The myth of the Roberto Carlos free kick is that it was genius. The truth is that it was the fifty seventh attempt of the season.
We met Roberto at his academy outside São Paulo. He is sixty two, he wears a tracksuit every day, and he spends forty minutes most afternoons with a group of twelve year olds who are allowed to ask him anything. The first thing he tells them is that the free kick in France in 1997 was not the one he meant to hit. The ball slipped. The technique was wrong. The trajectory was an accident. He had tried to curl it the other way.
"The coaches, the journalists, they say it was physics," he says, laughing. "It was luck. But luck only works if you are already practising."
He takes us onto the training pitch. There is a ball, a wall of cones, a goal. He does not demonstrate with his right foot. He demonstrates with his left, the one he says he spent the last four years of his career learning to use properly because his right had given out. "At thirty seven I was still a beginner at something," he says. "That is the lesson."
Why we sat down with Roberto
Striver's mentors series exists because the players our readers admire are not the ones who never failed. They are the ones who failed for longer than anyone else was willing to. Roberto misses the point of the story if you watch only the free kick. The academy kids get it: they have been watching the misses from the 1995 season every Tuesday morning since September.
The full conversation is in the Striver app - forty two minutes, the technique explained, and the part where one of the academy kids asks Roberto whether he regrets anything.
He does. It is not the free kick.
