If you've scored in the World Cup final, please also score at a game I can attend.
It’s a mouthful and it’s unachievable. Seeing live goals by players who’ve scored in the World Cup final is therefore unworthy of obsessive attention. Unless you’re a startlingly healthy 100-year-old millionaire, it’s not a doable list.
But, at half-time in the last match of the 2018 tournament, in Russia of all places, with France leading Croatia 2-1, a total of 57 different players had scored in the World Cup final. That this was the same as the number of Fabergé eggs in existence seemed particularly apt. And not just because those priceless ornaments were created for the Tsars by a craftsman of French heritage (President Putin watched from the executive seats as Antoine Griezmann became Scorer 57).
You can see a Fabergé egg but only the insanely rich get to own one. A goal in the World Cup final is every bit as beautiful and rare yet, while one country and one player will always claim them*, no-one can own what is essentially a fleeting physical action in time. And football, in one of its last democratic acts, can still allow us to experience World Cup final goals more viscerally than any bejeweled orb when we see the very same player score another goal in our presence.
So at full-time in the Brazil 2014 World Cup final I felt particularly denied. Three
participants in the Argentina v Germany decider had scored in games I’d
previously attended. Germany’s Mario Götze, who netted the only goal at the Maracana that night, wasn’t one of them. My personal collection was stuck at four. But then again they had all come to me - I'd seen them all in Glasgow.
In 1984, aged 15, I paid a fiver to watch Rangers host
Internazionale in a UEFA Cup second round, second leg. The decisive away goal came from Alessandro
Altobelli. My teenage devastation later gave way to a feeling of vicarious involvement
in the 1982 World Cup final, in which Altobelli scored Italy’s third against
Germany.
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge also starred for Inter that night. When he scored against Argentina in the next
World Cup final I retrospectively regretted him only hitting the Ibrox post.
Thirty nine years on, just eight countries have won the World Cup. My love of Scotland matches anything any Argentinian or German feels for their national XI. Yet those two have met in the World Cup final three times since Rummenigge struck Rangers old square woodwork; It’ll now be at least 28 years since Scotland even qualified for the tournament. Part of me wants a bigger return on time invested. So I mainline the greats.
Hitting the back of the net in the planet’s most important game isn’t subjective greatness. It’s solid football gold. Seeing such a player score in the flesh is the closest you, I or even most citizens of those World Champion nations will get to FIFA’s showpiece match.
Andres Iniesta’s first strike for Spain after his
winner in the final of South Africa 2010 came in a Euro 2012 qualifier against
Scotland. In Hampden’s Main Stand I held my breath when the ball rebounded to
him 12 yards out. This wasn’t solely because Scotland were already one down. I
was channeling Soccer City, Johannesburg and football’s biggest goal in four
years.
It’s not all consolation though. Playing for Olympique Marseille,
Rudi Völler scored at Ibrox in a July 1992 friendly. A relaxed home crowd
applauded. I thrilled at witnessing a goal by the German who’d made it 2-2 in
the Azteca in the Mexico 86 final. But five months later Völler returned, in
the Champions League, putting Marseille 2-0 up. This was too much of a rare
thing.
UEFA staged the 2002 Champions League final at Hampden. I
breathed the same air as Zinedine Zidane’s spectacular winner for Real Madrid,
mid-way between his two scoring World Cup finals.
To augment this collection, however, it seemed I'd have to travel further afield on my treasure hunts.
Desperation to actually attend a World Cup, and the
randomness of FIFA’s ticket ballot, found me at the opening game of Germany
2006. Philipp Lahm and Miroslav Klose scored against Costa Rica in Munich. The
following year, in the Nou Camp, I saw Lionel Messi score against Rangers in the Champions League group stage. That in 2014 none of these three scored in the World Cup final was only as surprising
as some of the 61 who have.
Italy’s Marco Materazzi (2006) and Germany’s Wolfgang Webber
(1966) both managed just one other international goal in their playing careers. José Luis Brown’s only
goal for Argentina was the opener in that 1986 final. Hector Castro, scorer of Uruguay's winner in the very first final, in 1930, was missing a right forearm.
