sense of the precise timing and speed of an attack.15
He wasn’t the only goalie compared to a divinity during this period. The Spanish keeper Ricardo Zamora was known as “The Divine One” and became one of the early soccer celebrities: a teammate called him “more famous than [Greta] Garbo and better looking.” He was the first great star of the Spanish professional team Real Madrid. In one game against archrival Barcelona, Zamora dived to stop a ball and created a great cloud of dust. Many in the stadium assumed that the opposing side had scored, but “as the dust cleared, Zamora emerged, standing impassively with the ball in his arms.” According to Wilson, it was “probably the most famous save in Spanish history.” Zamora’s fame traveled far. When a man named Niceto Alcalá Zamora became president of Spain, Stalin apparently assumed he was the soccer player, saying: “Ah, that goalkeeper!” Zamora’s presence and stature, according to Eduardo Galeano, “sowed panic among strikers.” Galeano imagines how the daunting goalkeeper made attacking players feel: “If they looked his way, they were lost: with Zamora in goal, the net would shrink and the posts would lose themselves in the distance.” He “hypnotized anyone who set foot in the box.” Even a star like Zamora, however, had his lows. At one point, as the keeper for Spain, he allowed seven goals by the English team and was widely ridiculed in the British press.16
Though he became famous as a novelist rather than a soccer player, the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov played as a goalie during the same period, leaving us a beautiful depiction of how the world looks from the position. He started in the position as a boy attending Tenishev School in Russia, where the headmaster wondered suspiciously why Nabokov liked this position rather than “running about with the other players.” Later, as a student at the University of Cambridge in the wake of World War I, Nabokov played on a university team. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he writes luminously of soccer games as the “windswept clearing in the middle of a rather muddled period” in his life. Some games were played on “bright, bracing days—the good smell of the turf, that famous inter-Varsity forward, dribbling closer and closer to me with the new tawny ball on his twinkling toe, then the stinging shot, the lucky save, it’s protracted tingle.” But there were other, “more esoteric days, under dismal skies, with the goal area a mass of black mud, the ball as greasy as a plum-pudding.” He writes, “I would fumble badly—and retrieve the ball from the net.” Then, “mercifully,” the game would move away from him, to the “other end of the sodden field.… Mists would gather. Now the game would be a vague bobbing of heads near the remote goal,” he recalled. “The far, blurred sounds, a cry, a whistle, the thud of a kick, all that was perfectly unimportant and had no connection to me.” He would sometimes lean “back against the left goalpost,” closing his eyes, listening “to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of the game.” He was so isolated that he felt like “less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret.” To be a goalie, he suggests, is to know a certain secret that only others who have occupied the role can understand.17
In those quiet moments by the goal, he felt like “a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer’s disguise,” and he returned to Russia in his mind, composing poems “in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew.” Among the differences between England and Russia he’d noticed was the way the English thought about the game, and specifically about the goalie. In England, goalies got little attention because there was a “national dread of showing off and a too grim preoccupation with solid teamwork.” As a result, the English just couldn’t understand the beauty of the “goalie’s eccentric art.” However, among Russians and Latin Americans, Nabokov writes, protecting the goal was considered a “gallant art,” and the goalie was therefore “surrounded by a halo of singular glamour.” He continues, “Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys,” as much “an object of thrilled adulation” as a “matador” or a “flying ace.” Photographers, “reverently bending on one knee,” might capture him “making a spectacular dive” as the “stadium roars in approval,” then he “remains for a moment or two lying full length where he fell, his goal still intact.” Nabokov depicted the goalie dramatically as “the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender.”18
The writer and philosopher Albert Camus was also a goalie. One might even attribute the entire structure of his existentialist thought to this fact. In his memories of his time playing soccer, Camus hinted that the sport was central to the way he came to see life and his relationship with others. Camus was the son of a French man and a woman of Spanish descent who were part of the European settler community in the French colony of Algeria. Camus was born in 1913, and the next year his father died fighting in World War I. He was raised by his mother. She could neither read nor write, and, because of a hearing impediment, she had to read lips to understand what others were saying. Growing up poor in the working-class neighborhood of Belcourt, Camus played soccer in the streets and at age fifteen joined the team at his local high school, wearing an “odious” uniform of purple and red.19
