Who scored the best goal ever? That will be debated often and there will be many contenders – Maradona’s individual goal against England in the World Cup in Argentina in 1986 was voted by one poll as the ‘Goal of the Century’. People will perhaps rack their brains to think of the classic overhead kick from the edge of the box or the chip from the halfway line or the powerful header from outside the penalty area or a turn and volley. There are always plenty of contenders for ‘Goal of the Season’ though each may be entirely subjective – who is to say whether a thunderbolt from thirty yards that the goalkeeper never saw is better than a delicate chip over the goalkeeper from an acute angle?
The best goal ever, captured on camera, may actually have been scored by a youth team in Greece in December 2012, going by the name of AO Giannina. The ball did not burst the net; in fact it only just reached the net after being struck from ten metres out. So what made it so good? A number of significant features combined to make it an astonishing goal. The team kicked off the match and scored the goal within a minute (fifty-eight seconds, to be exact) without any of the opposition touching the ball and with every one of their own team, including the goalkeeper, touching the ball.
The point that needs to be made here is this: one player did not score the goal but the team scored the goal. The person whom spectators and commentators will indicate scored the goal was purely the last person in their team to have touched the ball before it went over the line and into the goal. It does not actually matter who that person is.
In another scenario, one player may have run fifty yards with the ball, beaten three defenders and somehow threaded the ball through a crowded area to his team-mate standing one yard off the line who simply touches the ball into the net – who gets the credit for the goal? Whose name is reported on the score sheet? Yet who did all the hard work? The match reports do not say Lukaku 1 Arsenal 0 – the team’s name is reported. After all, does it matter who scored, as long as the team scored? A player does not score a goal; a team does.
Schools (and clubs, which is maybe why schools do it) love to hold an annual Awards Dinner. The fundamental flaw in having such awards is that they tend to highlight individual performance in a team sport, which goes against the whole concept of teamwork. By giving an award for the Top Scorer we are saying that scoring goals is the most important skill to have; it is also saying one player is more important than the others. It is ignoring the contributions of all the other players who have perhaps shown even greater skills and effort in order to lay on the goal for the scorer. Team sport is about the team, not individuals.
A further negative aspect of such awards is that it can also lead to an individual player becoming selfish in trying to score goals (in order to become top scorer and to get the ‘hero’ status of scoring goals) when he might have been better to pass to a team-mate who was standing in a better position to score. Equally, it can easily lead to the Top Scorer becoming complacent and arrogant, in thinking he is above other players on his team. The damage to the team ethic can be enormous.
The award of Top Scorer is equally damaging as not everyone has the same chance of winning the award; the goalkeeper will rarely have the chance to score a goal and no club has Best Goalkeeper of the Year (obviously, as there is only one goalkeeper in the team) so the goalkeeper is seen to be not as important as his team-mates. If there is ever an award for the Defender of the Year, few goalkeepers will even be considered for that award yet the goalkeeper is a key member of the team.
Of course, we might be quick to point out that we offer other awards, not just one for the Top Scorer – Best All-Rounder, Player of the Year, Most Valuable Player and numerous other awards. But again, each of the awards tends to highlight an individual when it should be about the team, not individuals. While the motive is in one sense commendable, as a means of encouraging players and recognising their contributions, the result is in fact counter-productive. We highlight areas that are not important and we ignore areas that deserve credit and commendation. After all, there is no ‘Best Goal’ – and what good is a brilliant goal if the team does not win? A team scores, not an individual.