And sometimes I’ve felt
it would have been easier for me to actually score in the final than see live
goals by those who have.
Fourteen months after his historic goal in Brazil, Götze showed up at Hampden for a Euro 2016 qualifier. Germany won 3-2 yet, rather than enjoy the consolation of him extending my collection, he had one chalked off for offside and another, which deflected off him into the net, credited to team-mate Thomas Müller.
By the time Rangers drew Borussia Dortmund in the 2021-22 Europa League – at Ibrox I watched the sides share four goals – Götze had left for PSV Eindhoven. When we drew PSV in the Champions League qualifiers six months later, again I attend an Ibrox leg ending 2-2, Götze had left for Eintracht Frankfurt... the side we’d lost to on penalties in the Europa League final in-between times. But I didn't attend that final so, you know, totally not bothered.
When Hampden was selected to host matches at Euro 2020 I successfully purchased a ticket for all four. The Covid afflicted tournament didn’t go ahead til 2021 and crowds in Glasgow were restricted to one quarter of the capacity; everyone had to return half their ticket allocation. Ivan Perišić, scorer of Croatia’s equaliser against France in the 2018 World Cup final, scored in two of these Hampden games. Yup, the two for which I was forced to return my ticket.
However the man who scored next that 2018 day in Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium, France’s Antoine Griezmann, had also scored versus David Moyes’ Real Sociedad when I saw them lose at Atletico’s old Vicente Calderón Stadium during an Easter 2015 holiday in Madrid. And, on 18 December 2022 as the world held its breath, wondering if Messi could negotiate extra time and penalties to finally land himself a World Cup winners’ medal, I already had what I’d sat on the sofa to see:
After 23 minutes of the 22nd World Cup final, the man I’d witnessed scoring against my club in Barcelona 15 years earlier tucked away a penalty and gave me my Half Dozen. That he’d just become a highly paid ambassador of the murderous Saudi Arabian regime certainly took some of the shine off the moment.
And that day's infamously venal presentation ceremony itself, in a Qatar stadium which caused death and misery to those who built it, had me feeling just a little bit less like a blessed fan of a democratic game than an acolyte of one of those old Russian Tsars who bankrolled Peter Carl Fabergé, despots blythley letting people perish while coveting their little collection of diamond-encrusted eggs.
Football losing its lustre is a middle age thing, yes. But it’s also a realisation we’ve all been coming to for decades now. Eight countries own the World Cup and five own the players who reach its final. If you live outside the homes of those five richest European domestic leagues you might get to see those players in semi-retirement – as long as you reside in Japan, the USA or the gulf states - or watch them wipe the floor with your club in an early stage of the Champions League.
But, just as it begins to feel like the "glittering jewelry" end of the game is not for the likes of you or me - the people who built it with love, adoration and a conviction it could genuinely illuminate our life - along comes the club I've adored the longest to offer this revolting peasant a flash of ultimate glamour:
An international weekend, of all things, leaves Rangers without a fixture this coming Saturday and Sunday. So, as has become the norm in such circumstances, a select side of "Rangers Legends" will play an "International XI" of equally retired and unfit greats of the global game on the very pitch where I saw my first ever World Cup final scorer score.
I wasn't interested initially. But then an e-mail arrived in my in-box listing both squads. I had to look. And the name that jumped out was one Emmanuel Petit, scorer of the clinching third goal in the 1998 World Cup final and frustratingly - for me - not on the score sheet when I saw him play for France in a 2000 friendly win v Scotland at Hampden.
Would seeing this guy score, almost twenty years after he retired from playing, in a friendly for retirees, count towards my World Cup Scorers list?
Not at £18.00 a ticket it won't. Thanks for nothing, Rangers. It'll be Easter soon - I'll use that cash for a deposit on a fancy egg.
*Or two countries and one player in the case of Croatia's Mario Mandžukić who scored for both sides in that 2018 final. Wikipedia claims, to date, that 62 players have scored in the World Cup final but this is only possible if "O.G." is a separate person from poor Mario. After the 2022 final, the total was 61 players.
A (very different) version of this article appeared on the When Saturday Comes website in September 2015.
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