By that time, soccer was well established throughout Algeria, with several clubs in the capital city of Algiers. Camus joined one of them, the Racing Universitaire d’Alger (RUA), which was affiliated with the university. Because it was considered representative of the “high-class elites” of Algiers, the team was on the receiving end of fairly intense hazing: bottles were thrown at the players from the stands, and opposing players were intent on inflicting maximum physical pain on them. Camus was actually quite poor—Galeano suggests he had first taken up the position of goalie because there “your shoes don’t wear out as fast”—but he still didn’t escape the abuse. He long remembered his “bulldozing centre-half,” Raymond Couard, who protected him as best he could. “But it was never enough.”20
Camus later recalled the experience of confronting one particularly rough forward nicknamed “Pastèque”—watermelon—over and over again. “He commanded all his weight against my kidneys. I also received a shin massage from his rough boots, some shirt-grabbing, occasional knees in the noble regions, and sandwiches in the post.” But, Camus went on, he came to understand that even the relentless Pastèque had “good in him” and should be respected as a player. “The world has taught me much, but what I retain on morals and the obligation of man, I owe to sport, and it’s at RUA that I learned it.”21
What had he learned, precisely? In his novel The Stranger, Camus famously wrote from the perspective of a narrator who, when he learns he is going to be executed, reminds himself that “it’s common knowledge that life isn’t worth living anyhow.” As he puts it, “Whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably.” Maybe it was the goalie in Camus—drawing on the intimate understanding of futility that comes from having to pull the ball out of the net, again and again—who created a character who understood that, in “the wide view,” it really makes no difference when one dies because “other men and women will continue living, the world will go as before.”22
Existentialist philosophy, at its core, is about accepting the inevitability of death and the concomitant absurdity of life. But it is also, at least in its slightly more optimistic variants, about using that knowledge to find a way to live in the world, to keep going, knowing that while we can make choices about how we live each day, we can’t ultimately control the outcome. More than any other player in soccer, the goalie is always reminded of this. However hard she tries and whatever effort she makes, the goalie will often be powerless in the face of fate, the ball endlessly slipping past her into the net. And yet, somewhat miraculously—but also absurdly—the goalie keeps trying anyway. Even if her team is down by many goals and is clearly going to lose, the goalie—knowing there is really no point—still dives courageously, bashing into the ground, trying to stop one more goal from going in.
Many goalies find themselves buffeted by the ups and downs of soccer. “It’s always the keeper’s fault,” writes Galeano, “and if it isn’t, he still gets blamed.” Goalies do not have the chances that other players have to erase the memory of a mistake. Defenders can experience the deep shame of scoring an own goal—sending the ball into their net by accident when they are trying to stop it from going in—but they can then at least hope to reverse the impact of this by scoring a goal themselves, restoring the balance of a game. Other players can “blow it once in a while” but then “redeem themselves with a spectacular dribble” or a “masterful pass,” as Galeano notes. But years of brilliant saves sometimes don’t make up for a crucial save missed. The rage directed at goalies by fans, who sometimes never forgive, is matched only by the rage they direct at referees. “The crowd,” Galeano notes, “never forgives the keeper.”23
This also means that the fortunes of goalies can go up and down with remarkable intensity and unpredictability. The legendary Russian goalie Lev Yashin experienced this over the course of his storied career, alternately heralded as a national hero and virulently attacked as the cause of his team’s downfall. Yashin, Galeano writes, stopped over a hundred penalty shots in his career and “who knows-how-many-goals.… He could deflect the ball with a glance.” Yashin profoundly shaped how the position is played today because he performed on an expanding international stage that had not existed in Roose’s time. Like Roose before him, he “saw the value in commanding his box and the space beyond” and frequently left his box to clear the ball. Yashin was “noted both for his physical courage and his heading ability.” That didn’t keep from being a scapegoat. In 1955, he was blamed for a loss by his professional team, Dynamo Moscow, in the Soviet Cup final. A cartoon showed him wearing boxing gloves instead of those of a goalie and announced, “The Cup would undoubtedly have been ours… but for Comrade Yashin.” Five years later, he was celebrated as “the best goal-keeper in the world” after his performance for the USSR in the 1960 European Championship. Yet