The pass came in to the Irish forward Stephanie Roche fast, about knee high, and she had her back to the goal. But she bounced it off her right leg, then kicked it up into the air with her left. She was just outside the penalty box, and as it arced above her, she twisted and volleyed it straight into the net. It was an exhilarating move, acrobatic, unflinching, direct, and graceful all at once.
When the moment comes, a forward cannot hesitate. She has to believe that she can score, even from an unexpected place. That is why forwards are also often called strikers: the goal needs to come like a bolt of lightning. Their feats on the pitch make them the most celebrated of soccer players. Their contributions can easily be counted, evaluated, and compared. What they accomplish is, of course, only possible because of all the other members of the team, and yet the magic of the final touch, of the motion that puts the ball into the net, represents the climax of the game. This also means that they carry a great deal of pressure, for in a way everything comes down to whether they can do precisely the right thing at precisely the right moment in precisely the right way. When a glorious team effort has built up play and placed the ball at the forward’s feet in front of the goal, everything perfectly set up, and then she fails, it can feel like a waste. And yet if she carries that burden too heavily, she is more likely to fail than succeed. A forward has to be a bit reckless, willing to take the risk of failing spectacularly—sending a ball looping over the goal and into the crowd, or a few feet outside the goalposts—so that sometimes she can succeed spectacularly. She has to accept that everything leads to her, to perhaps even love that fact. Strikers can seem arrogant and narcissistic at times, but there is a way in which that is precisely what the game demands of them. It is fascinating to watch how different forwards carry themselves in this role, and how they make it their own.
“I knew it was a good goal,” Roche told a journalist after the game. She posted a video of it on her Facebook page and sent it to some friends. From there it spread as people shared what came to be known as a “wonder goal,” and soon a million—and then a few million more—people had watched. Thanks to the attention on social media, a few months later FIFA selected Roche’s goal as one of ten nominated for the Puskás Award. The award, for the best goal of the year, is named after a Hungarian player of the 1950s and 1960s, Ferenc Puskás, who scored over five hundred goals in his career. The winners of the award are chosen from ten nominees by a public vote, and Roche won second place, behind a goal scored by the Colombian player James Rodriguez during the 2014 men’s World Cup. Strikingly, Roche beat out one of the most celebrated goals from that tournament, a diving header scored by the Dutch player Robin Van Persie.1
Roche’s recognition was all the more surprising given the fact that, when she scored her goal, there was only a tiny crowd watching. She was playing for Peamount United, an Irish women’s team based in the village of Newcastle in South Dublin. It is one of the leading women’s clubs in Ireland, and many of its players—including Roche—have competed internationally for the country. Like many women’s teams throughout the world, however, it has only a small local following. Roche’s goal was seen by so many thanks only to social media. Although the situation has improved somewhat in recent years, media coverage of women’s soccer has long been paltry. The continuing marginalization of the women’s game is not an accident. It is a legacy of institutional choices made as long as a century ago, when the men in charge of English soccer decided there was something dangerous about watching women score goals.
There has been very little work on the history of women’s soccer, but we do have enough traces to know it is as old as the game itself. By the 1880s, enough women were playing the sport that it was possible to organize international competitions. In 1872, a match was organized between men’s teams representing England and Scotland. Less than a decade later, the same rivalry was played out by women’s teams, with matches in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool. Although a women’s game in Glasgow was broken up when a group of men invaded the pitch, the games mostly drew large and sympathetic crowds. A few years later, in 1889, a Canadian women’s team traveled to Liverpool to play against English teams. In March 1895, Lady Florence Dixie—the daughter of a marquess and a “keen advocate of women’s rights”—created the British Ladies’ Football Club in London, with the goal of supporting tours by women’s teams throughout Britain. She invited women to come play “a manly game” and therefore show “it could be womanly as well.” Their first event was a matchup between teams representing the north and south of London. Another game in Newcastle soon after drew eight thousand spectators, a large crowd for the period.2
Women have consistently faced criticism and opposition from those who believe it is inappropriate for them to play soccer. In nineteenth-century Britain, critics argued it was immodest for men to watch women running about on a field. To dampen this criticism, women played in elaborate attire that must have made it quite hard to run and kick the ball. An 1895 report from Manchester described players in “full black knickerbockers fastened below the knees, black stockings, red berretta caps, brown leather boots and leg-pads,” and “a short skirt above the knickerbockers.” Some men involved in soccer organizations went further, claiming that playing soccer was bad for women’s health. The real source of their anxiety was something else, however. They worried that the existence of women’s teams posed a threat to the masculine image of male players and of soccer itself. In 1902, the English Football Association outlawed men’s teams from playing against “lady teams,” presumably fearing the embarrassment that might result from men losing to women.3
During World War I, women’s soccer nevertheless boomed in England, when women who had been recruited in large numbers to work in war-related industries embraced the tradition of the factory-based soccer team. It had been common since the nineteenth century for British factories to field soccer teams of their male workers, who competed against teams from other factories. During the war, however, these men’s teams were depleted by the departure of many men for the trenches. One day in October 1917, during the lunch break at the Dick, Kerr company in Preston, Lancashire, a woman named Grace Sibbert and her friends started making fun of the male players on the factory team, which had lost a series of games. “Call yourself a football team?” Sibbert taunted. “You’re useless; we could do better than you lot!” The male players, embarrassed, challenged the women to a match. Sibbert and her friends agreed. They enjoyed the game so much that they created the Dick, Kerr Ladies football club. On Christmas Day 1917, they organized their first game, a charity event to raise money for a local hospital for wounded soldiers. They faced off against a women’s team from a nearby foundry, drawing a crowd of ten thousand. It was, as Gail Newsham writes in her book about the team, the “start of what was to be the most phenomenal success story in the history of women’s sport.”4
The Dick, Kerr Ladies team organized other charity games over the course of 1917 and 1918, drawing crowds of between two and ten thousand. It was clear, one newspaper noted, that there was “distinctly a public for ladies’ football.” When the war ended, the team and others like it decided to keep playing. In 1919, a fourteen-year-old named Lily Parr came to work at the Dick, Kerr factory and was soon recruited to the team. She was a consummate forward, relentless and physical in attack. She eventually became the star of the team and, according to Newsham, can be considered “probably the greatest woman footballer of all time.” In a career that stretched from 1919 to 1951, she scored at least nine hundred goals.5
Parr was an imposing figure on the pitch, writes Newsham, “almost six feet tall, with jet-black hair, her power and skill were admitted and feared wherever she played.” Parr was “big, fast and powerful.” A 1921 newspaper article described the young player as the greatest “football prodigy” in the country, not just because of her “speed and excellent ball control” but for her strength, which enabled her to “brush off challenges from defenders who tackle her.” According to a 1923 match program, she could “take corner kicks better than most men and [score] many goals from extraordinary angles with a left foot cross drive, which nearly breaks the net.” Her long-time teammate Joan Whalley recalled how strong her kick was. She could “lift a dead ball, the old heavy leather ball, from the left wing over to me on the right and nearly knock me out with the force of the shot.” One male professional goalkeeper found out just how strong her strike was. He told her that while she might look impressive against other women, she couldn’t score a goal against a man. Parr decided to test the hypothesis. She told him to stand in goal, then took a shot that was so fast and strong that “as he put his hands up to catch the ball, his arm was broken by the force of her kick.” Parr “smiled to herself as she heard him say to his teammates, ‘Bloody hell, get me to the hospital as quick as you can, she’s broken me bloody arm.’”6
By 1920, Dick, Kerr was the most successful women’s team in England and began connecting with women’s teams in other countries. They invited a team representing France to play them at Preston. The British women greeted the visitors by singing La Marseillaise as their train came into town, and the two teams then played in front of a crowd of twenty-five thousand before going on a tour that ended with a game in Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium. The goalkeeper for the French team later returned to join Dick, Kerr, making it an international squad. Soon after, the team journeyed to Paris, where they played in front of a crowd of twenty-two thousand so animated that the game ended in a pitch invasion by French fans angry at a refereeing decision. After another game played in Roubaix, which had a large population of British soldiers and workers, the Dick, Kerr players were carried off the field by delighted fans after a victory. The tour helped to propel the growing popularity of women’s soccer in France.7
