For me Branco from Brazil. just brilliant, distance not an issue No pigskin and ball designed to bend (Becks\Carlos) no new designed boots with new balls that fly like store bought plastic balls (Bale\Ronaldo) Branco could score from 50 yards with a waterlogged 6 stone ball
Didn't Branco start playing around the time of the synthetic balls? Federnova, Etrusco etc, all those lighter, bendier plastic malarkeys. I'd probably put Zico ahead of him for quality of individual strikes with an old school leather ball, particularly the ones in the early 80s which had to be changed during games cos they were leaking! Tho hard to look past Juninho (not the Boro one...) for consistency - even with the new magic balls Becks, Carlos, Suarez, Ronaldo, Bale, RVP etc still whang the majority of kicks into the wall or past the post / bar. Hasn't Juninho scored more than 50% of the freekicks he's ever taken? There are designated penalty takers with worse records
the balls have always gotten better true but the balls today are laughable from a keepers perspective so I would discount those I mentioned but fair shout on Zico, but I prefer Branco as my No1 The boots also make a huge difference and Branco and Zico wore those leather clonkers
Way to go!!!!! he may have scored the best free kick ever... but not the best free kick taker ever, some call it jammy but fk me I never seen a ball curve so much. A free like that, like going for a 650 yard drive in golf, 9,99,999 our of 1,000,000 will go anywhere but where you want it and 1 will hit the mark, that is Roberto's free kick.
Good point about the boots. Tho' it would be interesting to see if the proportion of direct free kicks scored has actually improved over the years. The new balls and boots seem to encourage movement and pace, but also make it much easier to **** it up - get it right and it's unstoppable, but if you strike it even a little bit wrong the ball ends up decapitating someone in Row Z. Like RC's famous one - it looked awesome, but if he'd got the spin even a little bit wrong it would have gone way off target and everyone would have had a good laugh at how badly he missed.
This. Very, very consistent with them. Anytime Lyon had a freekick within 35 yards he was a cert. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL1bK34mPjQ
Hard to judge this across eras, due to the variables already mentioned. Ronaldo is probably the best I've seen in my lifetime but Beckham would run him close.