in 1962, he was again blamed by many for the poor showing of the USSR in the men’s World Cup. His wife remembers that upon his return, based on one ill-informed account of the game from the official news agency, everyone claimed, “Yashin lost the World Cup.” By the 1966 World Cup, he was once again celebrated for his feats on the field. As he grew older, however, he suffered from the physical toll of being a goalie, which can be extremely hard on the shoulders and hips. The constant diving and hitting the ground, over and over again in practices and in games, can cause serious injuries and also wear down the bones, cartilage, and ligaments over time. Along with the physical suffering, of course, was added the psychic cost for Yashin of never being sure if he would leave a game considered the cause of a nation’s downfall or a shining hero.24
Sometimes a goalie makes a save that is long remembered for its pure improbability: when everything seemed lost, he produced a miracle. This was the case in the 1970 men’s World Cup, when the English keeper Gordon Banks faced off against Brazil, perhaps the most brilliant attacking team ever assembled for the tournament. In the tenth minute, the forward Jairzinho sent a beautiful cross toward the goal. Banks read its arc and moved to cover it. The ball was heading toward Pelé, who, as the Scottish sports journalist Hugh McIlvanney wrote at the time, rushed toward the goal, “reading the situation flawlessly and moving as perhaps only he could,” and rose “in an elastic leap, arching his back and neck to get behind and above the ball.… The header was smashed downward with vicious certainty,” aimed at an opening that Banks had left exposed. Pelé was so sure the ball was going in the net that he shouted “goal” as he headed it. The heavily pro-Brazilian crowd jumped, ready to celebrate. “But Banks, hurling himself back across the goal at a speed that will never cease to awe those who were there or the millions who watched on television, was already twisting into range as the ball met the ground two or three feet from his line.” As it rose he flicked it upward with his right hand—and over the crossbar. He later thought the ball had been at shoulder height when he reached it. In fact, however, the ball was just a foot or so off the ground. He had moved so quickly that he didn’t even remember precisely how extraordinary his motion had been. “This is without question the greatest save I have ever seen,” said his teammate Bobby Charlton.25
Goalies can sometimes play absolutely extraordinary games, only to be remembered for a single failure at the very end. During the 2010 men’s World Cup, when Algeria played the US in the final match of group play—with the winner guaranteed to win a slot among the final sixteen in the tournament—the backup goalie for Algeria, Raïs M’Bolhi, took to the pitch after an injury to the starting goalie in the previous match. He was brilliant, stopping strike after strike from the US and basically keeping his team in the game. In the final minutes of the game, in extra time, Landon Donovan outwitted the Algerian defenders, rushed forward, and scored a brilliant goal. M’Bolhi’s team was out of the World Cup.
The US goalie that day was Tim Howard, who made history at the 2014 men’s World Cup in Brazil when he stopped a record sixteen shots that came at him from a brilliant Belgian team. His exploits earned him the ultimate form of contemporary celebrity: a meme called #ThingsTimHowardCouldSave. In the images that flowed across the Internet, he had stopped any number of things from happening, including the 9/11 terror attacks. Someone edited the Wikipedia page for the US Secretary of Defense and, briefly, gave him the position. Of course, rather than seeing Howard as an endlessly heroic goalie, one might instead argue that the US defense was just terrible, forcing the goalie into situations he never should have been in. And, in the end, the sixteen saves weren’t what mattered: instead, the two goals he ultimately let in, late in the game, were what counted against him. The goalie, writes Wilson, “will have the least to do when his side has played best and will be at his best only when the rest of the team has in some way failed. He is like a lifeguard or a fireman, to be thanked in times of crisis even as everybody wonders why the crisis arose in the first place.” For all Howard’s heroism, he still couldn’t save his team, which lost 2–1 to Belgium, eliminating them from the World Cup.26
The best goalies have a powerful presence in goal, and their confidence extends outward to their defenders and the rest of the team. This is the case of the American goalie Hope Solo, who is riveting to watch as much for the brilliant, acrobatic saves she makes as for the psychological intensity with which she confronts opposing forwards. Like many other goalies, she didn’t start out in the position, and she learned to play by scoring goals, not stopping them. As a girl, she was a strong forward, constantly scoring goals. As she recalls it, “No coach would have ever dreamed of taking me off the field and sticking me in goal.” She found solace from a difficult life on the football pitch. “I knew how soccer made me feel,” she writes, “and I knew I wanted to hold onto that feeling for the rest of my life.” She continues, “Life was calm and ordered on the soccer field,” where she felt “free and unburdened.”27