On the team’s return to England, they were more popular than ever. They played a charity match in Leicester at night. Searchlights were used to illuminate the pitch. On Boxing Day 1920, they played at Goodison Park in Liverpool, the home stadium of the Everton men’s team. A massive crowd of fifty-three thousand packed into the stadium to see Dick, Kerr take on the hometown women’s team. Another ten to fourteen thousand spectators were outside, unable to get in. By 1921, they were playing two games a week, traveling all over Britain. Because they were not paid as players, they continued to work in the factory. Sometimes the women left for matches in the afternoon, played, and then returned home the same night in order to be back on the job early the next morning. They were part of a huge, thriving network of an estimated 150 women’s teams in Britain by 1921. Dick, Kerr was considered the best of them. In a game against an all-star team of players from throughout the country played in Leicester, a crowd of twenty-five thousand watched as Parr scored a hat trick in the first half and then two more goals in the second, ensuring a 9–1 win for her side.8
While male spectators were thronging the games, some powerful men in the world of professional soccer were getting nervous. About nine hundred thousand spectators had gone to see the Dick, Kerr Ladies club over the course of 1921. Meanwhile, many men’s teams were struggling to draw crowds anywhere near as large. The women represented the threat of competition, and the leadership in the English Football Association fretted that soccer was starting to be seen as a women’s game. On December 5, 1921, the Football Association unanimously passed a resolution that declared: “Football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.” Clubs belonging to the association should, they went on, “refuse to use their grounds for such matches.”9
Overnight, Dick, Kerr and other women’s clubs found themselves banned from most of the stadiums in the country. The Football Association went even further in trying to marginalize the women’s game; referees credentialed by the association were instructed not to referee women’s matches. The association’s stated reason for the ban was to protect women’s health and fertility, which they claimed could be harmed by playing soccer. A few doctors came out in defense of women’s soccer, questioning this reasoning. As one physician noted, “Football is no more likely to cause injuries to women than a heavy day’s washing.” Many supporters were dismayed. “Why have the FA got their knife into girl’s football?” people asked on the streets of Liverpool. “Are their feet heavier on the turf than the men’s feet?” But the decision was made, and the broad power of the Football Association meant that the expansion of women’s soccer was stopped in its tracks.10
Women’s soccer in Britain went, if not quite underground, then to other grounds. “We play for the love of the game and we are determined to carry on,” Dick, Kerr captain Alice Kell wrote. Women’s teams came together to create an independent Ladies’ Football Association. The English Football Association ban, however, made it very difficult to find venues and referees for their games. The project of a women’s league foundered. The Dick, Kerr Ladies found another way to keep playing, however, organizing a new tour abroad, this time to North America. “They certainly rule English football,” Kell noted of the Football Association, “but not the world, thank goodness.”11
The English Football Association continue to go to great lengths to quash women’s soccer. Angry that Dick, Kerr was organizing an independent tour, the association members attempted to derail it by convincing their Canadian colleagues to refuse to organize matches with the team. In the United States, however, Dick, Kerr was welcomed. There were few women’s teams there at the time, but a number of men’s teams agreed to play the British women. There were games in New Jersey, Rhode Island, and in New York City, where Dick, Kerr played Centro-Hispano, a team made up of Latino immigrants. A brass band played the American and British anthems as the two teams marched onto the field. There were seven thousand spectators and a lot of goals: the game ended 7–5 for Centro-Hispano. From there, the tour took Dick, Kerr to other cities including Washington, DC; New Bedford, Massachusetts; and Baltimore, Maryland. The team drew larger crowds than usual for men’s games in the United States and also attracted more women to the stands.12
Kell noticed that the men’s teams in the United States played a different, more physical style of soccer. “There isn’t the same combination,” she wrote. “It’s all individual play out there. They don’t pass the ball around like we do, so the players all try to get through on their own.” Tackling was rough: “When a forward is coming along with the ball the full-back doesn’t bother much about the ball if he can get the man.” The British women also encountered that curious offshoot of soccer, American football. Visiting a college campus, they walked past a football practice. The odd-looking, oval-shaped ball came flying toward them, and Parr kicked it back—sending it over the posts at the end of the field. The coach joked that this was clearly a fluke, and Parr, characteristically, took up the challenge: she kicked it again, farther and higher. On their visits to some US campuses, the British women also met with athletics staff who were considering setting up women’s soccer teams on campus. It would ultimately take fifty years—and the passage of Title IX—but in time colleges became the focal point of the explosion of women’s soccer in the United States.13
On their return home to Lancashire, the Dick, Kerr players were greeted by local officials, one of whom said he was sorry about the ban on women’s football, adding that he hoped the leaders of the Football Association would soon see the error of their ways. They didn’t: the ban in England lasted until the late 1960s. Given England’s central place in the administration of the sport at the time, the association’s decision had global implications. Following England’s lead, similar bans were put in place in other countries in Europe and Latin America over the next decades. The German Football Association formally banned women’s soccer from 1955 to 1970. Even when the ban was lifted, for several years the association required women to play sixty-minute games, in flat shoes rather than cleats, and with smaller balls than the men. In Brazil, women’s soccer boomed in the early twentieth century as it had in England, with as many as forty teams just in Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilian Football Federation banned women’s soccer in 1941, however, a policy only lifted in 1979. While the country has produced probably one of the greatest forwards alive today, Marta Vieira da Silva, along with many other talented players, persistent lack of support and funding on the part of the federation has held back the team over the past decades. In 2017, frustrated players on the Brazilian women’s national team wrote a detailed letter outlining a history of unequal treatment at the hands of the federation, with some retiring from the team in protest.14
Such prohibitions, of course, could never stop women from playing the game they loved. As Dick, Kerr player Alice Norris recalled, though it was a “terrible shock” when the English ban was handed down in 1921, “we ignored them when they said that football wasn’t a suitable game for ladies to play.” In Britain and throughout the world, women found other grounds for practice and playing, and in time they organized independent networks of teams. Parr became a nurse and continued to live in Preston, where she played until 1951. Since her death in 1978, she has gradually been recognized as a pioneer and founder of modern soccer. Still, unfortunately, we only have descriptions of a few of her goals, and only a few images of her playing remain. We are left to imagine her streaming up the pitch, cutting around defenders, sending an arcing cross into the net, as she scored her hundreds of goals, embodying the determination and recklessness of a great forward.15
In soccer, forwards are the consummate authors of goals. And each goal is its own story, perhaps even its own poem. In a way, the work of the forward can seem evanescent. Some like it that way. As Jonathan Wilson describes, there is a story told in both Argentina and Uruguay of a player “skipping through the opposition to score a goal of outrageous quality and then erasing his footsteps in the dust as he returned to his own half so that no one else could ever copy his trick.” Although every goal is celebrated in the moment, most of them are forgotten. The forward knows, however, that there is always the possibility of scoring a goal that will become legendary, that if he writes one that enters the canon of soccer, he will also at the same moment be greeted into the pantheon of those who have written the greatest passages of the game.16
No one knows this better than Diego Maradona, whom many consider the most important and influential player the game has ever seen. He scored two of the sport’s most remembered goals in the course of one game during the 1986 men’s World Cup. Both were such memorable works of art that they were given titles. The first, the “Hand of God,” might just be the most infamous goal ever scored, while the other, known as the “Goal of the Century,” is often considered the greatest goal in soccer history. There will always be a debate about whether Maradona is the greatest soccer player the game has ever seen—and of course future players will have something to say about that. There is little doubt, though, that he is the most interesting, culturally significant player in the history of the sport, a kind of endless tornado whose life on and off the pitch is a mix of delirium, brilliance, excess, absurdity, and redemption.
