A great importance in football has a technical-tactical element, a free kick. A team that has a good performer has a great advantage in the field and a greater chance of reaching a goal. Best free kickers are usually the best technically trained players who play the most important position in football.
It's a tough list of big free-kickers over the past decade. There are a lot of them, however, who is the best of all time? It is very difficult to provide a precise answer.
Theoretically it could be solved by statistics, but the problem is that there is no reliable data for all players. Perhaps it would be possible to reach at least the approximate number of goals scored from the free kicks of individual players in competitive games, although it is difficult to determine for those who played six or seven decades ago, that further history is not considered, but will remain unknown the number of attempts, which is one of the key variables in the whole story. Because it's obviously not the same if you scored 50 goals from 5000 or 2500 attempts.
Since it is almost impossible to reach the number of attempts, I will focus only on the number of goals scored, which is still the best reference. But it's not that easy task as it may be at first, because it's very difficult to get precise statistics, even for active players.
Brazilians are the greatest
So who scored the most goals from free kick? I did not manage to find a reliable answer, but four footballers are manage to give more than a hundred goals in the official games. These are the famous Brazilians Didi, Pele, Garrincha and Zico.
Pele scored more than 1000 goals in a grand career, and he probably scored well over a hundred goals from free kicks. However, there is no precise statistics and it is difficult to say what kind of matches they were. Being far youngest in this quartet, it is only possible to find precise statistics for Zico, which goes like this: 62 goals for Flamengo, 17 for Udinese, 15 for Kashima and 7 for Brazil. Overall 101 goals. Some Brazilian journalists say that he scored more and counted all matches, but for that claim there are no reliable statistics.
I assume that many football fans and without seeing statistics would have hit Zico as the record holder or at the very top because he is known to have been a great master of free kicks. After all, Zico is one of the biggest shooters of Brazilian football. Although he was not a classic forwards player, he scored over 500 goals in his competitive career, and many of them scored from a free kick.
The younger generations remembers Juninho and Ronaldinho
The other on my list, for which I've managed to find precise information, is Juninho Pernambucano. The former Brazilian player and probably the best player of Lyon of all time total scored 76 goals from a free kicks in competitive games. Of that 44 in the Lyon jersey. It is assumed that this figure is quite close to Ronaldinho, but there is no precise statistics. It was investigated, for example, that the long time goalkeeper Sao Paulo Rogerio Ceni scored 61 goals from free kicks and Paraguayan goalkeeper Jose Luis Chilavert 58. It is presumed that over 60 probably went to Michel Platini, Ronald Koeman, Diego Maradona, Marcelinho Carioca, Marcos Assuncao , Kostas Frantzeskos and perhaps some others, but there are no precise statistics for them. Must mention Roberto Carlos, he was also great performer. His most famous free kick is one against France at WC 1998.
Andrea Pirlo and Siniša Mihajlović hold the Serie A record with 28 goals from free kick. Often it is mentioned that Mihajlović was the only one in Europe to hit a hat-trick from free kicks. David Beckham is, for example, an English record holder since Premier league with 15 goals, but is not at the top of his performance.
Laurent Robert has the best percentage of the number of games played. In 150 appearances he scored 11 goals, which is a goal after 13.6 games, and Beckham is under ten. It was calculated that Beckham scored in career counting all matches, and also friendly, 65 goals from free kicks. Basically, if in any case you thought that the best or most successful free kicks takers are Lionel Messi and Cristiano, you were quite cheated.
Messi and Ronaldo
Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo belong to a group of excellent shooters, but they are not at the top of the number of goals, and even less by the percentage of the realization from the free kicks. Although both have recently improved their statistics, taking a longer period of time, their percentage is not unique. For example, from April 2014 to April 2015, 57 attempts for one goal were scored, which is a desperate 1.79 percent. Ronaldo, for example, never scored a goal from a free kick on the Euro or the World Cup until now, and he only shot 34 times in the last Euro. Messi recently reached Koeman by the number of goals from the free Kicks in the Barcelona jersey, but he played far more matches. Koeman played "only" for six years in Barcelona and Messi already 13.
Looking through history, Messi and Ronaldo are not at the very top of their technical skills, and certainly will not come up with anything new, as football has long been invented, and free kick techniques. For example, if you thought Ronaldo was one of the first to shoot the "dead leaf," you were once again deceived. Ronaldo, Pirlo, or Didier Drogba copied Juninho, but that blow was long ago perfected by the great Italian Giuseppe Meazza for the past 30 years, and he was not the first to perform it. In football, in principle, one move does not know for sure who brought it first, but those who have celebrated it are remembered.
"I'm looking at the modern balls and football boots of today's players, and terrains like billiard tables. Huh, if we had that, I would score not a thousand but two thousand goals" Pele
This is just statistic data, every player are the best on their own unique way. I don't who is the best of all time, maybe nobody isn't. I mentioned in this post all player that I know about that they were great free kick takers. If I dropped somebody, please let me know.
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