“Goal-keeping isn’t glamorous,” Solo writes. “It’s tough and stressful and thankless.” Because youth soccer coaches often put less athletic kids in goal, there’s also a “stigma about goalkeeping.” When Solo was recruited into an Olympic Development Program (ODP) in Washington state, she started playing the position regularly. During her first game with the ODP team, the starting goalkeeper suffered a concussion after colliding with another player in the net. The coach, perhaps sensing something about Solo that would make her a good goalie, asked her to take over for the injured player. She did well and began playing occasionally in the position. Though Solo kept playing forward on her club and high school teams, she found that her knowledge of “how a forward attacks” allowed her to better position herself in goal and know when to run out and break up plays. Anchored in two roles, with a “double identity,” she learned how to think like a goalkeeper and a forward at the same time, closely watching attackers so she could position herself to stop them from scoring.28
In 2000, she got her first invitation to train with the US Women’s National Team, then coached by April Heinrichs. The team was fresh off their epochal victory in the 1999 Women’s World Cup, which had drawn record crowds. Solo was a young and untested player, and she found “the skill and confidence level” of the veteran players “daunting.” She found herself in goal behind the legendary defender Brandi Chastain, who had scored the winning penalty kick against China in the 1999 tournament final. Chastain had become an icon not only because of her goal, but because the image of her celebration—in which she had ripped off her shirt, revealing her sports bra—was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and heralded by many as a symbol of the bold strength and success of female athletes. For the young Solo, it was terrifying to be on the field with the famous player. At one point, Chastain turned around to the young goalkeeper and “barked: ‘That’s your ball.’” Solo recalls, “Oh fuck, I thought. Brandi Chastain is yelling at me.” In another practice, Solo maladroitly punted the ball up into the air, and the striker Mia Hamm stopped short, looked at her, and said, “Do you want me to fucking head the ball? Then you need to fucking learn how to drop-kick it.” Solo was mortified: “Oh, God, I thought. Now Mia Hamm is yelling at me.”29
A goalie’s size is important. Being tall, and having long arms, is an obvious advantage when trying to protect the goal. Yet perhaps even more important is the size of a goalie’s personality. A successful goalie projects authority, commanding and controlling her defenders. She arranges them to defend the goal on free kicks and corner kicks, calculating angles and interpreting the positioning and movement of the opposing players. The confidence of defenders depends on the strength of the goalie—knowing that the goalie has things covered in front of the goal enables them to stand firm, as well as take risks when necessary. When a team has confidence in a goalie, the defenders can move more freely up the field toward the opposing goal, putting more strength in the attack and pressuring the other team. In this sense, the goalie, though invisible in the attack, plays a crucial role in giving the rest of the team the space and inspiration to move forward quickly and aggressively.
Solo learned about the importance of authority the hard way. She first played for the US Women’s National Team in a game against Iceland in April 2000, and she was chosen again to play archrival Mexico on Cinco de Mayo in Portland. The US dominated the game, winning 4–0. At one point, with Mexico on the attack, Chastain let a ball through and Solo had to dive to make a save. Solo writes, “Brandi turned around and yelled at me—‘Come on, Hope!’—blaming me for not coming out for the ball.” Solo knew it was actually Chastain who had made the mistake, but—too respectful of the authority of the veteran player—she didn’t respond. “That was my mistake,” Solo admits. Afterward, Heinrich spoke to Solo about that incident on the field and her interaction with Chastain. “‘That tells me you’re not ready, Hope,’ she said. ‘We all knew Brandi made a mistake. Yet you didn’t have the courage to call her out and yell back at her. You’re not ready to lead the defense.’”30
In time, of course, Solo would be ready. Though she missed the 2000 Olympics, she played on the under-twenty-one team, and Heinrichs soon brought her back onto the roster of the national team. She attributes much of her improvement to a goalkeeping coach at the University of Washington, Amy Griffin. Soon after Solo starting playing for Washington, Griffin handed her a note that said, “A goalkeeper cannot win a game. A goalkeeper saves it.” What Griffin taught Solo was ultimately the key to goalkeeping: the “intellectual side” of the position, the endless work of observation, of calibration, of constantly adjusting one’s position, and of readiness in relationship to the flow of the game. Before training with Griffin, Solo writes, she had taken a relatively direct approach to guarding the net, waiting in goal and using