From last-gasp defeats to tearjerking farewells, sometimes football's a heartbreaking game.
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00:00Now, I'm not somebody who likes to laugh at the misfortune of others, but…
00:08Yeah, okay, that's a lie, I'm a football fan, I like nothing better than laughing at
00:15the misfortune of others, to me it tastes sweeter than the nectar of the gods themselves.
00:19But sometimes the beautiful game throws up moments so gut-wrenching, so harrowing, that
00:23you would have to have a heart made of whatever the hell they carved that horrifying Ronaldo
00:27sculpture out of, not to have it break.
00:30I'm Adam Cleary, this is 442, and these are the 10 most heartbreaking moments in football
00:35history.
00:36Number 10, Schalke lose the title.
00:37For just three improbable minutes, Schalke thought they were going to win the most improbable
00:42of Bundesliga championships.
00:44Going into the final day of the 2000-2001 season, the German side were three points
00:49behind Bayern Munich, but crucially, had a better goal difference.
00:53After beating Unterhaching, and apologies to any Germans who had to hear that 5-3, word
00:58began to spread that Hamburg had somehow done them the ultimate favour and beaten Bayern
01:031-0.
01:04Celebrations for a first Schalke title win for nearly 50 years began to sweep the stadium,
01:09but they were agonisingly premature.
01:12Despite Sergei Barberes' 90th-minute goal, Bayern rallied to score a 94th-minute equaliser
01:18through Patrick Andersen, thus snatching the title back from Schalke in the last possible
01:23minute.
01:24And despite another four second-place finishes since then, their wait for that first domestic
01:28championship since 1958 goes on.
01:31Number 9, Gareth Southgate's penalty.
01:33England's Euro 96 run on home turf raised hopes once more, six years on from reaching
01:38the final four at the World Cup, that a major tournament win could be in the offing.
01:42Or to translate that sentence into its more commonly used form, people thought that it
01:46might be, as the prophecy foretold, finally coming home.
01:50However, for all that song is ingrained in English footballing culture, so too is getting
01:54beaten on penalties.
01:57In semi-finals.
01:59Against Germany.
02:00After a run of what are, fair play, some of the most comprehensively scored penalties
02:04you're ever going to see in your life, the team's moved into sudden death at 5-5.
02:08Up steps Gareth Southgate, visibly having all the confidence of a child that's just
02:12gotten a fright off the dog, and weakly side-foots his effort into a gleeful German goalkeeper.
02:17Now, the thing is, players miss penalties in shootouts all the time, and English players
02:21with stunning regularity in fact, but what was different here was that you could immediately
02:25see the impact this had on him.
02:27Watching him break down under the Wembley floodlights, that might move pretty much the
02:31entire country to tears.
02:32Number 8, Cloughy's final season.
02:34I'm a happy man, protested a tearful Brian Clough on the day Forrest were relegated from
02:39the Premier League.
02:40Happiness comes from the inside, I'm a good socialist, I'm a good dad, I'm a good grandad,
02:44I'm happy.
02:45For the uninitiated, Cloughy had turned Nottingham Forest from second division strugglers into
02:49back-to-back European champions.
02:52But as the game had moved on into the 90s, it had sort of began to pass him by, and he
02:56ultimately retired in a manner nobody wanted to see.
02:59They finished rock bottom of the Premier League's inaugural season, and seeing one of the nation's
03:03greatest managers ever almost move to tears was tough for fans of any club to take.
03:08If you haven't seen the particular clip in question, don't worry, because Michael Sheen's
03:11only about ten years away from ageing into a sequel to the damned United.
03:14Number 7, Ajax's late collapse.
03:16Yeah, fair play, you were probably spectacularly not bothered if you're a Spurs fan, but Ajax
03:20became the Neutrals' darlings during the 2018-19 Champions League.
03:24Eric Ten Hag's youthful, exciting side battled all the way from the second qualifying round
03:29to the semi-finals, capturing the hearts and minds of romantics and tactics nerds alike.
03:34They knocked out Real Madrid and Juventus to get there, and looked set to reach the
03:37final after going 3-0 up on aggregate against Tottenham.
03:40But the final 35 minutes of the tie proved disastrous, as Lucas Moura, of all people,
03:45bagged an improbable hat-trick to win it for Spurs on away goals.
03:49Remember them?
03:50Brutally, this meant not only missing out on the final they deserved, but it killed
03:53off any lingering hopes the club might have had of keeping the squad together over the
03:57summer.
03:58Frenkie de Jong, Matthijs de Ligt and Kasper Dolberg all departed for huge sums of money
04:02in the next few months, because, well, it's a cruel old game.
04:056.
04:06The Karius Calamity Unlike the Ajax collapse, this was one that
04:09even opposition fans, in this case Real Madrid, have openly admitted was a crying shame.
04:13Loris Karius, inconsolable at the full-time whistle of the 2018 Champions League final
04:18after having two absolute howlers in a game that finished 3-1.
04:22First, and to be honest, the word howler doesn't even do this justice, he rolled the ball directly
04:27onto Karim Benzema's foot for Madrid's opening goal.
04:31Later, he would then allow a venomous, but nonetheless directly at him, Gareth Bale effort
04:35to wriggle through his hands for their third.
04:38And the real shame here is that, in hindsight, he clearly shouldn't have even been on the
04:41pitch.
04:42Moments before the first goal, a collision with Sergio Ramos, and I'm saying absolutely
04:46nothing there, was eventually diagnosed as having given him a concussion.