During his years as a player, Maradona was pugnacious and controversial. He struggled with drug use for much of his life, and was often at odds with coaches and FIFA. He was also a perpetual trickster. “Maradona had a habit of sticking out his tongue when he was on the attack,” writes Eduardo Galeano. “All his goals were scored with his tongue out.” His life was “one long improvisation on the field,” making him a kind of “talisman of Argentina soccer.” He was, in the words of Mexican journalist Juan Villoro, “the greatest and most impulsive artist ever to grace the game.” It is a struggle to even begin to represent Maradona, though the Serbian director Emir Kusturica offers a mighty effort in his 2008 documentary about the player, Maradona by Kusturica. The frenetic, swirling film takes us into the Church of Maradona (whose acolytes complete their marriage ceremonies by reenacting the Hand of God), offers us footage of Maradona leading anti-US demonstrations in the 1990s alongside Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and Bolivian president Evo Morales, and shows the player singing alongside his daughters a bittersweet, mournful, but ultimately exultant song of regret and apology for his years of cocaine addiction. If Maradona had not ended up a soccer player, Kusturica notes, he would have become a revolutionary. And in his way, he was.17
“Playing football gave me a unique peace,” Maradona writes of his childhood in the Buenos Aires suburb of Villa Fiorito. His family was poor, and he and his seven siblings sometimes had to dodge the leaks from their roof when it rained. His father, Don Diego, worked in a mill “pounding cattle bones from four in the morning to three in the afternoon.” As a young child, Maradona received a soccer ball from a cousin. It was, he writes, “the best present I’ve ever received in my life.… I was three years old and I slept with it hugged to my chest all night.” As he grew, he played with neighbors at a place called Siete Canchitas—seven little pitches—on the “enormous patches of waste ground” and “really hard earth.” Maradona recalls, “When we started running, we stirred up so much dust that we felt as if we were playing at Wembley in the fog.”18
The forward attributes his early success to the simple fact that his father made sure he always had at least one good meal every day. “That’s what made me different from the others: I had good legs and I ate.” Yet he was clearly always hungry to escape a life of poverty. Soccer was for Maradona, as for many other players in history, a way out and a way up. He embodied the fearlessness that a forward needs to succeed. He was willing to try to score in any way imaginable, willing to invent new ways of moving in pursuit of the goal, and he didn’t hesitate when there was an opening. By the time he was twelve, Maradona was already stunning defenders and crowds with his goals. Galeano describes one: “Several players tried to block his path: he put it over the first one’s tail, between the legs of the second, and he fooled the third with a backheel. Then, without a pause, he paralyzed the defenders, left the keeper sprawled on the ground, and walked the ball into the net.” Interviewed on film as a boy, Maradona declared to a journalist that his dream was to play in the World Cup for Argentina. It now seems prophetic, but of course, as he admits in his autobiography, “it was the same dream every child had.” And, as his years dogged by depression and addiction suggest, in his heart there was always fear, too, that he would fail.19
Starting at age fourteen, Maradona made his way up through the divisions of Argentinean soccer, from the ninth to the first. As he went to his debut with the first-division team Argentinos Juniors in October 1976, he hoped to get some prize money so he could buy “a second pair of trousers.” Putting him on the field, the coach told him, “Go on Diego, play like you know how… and if you can, nutmeg someone”—meaning that he should kick the ball between a player’s legs and then run past them, a particularly humiliating way of outplaying a defender. Maradona did: with his back to the defender covering him, he received the ball and then turned and kicked it between his legs. “It went clean through and I immediately heard the Ooooolé… of the crowd, like a welcome,” Maradona recalls. He also quickly learned that the defenders at that level didn’t mess around. “I had to jump in time; you had to dribble round a player, jump over his kick and continue with the ball. If you don’t learn that, after the third kick you can’t go on.” Part of the glory of Maradona on the pitch was watching him leap and twist, lightly, sometimes like lightning, as he tried to survive the onslaught of defenders who understood that the only way to stop him was to take him down. Maradona never forgot that debut. “That day,” he writes, “I touched the sky with my hands.” One newspaper article about the teenager’s meteoric rise declared, “At the age most kids hear stories, he hears ovations.”20
Maradona was so beloved in Argentina because he embodied a celebrated way of playing soccer, one that placed a premium on the spectacular, the beautiful, and the playful. The pure energy condensed in his body, the endless forward propulsion, the tension, always destabilized defenders who were never sure what he would do next. That is the mark of the great forward. It enables him to recalibrate an entire game, placing the opposing players on the edge of panic, always conscious that even the smallest of errors can be an opening for their roving opponent. At the time, Maradona writes, “there was a big fight between those of us who played and those of us who… ran. And I was something like the standard-bearer for those who loved having fun with the ball.” He constantly complained that referees did not protect him against fouls by defenders, and so allowed cynical, physical play to destroy the beauty of a creative attack. After he was seriously injured by a defender while he was playing for Barcelona, a headline describing the incident complained that Maradona was “forbidden to be an artist.” Like many other forwards, Maradona could easily be accused of being a pouting megalomaniac, not to mention paranoid and narcissistic. He regularly, childishly declared he was sick and tired of the way he was being treated and was leaving. As the Argentinean journalist Daniel Arcucci pointed out in 2008—when Maradona came out of retirement for a short spell as the manager of the national team—the player had “first announced he’d had enough in football in 1977.” Yet everyone knew not to take him seriously. Soccer was his life, and his lifeline, and even when he disappeared for a time, he always came back.21
Maradona lived and played at the crossroads of a long-standing debate in Argentinean soccer about precisely how the game should be played in a way that best embodied the national character. The country had tight links with Britain in the nineteenth century, and was the first in Latin America to adopt soccer, with a game recorded in 1867. Employees of the large British banks and companies in Argentina played the game, and Argentinean elites sent their children to English-language schools where soccer was part of the curriculum. It was in these schools and in athletic clubs set up by British and Anglo-Argentine residents that the game took root. The first league was formed in 1891, and the Argentine Football Association founded in 1893. But the anglophone elite soon found its dominance of soccer challenged. Between 1895 and 1914, the population of Argentina doubled with the arrival of European immigrants from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Germany. Soccer was a way, notes historian Joshua Nadel, to make these immigrants “part of the nation,” but it was also a way for them to “show their superiority over the elite ‘Anglos’ who were seen as controlling the national economy.” Soccer, explains Galeano, was a form of communication not just among various European migrants but also between these migrants and those arriving in Buenos Aires and other cities from the Argentinean countryside. “Thanks to the language of the game, which soon became universal,” he writes, “workers driven out of the countryside could communicate perfectly with workers driven out of Europe.” As the migrants from Europe and rural Argentina transformed Buenos Aires, soccer became a crucial cultural idiom. By 1914, there were about five hundred clubs in the city of Buenos Aires alone.22