her size and reflexes to stop what came at her. She learned that the key to goalkeeping at the highest level was to think tactically, remaining a few steps ahead. That meant taking charge of positioning defenders, reading the runs of opposing players as they moved across the field, and understanding “how to anticipate and predict what was happening in front of me.” The key to this was figuring out where the opposing players would likely move and shoot from, and calculating the angles so that she could position herself most effectively. Goalies constantly have to make critical decisions about where to place themselves, and Solo learned how to know when to leave the goal line to confront an onrushing player and when to stay back. All this new awareness made the position “much more interesting.” Rather than “ninety minutes of waiting for my defense to make a mistake,” it became “ninety minutes of tactics and strategy.”31
One of the highlights of Solo’s career came during the 2011 Women’s World Cup when the US faced off against Brazil in a riveting game. In the second half of the game, with the US leading 1–0, the referee gave a red card to US defender Rachel Buehler when she tangled with Brazilian striker Marta Vieira da Silva, known as Marta, in front of the goal. That call was controversial, but it was only the first of a bizarre string of refereeing decisions. The Brazilian player Cristiane Rozeira stepped up to take the penalty kick, and Solo made a brilliant diving save. The referee, however, immediately called for the penalty kick to be retaken. It wasn’t clear why at the time, although it was later understood that the call was for encroachment—one of the US players had started to run into the penalty area before the ball was kicked, which is indeed technically a foul, although quite rarely called. Solo argued with the referee and got a yellow card. Then Marta walked up to take the second penalty kick and struck it fast into the net. Solo was beaten this time. The sequence was enough to drive any goalkeeper mad. Solo kept her composure, though, throughout the rest of the game, even making key saves. In the shoot-out, Solo blocked one crucial penalty kick, winning the game for the US.
In the 2015 World Cup, Solo’s goalkeeping was once again critical to the US success. Against a powerhouse German team in the semifinal, Solo saved the game early on when the referee granted a penalty kick. German star striker Célia Šašić stepped up to take it. I was there in the stadium that day, and I could barely watch, sure that Šašić would make it. Solo did something odd, clearly aiming to psych out the German striker. She started to sort of stroll away from the goal. It almost looked, for a moment, like she had just decided that she was done, that she was leaving for good. As Carli Lloyd remembers, “It was a very leisurely stroll. If there were flowers nearby, she would’ve stopped to pick them.” It was a dangerous move: the referee could have given her a yellow card for it. Just in time, Solo turned back, came into goal, and stared down Šašić who, very uncharacteristically, sent the ball wide to the left of the goal. We went crazy in the stadium. “Sometimes,” Lloyd recalls, “even in the heat of a big game, you can feel the momentum shift on the spot.” That moment was “one of those times,” and the US went on to defeat Germany, and then win against Japan in the final.32
All goalies live with the knowledge that, in one instant, they can make a mistake that they will never live down. Certainly, the goalie who has been treated the most cruelly in history—and who is perhaps most deserving of his own existentialist novel or philosophical treatise—is the Brazilian Moacir Barbosa Nascimento. He was in goal during the 1950 World Cup final that pitted Brazil against Uruguay in the Maracanã stadium, which had been built for the tournament. There was an aura of inevitability about Brazilian victory: the tournament was on home soil, the people were confident that they played the best soccer on the planet, and all that was needed to take home the trophy was a draw in the final game. Barbosa was one of the great goalies of his generation. His “calm self-assurance,” writes Galeano, “filled the entire team with confidence.” And yet—with an estimated two hundred thousand spectators looking on—two defenders lost track of the Uruguayan player Alcides Ghiggia, and Barbosa dove the wrong way. His fingers grazed the ball, and when he got up he thought he’d knocked it safely outside the post. But when he turned around, there it was—in the net. The stadium was taken over by the “the most raucous silence in the history of soccer.” When the game ended, Jules Rimet, the French founder of the World Cup, had to wander about the pitch as devastated Brazilian players and fans milled about. He finally found the Uruguayan captain and shoved the trophy into his arms, then shook his hand silently. He had a prepared speech congratulating the Brazilians in his pocket, but had nothing to say about what had just happened. Tens of thousands of devastated fans spent the entire night in the stadium in silent mourning, unwilling to leave, perhaps hoping that they would somehow wake up from a nightmare.33
