The Greatest Goalkeepers and Best Defenders Every List Ignores

Start with the award that shapes every argument. The Ballon d’Or has been handed out since 1956, and in all that time exactly one goalkeeper has won it: Lev Yashin, in 1963. Defenders have done only marginally better — Franz Beckenbauer won it twice, and Fabio Cannavaro’s 2006 win is still the most recent for a defender. Everything else went to attackers.

Voters are not unreasonable so much as human. Goals are discrete and easy to attribute to one person. A defensive performance is a negative — the chances that never happened — and nobody can attribute an absence.

1

goalkeeper has ever won the Ballon d’Or

1963

Yashin’s year, and nobody has repeated it

2006

the most recent Ballon d’Or won by a defender

Television compounds it. Cameras follow the ball, so a defender is a shoulder at the edge of the frame until he does something wrong. Our separate guide to the greatest soccer players covers the forwards and the era problem; this one is about everyone the camera was pointed away from.

Here is the strange thing about defensive statistics: most of them go up when you defend worse. Tackles, blocks, clearances, and last-ditch interventions all require the ball to have arrived somewhere dangerous first. A center-back who reads the game perfectly spends the afternoon two steps ahead of a pass that never gets played, and finishes with a stat line that looks like he did nothing. The defender beside him, constantly out of position and recovering, racks up tackles and wins man of the match.

Goalkeepers have the problem in reverse: save counts reward the keeper behind a bad defense. And the biggest part of the modern job — organizing the line, commanding the space in front of goal, starting the attack with his feet — barely registers anywhere. There is no defensive equivalent of a goal, only proxies, which is why appreciating defending has always depended on watching.

Lev Yashin spent his career at Dynamo Moscow, played in all black, and won the Ballon d’Or in 1963 — the only goalkeeper ever to do it. The shot-stopping got him there, but his real legacy is that he treated the penalty area as territory to be governed rather than a line to be guarded.

Keepers before him stayed on their line and waited. Yashin came off it to punch crosses, shouted his defenders into shape, and threw the ball out to start counters instead of booting it downfield. Everything a goalkeeping coach now teaches — command your box, distribute with intent, talk constantly — was unusual enough in the 1950s to be written up as a personality trait.

The best defensive performance of the night is the one that gave the highlight editor nothing to work with.

The women’s game has one such data point too: Nadine Angerer won FIFA’s world player of the year award in 2013, the only keeper to manage it. One award apiece across two long histories is a structural bias with two exceptions.

Goalkeeping is the one position whose job description has been rewritten twice. Gordon Banks won the World Cup with England in 1966, but he is better remembered for a save against Pele in 1970 — a downward header aimed at the far corner, scooped up and over the bar off the bounce. It is the most famous save ever filmed — a rare defensive act a camera caught whole.

The 1992 back-pass rule was the first rewrite: keepers could no longer pick up a teammate’s pass, so players selected for their hands had to learn to play with their feet.

Peter Schmeichel dominated the 1990s by making himself geometrically enormous, spreading into a star shape that removed every option from a one-on-one. Gianluigi Buffon won the 2006 World Cup with Italy and stayed elite implausibly long, though he never won the Champions League. Iker Casillas captained Spain through the greatest run a national team has had, and his stop on Robben decided the 2010 final.

The second rewrite came from high defensive lines, which left acres of grass behind the back four, and Manuel Neuer completed it. At the 2014 World Cup he covered that space as a sweeper, clearing balls thirty yards from his goal. People called it reckless. It was the logical consequence of pressing high, and every serious club coaches it now.

Franz Beckenbauer is the reason defenders appear on all-time lists at all. He defined the attacking sweeper — the libero, the free man behind the defensive line — and turned a purely protective role into the position a team’s attacks began from. He won the Ballon d’Or twice, lifted the 1974 World Cup as captain, and won it again in 1990 as West Germany’s manager.

The innovation was not standing behind the defense; sweepers already did that. It was carrying the ball forward out of it. With no direct opponent, the libero was the one player guaranteed to be free, and Beckenbauer used that to step into midfield, forcing opponents to abandon a marking assignment or let him keep walking.

If Beckenbauer invented the modern defender, Milan of the late 1980s and 1990s perfected the defense as a machine. Franco Baresi organized a back line that pushed high and stepped up in unison to play opponents offside — four players making the same decision in the same instant. Done well it looks like an invisible wall. Done badly it is a breakaway.

Paolo Maldini was the other half. He started as a left-back with the pace and reach to handle anybody one-on-one, and when that pace faded he moved inside to center-back and kept playing at the top level into his forties — an exceptionally long career at Milan even by the standards of players who last.

• Maldini is famous for the idea that a sliding tackle means the defender already erred.
• Baresi’s value was the line he ran, not the tackles he made; the back four moved on his cue.
• Milan retired both the number 6 Baresi wore and the number 3 Maldini wore.
• The same defense produced Italy internationals in Tassotti and Costacurta — a system, not just talent.
• It is the ancestor of the high-line defending that pressing teams use now.

They were unmistakably great and impossible to put in a statistic. Notice, too, how defenders get praised: elegance, intelligence, reading — words about temperament rather than output. We have no language for defending that sounds as impressive as scoring.

Fabio Cannavaro won the 2006 Ballon d’Or after captaining Italy to the World Cup, and that is the bar: not merely being the best center-back in the world, but being so during the tournament your country wins, wearing the armband. Short for the position, he solved it by attacking crosses early, meeting them at their highest point rather than waiting to be jumped over.

Carlos Alberto made the opposite case. As Brazil’s captain in 1970 he scored the last goal of the final, arriving late from right-back to hit a pass from Pele first time into the corner. One of the most replayed goals in the sport’s history was scored by a defender, and nobody files it under defending.

Bobby Moore captained England to the 1966 World Cup and is remembered for a tackle on Jairzinho in 1970 that took the ball cleanly, at full speed, in the box. Virgil van Dijk finished runner-up for the 2019 Ballon d’Or, the closest a defender has come since Cannavaro. Briana Scurry’s save in the 1999 World Cup final shootout settled the most-watched women’s match of the era.

Appreciating this is a skill, learnable in about two matches. The trick is to stop watching the ball, which is hard, because the broadcast is engineered to keep your eyes on it.

1. 1

   Pick one defender for ten minutes

   Watch only him, even when play is at the other end. Most of his work happens while the ball is elsewhere.

2. 2

   Watch the line, not the tackle

   When the back four steps up together, note who moved first. That player is running the defense.

3. 3

   Look at the shoulders

   Defenders angle their body to close one side of the field, forcing the attacker onto his weaker foot. That is the decision.

4. 4

   Watch the keeper on corners

   Before the ball is struck, watch him set the wall and point people into place. The save he never has to make starts here.

The fastest way to internalize it is to play. Spend a season in goal or at center-back in a weekly pickup game and you will feel the moment the line should have stepped. Pickup Soccer lists the free games near you, and volunteering to go in goal is the quickest way into any team.