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The story behind Roberto Carlos’ immortal free-kick

By on January 7, 2016

“Who is the best free-kick taker in the world?”

Roberto Carlos didn’t miss a beat: “David Beckham.”

Speaking in an interview with UEFA during his time at Fenerbahce in Turkey, Carlos answered without a moment’s thought. Then he looked up at the camera and gave a small smile. Coming from a man who took arguably the greatest free-kick in history, Carlos knew the abruptness of his answer had caught his interviewer off-guard, while his delivery suggested that he might have had other thoughts.

Carlos will never be able to escape the inevitable questions about that free-kick against France in every interview he gives for the rest of his life, such was the awe surrounding his incredible strike in Brazil’s meeting with France in the 1997 Tournoi de France.

He placed the ball carefully on the spot of the free-kick, fully thirty-six yards from goal. Zinedine Zidane gave it a little nudge back and Carlos carefully realigned it again with the valve facing towards him, because it’s the hardest part of the ball, he says. The Brazilian fullback, finally satisfied, then took one, two, three, four, and ultimately seven steps back from the ball. He paced backwards a full fifteen yards, fully inside the center circle, before the referee blew his whistle and Carlos began his lengthy run-up.

Carlos took a few short steps, then broke into long strides. He was at a sprint pace by the time he arced his body around the ball and powerfully drove it on an astonishing trajectory. The ball whizzed wide of the wall. A ball boy, seated behind an advertising barrier eight or nine yards wide of goal, ducked. Then, so fast and suddenly that it was only via replays that the true majesty of the free-kick revealed itself, the ball arced back towards goal and in off the post.

“I saw him kick the ball,” Zidane, who was in France’s hapless wall, later said, per Real Madrid TV. “And when it went that way, with the goal being in the other direction, I told myself that it was wide. Then I heard shouts of ‘goal!’ And I said, how was that possible?”

There’s physics behind the strike and Carlos’ free-kick technique. He struck across the ball with the outside of his boot with great force, creating a lethal spin on the ball. Yet Carlos has always maintained that he doesn’t know how he struck the ball so cleanly and what clicked that specific day.

“People ask me all the time,” Carlos told the Times of India. “But my answer remains the same. I have no idea what and how I did it. People ask me for my secret [for taking free-kicks]. I have no secret. Truth is, it’s a result of training well. I worked hard.”

Perhaps that’s why Carlos regarded Beckham in such high regard. In his eleven years at Real Madrid, Carlos practiced free-kicks with Beckham every day during the Englishman’s three-year stint in the Spanish capital. For free-kicks in game, the pair would line-up on either side of the ball, Beckham on the left with his curling efforts and Carlos on the right side with his powerful shot, perhaps the greatest free-kick lineup ever to be seen. “I wanted to see Beckham take the free-kick because it’s beautiful how he hits the ball,” said Carlos.

Who would take the shot, “depended on the position of the ball and its distance. I would shoot along the short side of the wall or over it and he would shoot wide of the wall or over it.”

Carlos had range of weapons in his Arsenal, a powerful shot struck straight through the ball, or a side-footed, swerving effort, but none was more formidable than the sheer power with which he struck the ball. And none of his countless free-kick goals will ever be cast in the same light as that one immortal goal against France nearly twenty years ago.

Homepage photo credit: Amarhgil (Own work) [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.