10 Most Heartbreaking Moments In Football History
From last-gasp defeats to tearjerking farewells, sometimes football's a heartbreaking game.
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00:00 Now, I'm not somebody who likes to laugh at the misfortune of others, but…
00:08 Yeah, okay, that's a lie, I'm a football fan, I like nothing better than laughing at
00:15 the misfortune of others, to me it tastes sweeter than the nectar of the gods themselves.
00:18 But sometimes the beautiful game throws up moments so gut-wrenching, so harrowing, that
00:23 you would have to have a heart made of whatever the hell they carved that horrifying Ronaldo
00:27 sculpture out of, not to have it break.
00:30 I'm Adam Cleary, this is 442, and these are the 10 most heartbreaking moments in football
00:35 history.
00:36 Number 10, Schalke lose the title.
00:37 For just three improbable minutes, Schalke thought they were going to win the most improbable
00:42 of Bundesliga championships.
00:44 Going into the final day of the 2000/01 season, the German side were three points behind Bayern
00:49 Munich but crucially had a better goal difference.
00:53 After beating Unterhaching, and apologies to any Germans who had to hear that 5-3, word
00:58 began to spread that Hamburg had somehow done them the ultimate favour and beaten Bayern
01:03 1-0.
01:04 Celebrations for a first Schalke title win for nearly 50 years began to sweep the stadium,
01:09 but they were agonisingly premature.
01:12 Despite Sergei Barberes' 90th minute goal, Bayern rallied to score a 94th minute equaliser
01:18 through Patrick Andersson.
01:19 Thus snatching the title back from Schalke in the last possible minute.
01:24 And despite another four second-place finishes since then, their wait for that first domestic
01:28 championship since 1958 goes on.
01:31 Number 9, Gareth Southgate's penalty.
01:33 England's Euro '96 run on home turf raised hopes once more, six years on from reaching
01:38 the final four at the World Cup, that a major tournament win could be in the offing.
01:42 Or to translate that sentence into its more commonly used form, people thought that it
01:46 might be, as the prophecy foretold, finally coming home.
01:50 However, for all that song is ingrained in English footballing culture, so too is getting
01:54 beaten on penalties.
01:56 In semi-finals.
01:59 Against Germany.
02:00 After a run of what are, fair play, some of the most comprehensively scored penalties
02:04 you're ever going to see in your life, the teams moved into sudden death at 5-5.
02:08 Up steps Gareth Southgate, visibly having all the confidence of a child that's just
02:12 gotten a fright off the dog, and weakly side-footed his effort into a gleeful German goalkeeper.
02:17 Now the thing is, players miss penalties in shootouts all the time, and English players
02:21 with stunning regularity in fact, but what was different here was that you could immediately
02:25 see the impact this had on him.
02:27 Watching him break down under the Wembley floodlights, that might move pretty much the
02:30 entire country to tears.
02:32 Number 8, Cluffy's final season.
02:34 I'm a happy man, protested a tearful Brian Cluff on the day Forrest were relegated from
02:39 the Premier League.
02:40 Happiness comes from the inside, I'm a good socialist, I'm a good dad, I'm a good granddad,
02:44 I'm happy.
02:45 For the uninitiated, Cluffy had turned Nottingham Forest from second division strugglers into
02:49 back-to-back European champions.
02:51 But as the game had moved on into the 90s, it had sort of began to pass him by, and he
02:56 ultimately retired in a manner nobody wanted to see.
02:59 They finished rock bottom of the Premier League's inaugural season, and seeing one of the nation's
03:03 greatest managers ever almost move to tears was tough for fans of any club to take.
03:07 If you haven't seen the particular clip in question, don't worry, because Michael Sheen's
03:10 only about ten years away from ageing into a sequel to the damned United.
03:14 Number 7, Ajax's late collapse.
03:16 Yeah, fair play, you were probably spectacularly not bothered if you're a Spurs fan, but Ajax
03:20 became the Neutrals' darlings during the 2018/19 Champions League.
03:24 Eric Ten Hag's youthful, exciting side battled all the way from the second qualifying round
03:29 to the semi-finals, capturing the hearts and minds of romantics and tactics nerds alike.
03:33 They knocked out Real Madrid and Juventus to get there, and looked set to reach the
03:37 final after going 3-0 up on aggregate against Tottenham.
03:40 But the final 35 minutes of the tie proved disastrous as Lucas Moura, of all people,
03:45 bagged an improbable hat-trick to win it for Spurs on away goals.
03:48 Remember them?
03:49 Brutally, this meant not only missing out on the final they deserved, but it killed
03:53 off any lingering hopes the club might have had of keeping the squad together over the
03:57 summer.
03:58 Frenkie de Jong, Matthias Deligt and Kasper Dahlberg all departed for huge sums of money
04:02 in the next few months because, well, it's a cruel old game.
04:05 Number 6, the Carrillos Calamity.
04:07 Unlike the Ajax collapse, this was one that even opposition fans, in this case Real Madrid,
04:11 have openly admitted was a crying shame.
04:13 Lloris Carrillos, inconsolable at the full-time whistle of the 2018 Champions League final
04:18 after having two absolute howlers in a game that finished 3-1.
04:22 First, and to be honest the word howler doesn't even do this justice, he rolled the ball directly
04:27 onto Karim Benzema's foot for Madrid's opening goal.
04:30 Later, he would then allow a venomous but nonetheless directly at him Gareth Bale effort
04:35 to wriggle through his hands for their third.
04:37 And the real shame here is that, in hindsight, he clearly shouldn't have even been on the
04:41 pitch.
