Midfield Magicians: A bona fide winner who simply oozed class, Clarence Seedorf
The very best midfielders in world football must have multiple strings to their bow, capable of influencing proceedings at both ends of the pitch…
Midfield Magicians
32 articles
Legends
Midfield Magicians: The effortless orchestrator, Michael Laudrup
Football’s greatest players have an innate ability to slow the process of a game, finding time when everything around them continues at startling speed.…
Midfield Magicians: Yaya Toure – A marauding monster
Asked to construct the perfect box-to-box midfielder, and your hypothetical project would likely resemble something close to Yaya Toure. Toure’s best football saw him…
Midfield Magicians: Cesc Fabregas, a Catalan creative genius
There’s been something in the Spanish water since the turn of the millennium. Not in a literal sense, like that something that once made…
Midfield Magicians: The Architect, Andrea Pirlo
Andrea Pirlo is perhaps the embodiment of the footballer that most fans wish to be. Outrageously good whilst remaining effortlessly cool, the midfielder evolved…
Midfield Magicians: Fernando Redondo, gentleman, scholar and deep-lying playmaker supreme
Each April, it is difficult to navigate footballing social channels without being witness to a moment of skill that has come to define Fernando…
Midfield Magicians: Portugal’s playmaker supreme, Rui Costa
Nineties Serie A was a golden age for modern football, as the best faced the best and almost every side in the division possessed…
Midfield Magicians: An elegant enigma, Rafael van der Vaart
Football fans often gravitate towards mercuriality, so commonly an attribute associated with cult heroes, past and present. Football, after all, is an entertainment business,…
Midfield Magicians: Juninho Pernambucano, free-kick master
Juninho Pernambucano will forever be associated with the art of free-kick taking. There have been a wealth of players before and since with wondrous…
Midfield Magicians: Barcelona’s beating heart, Xavi
Xavi Hernández can claim to be the brain behind arguably the greatest side club football has ever witnessed. Perhaps a sentiment that is also…
Midfield Magicians: The under-rated metronome, Michael Carrick
Sir Alex Ferguson possesses one of football’s greatest minds, with the manager’s mistakes few and far between during a record-breaking career at Manchester United.…
Midfield Magicians: The chain-smoking playmaker, Robert Prosinecki
Representing Real Madrid or Barcelona often represents the pinnacle for professional footballers, Spanish football’s superpowers possessing a grandeur and allure that is the envy…
Midfield Magicians: David Silva – El Mago
When waving goodbye to an adoring Manchester City crowd for the final time, David Silva did so regarded as quite probably the greatest footballer…
Midfield Magicians: Pavel Nedved – The Czech Fury
Had it not been for huge political change and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in the late eighties, the footballing world may…
Midfield Magicians: Michael Ballack – Little Kaiser
Michael Ballack’s legacy is one which is difficult to quantify, a career in which the age-old question of how full the glass is truly…
Midfield Magicians: Spurs’ balletic dictator, Mousa Dembélé
Mousa Dembélé has always been a difficult footballer to categorise in an era in which labels are often sought, his utter uniqueness having perhaps…
Midfield Magicians – Juan Román Riquelme, a flawed diamond
Once in a while a footballer comes to the fore who, in method and manner, flies in the face of all convention. A player…
Midfield Magicians: Wesley Sneijder, fleetingly great
For a short period, as the noughties faded into the 2010s, few midfielders in world football were as influential as Wesley Sneijder. Sneijder’s talent…