The Most Useless Tricks in Soccer

By: Daryl | August 19th, 2009

This might be a personal issue, but I hate when footballers try unnecessary tricks. Skills designed to show off their skills, rather than skills designed to actually acomplish anything. For me, it’s up there with diving and asking the ref to card an opposition player, at least in terms of how much my blood pressure raises when I see it. Just the arrogance of it.

So I was very happy to see the above video on 101GG, where Heracles’ striker Everton gets his comeuppance for an unnecessary number of stepovers by being made to look very very foolish. (Please feel free to make your own jokes about Everton being embarrassed twice this week).

Everton’s useless trick can be classified as “too many stepovers”. He isn’t the first to do it, and he won’t be the last. But there are plenty of other crimes against football involving unnecessary skills. Selected YouTube highlights below, and please share any more that you know of in the comments.

The Rabona:
The rabona – where you cross one leg behind the other to play the ball – doesn’t prove that you have otherworldly talent. You might think it does. But what it actually proves is that you’re so one footed that you’d rather twist your legs into a pretzel than use your weaker foot. Which is why David Dunn deserved this:

Standing on the ball:
So far, I’ve only seen Andrei Kanchelskis do this. It accomplishes nothing except making you look silly, and possibly makes the ball egg-shaped.

360° spin (sans ball):
When Zinedine Zidane does a 360, he takes the ball with him and dizzies his opponent. Now that’s a trick. But Andrei Kanchelskis (yep, him again) does the 360 without the ball, thereby making himself dizzy instead.

Juggling for no reason:
I’m giving Kerlon and his seal dribble a pass here, mostly because it actually takes him past opposition players. But Nani’s infamous juggle against Arsenal actually took him in the wrong direction, towards his own goal. He got away with it, but it could very easily have gone very wrong.