The Athletic’s How To Series: Learn to showboat like Ronaldinho, Maradona and Kerlon

It’s 1989 and an Argentinian man is dancing to the sound of a song from an Austrian pop group while balancing a ball on his head in the middle of a football pitch. His name is Diego Maradona and he’s warming up for Napoli before a UEFA Cup semi-final against Bayern Munich.

In truth, it’s more of an exhibition than a warm-up, and made even better by the fact that Maradona hasn’t even bothered to tie up the laces on his boots. Liberated and carefree, Maradona is living his best life.

Ball-juggling wasn’t born that day, but the footage is iconic and was inspirational for freestylers, including Woo Hee Yong (otherwise known as Mr Woo), the trailblazing South Korean who defied gravity with his extraordinary repertoire of flicks and tricks (he once bounced the ball up and down on his head for more than five hours).

Legend has it that the Brazilian superstar Ronaldinho asked for Mr Woo’s autograph when the two filmed together because he was so good, and you won’t regret spending six minutes of your time watching his half-time entertainment at the Scottish club Rangers in 2004.

That said, we want you learning freestyler tricks, not just viewing them. So here’s YouTuber and content creator Eman SV2, together with the king of the showboat Lee Trundle, to guide you through half a dozen skills to get you started on your ball-juggling journey, including one or two that you might even see in a game.

Maradona 7

Never mind learning a new ball-juggling skill, there’s a chance to get yourself a Guinness World Record certificate here.

Inspired by that warm-up for Napoli all those years ago — well, pretty much any warm-up that Maradona ever did because ball-juggling was always a central part of it — the ‘Maradona 7’ requires you to keep the ball up in the air using both feet, both thighs, both shoulders and the head, hence the number seven. But you’ve got to do it in order.

Master that and the next challenge is to do the routine 10 times through, as quickly as possible, without the ball touching the ground. Back in 2017, 13-year-old Tommy Boyd set a new world record (since surpassed by Aditya Srikakulam, from India) of just under 30 seconds.

Maradona would have been able to do that with a golf ball. In fact, he could have done it with anything — I know that after researching ‘Maradona 7’ and getting completely sidetracked watching showreels of the Argentina legend (what a beautiful waste of time that was).

Anyway, here’s Trundle.

Around the world

Ronaldinho, Nike commercials and the ‘around the world’ skill went hand in hand at the start of the 21st century.

Some of you may remember ‘stickman’, a computer-generated cartoon character who featured alongside Ronaldinho, Mr Woo and several other freestylers in a 2003 Nike advert. In that video, Ronaldinho performed the ‘around the world’ skill three times in succession, prompting ‘stickman’ to buff his shoes for him afterwards.

Freestyling was taking off at that time — “a new craze” is how the Guardian newspaper described it back in 2003 — and Ronaldinho, who had won the World Cup with Brazil the year before, was totally at home in the company of people who made it feel as though a football was their best friend.

A couple of years later, when Ronaldinho created his own version of the “crossbar challenge” in an iconic Nike advert that broke the internet, ‘around the world’ was the first skill that the Brazilian performed after taking a pair of brand new Tiempo Legend boots out of a gold briefcase.

The good news is that this trick is at the lower end of the difficulty scale. Essentially, you’re flicking one foot around the ball while keeping the ball up in the air, and lightly skimming it as you make that quick circular movement.

Keeping the ball below knee height while juggling will help (as will being able to do keepie-uppies in the first place).

Time for Eman’s tutorial, including a progression for the quick learners.

Sombrero flick

The sombrero flick means different things to different people. For instance, you’ll sometimes see ‘sombrero flick’ used to describe the piece of skill when a ball is lifted over an opponent’s head and retrieved the other side. The clip below, showing Nico Paz, Como’s Argentine winger in a game against Juventus, is a perfect example.

Neymar loves that skill and memorably used it in a game for Barcelona against Villarreal, when he controlled Luis Suarez’s cross with one touch, flicked it over a defender’s head with another, and scored with a third. Magnificent.

But a freestyler’s sombrero flick starts with the ball on the floor and requires two touches with the same foot to get it up and over your head, including a little jig in between. Well, “kind of like a karate kick , according to Eman.

Over to him to explain and demonstrate.

