Andoni Goikoetxea - ‘The Butcher of Bilbao’
Athletic Bilbao in the Eighties were not a team to be messed with. Indeed, comparisons can be made with Wimbledon’s ‘Crazy Gang’, a disparate clan of cloggers whose training ground hijinks and underdog spirit were celebrated, their outright thuggery criminally downplayed.
If Bilbao had their fair share of notorious henchmen however, nobody came close to Goikoetxea for persistent brutality.
This is a player who ruthlessly downed Diego Maradona in 1983, injuring his ankle tendons. It was less a foul, more an assault, and so proud of his work was the Spanish sociopath he kept his match boots in a glass case thereafter.
Two years later, he all-but-ended Bernd Schuster’s career, with a knee-high act of GBH.
All of which is unsavoury, even despicable. That nickname though. It’s a moniker you can easily imagine being whispered in dread by townsfolk in a Sergio Leone classic.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer – Baby-faced Assassin
It is not uncommon for strikers to be compared to hit-men, each dealing in lethal trades. Both require ice in the veins and a clinical eye.
With the goalposts in his crosshairs, the Norwegian rarely missed, which is why Manchester United’s supersub scored 126 goals from just 216 starts, across 11 seasons that usually saw him short-priced in the Premier League top scorer odds.
Factor in too, a youthful demeanour that brings to mind a cheeky scamp in the Bash Street Kids, and one of the coolest nicknames in world football was almost an inevitability.
Vagner Silva de Souza – Vagner Love
Who here thought that the former Brazilian forward was really called ‘Love’? You’re not alone.
In actual fact, Vagner Silva de Souza gained the nickname from his off-the-pitch activities, a playboy lifestyle that makes noted womaniser Romario seem positively monk-like.
Having established himself as a skilful number nine at CSKA Moscow, Love was extremely glad to return to his native South America in 2011, blaming the arctic Siberian winds for limiting his extra-curricular fun. “I’m not tough enough to do it when it is minus 27,” he soon after claimed to Playboy Brasil.
In the same interview, the much-travelled frontman admitted that orgies were commonplace when starring for Palmeiras.
Franz Beckenbauer – Der Kaiser
Credited with inventing the sweeper role, the Emperor’s stylish elegance and all-round mastery of his surroundings led to two Ballon d’Or awards as Bayern Munich dominated club football in the Seventies and West Germany did likewise on the international stage.
One of only three men to have won the World Cup as a player and a manager, Beckenbauer’s legendary status in the game cedes to no-one.
The dictionary definition of emperor says it all – a supreme monarch of an empire. He was that and more.
Ronaldo – Il Fenomeno
Ronaldo Luis Nazario de Lima was so extraordinarily gifted he could affect the sports betting with one moment of individual magic, a moment that would leave collective jaws on the floor, as atheists questioned their entire belief system.
It is a perfectly reasonable claim that the Brazilian megastar was the equal of Maradona. The equal of Messi.
The two-time Ballon d’Or winner therefore was deserving of an especially heightened nickname, and that duly came early into his career when his peers and the public alike began to refer to him as the ‘Phenomenon’.
Not a phenomenon, you understand. That would suggest there is more than one. The phenomenon.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
