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 misfortune of others.
00:16 To me, it tastes sweeter than the nectar of the gods themselves.
00:19 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 Ronaldo sculpture out of
00:29 not to have it break.
00:30 I'm Adam Cleary, this is 442, and these are the 10 most heartbreaking moments in football history.
00:35 Number 10, Schalke lose the title.
00:37 For just three improbable minutes, Schalke thought they were going to win the most improbable of Bundesliga championships.
00:44 Going into the final day of the 2000-2001 season, the German side were three points behind Bayern Munich,
00:50 but crucially, had a better goal difference.
00:53 After beating Unterhaching, and apologies to any Germans who had to hear that 5-3,
00:58 word began to spread that Hamburg had somehow done them the ultimate favour and beaten Bayern 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 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 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 the final four at the World Cup,
01:40 that a major tournament win could be in the offing.
01:42 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.
01:50 However, for all that song is ingrained in English footballing culture, so too is getting beaten on penalties.
01:56 In semifinals.
01:58 Against Germany.
02:00 After a run of what are, fair play, some of the most comprehensively scored penalties you're ever going to see in your life,
02:05 the team's moved into sudden death at 5-5.
02:08 Up steps Gareth Southgate, visibly having all the confidence of a child that's just gotten a fright off the dog,
02:14 and weakly side-foots his effort into a gleeful German goalkeeper.
02:17 Now, the thing is, players miss penalties in shootouts all the time, and English players with stunning regularity in fact,
02:23 but what was different here was that you could immediately see the impact this had on him.
02:27 Watching him break down under the Wembley floodlights that night moved pretty much the entire country to tears.
02:32 Number 8, Cloughy's final season.
02:34 "I'm a happy man," protested a tearful Brian Clough on the day Forrest were relegated from the Premier League.
02:40 "Happiness comes from the inside. I'm a good socialist, I'm a good dad, I'm a good grandad. I'm happy."
02:45 For the uninitiated, Cloughy had turned Nottingham Forest from second division strugglers into 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,
02:56 and he ultimately retired in a manner nobody wanted to see.
02:59 They finished rock bottom of the Premier League's inaugural season,
03:02 and seeing one of the 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 Yeah, fair play, you were probably spectacularly not bothered if you're a Spurs fan,
03:20 but Ajax became the neutral's darlings during the 2018/19 Champions League.
03:24 Eric Ten Haag's youthful, exciting side battled all the way from the second qualifying round to the semi-finals,
03:30 capturing the hearts and minds of romantics and tactics nerds alike.
03:33 They knocked out Real Madrid and Juventus to get there,
03:36 and looked set to reach the 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.
03:49 Remember them?
03:50 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 over the summer.
03:57 Frenkie de Jong, Matthijs de Ligt and Kasper Dahlberg all departed for huge sums of money in the next few months,
04:03 because, well, it's a cruel old game.
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 Karius 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,
04:26 he rolled the ball directly onto Karim Benzema's foot for Madrid's opening goal.
04:31 Later, he would then allow a venomous, but nonetheless directly at him,
04:34 Gareth Bale effort to wriggle through his hands for their third.
04:38 And the real shame here is that, in hindsight, he clearly shouldn't have even been on the pitch.
04:42 Moments before the first goal, a collision with Sergio Ramos,
04:45 and I'm saying 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 Dupuffin has won everything there is to win in football,
05:03 except the Champions League.
05:05 Therefore, in what was supposed to be his final season with Juventus,
05:08 both he, the club, 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,
05:16 already 3-0 down from the first leg, but an improbable Juventus comeback
05:20 had the tie 3-3 on aggregate, with extra time looming.
05:23 But then, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, Lucas Vazquez is bundled over in the box,
05:29 Michael Oliver awards a stoppage time penalty, and Jean-Louis Dupuffin...completely loses his mind.
05:35 Capovolto e il capozzo 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 conference
05:48 afterwards, Dupuffin simply said that the referee had a rubbish bin instead of a heart.
05:52 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 Zidane
06:01 looks on smiling. I wonder if that's going to be at all coincidental later in the video.
06:05 Number 4 - 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 at exactly the
06:20 same time since the first airing of that Futurama episode with Fry's dog, and it still gets me.
06:25 Anyway, a local lad, a one-club man, one of the greatest talents of his generation,
06:30 and let's all hold our hands up here a complete slice,
06:33 Totti became an absolute icon during 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,
06:41 and there wasn't a dry eye in the Stadio Olimpico.
06:44 Roma's official video of the moment was titled "A Stadium of Tears",
06:48 and I'm not going to go and read the whole thing to you now, but...yeah, yeah, it'll get you.
06:52 Number 3 - This does not slip.
06:54 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,
07:02 it is kinda heartbreaking how Steven Gerrard went out at Liverpool.
07:07 In his last proper season at the club, like the one after this was like,
07:10 just this weird farewell tour, he lost his footing in a crucial,
07:14 title-deciding match against Chelsea in the 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 five points ahead of Man City, he, as the song goes,
07:29 fell on his f***ing arse and gave it to Demba Bar.
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...
07:40 Hang on, wait...
07:41 Is that...is that Mo Salah?
07:44 In the Chelsea cel...
07:46 Mo Salah played in this game of football, against Liverpool.
07:51 Am I on spice here? Did everybody know this?
07:54 That's just...that can't be right, surely.
07:57 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,
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,
08:13 and his Pernenka penalty had already put France ahead after just seven minutes.
08:18 But it was how he used his own ahead, get it? Eh?
08:23 That he was ultimately remembered for.
08:25 Marco Materazzi, who had earlier equalised for Italy,
08:28 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.
08:47 That image of Zidane walking down the tunnel past the trophy he'd almost certainly just cost
08:52 both his teammates and his nation will forever go down as...
08:56 Oh wait, no, hang on, yep, there's Gianluigi Buffon smiling.
08:59 I knew that was going to come back.
09:00 Number 1, have a word with him.
09:01 Oh, Gaza, man, the wobble of the England midfielder's bottom lip as he received a yellow card
09:08 that would have ruled him out of the 1990 World Cup final softened even the hardest of hearts.
09:15 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,
09:21 but this was the moment a nation fell in love with the precociously talented youngster.
09:26 Arguably, it's also a moment that so struck a chord with the nation as a whole
09:30 that it rehabilitated football's image in the country and led to the all-conquering
09:35 domestic league we have today, but at the time, it was just really, really, really, really sad.
09:43 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
09:49 and making it all the way till the end. Somebody's keen.
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10:03 Until next time, though, thank you once again for watching.
10:05 I do hope you enjoyed yourself and I'll see you soon.
10:08 Goodbye.