04:50However, instead of getting treatment or being substituted, he simply tried to play on with
04:53it and, well, let's watch that back again, you can tell.
04:575.
04:59Gianluigi Buffon has won everything there is to win in football, except the Champions
05:05League.
05:06Therefore, in what was supposed to be his final season with Juventus, both he, the club,
05:09and pretty much every neutral in football was desperate for him to win it.
05:13Things looked not great heading to the Santiago Bernabeu, already 3-0 down from the first
05:17leg, but an improbable Juventus comeback had the tie 3-3 on aggregate, with extra time
05:23looming.
05:24And then, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, Lucas Vazquez is bundled over in the box, Michael
05:29Oliver awards a stoppage time penalty, and Gianluigi Buffon completely loses his mind.
05:35Capovolto il capreccio amico is apparently Italian for flipped your lid, mate, and after
05:40literally shoving the referee in the back, a red card was duly brandished.
05:44The penalty was predictably scored, and when asked about the whole affair in the press
05:47conference afterwards, Buffon simply said that the referee had a rubbish bin instead
05:52of a heart.
05:53I mean, that's just, that is pure, pure poetry, isn't it?
05:56Anyway, interesting that Buffon gets sent off in his air quotes final game while Zinedine
06:00Zidane looks on smiling, I wonder if that's going to be at all coincidental later in the
06:05video.
06:064.
06:07Totti's letter Rarely, if ever, has a stadium been filled
06:09with as much emotion as on the 28th May 2017, the day Roma said goodbye to Francisco Totti.
06:15In fact, there hasn't been an instance in recorded history of that many men all crying
06:19at exactly the same time since the first airing of that Futurama episode with Fry's
06:24dog.
06:25And it still gets me.
06:26Anyway, a local lad, a one-club man, one of the greatest talents of his generation, and
06:30let's all hold our hands up here, a complete slice, Totti became an absolute icon during
06:35his 25 years at the club.
06:37After his final game though, a 3-2 win over Genoa, he read a letter to the fans, and there
06:42wasn't a dry eye in the Stadio Olimpico.
06:44Roma's official video of the moment was titled A Stadium of Tears, and I'm not going to go
06:49and read the whole thing to you now, but yeah, it'll get you.
06:533.
06:54This does not slip Look, I know this could just as easily be
06:56in a video about the funniest moments in football, haha, maybe it probably will be, but when
07:01you really think about it, it is kinda heartbreaking how Steven Gerrard went out at Liverpool.
07:07In his last proper season at the club, he lost his footing in a crucial, title-deciding
07:15match against Chelsea in the third-last game of the season.
07:19After 16 years at the club, with Liverpool's most coveted prize finally within their grasp,
07:25five points ahead of Man City, he, as the song goes, fell on his f***ing arse, and gave
07:32it to Denver Bar.
07:33City won their game, and then their game in hand, and that was that.
07:37Gerrard called the period the worst three months of his life, and would later, hang
07:40on, wait, is that, is that Mo Salah?
07:45In the Chelsea celebration, Mo Salah played in this game of football, against Liverpool.
07:51Am I, am I on spice here, did everybody know this?
07:54That's just, that can't be right, surely, god I'm so old.
07:582.
07:59Zidane bows out The stage could not have been more perfectly
08:01set for Zinedine Zidane, arguably the finest player of his generation, to bow out in the
08:06most glorious way imaginable.
08:08The final game of the mercurial playmaker's career was the World Cup final, and his Penenka
08:13penalty had already put France ahead after just seven minutes.
08:18But it was how he used his own ahead, get it, eh, that he was ultimately remembered
08:25for.
08:26Marco Materazzi, who had earlier equalised for Italy, said something to Zidane in extra
08:31time, and he absolutely lost his mind.
08:34Headbutting his opponent in the chest of all places, and in full view of the ref, he was
08:39promptly sent off and forced to watch Italy triumph on penalties, among their scorers,
08:46you guessed it, Materazzi.
08:47That image of Zidane walking down the tunnel past the trophy he'd almost certainly just
08:52cost both his teammates and his nation will forever go down as, oh wait, no hang on, yep,
08:57there's Gianluigi Buffon smiling, I knew that was gonna come back.
09:001.
09:01Have a word with him Gazza, man, the wobble of the England midfielder's
09:06bottom lip as he received a yellow card that would have ruled him out of the 1990 World
09:11Cup final softened even the hardest of hearts.
09:15The Three Lions never made it there of course, going on to, as previously mentioned, predictably
09:19lose on penalties in a semi-final to Germany, but this was the moment a nation fell in love
09:24with the precociously talented youngster.
09:27Arguably, it's also a moment that so struck a chord with the nation as a whole that it
09:31rehabilitated football's image in the country and led to the all-conquering domestic league
09:35we have today.
09:36But at the time, it was just really, really, really, really sad.
09:43I mean just look at Lineker here, man.
09:46He knows.
09:47And that's it.
09:48That's the video.
09:49Thank you so very much for watching and making it all the way till the end.
09:52Somebody's keen.
09:53While you're here, please do consider subscribing to the 442 YouTube channel and we've got loads
09:56of awesome football content dropping all through the week as well as an amazing library of
10:00documentaries, player interviews and performance guides as well.
10:03Until next time though, thank you once again for watching.
10:05I do hope you enjoy yourself and I'll see you soon.
10:08Goodbye.