Wresting soccer from the English—and transforming it by developing new styles of playing rooted in Argentinean culture—gave the game a potent and enduring social meaning. Players in the country, writes Wilson, developed their own style of play, in which “power and discipline were rejected in favor of skill and sensuousness.” As Nadel notes, Argentinean writers during the period crafted an image of a particular kind of player, a pibe, a poor kid who “taught himself to play the game on the empty fields of the Buenos Aires suburbs.” There, the “holes, roots, rocks created an obstacle course for the pibe, who by playing on this uneven ground learned how to retain possession of the ball.” The skills developed there made for a kind of “star player defined by his ability to keep the ball at his feet and to use a series of feints to go through opposing defenses.” Galeano argues there was also a link between soccer and another popular form of performance developed at the time: the tango. “Dancers drew filigrees on a single floor tile,” he writes, “and soccer players created their own language in that tiny space where they chose to retain and possess the ball rather than kick it, as if their feet were hands braiding leather.… The ball was strummed as if it were a guitar, a source of music.” Although some criticized this style of soccer as being too individualistic, by the 1920s it had come to be seen as just as quintessentially Argentinean as the tango.23
In time, this style of play became known in Argentina as la nuestra—our style. It was driven by the joy of attacking, and therefore focused on spectacular play by strikers. The games were festivals of goals: between 1936 and 1938 there was not a single 0–0 game played in the highest-level Argentinean league. In the novel On Heroes and Tombs, the writer Ernesto Sabato offers an anecdote from the 1920s that crystallizes what many in Argentina thought soccer should be. During a game, a striker named Manuel Seoane set up a play with his teammate Alberto Lalín. “Cross it to me, man,” Seaone said, “and I’ll go and score.” The plan worked perfectly, Seoane got the ball, shot, and scored. As he ran back to celebrate, he said, “See, Lalín, see?!” His teammate responded, “Yes, but I’m not having fun.” Scoring goals in a predictable way wasn’t really worth it. Instead, the key was developing a style that was beautiful and exuberant, that made fans gasp and cheer because of its inventiveness and creativity. This is what would give soccer meaning as an expression of a broader, bold Argentinean culture, a way of being in the world, something Maradona exemplified more than any other player.24
“We went out on the pitch and played our way: take the ball, give it [to] me… this, that and the goal came by itself,” explained Juan Carlos Muñoz, a forward who played on the Argentinean team River Plate in the 1940s. Fans called the team the “Knights of Anguish” because it often “took a long time for the goal to come.” In front of the goal, the forwards did their best to score, but “in the midfield we had fun. There was no rush.” This was perhaps an embrace of one of the fundamental truths about being a forward. A forward’s work is, in its purest sense, the point of the game: to score goals. Yet a forward’s dominant experience is one of building and building toward a goal, but never reaching that goal. For every score that is made, there are so many more misses and failures. There are yawning volleys over the bar and strikes where just a fractionally different angle would have made all the difference. The rarity of goals is part of soccer’s fundamental truth. The Argentinean style was meant to accept that and turn it into a form of pleasure. The game is about the process, the pleasure of building up something through intricate movements and passes, each of them beautiful and pleasurable in their own way. Instead of always being focused on the goal, why not accept that soccer should really be about enjoying the play?25
In the late 1970s, César Luis Menotti, the manager of the Argentinean national team, sought to anchor his leadership of the team in this understanding. He was an unlikely figure to represent his country on the international stage. Argentina was in the hands of a brutal, right-wing military dictatorship, and Menotti was, as Wilson describes, “left-wing, intellectual, a philosopher, and an artist”—an “ineffably romantic figure,” a “pencil-thin chain-smoker with collar-length hair, graying sideburns, and the stare of an eagle.” According to Wilson, Menotti saw soccer as “a means of self-expression, a way for a player or a coach to live out their ethical beliefs.” For him, the team was “above all an idea.” Like those who celebrated Total Football during the same period, he was worried that coaches were too oriented toward victory, and therefore destroyed the “festival” that should be at the heart of soccer. Focusing only on the outcome of each matchup led to a style that avoided risks and diminished the beauty of the game. After all, Menotti noted, most teams in any given competition ultimately lost, so winning should not, and could not, be the only objective. “In a thirty-team championship,” he said, “there are twenty-nine who must ask themselves: what did I leave at this club, what did I bring to my players, what possibility of growth did I give to my footballers?” Menotti’s goal was therefore to make sure that efficacy was never “divorced from beauty.” As a coach of the professional team Huracán in the early 1970s, he managed to make the team embody their name. “To watch them play was a delight,” one journalist noted. It brought fans back to an earlier day of Argentinean soccer, full of “one touch-moves, nutmegs… one-twos, overlaps.” After Huracán defeated one team in Rosario 5–0, the opposing fans applauded them in gratitude for the beauty of their play.26
Argentina hosted the 1978 men’s World Cup, and its government sought to use the tournament to legitimize its dictatorial rule and present an image to the world that hid its human rights violations. Nevertheless, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who protested silently with photographs of their children who had been disappeared by the military, were able to use the event to gain international attention for their cause. Given his politics, Menotti was in an ambiguous position. He knew that he and his team were being used to stoke nationalism and silence opposition. But, he argued, by playing a kind of soccer that was “free and creative,” the team could offer the people of the country “a reminder of the free, creative Argentina that existed before the junta.” Before the final game, he told his players, “We are the people. We come from the victimized classes, and we represent the only thing that is legitimate in this country—football. We are not playing for the expensive seats full of military officers. We represent freedom, not the dictatorship.” Menotti’s team defeated the Dutch in an intense final in Buenos Aires.27
The eighteen-year-old Maradona was not on the team in 1978. But in the coming years, the young striker would become the standard-bearer for Argentinean soccer. He embodied the quick-moving, theatrical style long celebrated in the country. By the time of the 1986 men’s World Cup, he was the most celebrated player in the world, and he captained the Argentinean team. Hugh McIlvanney captured the wonder, and surprise, of Maradona in his dispatches from Mexico that year. Compared to other “truly great goal-scoring attackers in the history of football,” such as Pelé or Johan Cruyff, Maradona might “at first glance” look like “a Jeep among racing cars.” Although short and stocky, he was masterful at the “sinuous infiltration of the crowded penalty areas of the modern game.” He was, writes McIlvanney, a “Formula One machine all right, a phenomenon capable of reducing the best and swiftest defenders to impotent pursuit, of leaving them as miserable stragglers baffled by astonishing surges of acceleration and the most remarkable power steering in sport.”28
