Soccer Legends Quiz
Football's legends include a winger who would not retire and a captain with a second career waiting.
A soccer legends quiz with answers about the players who shaped football before the modern era of wall-to-wall television. It looks at their positions, their unusual records and the awards that carry their names.
Did you know?
- Garrincha's nickname means 'little bird'. He was born with a curved spine and legs that bent in different directions, one of them several centimetres shorter than the other. Doctors doubted he could play sport at all, yet Brazil never lost a match in which he and Pelé both played.
- Eusébio, Portugal's great striker of the 1960s, was born in Mozambique and joined Benfica as a teenager. At the 1966 World Cup he was the top scorer with nine goals, including four in one match after his team had fallen three goals behind against North Korea.
- Johan Cruyff wore the number 14 at a time when starting players were expected to wear 1 to 11. The habit began by chance when a team-mate could not find his own shirt. Ajax retired the number in 2007 as a tribute on his sixtieth birthday.
The players who changed football
For most of the twentieth century, football's greatest players were known through radio, newspapers and a few minutes of newsreel. The Ballon d'Or, created by the magazine France Football in 1956, was the first widely followed individual award. Until 1995 it was open only to European players, which is why Pelé and Diego Maradona, often named as the two greatest of all, never won it during their careers.
Pelé and Brazil
Pelé was seventeen when he played at his first World Cup, in Sweden in 1958, and he spent almost his whole club career with Santos. He usually played alongside Garrincha, a winger whose dribbling was as admired in Brazil as Pelé's goals. The national team's attacking style in those years, with full-backs running forward and forwards swapping places, gave Brazilian football a reputation for skill and invention that it has kept ever since.
Cruyff and total football
In the early 1970s the Dutch club Ajax and the Netherlands team played a system known as total football, in which any outfield player could take over the role of any other. Johan Cruyff was its conductor, dropping deep, drifting wide and directing team-mates with his arms. As a coach at Barcelona he later passed on the same ideas, and they still shape how many of the world's leading clubs train young players.
Maradona and the number 10
Diego Maradona was short, strong and almost impossible to knock off the ball. He led Argentina to the World Cup title in 1986 and then did something few thought possible in Italy, taking Napoli, a club that had never been champions, to league titles in 1987 and 1990. The city's devotion to him was such that Napoli later retired his number 10 shirt, so that no other player at the club can wear it.