10 Footballers Who Are Only Famous For One Thing

Chris Wright

6th, January 2015

20 Comments

By Chris Wright

First up we feel we should point out that the keen-eyed among you may notice there are slightly more than 10 entries (roughly 17 more to be precise) in the list.

What can we say? Things got out of hand. Just try to deal with it as best you can.

Hey ho, let’s kick things off with a controversial one…

Carlos Valderrama

The hair. The marvellous, marvellous hair. ‘El Pibe’ was undoubtedly a fine player on the world stage, but nobody can really remember who he played for at club level or any of the goals he scored without Googling them first…

Soccer - World Cup France 98 - Group G - Colombia v Tunisia

David Busst

Famous for one harrowing, shin-splintering moment of nominative determinism…

Manchester United v Coventry - Busst broken leg

For the record, Busst now plays for the same Sunday League side as Stan Petrov.

Mauro Bressan

Fair enough, if you’re going to be remembered for one thing then make it a 25-yard overhead kick against Barcelona…

Rory Delap

For being born blessed with gibbon arms…

Jean-Marc Bosman

Of “Bosman ruling” fame. Famously threw a gigantic, litigious wobbly in order to leave his club and duly rendered all subsequent football contracts near-worthless…

bosman

Jan Olsson

Perhaps not a name you’d recognise straight away, but the Swedish defender was the first unlucky patsy to be skinned alive by the Cruyff Turn…

Legend has it it took multiple surgeries and several weeks of intensive therapy to untwist his blood.

Roy ‘The Ceefax Kid’ Essandoh

Essandoh famously answered an advert for a non-cup-tied striker posted on Ceefax by Wycombe Wanderers.

He turned up, scored the winner in an FA Cup quarter-final against Leicester City and then promptly vanished back into the footballing wilderness without a trace…

The full story is available to peruse here.

Nayim

From the half-way line…

Ronnie Radford

Bless him. Still wheeled out by the Beeb every single sodding third round weekend…

Gabor Kiraly

Largely unremarkable ‘keeper who, for reasons unknown, decided on a pair of ugly grey jogging bottoms as his USP…

Soccer - Coca-Cola Football League Championship - Blackpool v Burnley - Bloomfield Road

Temuri Ketsbaia

The Georgian baldy attained cult hero-dom at Newcastle, but the mention of his name conjures but one image in the mind of the neutral fan…

Ali Dia

The infamous phoney “Senegalese international” who somehow managed to con his way onto Southampton’s bench, only to then come on for Matt Le Tissier…

Not Graeme Sounness’ finest hour, that one.

Tim Buzaglo

Estate agent by day, international cricketer for Gibraltar by mid-afternoon and scourge of West Brom’s back four by night/sort of early evening-ish.

Playing for non-league Woking, Buzaglo ran rings around the Baggies during a 1990/91 FA Cup third round tie, scoring a hat-trick in the process before swiftly returning to anonymity…

Facundo Sava

Slap, bang average striker elevated to noteworthy-ness by his distinctly unhygienic goal celebration: pulling a mask from out behind his sweaty shinpads and placing it across his eyes…

facundo-sava

Kerlon

A fairly impressive party trick, but in reality all Kerlon’s signature “seal dribble” ever got him was a few thousand Youtube hits and a slew of bruised shins/ribs…

Harald Schumacher

The man who broke the Bat(tiston)…

Antonin Panenka

Floaty light…

Gerry Armstrong

The goal that landed his job-for-life gig as a commentator on La Liga games…

Pedro Mendes

Remembered solely by most as being the poor sod who was destroyed by a pointy bit of the equally otherwise forgettable Ben Thatcher…

Rene Higuita

Scholars of insane South American goalkeepers will know that Higuita’s innate madness wasn’t solely confined to the scorpion kick, but let’s face it: it’s all people ever remember…

Soccer - Colombia v England

Jason Lee

Another classic case of a player’s hair being far more famous than the man located directly underneath…

jason-lee

Jimmy Glass

Glass’ unremarkable career panned out much like any other lower-league goalkeeper, with the sole exception being the fateful day he scored the 91st-minute goal that kept Carlisle in the Football League on his third and final appearance for the club…

Soccer - Nationwide League Division Three - Carlisle United v Plymouth Argyle

You have to wonder how many chapters of Jimmy’s autobiography, “One Hit Wonder: The Jimmy Glass Story“, are taken up by that particular anecdote.

Borislav Mikhailov

Noteable only for wearing a rather terrible wig at the USA ’94 World Cup…

mikailov

Geoff Thomas

That miss, England versus France, 1992…

Ronny Rosenthal

Speaking of career-defining misses. Rosenthal was actually a fairly decent player, but his name shall forever be synonymous with this disaster…

Jeremy Goss

Hey, if your career peaks with a sweetly struck volley in a 2-1 victory over Bayern Munich with a Norwich City shirt on your back, you’ve probably not done too badly…

Phil Babb

Yeesh. We still can’t quite bring ourselves to watch this one again after all these years.

In fact, it makes our danglers throb just thinking about it…

*Shudder*

There you go folks, that’s your lot!

Any further suggestions? Hit us with them.