THE HISTORY OF THE BANANA KICK IN FOOTBALL

How Footballers Learned to Make the Ball Bend

There was a time when football entered our lives through the printed word. Their stories reached  us through newspapers and magazines. Pele, Garrincha, Didi, Puskas, Bobby Charlton and many others were familiar names long before we had the opportunity to see them play. Their exploits reached us through match reports, photographs and stories carried across continents. We could imagine the goals, the dribbles and the great matches, but the players themselves remained distant figures, almost like characters in a story. Then television changed everything.

Football entered our living rooms, and for football lovers in Kerala it was almost like opening a window to another world. Brazil, Argentina, England, Germany, Italy, France and the other great football nations were no longer simply names in newspapers. Their players became moving figures on our television screens. We could watch their dribbles, their passes, their goals and, perhaps most fascinating of all, their free kicks.

We watched a player stand several yards away from a stationary ball while a wall of defenders formed between him and the goal. The goalkeeper took his position, waiting for the expected shot. Then came the measured run-up and the strike.

The ball would rise, apparently travelling away from its intended target, and then something extraordinary seemed to happen. As it moved through the air, it would begin to bend, sweeping around or over the defensive wall before turning towards the goal. What had appeared to be a straightforward kick became a graceful curve through the air.

For a generation of football lovers, it was one of the game's most beautiful pieces of magic.

We called it the banana kick.

But the banana kick was not born in the age of television. By the time television brought its magic into our homes, footballers had already been experimenting with the art of making the ball bend for generations. What television did was give that art a worldwide audience.

The story of how footballers learned to manipulate the flight of the ball is almost as fascinating as the kicks themselves.

The Art of Making the Ball Bend

At its simplest, a banana kick is a curved football shot, most often associated with a free kick. Instead of travelling in a straight line, the ball follows a pronounced arc through the air, allowing a player to send it around or over a defensive wall and towards the goal.

It may look simple when performed perfectly. Footballers gradually discovered that the behaviour of a football could be changed by the way it was struck. The point of contact, the movement of the foot, the speed of the kick and, above all, the rotation imparted to the ball could influence its flight.

There was no single moment when somebody invented the banana kick. It evolved through experimentation, observation and imitation. Players tried different ways of striking the ball and learned, often through repeated practice, that a football did not always have to travel where its initial direction seemed to suggest. Some players became particularly gifted at exploiting this behaviour. Among the early celebrated masters of unusual free kick techniques was a Brazilian whose name would become closely associated with one of the game's most distinctive dead-ball techniques.

Didi and the Folha Seca

Brazil's relationship with imaginative free kick taking goes deep into its football culture. One of its earliest celebrated exponents was Didi, the elegant midfielder who helped Brazil win the 1958 and 1962 World Cups.

Didi became famous for a distinctive free kick technique known as the folha seca, or “dry leaf”. The name itself captured the imagination. A dry leaf caught in the air can float, drift and suddenly fall, responding to movements in the air that are not always visible to the eye. Didi's free kick could create a similarly deceptive impression. The ball could travel with an apparently controlled trajectory before suddenly changing its movement and dropping towards the goal.

Didi's importance lies not only in the goals he scored but also in what he represented. He belonged to a generation of Brazilian footballers who treated the ball as something that could be manipulated through touch, technique and imagination. The football was not simply an object to be kicked towards a target. Its flight could be shaped.

That Brazilian tradition of imaginative free kick taking would continue through succeeding generations. Techniques were refined, new variations appeared and the art of the dead ball became increasingly sophisticated.

Then television brought the great practitioners of that art into homes around the world. For football loving youngsters in Kerala, the television screen became an informal classroom. We could watch the approach of a player, the position of his supporting foot, the movement of his kicking leg and, most importantly, the extraordinary journey of the ball after it left his foot.

We watched the masters, admired them and tried to imitate them on our own playing fields.

Among all the free kicks that entered football's visual memory, however, one would eventually stand apart.

Roberto Carlos and the Ball That Seemed Impossible

It was 3rd June 1997. Brazil were playing France in the Tournoi de France at Lyon, and Brazil had been awarded a free kick roughly 35 metres from the French goal.
Standing over the ball was Roberto Carlos. The Brazilian left-back took his familiar approach and struck the ball with his powerful left foot. At first, the trajectory seemed completely wrong. The ball travelled towards the right, apparently moving away from the goal. Then, as it continued through the air, it began to curve back towards the target.

It swept around the defensive wall and passed inside the post, beyond the reach of goalkeeper Fabien Barthez. For those watching, it seemed almost impossible.
The goal quickly became one of the most famous free kicks in football history. Its extraordinary trajectory attracted attention not only from football followers but also from scientists. Years later, French physicists studied the kick, seeking to understand how a ball could travel on such an apparently improbable path.

For the football world, it was a spectacular goal. For scientists, it was a fascinating problem. How could a ball that appeared to be travelling away from the goal suddenly curve back towards it?

The explanation lay not in magic but in the interaction between a spinning football and the air around it. The physics was there all along, although most spectators needed no explanation. We simply watched the ball bend and marvelled.

Roberto Carlos had shown the world just how dramatic that bending movement could become. Five years later, another Brazilian would produce a free kick that demonstrated a different way in which the flight of a football could deceive the eye.

