The Greatest Goals Ever Scored
What makes a goal legendary
A great goal is not simply one that goes in from a long way away, or at an important moment. The greatest goals combine technical difficulty, context and an element that resists easy description: they feel inevitable in hindsight and impossible in the moment.
Maradona's second goal against England in 1986 meets all three criteria. The technical execution, a sixty-yard run past five players and the goalkeeper, is extraordinary. The context, a World Cup quarter-final against England eleven years after the Falklands War, adds a layer that no goal scored in a league match could carry. And the sense of watching someone do something that should not be possible makes it stick in the memory differently from any other goal in football history.
The technical ceiling
Van Basten's volley for the Netherlands against the Soviet Union in the 1988 European Championship final is the answer most coaches give when asked for the single most technically difficult goal ever scored. The ball arrived at an angle from the right wing; striking a volley cleanly from that position and directing it into the top corner of the net with pace is something most professional players cannot do at all, let alone in a tournament final.
Bergkamp's turn and finish against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup required controlling a long pass with one touch, spinning around a defender and shooting in a single movement with almost no time to think.
Goals that changed football
Some goals matter because of what happened after them. Roberto Carlos's free kick for Brazil against France in 1997 changed how goalkeepers and coaches thought about free kick walls. Before that match, a ball curving around a wall from forty metres was considered impossible; after it, teams began positioning a player outside the wall to cover the curling trajectory.
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