Dogs, dives and disastrous defending: A taxonomy of the viral football video

Before we peel away the many sub-genres (and sub-sub-genres) of the viral football video, we ought to establish a threshold for virality. Just how widely do these perennially amusing/fascinating/awe-inspiring phenomena need to be shared to qualify as “viral”?

Let’s set the benchmark at, say, a thousand retweets (and a couple of thousand likes). The video must also have been commandeered by the social-media intern of each of the 308 UK betting companies’ Twitter accounts within 12 hours, quote-tweeted by Jake Humphrey within 24 hours, and then - within six months - sent to you via Facebook by someone over the age of 45, in the genuine belief that you were about to watch it for the first time.

Our attempt to classify the 21 types of viral football video begins about fifty yards out.

Goals from the halfway line

How many goals from the halfway line can the average human withstand before they become completely desensitised to the spectacle of goals from the halfway line? What once seemed like a precious, rare fluke of circumstance has been exposed, in fact, as a weekly occurrence somewhere in the world.

Thankfully, the likes of Billie Simpson returning a goal-kick with interest - on the volley, no less - looks to have breathed new life into the tired phenomenon of the extra-long-range effort, but the sheer wonder with which we treated David Beckham “spotting Sullivan off his line” back in 1996 might as well be one million years ago.

Goalscoring goalkeepers

As we start to shrug our collective shoulders at the sight of one going in from fully 50 yards, what of the perennial crown jewel of viral football videos: the goalscoring goalkeeper?

Some academic studies have indicated that our interest in goalkeepers finally adding a “(1)” to the goals column on their Wikipedia page may expire completely by the year 2040, particularly if they insist on doing so from within their own half:

There is plenty left in the tank, however, for the injury-time, extra-curricular goalkeeping opportunist. While Jimmy Glass remains the zenith of the art-form, every successful act of custodian-led scoresheet infiltration is, by default, a glorious moment, no matter how many mindless Twitter accounts share the shaky footage.

Alberto Brignoli’s 95th-minute headed equaliser against Milan in December 2017, which ended Benevento’s record-breaking run of 14 consecutive Serie A defeats, did more than enough to suggest that our appetite for goalkeepers going rogue remains strong.

Terrible, terrible misses

A perfect example of how the absolutist language of viral football videos has worked against them: every new miss from a yard out instantly becomes the “WORST MISS EVER” without due diligence being conducted on all the previous worst misses ever.

Google Trends analysis of the phrase “worst miss ever” reveals a clear (and since unmatched) spike in its usage in November 2010.  That neatly coincides with Qatar’s meeting with Uzbekistan at that year’s Asian Games, during which their teenage striker Fahad Khalfan ensured - even eight years later - that 40.8% of his Wikipedia page would be dedicated to how he missed an open goal from precisely two yards out.

Khalfan will still be only 30 when his country host the 2022 World Cup, so a tale of extraordinary redemption - or, at least, a new paragraph for that Wikipedia page - remains a possibility.

Nutmegs

Nutmegs - the act of impudently dribbling the ball between an opponent’s haplessly parted legs - are such a rich source of such presumed embarrassment to the nutmeggee that each video is accompanied with an ever more outlandish caption than the last.

66 years since Geoffrey Green described Billy Wright's attempt to deal with a Ferenc Puskas drag-back at Wembley as “like a fire engine going to the wrong fire”, we now have players being sent for hotdogs, being so wrongfooted that they end up outside the stadium buying a ticket to get back in, being so humiliated that we have to remind each other that these poor men have families, or simply suffering a metaphorical death.

RIP to them all, but long live the eminently videogenic nutmeg.

Own goals

For all the venerable appeal of the ball being out through a player’s own net, our modern fascination with own goals is broadly split into to strands.

Firstly, there is the Inexplicable Own Goal, which relies heavily on repeated viewings to try and even hazard a guess at what might have been going through the player’s mind at that precise moment that his world fell apart:

Otherwise, there is the sub-genre known as Own Goals Which, At a Glance, Actually Look Like Brilliant Finishes, a slightly rarer but aesthetically more compelling spectacle:

Wacky penalty-taking

A frequently fruitful source of footballing schadenfreude. The innate pride-before-a-fall potential of a player trying something a bit different from the penalty spot is perfectly packaged for social media, whether the penalty is missed...

...or scored:

Convoluted free-kick routines

There’s something about teams taking the scenic route to the mixer which clearly captures the imagination of the average office worker, lunching al desko, browsing Twitter on a grey Monday afternoon. Naturally, the bright minds of the Bundesliga are where it’s at when it comes to the successful set-piece chicanery...

...while the attention-seeking routines of the Polish lower divisions have an altogether more subtle conclusion, but one still very much worth waiting for:

Goalmouth scrambles

Still alive, despite their 1990s heyday fast disappearing over the horizon, and still a source of premium, drawn-out amusement.

The real beauty of watching a goalmouth scramble - compared to, say, a wondergoal or a brutal foul - is that you can never be quite sure when it’s all over. There will always be time for one more clang of the woodwork.