Akka 3000

With a lot of football tricks and skills, it’s hard to know where they really originated, and you can tie yourself in knots trying to find out. Who, for example, did the first ever ‘around the world?’

But there’s no debate whatsoever when it comes to the AKKA 3000. Issy “Hitman” Hamdaoui, a well-renowned street footballer from Amsterdam who would be the first pick in your five-a-side team, created the trick at the age of 14, when he was filming for a video game.

“The fun part about the Akka 3000 is that I did it in Canada, seven months before the release of FIFA Street 2,” Hamdaoui told Voetbalshop.nl in an interview in 2019. “Edward van Gils (another famous street footballer) didn’t think much of that trick back then because it looked terrible and wasn’t functional. But when FIFA Street 2 came out, I came back to that trick. I perfected it that very same day and put it online immediately. From then on, it went viral on social media, and I do regret not adding my own name to it. If I had known it would become so big…”

Akka means “hook” in Surinamese, which provides an explanation of sorts for the name of a trick that the Ghana and Manchester City winger Antoine Semenyo was filmed learning last season.

“I can’t do it, I’m telling you!” Semenyo told Jack Downer, otherwise known as Street Panna.

Within 20 seconds, Semenyo had cracked it.

But it’s just a trick that looks good, right?

Well, not necessarily. The idea behind it is that the ball is brought up into the air to take it around an opponent, using a combination of the calf/shin and the foot in one fluid motion.

The skill that Arthur Masuaku used to go between two Tottenham Hotspur players, after lifting the ball around them, wasn’t an AKKA 3000 but it was from the same family.

OK, Eman, do your thing.

Shoulder roll

A shoulder roll? Who would ever use that in a game?

Lee Trundle.

It’s September 2003, Swansea City are playing Huddersfield Town and a high ball drops out of the sky. Standing with his back to play on the edge of the centre circle, Trundle takes the ball down on his chest and, for reasons only he can explain, rolls it around the back of his neck using his shoulders. “I didn’t plan to do it,” Trundle adds, sounding like a naughty schoolboy.

The trick went down well with the Swansea supporters and earned a League Two footballer wider acclaim. “Soccer AM picked up on that — I think that was the one that got people outside Swansea noticing me,” said Trundle, referring to the iconic Saturday morning TV show that attracted a cult following in the UK in the early 2000s.

The opposition, however, were not so impressed. Two of the Huddersfield players were sent off for fouling Trundle, and their manager Peter Jackson was incensed.

“I wasn’t happy with some of the showboating he did,” Jackson said. “Trundle is a tremendous player and Brian Flynn (the Swansea manager) has picked up a bargain, but he goaded some of our players. We’re all professionals out there and that behaviour does annoy me.”

Twenty-three years later and Trundle has still got it.

Seal dribble

His name is Kerlon Moura Souza and he could dribble on a football pitch in a way that people had never seen before. Who needs to run past opponents with the ball at your feet if you can balance it on your forehead?

Kerlon’s story, told brilliantly by The Athletic’s Jack Lang, who found the Brazilian as he was putting a bag of footballs into the boot of his car in North Charlotte two years ago, is a joy.

O Foquinha — The Little Seal as he became known — did four or five headers in a row one day after his dad passed him the ball, and it was a lightbulb moment. “My dad stopped,” Kerlon said. “He asked, ‘If you ran with the ball on your head like that, would it be a free kick?’. I said that I didn’t know but that we should find out. My dad looked up the rules and saw that it was legal. There was no issue with it.”

After practising the move every day with his father, Kerlon tried it in a game for the first time, using his chest to propel the ball onto his head. He promptly ran from the centre of the pitch to the penalty spot, brought the ball down and scored. The seal dribble worked.

The fun and games didn’t last, though. In youth football, Kerlon got some rough treatment. At senior level it was a lot worse. The seal dribble was seen as provocative and when Kerlon performed his party trick after coming on for Cruzeiro against Atletico Mineiro in a game in 2007, all hell broke loose. Kerlon was on the receiving end of a brutal challenge.

“In the future, he could miss a lot of football,” said Atletico’s coach, Emerson Leao. “Maybe one day he does that, gets kicked in the face and never plays again.”

Without further ado, and with no risk of anybody clattering into him, we asked Trundle to turn into a performing seal.

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