Brazilians experienced the loss as a massive national trauma. The game even has its own name, the Maracanazo. A Brazilian midfielder described the moment in simple terms: “The world collapsed on me.” The playwright Nelson Rodrigues went so far, stunningly, as to dub the moment “our Hiroshima.” He was not the only one to think of the event as a wartime defeat: a nine-year-old kid named Edson Arantes do Nascimento—who would later be better known by his nickname, Pelé—sat by the family radio and, as he later recalled, felt an “immense sadness.” He experienced the defeat as “the end of a war, with Brazil the loser and many people killed.” In 1986, Paulo Perdigão—a journalist, film critic, and specialist on existentialist philosophy who translated Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness into Portuguese—published a book called Anatomy of a Defeat. As Wilson notes, he reprints the entire radio commentary from the game—which he describes as both a “Waterloo of the tropics” and the Brazilian equivalent of a Wagner opera—“using it as the basis for his analysis of the game almost as though he were delivering exegesis on a biblical text.”34
Barbosa’s entire life after that was defined by that one instant—his slight miscalculation of angles and velocity, momentum and friction. As Wilson describes it, he seems to have known, right then, what had happened: this was his “assassination,” and that “his life as a normal citizen was over. The video of the game shows him down on one knee after the goal, slowly, sadly raising his powerful body as though he knew already the burden he would carry for the rest of his life.”35
The failure, of course, was not just his. Every player on the Brazilian team that day contributed to the loss. Why not blame the forwards who failed to score, rather than the goalie who had let the ball in? But that is not how it works. The visibility and concreteness of the failure of the goalie makes him the perfect scapegoat for what seems like an impossible and unexplainable loss. The team’s two defenders—who, like him, were Afro-Brazilian—were also singled out as culprits in the loss. The criticism of the three of them often took on racist overtones, suggesting that black players didn’t have the capacity or discipline to represent the nation at the highest levels. The next generation of Afro-Brazilian footballers, including Pelé, would often have to struggle to find their place and gain the recognition they deserved in comparison to white players. Barbosa was made to feel like he was a kind of curse. Not only was he taken off the team, but he was also barred from ever commenting on national team matches and from attending any national team practices for the rest of his life. In 1963, he apparently invited friends to a barbeque during which he burned the Maracanã goalposts in a “liturgy of purification.” As he noted in an interview in 2000, in a country where the maximum jail sentence for any crime was thirty years, he had gotten “fifty years of punishment for a crime he had not committed.”36
If there is one moment where the goalie has the best chance of earning redemption, and emerging as a hero, it is during a penalty kick shoot-out. Depending on your perspective, this is either the most riveting or the most absurd spectacle in soccer.
A penalty kick shoot-out is a relative rarity. In regular league play for professional teams, it is fine for a game to end with a draw, 0–0 or 1–1, since the rankings are based on a point system, with 0 for a loss, 1 for a draw, and 3 for a win. The same is true in the group stages that make up the beginning of international competition, where a selected set of teams—usually four—all play one another, and the top teams progress on to the next rounds. There are, however, some games that have to end in the elimination of one of the teams. In this case, if the game is still tied after ninety minutes, it goes into overtime. If it is still tied after two fifteen-minute periods of overtime, the game is decided in penalty kicks. The shoot-out works like this: teams alternate taking the same kind of penalty kicks that are given for fouls inside the box during regular play. One after another, the players step up and try to score.
In this dramatic sequence, all eyes are on the goalie, who has to stand up again and again and try to stop the other team from scoring. This is the moment when a goalie has the greatest chance of being hailed as a hero. Stopping even one goal, notably by successfully playing mind games—positioning herself oddly or unexpectedly, moving in a distracting way, or otherwise putting the opposing player off her game—can assure the goalie’s team victory. The tables are turned, and for once it is those who are trying to score who bear all the responsibility.
That is partly because penalty kick shoot-outs are less about technical skills than a psychological game between the kicker and the goalie. Once, as I tried to explain baseball to a perplexed French visitor to my home in Durham, I finally hit upon this imperfect but still useful comparison: imagine the relationship between the pitcher and the batter as being a penalty kick shoot-out, repeated over and over again. What you are watching for is the drama of the relationship between the two of them, though the potential outcomes in baseball are much more varied than in soccer, where there is either a goal or not.