Dogs on the pitch

The enduring crossover appeal of dogs and football may be baffling to some, but the numbers do not lie when it comes to viral football videos. The standard scenario is simply a dog - by virtues of either having escaped its owner or by not having one at all - running on to the pitch, mid-game, and causing a charming nuisance with its aimless and uncontainable enthusiasm. Exhibit A:

Harder-to-please viewers and canine sceptics may need more from their dog/football fusions. A dog saving a goalbound shot? Well, that sounds universally ideal - here’s Exhibit B:

For some reason, pitch-invading dogs rarely seem to attract the same parody Twitter accounts which are hastily set up when non-human creatures or inanimate objects find their way on to a pitch (@NouCampCat was, of course, abandoned after just two days) and that is to their significant credit. 

Choreographed goal celebrations

The height of football tweeness, perhaps, and certainly not for the goal-celebration purists who prefer unbridled glee, shoved-away teammates, advertising boards being hurdled and the occasional knee slide.

Sadly, there will always be the celebratory routines of that Scandinavian team, whose name nobody ever bothered to remember, and Venezuelan forward Eduard Bello, who was rightly booked for celebrating a goal by proposing to his fiancée outside of the perimeter of the pitch.

Players falling off stretchers

Poorly-trained stretcher-carriers have been an evergreen source of football mirth since the glory days of VHS tapes. Traditionally a South American phenomenon, it reached the European mainstream in 2015, when Ergotelis’ Brazilian-born midfielder Leonardo Koutris had his misery compounded by some slapstick stretcher-bearing. He was, of course, later linked with a move to West Ham.

Threatened with having their heritage plundered, South America has recently hit back, thanks to one of those motorised stretchers (surely only invented for the purpose of appearing in a viral football video) running over an injured player’s ankle.

Comical diving

So often the No 1 gripe of Proper Football Men, the dark art of feigning injury does occasionally venture outside its bubble of sanctimony.

We can comfortably laugh at these moments, safe in the knowledge that, on these shores, our players are honest and whole-hearted divers.

Barcelona youth teams scoring after 48-pass moves

After serving their primary purpose of making you realise you weren’t that good at football when you were 10 after all, these almost robotic performances from fully-indoctrinated Catalan pre-adolescents just make you feel a bit sad for the 90% of them who will end up on the footballing scrapheap. Or loaned out to Stoke.

Will a Spanish 9-year-old ever experience the simple joy of hoofing the ball upfield, over the heads of the bigger kids, so that the smallest, fastest kid can gallop through and score? Apparently not. Enjoy all your World Cup and European Championship medals.

Goals scored in training

The viral football video industry’s reliable midweek filler. Training-ground wondergoals, caught by wide-angle cameras and then gleefully tweeted out by the club’s official account, are often the domain of 6ft 2in centre-halves, who suddenly pluck a flying volley out of nowhere at a training camp in Dubai:

But, just to restore the natural order, there will always be a reminder that Lionel Messi is capable of pressure-free brilliance as well:

Meanwhile, the elite-level preoccupation from scoring from the wrong side of the goalline continues, despite it having almost no use in an actual game:

21-man brawls

Essentially goalmouth scrambles without a goal, or a ball, the 21-man brawl (someone always stays out of it - normally a sighing, disapproving goalkeeper with his hands on his hips) follows a frequent rule of viral football videos: the more obscure the setting, the better.

With that in mind, an Ecuadorian defender using a corner flag as an offensive weapon during an Under-20 Copa Libertadores semi-final safely ticks that box.

Refereeing eccentricity

A sphere long dominated by Wirral-based former ballroom dancing champion turned no-look yellow-carder Mike Dean, but even he has yet to earn himself a six-month ban for kicking a player after falling over.

Ultraviolent tackles

Viewer discretion is often advised here, but there is still plenty of social-media mileage in even the most PG-13 of studs-up heinousness.

Away fans singing on a stadium concourse

There is, it seems, a visceral appeal to watching mobile-phone footage of a throbbing mass of 18-to-50-year-old Yorkshiremen singing about the semi-mythical goalscoring exploits of Polish midfielders to the tune of The Beautiful South’s fourth-highest-charting single.

If that’s not your bag, there’s always the Iceland fans, who have been guaranteeing us retweets of videos of synchronised clapping since 2016.

Nice and/or classy touches

Experts are yet to establish the definitive difference between a “nice touch” and a “classy touch” but the common denominator appears to be a gesture that sits somewhere on the scale of pleasantness between “basic human decency” and “going slightly out of your way to make someone happy”.

This tends to involve a player handing their shirt to a young fan after the final whistle...

...or simply allowing himself to be “spontaneously” swamped by a small army of young fans who just happen to be nearby.

Ex-footballers rolling back the years

Quite why it should be such a surprise that former world-class footballers might still remember how to do world-class things with a football - even after five years of unlimited post-career carbohydrates and holidays in Abu Dhabi - is not entirely clear. Nonetheless, we are obliged to point out that Francesco Totti has “still got it!”...

...and that Dennis Bergkamp, albeit at a speed just above walking pace, does indeed still possess “it”, by which we mean the ability to “roll back the years” in almost annoyingly casual charity matches:

Passages of refreshingly unsophisticated football

This essentially comprises of about 37 seconds of head-tennis and hoofing, often accompanied by the brief caption of “best league in the world” if captured from a stultifying Saturday 12.30pm Premier League game.

Generally, though, in an era when being willing and able to “get the ball down and play” is becoming almost universal, there should be room for enjoying some old-fashioned panic and ineptitude.