Maradona was in fact very fond of fast cars. At the time of the 1986 World Cup, he was playing professional soccer for Napoli, leading the team to unprecedented success in the Italian league. He was beloved in Naples for the defeats he inflicted against much-hated rival teams from the north of Italy. These teams looked down on Napoli. One banner at a game read, “Welcome to Italy: now wash your feet.” When Maradona helped lead the Napoli team to victory, writes Villoro, it “defied all logic.” The team was seen as “an African horde” from “the lofty climes of the Milan dressing room.” But they were winning nevertheless. Maradona had also become a global icon. A poll taken at the time determined he was the “best-known person in the world.” Not surprisingly, automobile companies were eager to have Maradona seen in their latest models. “I asked for cars that weren’t available and soon afterwards I would get them delivered,” he recalled. Once, representatives from Mercedes brought him a new high-end model—the first to come into Italy—as a gift. He tried it out, but it was an automatic, so he wasn’t interested. He did keep several other sports cars, including a Lamborghini, a Rolls-Royce, and a black Ferrari F40—“the only one in the world at the time.” They came in handy as Maradona negotiated a busy season of professional play and World Cup qualifying matches for Argentina in 1985. After a game in Turin against Juventus, he sped away in one of his sports cars—“I can’t remember which one,” he writes—and drove 250 miles to the airport so he could take the plane to Argentina to play a qualification match in Buenos Aires the next day. Maradona played the game, scored a goal, and got back on the plane for Rome, playing a match for Napoli before again crossing the Atlantic to play in Argentina.29
Maradona recalls how much trouble a young Peruvian defender named Yordy Reyna had given him during a World Cup qualifier. Reyna had been given the order to never leave Maradona’s side. He “followed me everywhere, to the loo practically, it was madness!” At one point Maradona needed medical attention and Reyna “followed me to the edge of the pitch.” Years later, Reyna and his teammates sent Maradona a signed ball when he was receiving medical treatment in Cuba. “Aged forty and in Havana,” Maradona jokes, “and I still couldn’t shake him off!” Maradona almost always could beat one defender—even one as dogged as Reyna—but he admitted that early in his career he had trouble with what was called “zonal marking.” This approach has defensive players cover a particular zone on the pitch rather than follow a specific player. While this requires good coordination between defenders, it often frustrates forwards, who find all the space in front of the goal they are attacking carefully covered by the opposing team. In 1980, the England coach Ron Greenwood had success containing Maradona with such an approach in a game at Wembley. “If you tried to mark Maradona one-for-one,” he told his players, he “would murder you—isolate you and leave you stranded.” What Maradona wasn’t used to was “people coming at him from all sides.” So, every England player near him should “attack his possession, creating the effect of coming at him from all angles… and chasing him from the back.” Because they were able to contain Maradona, England was also able to move into the attack and won 3–1 against Argentina.30
By 1986, though, Maradona was a more mature player and seemed unstoppable as he led his team through the early stages of the men’s World Cup. His teammate Jorge Valdano described Maradona as “the soul of our team,” and “our great offensive key.” When Argentina earned a place in the quarterfinal against England, it felt almost as portentous as a final. In 1982, Britain and Argentina had gone to war over the control of the Islas Malvinas, also known as the Falkland Islands. The Argentinean government had seized the territory, which was held by Britain, and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher dispatched troops to take it back. The war was on the minds of the Argentinean players as they went into the match. “Of course, before the match, we said that football had nothing to do with the Malvinas War,” and that “football and politics shouldn’t be confused,” Maradona recalls. But, as had been clear during the men’s World Cup held in Argentina in 1978, politics was always involved in the tournament. In the game against England, the political stakes were very clear. Maradona and the other players went in seeking a kind of revenge on the pitch. The players knew that many Argentinean “kids had died there, shot down like little birds,” he recalls. “In a way, we blamed the English players for what had happened, for all the suffering of the Argentine people.” It felt very personal: “We were defending our flag, the dead kids, the survivors.”31
Maradona scored two goals that day, authoring two sacred texts in the history of soccer. The first goal came in the fifty-first minute. Maradona was moving forward when he played a one-two with Valdano, who had to kick the ball quickly to Maradona, under pressure from the English defenders. The “dud ball” floated toward Maradona at a height he couldn’t reach with his head. In a moment of inspired madness, he jumped up with his fist up behind his head, and punched the ball into the goal with his hand. An English defender immediately appealed for a handball, but Maradona acted the part of a goal scorer brilliantly. As he recalls, he made “a beeline towards the stand where my dad was with my father-in-law to celebrate with them.” He admits, “I was a bit stupid, because I was celebrating with my left fist outstretched and watching what the linesmen were up to out of the corner of my eye.” The referee might have seen that and suspected something was going on. In fact, Valdano looked over at Maradona and said “shhh! with a finger over his lips.” Then the referee signaled that the goal would stand. “I got a lot of pleasure” from the goal, Maradona admits gleefully in his autobiography. “Now I am able to say what I couldn’t then. At the time I called it the ‘hand of God.’ Bollocks was it the hand of God, it was the hand of Diego! And it felt a little bit like pickpocketing the English.”32
Maradona had scored a few goals with his hand before. He had gotten away with it once, as a young player, though on another occasion the referee had caught him. “He advised me not to do it again,” Maradona remembers. “I thanked him, but I also told him I couldn’t promise anything.” He thought of that referee after he scored in the World Cup: “I don’t know if he cheered our victory over England or not.” Maradona had long criticized referees for not protecting him on the pitch against fouls by defenders. It was probably with an ironic smile that he told a BBC reporter who asked him about the goal, “It was one hundred percent legitimate because the referee allowed it and I’m not one to question the honesty of the referee.” Of course, there were then, and are now, and will always be, many who see the goal as perhaps the pinnacle of cynicism and dishonesty in the sport. At the time, though, McIlvanney—a Scot rather than an Englishman—pointed out that if the tables had been turned, few English fans would have refused the gift. “Of course,” he writes, Maradona “could have set a noble example to the youth of the world.… He would have been an international hero. But would his team-mates have seen him in that light?” It made good sense for Maradona to accept “condemnation from the rest of us,” McIlvanney concludes, rather than suffer the “resentment and disapproval” of his teammates.33
Maradona’s Hand of God goal is so famous, and still talked about, precisely because it tore at the fabric of soccer’s spectacle. It represented a clear breach in the always falsifiable but nevertheless often deeply held belief that there is fairness and logic and reason to be found in soccer. The moment exposed then, and continues to expose now, some deep truth about the game, and about ourselves. The way we interpret and react to it perhaps says more about us, in the end, than it does about Maradona. For those devoted to the idea that soccer should, ultimately, aspire toward fairness and fair play, the Hand of God goal represents perhaps the worst violation of the norms of the game, something to be condemned and avoided. And yet it remains celebrated by many fans, not just Argentina, because it captures what they love about soccer—the moments of madness and unpredictability, the possibility of a rebellion against form and rules, and the fact that it can create a space for a figure like Maradona to do something completely crazy and get away with it.