04:42 Moments before the first goal, a collision with Sergio Ramos, and I'm saying absolutely
04:46 nothing there, was eventually diagnosed as having given him a concussion.
04:49 However, instead of getting treatment or being substituted, he simply tried to play on with
04:53 it and, well, let's watch that back again.
04:57 You can tell.
04:58 Number 5, a bin for a heart.
04:59 Jean-Louis Dupuffin has won everything there is to win in football, except the Champions
05:04 League.
05:05 Therefore, in what was supposed to be his final season with Juventus, both he, the club,
05:09 and pretty much every neutral in football was desperate for him to win it.
05:13 Things looked not great heading to the Santiago Bernabeu, already 3-0 down from the first
05:17 leg, but an improbable Juventus comeback had the tie 3-3 on aggregate, with extra time
05:23 looming.
05:24 But then, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, Lucas Vazquez is bundled over in the box, Michael
05:29 Oliver awards a stoppage time penalty, and Jean-Louis Dupuffin completely loses his mind.
05:35 Capovolto il capo e cio amico is apparently Italian for "flipped your lid, mate",
05:40 and after literally shoving the referee in the back, a red card was duly brandished.
05:44 The penalty was predictably scored, and when asked about the whole affair in the press
05:47 conference afterwards, Dupuffin simply said that the referee had a rubbish bin instead
05:52 of a heart.
05:53 And I mean, that's just, that is pure, pure poetry, isn't it?
05:56 Anyway, interesting that Dupuffin gets sent off in his air quotes final game while Zinedine
06:00 Zidane looks on smiling, I wonder if that's going to be at all coincidental later in the
06:04 video.
06:05 4.
06:06 Totti's letter
06:07 Rarely, if ever, has a stadium been filled with as much emotion as on the 28th of May,
06:11 2017, the day Roma said goodbye to Francisco Totti.
06:15 In fact, there hasn't been an instance in recorded history of that many men all crying
06:19 at exactly the same time since the first airing of that Futurama episode with Fry's dog,
06:24 and it still gets me.
06:25 Anyway, a local lad, a one-club man, one of the greatest talents of his generation, and
06:30 let's all hold our hands up here a complete slice, Totti became an absolute icon during
06:35 his 25 years at the club.
06:37 After his final game though, a 3-2 win over Genoa, he read a letter to the fans, and there
06:42 wasn't a dry eye in the Stadio Olimpico.
06:44 Roma's official video of the moment was titled "A Stadium of Tears", and I'm not going
06:48 to go and read the whole thing to you now, but yeah, it'll get you.
06:53 3.
06:54 This does not slip
06:55 I know this could just as easily be in a video about the funniest moments in football, haha
06:59 maybe it probably will be, but when you really think about it, it is kinda heartbreaking
07:04 how Steven Gerrard went out at Liverpool.
07:07 In his last proper season at the club, like the one after this was like, just this weird
07:10 farewell tour, he lost his footing in a crucial, title-deciding match against Chelsea in the
07:17 third last game of the season.
07:19 After 16 years at the club, with Liverpool's most coveted prize finally within their grasp,
07:25 5 points ahead of Man City, he, as the song goes, fell on his f***ing arse and gave it
07:32 to Demba Ba.
07:33 City won their game, and then their game in hand, and that was that.
07:37 Gerrard called the period the worst three months of his life, and would later- hang
07:40 on, wait, is that, is that Mo Salah?
07:45 In the Chelsea cel- Mo Salah played in this game of football, against Liverpool?
07:51 Am I on spice here?
07:53 Did everybody know this?
07:54 That can't be right, surely.
07:56 God, I'm so old.
07:58 Number 2, Zidane bows out.
07:59 The stage could not have been more perfectly set for Zinedine Zidane, arguably the finest
08:03 player of his generation, to bow out in the most glorious way imaginable.
08:08 The final game of the mercurial playmaker's career was the World Cup final, and his Penenka
08:13 penalty had already put France ahead after just 7 minutes.
08:18 But it was how he used his own "ahead", get it?
08:22 Eh?
08:23 That he was ultimately remembered for.
08:25 Marco Materazzi, who had earlier equalised for Italy, said something to Zidane in extra
08:31 time and he absolutely lost his mind.
08:34 Headbutting his opponent in the chest of all places, and in full view of the ref, he was
08:39 promptly sent off and forced to watch Italy triumph on penalties, among their scorers,
08:45 you guessed it, Materazzi.
08:47 That image of Zidane walking down the tunnel past the trophy he'd almost certainly just
08:52 cost both his teammates and his nation will forever go down as-
08:56 Oh wait, no, hang on, yep, there's Gianluigi Buffon smiling.
08:58 I knew that was gonna come back.
09:00 Number 1, have a word with him.
09:02 Oh, Gaza, man, the wobble of the England midfielder's bottom lip as he received a yellow card that
09:08 would have ruled him out of the 1990 World Cup final softened even the hardest of hearts.
09:14 The Three Lions never made it there of course, going on to, as previously mentioned, predictably
09:18 lose on penalties in a semi-final to Germany, but this was the moment a nation fell in love
09:24 with the precociously talented youngster.
09:26 Arguably it's also a moment that so struck a chord with the nation as a whole that it
09:31 rehabilitated football's image in the country and led to the all-conquering domestic league
09:35 we have today, but at the time, it was just really, really, really, really sad.
09:42 I mean, just look at Lineker here, man.
09:45 He knows.
09:46 And that's it, that's the video.
09:48 Thank you so very much for watching and making it all the way till the end.
09:51 Somebody's keen.
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10:08 Goodbye.