Football Debuts That Shocked The World
Brilliant beginners and super starters: we reckon these are football's best debuts ever.
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00:00As I was aggressively informed by my girlfriend's father when I turned up to meet him in a t-shirt
00:04that ironically read World's Greatest Love Machine, first impressions count. In fact,
00:10you can likely mask over an entire lifetime of mediocrity if you just get off on the right foot.
00:14The beauty of football, of course, is that the right foot can literally be your right foot,
00:18and using it to make some vital contributions to your team's fortunes before those in the stands
00:22even fully know your name can see you idolised for years to come. I'm Adam Cleary, this is 442,
00:29and these are the 10 Greatest Debuts in Football History.
00:32Number 10, Ronaldo, Real Madrid, 2002. 61 seconds, that's all it took for Ronaldo to
00:39get off the mark in the white of Real Madrid. If you started listening to Frank Sinatra's
00:42my way when he comes on to replace Javier Portillo in the 64th minute,
00:46the big man's not even had regrets, and a few of them by the time Ronaldo's lashed the ball
00:50past the Alaves goalkeeper. Not content there, though, he later gleefully receives a pass from
00:54Steve McManaman of all people for a second, Maka hilariously asking for the ball back after
00:59playing him in, before then missing a fairly easy chance to notch a hat-trick. A miss, by the way,
01:03he has always asserted was deliberate so as to not set the bar too high for the rest of the season.
01:08Very clever. Number 9, Sergio Aguero, Manchester City, 2011.
01:13Two goals and an assist for Sergio Aguero, I don't find that at all impressive.
01:18Yeah, alright, fair enough, there were months-long spells during Aguero's time at City
01:22where it did sort of feel like he was doing that every single game. But what if I was to
01:26tell you that this particular haul came despite him not even muddying his boots until the 59th
01:30minute? Eh, yeah, see, pretty good. In a dazzling half-hour cameo, he arrived on the end of a
01:35Micah Richards cross for a tap-in, played a blind head-height backpass for David Silva to score,
01:40and then just leathered one in from fully 30 yards. Number 8, Alan Shearer, Southampton,
01:461988. A handy reminder to anyone who needs it that football wasn't invented in 1992 here,
01:51as the Premier League's record goalscorer was already banging them in four years before it
01:56even launched. Making his way through Southampton's academy, the Saints saw enough
01:59talent in a rosy-cheeked 17-year-old Alan Shearer to give him a full debut against
02:04high-flying Arsenal, themselves some eight games unbeaten. What followed were three goals that
02:09absolutely scream late-80s British football and come from a combined distance of about
02:15five very muddy yards. This did also make him the youngest ever scorer of a hat-trick in the
02:19English top flight, and that is a record that, much like his statue outside St James' Park,
02:24will likely be standing for a very long time. Number 7, Zinedine Zidane, France 1994.
02:30Now, if you ever want to discuss the greatest possible contrast between someone's first and
02:34last appearance for a club, Zinedine Zidane's France career is probably where that conversation
02:39both starts and ends. 18 years before he'd head down the tunnel at the World Cup final with sorrow
02:44in his heart and Marco Materazzi's necklace imprinted on his forehead, Zizou arrived off
02:48the bench with his country 2-0 down to the cheques. Immediately looking like someone's
02:53much older brother deciding to bully a game in the playground, he weaved his way through
02:56three players before burying an unstoppable 30-yarder with five minutes to go. Not two minutes
03:01later, he leapt a clear foot and a half above everyone else in the box to score a header you
03:06would struggle to replicate with a stepladder. A great cameo, thought French football fans,
03:11but still surely not enough for him to take Captain Eric Cantona's place in the team.
03:15Not unless, I don't know, in the next few months he was about to dive boots-first into the crowd
03:19at Selhurst Park after being sent off against Crystal Palace and receive an enormous domestic
03:23and international football ban, but that's not gonna happen.
03:27Number 6, Fabrizio Ravinelli, Middlesbrough 1996
03:31Yeah, so Middlesbrough in the mid-1990s feels more like a fever dream than it does actual
03:36footballing history. Returning them to the Premier League, Brian Robson decided that the best
03:40approach was to bring in some of the most creative, expressive players in world football
03:45to a part of the country famous for drowning a chicken cutlet in cheese sauce and 80% of
03:50its buildings being made out of corrugated metal. And apologies to any Middlesborough fans who might
03:54take issue with that, I personally really like Aparmo, but I'm also crucially not scoring double
03:58figures in Serie A and getting modelling contracts off Dior. And the crazy thing is, this policy did
04:03actually work. For precisely one game. Joining Samba stars like Juninho, Emerson and
04:10Robby Musto was Italian goalscorer Fabrizio Ravinelli who promptly scored a hat-trick against
04:15the mighty Liverpool. Despite them being fourth at one stage, the results then spectacularly
04:20fell off a cliff and Borough were promptly relegated back whence they came. Oh well,
04:24it was worth a shot. Number 5, Gianluigi Buffon, Parma 1995
04:28You see, great debuts aren't all about scoring goals, unless, well, you know, that's your job,
04:33and Gianluigi Buffon announced himself on the big stage with a shutout for the ages.