The place of the Hand of God in the history of soccer would also, undoubtedly, be very different if it was the only goal scored that day. Instead, perhaps in a bid for redemption—though he would no doubt never admit that himself—Maradona did something truly extraordinary four minutes later. He took it upon himself to score a goal entirely alone.
“Here’s how it went,” he recalls. “I started off from the middle of the pitch, on the right; I stepped on the ball, turned, and sneaked between [Peter] Beardsley and [Peter] Reid. At that point I had the goal in my sights, although I still had a few meters to go.” He then passed another defender, and there was just one more between him and the goal. He was looking over at Valdano, wanting to pass to him, but the last English defender was sticking too close. “So I faced him, then threw a dummy one way and then another, towards the right.” Maradona got past him, then did the same with the English goalie, smoothly rolling the ball into the net. It was, Maradona later wrote, the “goal you dream of as a kid.” Back on the dusty ground in Villa Fiorito where Maradona had played as a kid, “we used to say that we’d made the opponent dizzy, that we’d made them go crazy,” and that was what Maradona had done to the English. “I wanted to put the whole sequence of that goal, in stills, blown up really big, above the headboard of my bed,” and—alongside a picture of his first daughter, an infant at the time—add an inscription that said “My life’s best. Nothing more.”34
The sound and images from that goal remain perhaps the most legendary in the history of soccer. The commentator Víctor Hugo Morales called the goal on Argentinean television, and the way he described it, the gathering acceleration and pitch of his narration, is itself a kind of work of art. After Maradona scored, Morales improvised a spontaneous poem to the glory of soccer: “I want to cry! Holy God! Long live soccer! Golazoooooooooo! Diegooooooool!… What planet did Maradona come from, to be able to get past so many English players?… Thank God! For soccer, for Maradona, for these tears.” Recently, the musical group Gotan Project invited Morales to reconstitute his call of the play in a tango-inspired celebration of Maradona called “La Gloria.” The song brings together layers of Argentinean history—tango and soccer coalescing into one form, with the verbal brilliance of Morales incorporated and therefore acknowledged as a form of music itself.35
As Argentina moved through the 1986 World Cup, Maradona remembers, “Each game brought more joy.” They defeated Belgium and won a place in the final against West Germany, which had defeated France in the semifinal in a riveting match. By then, everyone in Mexico and throughout Latin America, and many places beyond, was rooting for Argentina, and specifically for Maradona. “Never before in more than half a century of World Cups has the talent of a single footballer loomed so pervasively over everybody’s thinking about the final,” McIlvanney writes. It was not just that Maradona was seen as the best player on the planet, but also that there was a “potent sense of declaration inherent” in his actions on the field during the World Cup. Ahead of the final, according to McIlvanney, his “vast” public had a clear “conviction” that he had “chosen the Aztec stadium as the setting for the definitive statement of his genius.” The Germans were good, yes. But the only way to defend against Maradona, as McIlvanney puts it, probably involved “putting a white cross over his heart and tethering him to a stake in front of a firing squad. Even then there would be the fear that he might suddenly dip his shoulder and cause the riflemen to start shooting one another.” Two billion would watch the final around the world, and “surely all but a tiny Teutonic minority are going to will him to succeed.” Argentina triumphed in the final, and Maradona’s childhood dream of holding the trophy for his country was finally realized. It was an apotheosis of sorts too, securing him a permanent and in many ways untouchable place in the pantheon of the sport.36
Years before, in October 1981, Maradona traveled to West Africa on a tour with the Boca Juniors. He was just at the beginning of his career, but already famous. “The world knew me,” he recalls in his memoir. When the team arrived in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, a massive crowd was waiting to see him. “I’d never seen anything like it before and I don’t think I ever lived through it again in my whole career.” Crowds stepped over the “machete-wielding police” surrounding Maradona and hugged him, crying out “Die-gó, Die-gó!” Twenty-five thousand people came to watch the team play in the Abidjan stadium. He recalls how, at lunch, a little boy came up to him and called him pelusa—a childhood nickname. He was amazed that a child in Ivory Coast would know this small, sweet detail about him.37
At the time, there was another little boy living in Abidjan, a three-year-old named Didier Drogba. Perhaps the electricity around the visit of Maradona left its mark on him, for in time Drogba would grow up to be a great forward, one of the greatest of his generation. Drogba was a very different kind of forward than Maradona: a strong presence at the front of his team, always roving around the penalty area, powerful in the air. He was, in his way, the consummate modern striker—there, again and again, when he was most needed to finish a play, to do exactly what was needed for his team. Drogba’s style was perhaps more suited to the world of football in the 1990s and 2000s, in which speed and physicality overshadowed the playful, twisting, technical play of a Maradona. But like Maradona, Drogba ultimately became a symbol to his country too.