Ronaldinho and the Ball That Kept Rising

At the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, Brazil faced England in the quarter-final at Shizuoka.

Ronaldinho stood over a free kick more than 35 yards from goal and towards the right side of the field. England goalkeeper David Seaman was positioned away from his line.

Ronaldinho struck the ball.

It rose high into the air, travelled over the English goalkeeper and dropped into the top corner. For a moment, it was difficult to know exactly what Ronaldinho had intended. Had he attempted a shot or was he trying to cross the ball?

The uncertainty became part of the story. England's players believed he had intended to cross the ball, while Ronaldinho maintained that he had been trying to shoot. He later acknowledged that the ball had travelled farther and swerved more than he had expected.

Whatever the original intention, the goal became unforgettable.

It demonstrated something important about the relationship between a footballer and the ball. A player can determine the manner in which he strikes it, but once the ball leaves his foot, its journey is shaped by forces beyond his direct control. Football has entered a different world, where speed, spin, gravity and the surrounding air begin to determine what happens next.

The great free kick taker learns to anticipate that journey. The greatest seem to make it look effortless.

Beckham and the Age of Precision

By the beginning of the new millennium, the curling free kick had become one of football's most admired skills. Few players made it more recognisable than David Beckham. If Roberto Carlos was associated with extraordinary power, Beckham became renowned for precision. His free kicks often seemed to follow an invisible path chosen before the ball was struck. Over or around the defensive wall, towards a particular part of the goal, the ball would rise, bend and descend with remarkable accuracy.

His technique became familiar to millions of viewers: the measured approach, the carefully planted foot and the distinctive swing of the right leg. The result was often a ball that seemed to obey an instruction written into the kick itself.

One of the defining moments came against Greece in 2001, when Beckham's stoppage time free kick secured England's qualification for the 2002 World Cup. Another memorable example came against Ecuador at the 2006 World Cup.
By then, “bend it like Beckham” had entered popular culture.

The banana kick had moved beyond the football field and into everyday language. Yet football's experimentation with the flight of the ball was about to take another turn.

When the Ball Refused to Behave

The traditional curling free kick depends heavily on spin. But another Brazilian, Juninho Pernambucano, became famous for a different kind of dead ball technique. During his remarkable spell with Lyon, Juninho became one of the most feared free kick specialists in European football. He could produce the familiar curling shot, but he also became famous for a technique that appeared to challenge the very idea of predictable ball flight.

The knuckleball
Instead of giving the football substantial spin, the player attempts to strike it in a way that produces very little rotation. The result can be a ball that dips, swerves or changes direction unexpectedly as it travels towards the goal. One of Juninho's most celebrated examples came against Bayern Munich in the Champions League in 2003. From around 30 metres, he struck a free kick that dipped dramatically before going into the net off the inside of Oliver Kahn's left-hand post.

The traditional banana kick had a graceful, recognisable curve. Juninho's knuckleball seemed far less willing to follow a predictable path. It was another chapter in football's long experimentation with the behaviour of the ball.

And once again, television allowed millions of spectators to witness something that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined.

Messi and the Modern Generation

The art of bending a football continued into the modern era, and Lionel Messi became one of its finest practitioners.

His free kick against Liverpool in the 2019 Champions League semi-final has become part of the modern collection of great curling free kicks. From a central position outside the penalty area, Messi lifted the ball over the wall and sent it bending into the top corner, leaving goalkeeper Alisson with little chance.

The scene was familiar, even though the football world around it had changed enormously. The equipment had changed. The football itself had changed. Goalkeepers had become taller, stronger and more extensively prepared. Set piece coaching had become increasingly sophisticated, with coaches and analysts studying angles, positions and patterns in ways earlier generations could hardly have imagined.

Yet there was still room for the old art. A footballer could still stand over a stationary ball and make it bend.

From Didi to Roberto Carlos, from Ronaldinho and Beckham to Juninho and Messi, different generations developed different ways of communicating with football. Some relied on power, some on precision, some on extraordinary spin and others on almost no spin at all.

But they were all searching for essentially the same thing: a way to make the football travel somewhere the goalkeeper did not expect.

From Magic to Science

For a long time, the explanation seemed simple. It was talent, skill and, perhaps, a little magic.

But behind every bending football was something more than the eye could see. The ball was responding to the way it had been struck and to the forces acting upon it as it travelled through the air. What appeared mysterious on the television screen was, in fact, nature at work.

The great footballers did not need to know the language of physics to master it. Through countless hours of practice, they learned to make the ball do things that seemed almost impossible.

References

1. Dupeux, B., Le Goff, A., Quéré, D. and Clanet, C. “The Curve Kick of a Football.” New Journal of Physics, Vol. 12, 2010.
2. Croxford, Saul Marcus Benedict, Joel Thomas Best and Matt Jackson Duggan. “S4_4 Roberto Carlos’ ‘Impossible’ Free Kick.” Physics Special Topics, University of Leicester, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2017.
3. FIFA. “Wonder Goal or Fluke? Ronaldinho’s 2002 Strike Remembered.” 
4. UEFA. “The Best Free-Kicks in UEFA Champions League History?” UEFA.com.
5. Banana Kick,Football History,Football Skills,Free Kicks,Roberto Carlos,Football Legends,Sports Science
6. FIFA. “Brazil’s Prince and King of ’58 - Didi.” FIFA.

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