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 [FUNKY MUSIC]
00:04 Now I'm not somebody who likes to laugh at the misfortune of others, but...
00:07 [LAUGHTER]
00:11 Yeah, okay, that's a lie. I'm a football fan. I like nothing better than laughing at the
00:15 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,
00:23 that you would have to have a heart made of whatever the hell they carved that horrifying
00:27 Ronaldo sculpture out of not to have it break. I'm Adam Cleary, this is 442, and these are the
00:32 10 most heartbreaking moments in football history.
00:35 Number 10, Schalke lose the title. For just three improbable minutes, Schalke thought
00:40 they were going to win the most improbable of Bundesliga championships. Going into the final
00:45 day of the 2000/2001 season, the German side were three points behind Bayern Munich, but crucially
00:51 had a better goal difference. After beating Unterhaching, and apologies to any Germans who
00:56 had to hear that 5-3, word began to spread that Hamburg had somehow done them the ultimate favour
01:02 and beaten Bayern 1-0. Celebrations for a first Schalke title win for nearly 50 years began to
01:08 sweep the stadium, but they were agonisingly premature. Despite Sergei Barberes' 90th-minute
01:14 goal, Bayern rallied to score a 94th-minute equaliser through Patrick Andersson, thus
01:19 snatching the title back from Schalke in the last possible minute. And despite another four
01:25 second-place finishes since then, their wait for that first domestic championship since 1958 goes
01:31 on. Number 9, Gareth Southgate's penalty. England's Euro '96 run on home turf raised hopes
01:36 once more, six years on from reaching the Final Four at the World Cup, that a major tournament
01:41 win could be in the offing. Or to translate that sentence into its more commonly used form,
01:45 people thought that it might be, as the prophecy foretold, finally coming home. However, for all
01:51 that song is ingrained in English footballing culture, so too is getting beaten on penalties.
01:56 In semi-finals. Against Germany. After a run of what are, fair play, some of the most
02:02 comprehensively scored penalties you're ever going to see in your life, the team's moved
02:06 into sudden death at 5-5. Up steps Gareth Southgate, visibly having all the confidence
02:11 of a child that's just gotten a fright off the dog, and weakly side-foots his effort into a
02:16 gleeful German goalkeeper. Now, the thing is, players miss penalties in shootouts all the time,
02:20 and English players with stunning regularity in fact, but what was different here was that you
02:24 could immediately see the impact this had on him. Watching him break down under the Wembley
02:29 floodlights that night moved pretty much the entire country to tears.
02:32 Cluffy's final season. I'm a happy man, protested a tearful Brian Cluff on the day
02:38 Forrest were relegated from the Premier League. Happiness comes from the inside,
02:41 I'm a good socialist, I'm a good dad, I'm a good grandad, I'm happy.
02:45 For the uninitiated, Cluffy had turned Nottingham Forrest from second division strugglers
02:49 into back-to-back European champions. But as the game had moved on into the 90s,
02:54 it had sort of began to pass him by, and he ultimately retired in a manner nobody wanted
02:59 seen. They finished rock bottom of the Premier League's inaugural season, and seeing one of the
03:03 nation's 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 though, don't worry,
03:10 because Michael Sheen's only about 10 years away from aging into a sequel to the damned United.
03:14 Ajax's late collapse. Yeah, fair play, you were probably spectacularly not bothered
03:19 if you're a Spurs fan, but Ajax became the neutral's darlings during the 2018/19 Champions
03:24 League. Eric Ten Haag's youthful, exciting side battled all the way from the second qualifying
03:29 round 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 final
03:38 after going 3-0 up on aggregate against Tottenham. But the final 35 minutes of the tie proved
03:42 disastrous as Lucas Moura, of all people, bagged an improbable hat-trick to win it for Spurs on
03:48 away goals. Remember them? Brutally, this meant not only missing out on the final they deserved,
03:53 but it killed off any lingering hopes the club might have had of keeping the squad together
03:57 over the summer. Frankie De Jong, Matthias Deligt and Kasper Dahlberg all departed for
04:01 huge sums of money in the next few months, because, well, it's a cruel old game.
04:05 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. Lloris Karius, inconsolable at the full-time whistle of
04:16 the 2018 Champions League final, 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. Later, he would then allow a venomous,
04:32 but nonetheless directly at him, Gareth Bale effort to wriggle through his hands for their
04:37 third. And the real shame here is that, in hindsight, he clearly shouldn't have even been
04:41 on the pitch. Moments before the first goal, a collision with Sergio Ramos, and I'm saying
04:45 absolutely nothing there, was eventually diagnosed as having given him a concussion.