Like that of many other well-known contemporary soccer players of African background, Drogba’s story is one of immigration, and of finding a home on the pitch in a life lived between nations. When Drogba was five, his parents sent him to live in France with his uncle Michel Goba, a professional soccer player. Looking back, Drogba describes this experience of being “uprooted” at a young age as a defining one, though he “never forgot those roots” in Ivory Coast. Following his uncle’s itinerant career, he grew up in different small towns in France, first in Brest, then Angoulême, then Tourcoing on the outskirts of Lille. Drogba stood out; he recalls that some friends “would even rub my skin to see if I really was that colour!” In Dunkirk, Goba—by then Drogba’s legal guardian—got him on a youth football team. On Sundays, they went down to the beach where his uncle showed the young boy “all sorts of tricks,” such as “how to use my body against a defender, and how to time a jump effectively.” Drogba recalls, “When I saw him jumping up for a ball, I used to think that he stayed in the air forever, as if he was flying.”38
Eventually Drogba was reunited with his family when his mother and father emigrated to France as well. There were eight of them in a one-room apartment. His father discouraged him from playing football and urged him to focus on his studies. However, when his father came to watch him play, he realized it was on the pitch that his son, so shy and taciturn at home, was truly himself. “Who are you really, Didier?” his father asked him. “Who are you? Because the guy I saw out there, he was happy, talking, directing people, gesticulating, enjoying himself.” Drogba writes, “It was true.… The football pitch was the only place I could be myself, the only place where I felt truly free.” Drogba began to develop a knack for being in the right place at the right time in order to score, every forward’s goal.39
Drogba writes with gratitude about various managers who taught him who he was as a player. An early manager in France told him, “You don’t need to play the full ninety minutes. For you, five, ten minutes are enough.… You can play ten minutes and make a difference.” Drogba’s manager on the French professional team Guingamp, Guy Lacombe, “taught me a lot about placement, movement, pace,” the forward recalled. Later on, when he was playing for Chelsea, coach Guus Hiddink reminded him that he could “stop running around all over the place.… ‘You’re a striker, you don’t have to do that. Just stay up there and finish the actions.’” Drogba’s most important connection was with the manager José Mourinho. Working together for Chelsea, the two claimed the greatest trophy in European professional soccer, winning the Champions League in 2012. Throughout his career, both in professional and international football, Drogba continued to have that transformative presence on the pitch; he often came on as a sub in a game and changed everything. “I have been lucky enough to score a few goals that mattered,” he writes, with a modesty unusual for a forward.40
In a sense, Drogba was a kind of specialist, valued as a player who could be depended on to finish a play with a goal. What mattered most was what he did at the key moments, the way in which he could receive a ball, turn quickly and decisively, and power it into the goal. It was his ability to do so at moments when everything was on the line that made him so valuable. Sometimes, it seemed as if he were saving up his strength and concentration for just such a moment. In this sense, Drogba embodied the forward as a figure who, in an instant, can change everything. His effectiveness at finishing plays with a goal, of course, reconfigured the game in many ways. Opposing teams had to deal with the constant threat Drogba posed as he roved toward the goal. A star forward like Drogba also shores up the defense for all the other players on his team. Such a player has to constantly and carefully be watched, controlled, and contained by opposing defenders and midfielders, which ties up players who might otherwise move into offense.41
Drogba’s ascent began in earnest when he was recruited, at the age of twenty-five, to Olympique de Marseille. The city of Marseille is famous for the intensity and devotion of its soccer fans. He was given a jersey with his favorite number—11—and greeted on his first game with a giant banner that said “Drogba, score for us.” Playing in front of the sixty thousand fans in the Stade Vélodrome, “it almost felt unreal for me to be wearing that pale blue shirt,” Drogba writes, “about to run into this incredible stadium.” Before an important game, he went to the hilltop basilica in the town, leaving his Olympique de Marseille jersey there in the hopes that this would “give us a bit of divine fortune.” The shirt was accepted as a gift and hung up to the right of the entrance to the basilica, alongside an Olympique de Marseille pennant—“but sufficiently high up to deter anyone from making off with it!” Drogba became famous in Marseille for the way he celebrated his goals. “Whenever I scored,” he writes, “I broke into a bit of coupé-décalé, a popular dance in Ivory Coast and in the Ivorian community in France, based on Ivorian pop music.”42
In the lower divisions in France, Drogba had suffered from the physicality—at times brutality—of play. At Marseille, he gained that peculiar kind of flattery that marks a good striker; he heard defenders “making some comments along the lines of the only way to stop me was to kick me.… That comment, for me, was the greatest compliment they could have given me!” It was, however, as a player at Chelsea, working with Mourinho, that Drogba reached the pinnacle of his career, when he played a central role in securing the team’s victory in the Champions League competition. It was a particularly sweet win, for Chelsea had made it to the final of the competition before, in 2008, but suffered a bruising defeat at the hands of English rivals Manchester United. Drogba had played in that defeat and remembered it well. In the locker room after the 2012 victory, draped in the Ivory Coast flag, he delivered a long speech directed at the Champions League trophy. “Why? Why have you avoided us for such a long time?” he asked it accusingly. He told the long story of the many “almosts,” the defeats Chelsea had experienced in the Champions League before, concluding with “everything we’d had to do in this match in order, finally, to be able to claim this trophy as our own.” He later wrote, “Some of those who witnessed my speech told me afterwards that it almost felt like a religious experience.” A brilliant striker on the pitch, Drogba also proved he was a striking orator off it.43
It was, however, as a player on the Ivory Coast national team that Drogba made his most important speeches. Though a dual national, with both French and Ivory Coast passports, Drogba was never selected to play on any of the junior national teams in France. His uncle, however, had once played for Ivory Coast. “I really wanted to continue the family tradition and pull on the jersey for ‘The Elephants,’” Drogba writes. “Even when I was young, I used to get goosebumps whenever I heard our national anthem.” He recalls his first match with the national team, an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier, in September 2002: “What is seared in my memory forever is the excitement of walking out into the cauldron of heat that was our national stadium, the Stade Félix Houphouët-Boigny.” The “atmosphere” was different than “anything I had ever experienced.” Fans had packed the stadium since ten in the morning, with artists and musicians performing, and “everyone had been joining in.”44
Ten days later, a civil war began in Ivory Coast. Over the next years, there were periods of cease-fire followed by bursts of fighting, and French and UN peacekeeping troops were deployed to the country. Drogba became captain of the Ivory Coast team in 2005 and led them to qualification for the 2006 men’s World Cup. As the team was celebrating, Drogba approached the cameraman filming the scene for Radiodiffusion Télévision Ivoirienne and asked him for the microphone. “We had always said that if we managed to qualify, it would be for the people, a way to ask them to bring peace back to Ivory Coast,” Drogba recalls. As the star forward, he was the most visible player on the team, and he understood himself as its spokesman. “Spontaneously, with no forethought or prepared speech,” he gathered his teammates around him in front of the camera and said, “My fellow Ivorians, from the north and from the south, from the centre and from the west, we have proved to you today that the Ivory Coast can cohabit and can play together for the same objective: to qualify for the World Cup.” Then, asking his teammates to get down on their knees and pray, he continued: “We ask you now: the only country in Africa that has all these riches cannot sink into a war. Please, lay down your arms. Organise elections. And everything will turn out for the best!”45
