Why the best-loved wondergoals aren't always the hardest to score
A new Planet Football rundown of nine famous strikes, from George Weah to Hatem Ben Arfa, shows that technical difficulty is only one part of what makes a goal unforgettable.
Planet Football has revisited nine of football's most celebrated individual goals and reached an argument that cuts against the usual way wondergoals get ranked: difficulty is not the thing that actually makes them memorable.
The outlet's list runs from George Weah's run from his own box against Verona in 1996 to Hatem Ben Arfa's slalom for Newcastle against Bolton in 2012, and includes Nayim's 1995 lob over David Seaman, Steven Whittaker's length-of-the-pitch finish for Rangers against Sporting in 2008, Hal Robson-Kanu's turn for Wales against Belgium in 2016, Luis Suarez's goal against Norwich in 2013, Tony Yeboah's strike for Leeds against Wimbledon in 1995, Riley McGree's 2018 Puskas-nominated effort for Newcastle Jets, and Matt Taylor's long-range goal for Portsmouth against Sunderland in 2005.
Coast-to-coast transitions reward running more than skill
Two of the goals on the list are built around the same mechanism: a turnover deep in a team's own half triggers a transition in which one player simply carries the ball the length of the pitch. Weah collects possession in the Milan penalty area and has to beat only two Verona defenders over the full length of the field, one of whom actually gets a tackle in. Whittaker's run for Rangers follows an almost identical pattern against Sporting, a sequence of cautious touches rather than explosive skill.
What both goals capture, as Planet Football points out, is the gap between a goal's visual drama and its technical demand. A transition like this is thrilling because of distance and stakes, not because the dribbling involved is beyond an ordinary player. The space opens up because the opposition is disorganised in transition, not because the scorer conjures it through skill.
A feint can do more work than a finish
Robson-Kanu's goal against Belgium belongs to a different category entirely. His Cruyff turn inside the Belgian box works because Marouane Fellaini commits to blocking a shot that never comes, not because the turn itself is technically unrepeatable. Planet Football frames it as a goal built on nerve and quick thinking rather than physical gifts, which is why it argues a lot of competent forwards, rather than only elite ones, could have pulled it off.
McGree's goal for Newcastle Jets works on a similar logic. The one-two combination that sets it up is straightforward enough, and it is the instinctive, almost accidental backheeled finish that elevates it. The piece is careful to note the uncertainty here: it concedes the flick could be read either as a lucky reflex or as the best finish on the entire list, and it does not pretend to settle which.
Bounces, deflections and the goals a bad surface can gift you
The clearest illustration of luck's role in a wondergoal's reputation comes from Suarez's goal against Norwich. Planet Football singles it out as the easiest of his Liverpool highlights to imagine replicating, helped by a favourable bounce and goalkeeper John Ruddy's positioning, in contrast to the technical precision of his chip against Tottenham or his curling finish against Stoke.
Yeboah's strike against Wimbledon carries the same caveat. It is among the hardest-struck goals ever recorded, yet the piece notes that the ball's path was altered by an accidental deflection off his own knee before it flew in, which it argues makes the goal feel more human despite its ferocity.
Taylor's two long-range goals for Portsmouth make the contrast explicit within one player's own highlight reel. His volley against Everton is treated as the harder of the two, a clean technical strike, while his effort against Sunderland bounced three times on its way to goal, a trajectory the piece describes as making the shot harder to miss than to score.
Nayim's effort against Arsenal sits closer to the volley end of that spectrum: a shot struck with real technique from distance, judged by one YouTube account cited in the piece as simply "impossible". Ben Arfa's dribble against Bolton, by contrast, is built on repeated close touches and sustained balance through traffic, the kind of individual ball-carrying that depends on technique sustained over several seconds rather than a single moment of fortune.
Taken together, the nine goals make the same point from different angles: a wondergoal's status rests on a mix of distance, stakes and the story told about it afterwards, and not strictly on how hard the finish was to execute. Some, like Weah's and Whittaker's, lean on transition and space. Others, like Suarez's and Yeboah's, lean on a bounce the scorer did not control. Planet Football's underlying case is that this does not make them lesser goals, only more human ones.