04:50 However, instead of getting treatment or being substituted, he simply tried to play on with it,
04:54 and, well, let's watch that back again, you can tell.
04:57 Jean-Louis Dupont has won everything there is to win in football, except the Champions 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. Things looked not
05:14 great heading to the Santiago Bernabeu, already 3-0 down from the first leg, but an improbable
05:19 Juventus comeback had the tie 3-3 on aggregate, with extra time looming. But then, oh dear, oh
05:25 dear, oh dear, Lucas Vazquez is bundled over in the box, Michael Oliver awards a stoppage time
05:30 penalty, and Jean-Louis Dupont… completely loses his mind. Capovolto Il Capriccio Amico is apparently
05:37 Italian for "flipped your lid, mate", and after literally shoving the referee in the back,
05:42 a red card was duly brandished. The penalty was, predictably, scored, and when asked about the
05:46 whole affair in the press conference afterwards, Dupont simply said that the referee had a rubbish
05:51 bin instead of a heart. And I mean, that's just… that is pure, pure poetry, isn't it? Anyway,
05:56 interesting that Dupont gets sent off in his air quotes final game while Zinedine Zidane
06:01 looks on smiling, I wonder if that's going to be at all coincidental later in the video.
06:05 Rarely, if ever, has a stadium been filled with as much emotion as on the 28th May,
06:11 2017, the day Roma said goodbye to Francisco Totti. In fact, there hasn't been an instance
06:17 in recorded history of that many men all crying at exactly the same time since the first airing
06:21 of that Futurama episode with Fry's dog, and it still gets me. Anyway, a local lad, a one-club
06:27 man, one of the greatest talents of his generation, and let's all hold our hands up here a
06:32 complete slice, Totti became an absolute icon during his 25 years at the club. After his final
06:38 game though, a 3-2 win over Genoa, he read a letter to the fans and there wasn't a dry eye
06:43 in the Stadio Olimpico. Roma's official video of the moment was titled "A Stadium of Tears" and
06:48 I'm not going to go and read the whole thing to you now, but yeah, yeah, it'll get you.
06:52 Look, I know this could just as easily be in a video about the funniest moments in football,
06:58 ha ha ha, 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. In his last proper season at the club, like the one after
07:09 this was like, just this weird farewell tour, he lost his footing in a crucial, title-deciding
07:15 match against Chelsea in the third last game of the season. After 16 years at the club, with
07:21 Liverpool's most coveted prize finally within their grasp, five points ahead of Man City, he,
07:28 as the song goes, fell on his f***ing arse and gave it to Demba Bar. City won their game,
07:34 and then their game in hand, and that was that. Gerrard called the period the worst three months
07:39 of his life and would later… hang on, wait, is that… is that Mo Salah? In the Chelsea cellar?
07:46 Mo Salah played in this game of football? Against Liverpool? Am I on spice here? Did
07:53 everybody know this? That's just… that can't be right, surely? God, I'm so old.
07:58 Number 2, Zidane bows out. The stage could not have been more perfectly set for Zinedine Zidane,
08:02 arguably the finest 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 seven minutes. But it was how he used his own
08:20 "ahead", get it? Eh? That he was ultimately remembered for. Marco Materazzi, who had earlier
08:27 equalised for Italy, said something to Zidane in extra 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,
08:39 he was promptly sent off and forced to watch Italy triumph on penalties
08:44 among their scorers, you guessed it, Materazzi. That image of Zidane walking down the tunnel
08:50 past the trophy he had almost certainly just cost both his teammates and his nation will
08:55 forever go down as- oh wait no hang on, yep, there's Gianluigi Buffon smiling,
08:59 I knew that was gonna come back. Number 1, have a word with him.
09:01 Awww, Gazza, man, the wobble of the England midfielder's bottom lip as he received a yellow
09:08 card that would have ruled him out of the 1990 World Cup final softened even the hardest of
09:14 hearts. The Three Lions never made it there of course, going on to, as previously mentioned,
09:18 predictably lose on penalties in a semi-final to Germany, but this was the moment a nation
09:23 fell in love with the precociously talented youngster. Arguably it's also a moment that
09:28 so struck a chord with the nation as a whole that it rehabilitated football's image in the
09:33 country and led to the all-conquering domestic league we have today, but at the time, it was
09:38 just really, really, really, really sad. I mean, just look at Lineker here, man, he knows.
09:46 And that's it, that's the video, thank you so very much for watching and making it all the
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10:03 Until next time though, thank you once again for watching, I do hope you enjoy yourself
10:07 and I'll see you soon. Goodbye!