One of a kind

The only goalkeeper to win the Ballon d'Or

Sixty years on, Lev Yashin still stands alone

The Ballon d'Or has been handed out since 1956. Strikers have hoarded it. Midfielders have owned whole decades of it. Defenders have sneaked the odd one. In nearly seventy years, exactly one goalkeeper has ever lifted it, and no keeper has come close since.

His name was Lev Yashin, he played every senior match of his career for Dynamo Moscow, and in 1963 he won the lot.

The man in black

Yashin played in an all-black kit, moved like something that shouldn't be able to move that fast in gloves, and picked up a nickname that stuck across every language: the Black Spider. Some called him the Black Panther. Both got at the same idea, which was that shots he had no business reaching kept ending up in his hands.

The numbers around him have grown taller with the retelling, and the honest truth is that Soviet record-keeping was patchy. What is not in doubt is the shape of the career: more than twenty years at one club, a clutch of Soviet league titles, an Olympic gold in 1956 and the first European Championship in 1960. He is still widely credited with saving more penalties than any keeper in history, a figure usually put around 150.

He didn't just stop shots. He changed what a goalkeeper was allowed to be.

The keeper who came out of his goal

The real case for Yashin isn't the saves. It's that he rewrote the job description. Before him, goalkeepers guarded a line. Yashin left it. He raced off it to smother attacks, barked defenders into position, and threw the ball out to launch counters instead of hoofing it and hoping. Every modern sweeper-keeper, every Neuer surging to the halfway line, is doing a version of what a man in Moscow was doing in the 1950s.

That is the argument the 1963 voters were making. They were not simply rewarding a good season. They were acknowledging that the best player in Europe happened to wear gloves, which had never been said before and, remarkably, has never been said since.

Why no keeper has repeated it

Goalkeeping is a thankless position when the prizes are handed out. A striker's brilliance is loud and countable; a keeper's is quiet and easy to miss until the one afternoon it isn't. Gianluigi Buffon, Iker Casillas, Manuel Neuer and Oliver Kahn all had years worthy of the shortlist, and all finished as runners-up at best. Kahn remains the only keeper named player of the tournament at a World Cup, in 2002, and even that came in a losing final.

Football eventually admitted the imbalance. In 2019 the organisers introduced the Yashin Trophy, a separate award for the best goalkeeper of the year. It is a fitting tribute and a quiet confession all at once: the only way to guarantee a keeper wins something is to give keepers their own trophy, named after the one man who beat the strikers at their own game.

More: football's great journeymen · the greatest tournament shocks