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    Football Skills Named After Players And Teams

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    Anyone who has ever played football will know that at its most simple it is quite a basic sport. You kick the ball from one player to another in an attempt to get it further up the pitch and score a goal. For the vast majority of people who play the game, that is pretty much all they could ever hope to do.

    For some, though, they posses a genius that means that they can think outside of the box and do what is necessary to win. This can involve literally coming up with moves that no one else has ever done before, often resulting in the piece of skill in question being named after them. Here is a look at some of the more notable ones.

    The Cruyff Turn

    If you’re going to talk about football skills that will always and before be thought of as being linked to a specific player, there is probably no better place to start than with the Cruyff Turn. Although he’ll almost certainly have performed it countless times before, the time that Johan Cruyff did it and it caught the attention of the world was during the 1974 World Cup.

    He looked as if he was going to pass the ball one way, only to drag it in the opposite direction and making it into the penalty area. The Swedish defenders he was up against didn’t have a clue what was going on and one of the games greatest skills went global.

    The Panenka

    If you don’t think that the Cruyff Turn is football’s most famous skill named after a player then that must be because you’re thinking of the Panenka. It is arguably the most cocky move that a footballer can pull off, if for no other reason than if it goes wrong then you look like an idiot. It involves a player running up to take a penalty and then chipping it straight down the middle in nonchalant fashion.

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    Presuming the goalkeeper has dived one way or the other, the ball sails gently into the back of the net. It was performed by Antonin Panenka in the 1976 European Championship final to score the winning penalty for Czechoslovakia over West Germany.

    La Cuauhteminha

    Not all skills that players come up with become much-used, but they can often by iconic. This can be seen in La Cuauhteminha, which was a move that Cuauhtemoc Blanco would perform in certain circumstances. Faced with two players all but blocking his path, Blanco squeezed the ball between his feet and then jumped through the air, carrying the ball past his opponents before releasing it and carrying on running.

    It wasn’t always successful, with numerous occasions seeing him lose the ball or tackled, but when it did work it left the defenders who had been facing him rather red-faced and embarrassed at being left behind.

    The Puskás ‘V’ Move

    Many people will have heard of Puskás, on account of the fact that Ferenc Puskás’ name is attached to an award that has been given out by FIFA every year since 2009. The Real Madrid striker was known as being a prolific goalscorer for both the Spanish side and the Hungarian national team for which he played, which is why the Puskás Award is the trophy given to the scorer of the most aesthetically pleasing goal over the course of a year.

    His own ‘V Move goal was scored in 1953 when he received the ball on the edge of the six-yard box and fooled the defender by rejecting the chance to shoot, instead dragging the ball back and sending him flying past him.

    The Okocha Turn

    Jay-Jay Okocha was, it was often joked, so good that they named him twice. One of the top tricksters that the Premier League had ever witnessed, he would often evade opposition players whilst performing for Arsenal by using an number of tricks that he had up his sleeve.

    Perhaps the best one involved him rolling the ball one way with the studs of one boot before using his other foot to fake taking the ball in a different direction. Instead of doing so he would step over the ball and carry on heading the same way he was originally, which would leave the defender completely wrong-footed and given Okocha space to escape.

    The Marseille Roulette

    Not all pieces of skill are named after the players that made them famous, which can be seen in the Marseille Roulette. Some people call it the ‘360’, some the ‘Gringo’, but it was Diego Maradona who introduced it to the world.

    The trick sees the player use one foot to stand on the ball whilst spinning over it in order to shield it away from the defender. The opposite foot then comes into play, dragging the ball away from the player in order to allow Maradona, or whoever is performing it, to leave the opposition member where they’re standing and give them the chance to run off into space and play a pass or have a shot.

    The Rabona

    Another example of a piece of skill that isn’t named after the player that performed it is the Rabona. It isn’t all that easy to say exactly who first performed the move, but we can say who it is that is credited with doing so as well as where the name comes from.

    Ricardo Infante performed it in a game between Estudiantes and Rosario in 1948, with an Argentine football magazine called El Grafico displaying a picture of him performing it alongside the phrase ‘Infante rabona’. That means ‘Infante played hooky’, with the word ‘rabona’ being the Spanish for skipping school, which is ‘hooky’ to many people, and the term stuck.

    The Step-Over

    One of the most common pieces of skill that you’re likely to see on a football pitch, performed by people of virtually all abilities, is the step-over. Although it has been done by the likes of Lionel Messi, Zinedine Zidane and even Chris Waddle, the first person to do it according to most was the Dutch player Law Adam.

    In essence it simply requires a player to move their foot over and past the ball before bringing it back, often using alternate legs. In doing so, the opposition player can’t quite tell what the footballer is going to do, so that gives them enough room to put a cross in or get a shot off; presuming they’ve done it correctly.

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