When the team arrived home in Abidjan, there were huge crowds waiting at the airport and “crazy” celebrations. His parents were waiting for him, and they were deeply proud, “not so much because of our qualification—that was almost secondary—but for the message I had sent out for peace.” Drogba’s words had been played and replayed on television and aired on the radio for days. As the team made their way through the city to the president’s house, there were throngs of celebrants in the streets, on rooftops, joyously waving flags and honking horns. It seemed that, “at least for the time being, bitterness between people was being suspended. There was still a long way to go until real peace was achieved, but it was a start.”46
Although the team had a disappointing performance at the 2006 men’s World Cup, Drogba was chosen as the African Player of the Year in 2007. In March of that year, a cease-fire was brokered between rebel forces in the north of Ivory Coast and the government. Drogba had an idea: What if he traveled to the rebel stronghold in the north, in Bouaké, to present his trophy? And what if Ivory Coast played their next game—an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier—not in Abidjan but in the north as well? Drogba brought the idea to the head of the Ivorian Football Federation and then to the president of Ivory Coast, and both agreed. On March 28, 2007, Drogba traveled “into the rebel heartland of Bouaké” in an “open-topped car,” escorted by soldiers. He met with the leader of the rebel group Forces Nouvelles, Guillaume Soro, who was soon incorporated into the government as prime minister as part of the resolution of the conflict. Drogba felt full of “pride in our country and hope for the future.” He remembers, “One elderly lady ran alongside the car for the entire journey.” He was “just a footballer, one from humble origins,” but felt that he was contributing to “rebuilding a unified country.”47
The Africa Cup of Nations qualifier, against Madagascar, was set for June 3 in Bouaké. Some teammates were worried about the journey into rebel territory, but Drogba reassured them. “I went there, I saw them, they love football, they love the team, and they have always supported us, even when we were losing. So we have to go.” The team blazed against Madagascar, winning 5–0, with Drogba scoring the final goal. “The game itself became a symbol of an attempt to heal divisions. I saw soldiers from the army watching alongside soldiers from the rebel forces.” Footage of the game, broadcast throughout the country, offered a different image of what was happening in the north and encouraged people who had fled the region to return. “People were heard to say, ‘If Drogba has been to Bouaké, it means it’s safe to return.’” Drogba had left Ivory Coast as a child, found a place for himself as a young man on the pitches of provincial France, and ultimately climbed to the heights of the international game. He has continued to journey, playing in China and Canada. Yet his most important moment on the pitch—the place where he had always felt most at home—was probably when he played in Bouaké in 2007, and in so doing was able to help bring displaced people home.48
Drogba’s career developed during a time when the cost of players, especially forwards, increased vertiginously. In the contemporary game, forwards are the most expensive members of professional teams for, as David Goldblatt puts it, “overwhelmingly they are the goal scorers and goals remain rare and difficult to come by.” There are times when the focus on the forward can hamstring a team. That was the case for years on the Portuguese national team, led by star forward Cristiano Ronaldo, who in both his pure brilliance on the field and what his critics see as his megalomania, perhaps best exemplifies what the position means today. The Portuguese team, however, has had disappointing showings in international competition, in part because they often seemed too focused on Ronaldo, working less as a coherent team than a forward with ten other players around him.49
This can happen to other national teams when a star forward becomes too central to their tactics. During the 2015 Women’s World Cup, for instance, the US women’s team entered with a strategy built around the star forward Abby Wambach. There was a logic to this. She was the FIFA player of the year in 2012, and is the all-time greatest goal scorer in American soccer history, having scored a total of 184 goals in international competition, far greater than any male US player. Yet by 2015, she was not as potent a striker as she had been during the 2011 Women’s World Cup, and the team at times seemed to be foundering because of too great a focus on her at the expense of other players. Manager Jill Ellis made the difficult decision to pull Wambach off the field, starting other forwards instead, and the team’s play improved markedly. The change in tactics was critical and enabled the team to win the competition.
Something similar happened in the final of the 2016 Men’s European Cup, though inadvertently. The game pitted Portugal against a favored French team, which was soaring from a victory over Germany in the semifinal. There was a surreal feel to the game because the staff at the Stade de France, which had been targeted by terrorists in November 2015, decided to leave the bright lights illuminating the field on overnight to make it easier for security to police the stadium. They hadn’t counted on how nature would react. The lights served as a massive beacon, and brown moths from all over the region had been drawn to the stadium. There were so many that you could see them fluttering all over the pitch, sometimes landing on players.
All eyes were on Ronaldo, with Portuguese fans hoping this would be the moment of his final ascension to the heights of the game. Early on, however, he came down, seriously injured, and motioned to the sidelines that he needed to be taken off. He had tears in his eyes, and as the camera focused in on him you could see a moth poised on his shoulder, almost as if it was whispering to him, maybe consoling him. Maybe the moth understood something we didn’t. At the moment it happened, it seemed like a complete disaster for the Portuguese team, portending a certain victory by the French. Instead, it was a blessing. With Ronaldo gone, everything changed about the game, and the French team, geared up to contain him, seemed unsure of what to do. And another Portuguese forward, Ederzito António Macedo Lopes, known as Eder, realized it was his moment.
Eder was born in the former Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau and moved to Portugal as a child. He was nowhere near as famous as Ronaldo, having played professionally in France and, at age twenty-eight, nearing the end of his career as a striker. But with Ronaldo injured, he took control of the Portuguese attack. In the second overtime of a 0–0 game, roving the edge of the penalty box, still far from goal, he decisively turned and kicked a beautiful volley into the French net. Portugal won the game 1–0, and the tournament, bringing home the country’s first major trophy from an international competition. Everyone had assumed Ronaldo would be the hero of such a victory, but instead it was a much less well-known player, born in Africa, who became a national hero. It was a moment rich with history and meaning. Portugal’s greatest footballer, the forward Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, known as Eusébio, was also of African background, born in Mozambique. He is considered one of the greatest soccer players in history, and led the Portuguese national team from 1961 to 1973. But even he had never won a trophy for the country. He died in 2014, and on the way back from their 2016 victory in Paris, the Portuguese team took a photograph of their trophy with a photograph of Eusébio propped up on it. The lineage from Eusébio to Eder, foregrounding the place of Africa in Portuguese—and European—soccer, was made powerfully clear in this moment.50
At their best, forwards embody the beauty of soccer as a language. Out of their motion, their decisions, the tiny choices they make about where they are and how they kick the ball, come the goals that create the rushes of emotion that tie fans to the sport. A forward can divide the story of the game into a before and an after, changing the narrative in an instant. In a game where goals are comparatively rare, often frustratingly so, there is always something a bit uncanny and unexpected about a goal. Nick Hornby writes that there is “the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, and not at all if you are not.” And some goals—particularly those that secured a historic victory—become seared in the memories and consciousness of fans, who can call up the intricacies of the moment easily, describing it as if it is replaying before their eyes.51
The depth of feeling generated at these moments is one of the reasons that forwards inspire startling levels of devotion and awe from their fans, becoming icons in a way that few other modern figures do. A forward, ultimately, is the person who reminds us how to turn a possibility—of a goal, of a victory, of happiness—into a reality.