04:38Barely 17 years old and only four years after converting from an outfield player in the club's
04:43academy, he was thrown into the deep end against Carlo Ancelotti's all-conquering Milan side.
04:49The game somehow finished completely goalless thanks to Buffon repeatedly frustrating Roberto
04:54Baggio, Marco Simeone and Ali Dier's cousin George Weah. He might have made over 1,000 plus
05:00competitive appearances after this and won every single accolade worth winning, but he'll never
05:06have forgotten his first. Number 4, Zlatan Ibrahimović, LA Galaxy 2018
05:11Now what can be said about Zlatan Ibrahimović's US debut and indeed his entire career
05:17that hasn't already been said by the man himself about himself?
05:223-1 down, at home, in the Los Angeles Derby, which is apparently a thing,
05:27on comes the great one and MLS is changed forever. Two minutes in and his presence alone is enough to
05:32allow Galaxy to pull one back, but the equaliser could not possibly have been more Zlatan if the
05:38ball had been covered in bad tattoos and started referring to itself in the third person.
05:44A volley 40 yards from goal sailed both into the net and into the history books
05:50with the same level of fim. His second arrived in suitably dramatic fashion with the game having
05:55ticked into injury time, he somehow outjumped two defenders and the goalkeeper to nod in the
06:00most dramatic of winners. You wanted Zlatan, he said in the press conference, I gave you Zlatan.
06:07Number 3, Wayne Rooney, Manchester United 2004
06:10It's a tale as old as time, a once in a generation talent bursts onto the scene
06:14with his hometown team, secures a big money move to one of the biggest clubs in the world,
06:18but the step up is initially slightly too much for them. Not Wayne Rooney though,
06:23Wayne Rooney absolutely took the piss. Noping out of David Moyes Everton for a
06:28pricely 27 million, he arrived at Old Trafford still just 18 years old and promptly put
06:33Fenerbahce's head down the toilet. Two goals in the first half of the second, a delightful
06:38long-ranger were capped off with a brilliant free kick before his Manchester United career
06:42was even one hour old. And yeah, okay, he looks like he owns a failing chain of chip shops now,
06:47but that night in 2004, no other player in world football looked more exciting. None.
06:53Number 2, Erling Haaland, Borussia Dortmund 2020
06:56Getting two goals against West Ham in his proper Manchester City debut,
07:00because nobody counts the community shield, was an impressive start for Erling Haaland,
07:04but it was nothing, nothing compared to his arrival at Dortmund. With 55 minutes gone,
07:09his team's title challenge looked in tatters as they trailed 3-1 to Augsburg. They threw Haaland
07:14on and within three minutes he'd halved the deficit with a great strike from a narrow angle.
07:1911 minutes after that and following an equaliser from Jadon Sancho, he raced through with Thorgan
07:24Hazard for a neat tap-in. Nine minutes after that he burst clear of the defence, doing that big,
07:29weird, gangly look at me, I'm Erling Haaland, I'm a superhuman freak run,
07:33and the turnaround was complete at 5-3. Or to, you know, put that another way,
07:38in Erling Haaland's first 20 minutes of German football, he scored a hat-trick with his first
07:44three shots and only his first ten touches. He's an alien, he's not normal.
07:501. Alvaro Recoba, Inter Milan, 1997
07:55Now if a time traveller had appeared in the Inter Milan dressing room ahead of this game
08:03and told those present that they would go down in the annals of footballing debut history,
08:07all eyes would have immediately turned to the 20-plus million Brazilian lacing his boots.
08:12But Ronaldo's debut is frankly nothing compared to that of his fellow debutant, Alvaro Recoba.
08:18Trailing 1-0 to Brescia, the Uruguayan came off the bench and decided to have his own,
08:23personal, goal-of-the-season competition in the half-hour that remained.
08:27The first, a rasper directly into the cazonete superiore would have been enough,
08:32but the winner five minutes from time somehow managed to outdo it.
08:36Fully 30 yards from goal, he somehow both bends and wellies a free kick into the one part of the
08:42goal the keeper can't reach. I mean, look, he's that, he's standing there, he's that side,
08:47and he looks about six years old when it flies past him.