It shouldn’t be that hard to score a penalty kick. The player shooting on goal has the advantage, at least in principle. The goal is huge, the goalie covering just a tiny part of it, and you can run up and kick the ball as hard and with as much precision as possible, with no distraction from defending players. You do, however, have to make a decision about where to kick and how hard. And you have to make that decision in a condition of tremendous stress, with everything depending on you. Most importantly, you have to make sure nothing about your approach or body language provides the goalie with a hint about where you are going to kick. If he picks up correctly on any such hints, the goalie is far more likely to be able to dive in the right direction and stop the goal. The situation is ripe for a kind of infinite regression of trying to read the other person while not letting them read you. Your mind can spin: does the goalie know what I am going to do? And if so, what should I do? Penalty kicks are, writes Wilson, a game of “bluff and double bluff.”37
The penalty kick shoot-out has inspired its own share of literature. In his book The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty—made into a film by director Wim Wenders—the Austrian novelist Peter Handke uses the protagonist’s confrontation with this problem as part of a broader reflection on fate and choice. In the book, during a scene that takes place in the stadium, a character explains the dilemma of the goalie to a man standing next to him. The goalie knows where the kicker usually sends the ball. But he also knows the kicker may know that he knows, and so will decide to go the opposite way. “But what if the kicker follows the goalkeeper’s thinking and plans to shoot in the usual corner after all? And so on, and so on.” In a short story by the Argentinean writer Osvaldo Soriano, woven around what he calls “The Longest Penalty Ever,” a penalty kick has to be retaken a day after a match is played, giving everyone too much time to think about which way the kicker might go. The goalie gets plenty of advice. One person tells him that the kicker “always” kicks to the right. “But he knows that I know,” the goalie answers. “Then we’re fucked,” comes the reply. “Yeah, but I know that he knows,” continues the goalie. “Then dive to the left and be ready,” someone else suggests. “No. He knows that I know that he knows,” the goalie responds—at this point so exhausted by the whole process of speculation that he goes off to bed. On the pitch, however, the outcome of the process of speculation can often determine the outcome of a game. When the goalie outsmarts the player taking the kick, it is as if the goalie has just scored a goal—and the crowd, for once, cheers for him as if he did.38
Every once in a while, in a penalty kick shoot-out, the goalie gets to actually score the winning goal. In at least one case, in fact, a goalie achieved perhaps the greatest feat in soccer: making both a critical save and the critical goal in one game. His name was Boubacar Barry, and he was the goalie for Ivory Coast in the final of the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations. As is surprisingly common in the Africa Cup of Nations, it went not just to penalty kicks but to a surreal and extended shoot-out that culminated in the two goalies taking shots against each other. Barry became a legend that day by first blocking the penalty kick from the Ghana goalie. Then he proceeded to step up, sweating, and kick the ball into the goal, winning the cup for his country.
Barry was, in a sense, a surprising hero. He plays for a good professional team in Belgium, but is not a very well-known goalie. He had been on the bench most of the tournament, and was in the final only because of an injury to the preferred, younger goalkeeper. He could have been forgiven, too, for being terrified. He had been in goal in the previous Africa Cup of Nations Final, in 2012, when Ivory Coast lost on penalty kicks to Zambia. Yet, despite all the pressure, he won the trophy by both blocking the goal and taking his final kick with tremendous poise—a small, humble figure somehow becoming a footballing giant.
That day in 2015, the legendary striker Didier Drogba, who for many years had been Barry’s teammate on the Ivory Coast team, was watching at home. He had retired from international play and therefore had to watch the game on television rather than playing in it. He decided to film himself and his family as they watched the penalty kick shoot-out, producing what may be the best thing ever to be shared on the Internet.39
In the video, as he watches his teammates take their kicks from his living room, Drogba talks nonstop. He talks about those who have doubted Barry as a goalkeeper, clearly hoping they will be proven wrong. When Barry blocks the key penalty, Drogba cheers and then settles back in to watch as Barry takes his own kick. When Barry scores, Drogba and his wife explode into song and dance, unbelieving in the face of a miracle. It could be a film of any football fan watching a decisive penalty kick shoot-out involving his favorite team with a title on the line, except that it’s not an ordinary fan; it’s Didier Drogba. There is a certain sadness, or longing, about the moment. Drogba is experiencing vicariously a victory that had long eluded him when he was playing for Ivory Coast. The intensity of the video is partly the result of the fact that the viewer knows that Drogba wishes he were there with Barry. Or maybe it is that, in a sense, Drogba is there on the pitch as he kneels on the floor, almost praying in front of the television.
Barry was greeted as a hero back in Ivory Coast and paraded through the city. With classic modesty, when interviewed he explained, “I am not big in size or in talent. But I thought of my mother who loved me.” In a sense, Barry at that moment was the ultimate goalie: a bit of an outsider, perhaps never appreciated and respected as he should be, but also—when it counted most—a savior.40