An Elegy to the Lost Mystery of World Cup Footballers

That bouncing shock of blonde hair, looking like the aftermath of a hydrogen bomb. Those long, spindly legs fending off challenge after hefty challenge. The passing vision of Russell Grant on DMT. The Tash so proud that it should only be referred to as a Tash, with a capital T.

It can only be Carlos Valderrama, the legendary Colombian who captained his national side over three World Cups. Valderrama was the quintessential playmaker of his generation, dancing around the blurry VHS-quality videos of the '90s, casually dispatching piercing through-balls and retaining possession like a man possessed.

Or at least that's how I remember him from the little bursts of genius I caught on terrestrial television every four years. Valdarrama is the ultimate World Cup player, in that you only saw him at the sport's global showpiece event. He played his club football in Colombia, with middling European sides, and later on in Major League Soccer. He won only a few trophies along the way and – the World Cup aside – rarely found his way on to our TV screens.

Yet off the back of his performances on the big stage he is regarded as one of the top 100 players of the 20th century, ranking in 77th place. That puts him ahead of stone-cold legends of the game like Ryan Giggs (83) and Edgar Davids (81). He even manages to outdo number 95 on the list, the great Neville Southall…

So how could a player that has only won a smattering of Colombian league titles be rated higher than a footballing giant like Big Nev? It has a lot to do with how we used to view the World Cup, before we were inundated with television highlights from every corner of the globe, pinpoint statistics from Pro-Zone and lazy opinions from every tired pundit (like Neville Southall).

The World Cup used to be a truly uniting spectacle on a global scale. Before the rise of the internet and the long fingers of television poking into every crevice of the known world, the chance to see a collection of the top national sides on the planet brought excitement on another level. You could argue that the World Cup was so exciting to us as a country that we sought to replicate the myriad of playing styles, tactics and bouffants in our own domestic league, always thirsty for the next 18-year-old wunderkind from Brazil with an exotic sounding name like Oscar, Wallace, or Nathan.

Imagine seeing Brazil for the first time, either on the telly or at a stadium. The vibrantly coloured kit and watchable style of football from the Selecao must have blown a few British minds back in the 1970 World Cup, when clubs as bog standard as Everton were winning the domestic league. Attack-minded teams featuring pacy flair players like Jairzinho and Pele would have been a world away from what British fans saw week in, week out. Our teams were actually quite successful in Europe at the time, but their tactics were based on the solid defensive framework of players like Graeme Sounness and Alan Hansen who, y'know, liked kicking the shit out of people.

This was at a time when the world was a much bigger place. 99% of club teams would be built of homegrown players, who formulated a national of play in places like Santos or Ajax. The only chance you had to see them was at the World Cup or in European Cup Finals, just tiny glimpses into the countless different ways that football could be played when the focus was on dribbling and passing, rather than two-footed challenges and terrible perms.

The perfect example of how the aura of the World Cup has been lost can be seen in how we viewed the Dutch 'Total Football' revolution of the 1974 tournament, as compared to the Spanish Tiki-Taka of 2010. We had seen the Tiki-Taka being employed successfully at Barcelona for four or five years before Spain used it to waltz their way to World Cup victory, so it was nothing new. In fact, after seeing it in La Liga, World Cup qualifying and extensively employed by Nathan Dyer and Wayne Routledge for Swansea City every week, it got a little boring. So boring that even Arsene Wenger, a man who probably uses the principles of Tiki-Taka to keep possession of the remote control from his children, ended up calling it 'negative' and 'conservative'.

Compare that to how the firebrand Total Football lit up the 1974 World Cup. Yes, the Netherlands ran out eventual runners up, but the legend of Johan Cruyff was born in those few matches. His influence on the tournament was completely unique and nothing like anyone had seen before in the game. It was really only around for one tournament, as by the 1978 World Cup the Dutch had been weaned off it and on to a more rigid formation, although the spirit of Johan lives on every time I try a Cruyff-turn at Thursday five-a-side and fall on my arse.

In a similar way, when I was growing up I always used to ape the unique goalkeeping genius of Jorge Campos. The Mexican national team shot-stopper played in the 1994 and '98 World Cups. He was extremely small for a 'keeper at 5'9, and constantly adorned with kits that made him look like a psychedelic bat – which is fitting because he was bat-shit crazy.

At games on astro-turf pitches at my local YMCA I'd always want to play in goal after seeing Campos, as back then I too was tiny and had a similar penchant for wearing psychedelic Sondico kits. He taught me the beauty of running out of your area for no apparent reason to slide-tackle someone, or have a random dribble near the halfway line, because why the fuck not?

The point is that Campos' performance, look and aura in those competitions completely influenced me as a goalkeeper, until I gave it up to become the Phillipe Senderos clone I am today. Although heroes still exist, these days everyone has critics, everyone makes mistakes, and bad days are pored over to the minutest degree.

Take David Ospina, a similarly 'small' keeper by today's standards who also had a great recent World Cup with Colombia, and was signed by Arsenal off the back of it. He had a good spell for the club near the end of his first season, but as soon as he made a mistake in the Champions League it was pounced upon by wild-eyed and savage critics, eager to bring him down, and he's been consigned to the bench ever since. How would I have reacted to that as a child? I'd probably have joined in laughing at him and not discovered an eccentric goalkeeping idol.

Campos also had his bad games and dropped more than a few clangers in his time (quite a lot of them, as you might imagine with his methods), but crucially I never got to see them. I only saw him excelling, making athletic saves and generally being totally off his rocker in the few matches that made him a World Cup legend.

Being the misty-eyed nostalgia junkie that I am, I feel a little sad when I see the overindulgence in stats, coverage and regurgitated opinions. Yes, I love to mong out in front of the telly any given Saturday and let the wave of back-to-back football wash over me like a soothing and gentle ambience; and I love having access to it all at the touch of a button, enjoying the multitude of tactical attitudes and playing methods.

But the child in me still misses the thrill of seeing a new face at a World Cup and not knowing how he'd play. I miss seeing a star being born on the global stage who suddenly changes the way you think about football. It's a part of the game that's sadly been lost through rapid globalisation and media expansion. Those aren't bad things in themselves, but wouldn't it be great to one day see a player and not know his height, weight, inside leg measurement and star sign before he's even touched the grass?

@williamwasteman