Who Was Lev Yashin? The Only Goalkeeper To Win The Ballon d'Or And The Legacy He Left Behind
In 63 years of the Ballon d'Or, one goalkeeper has won it. Lev Yashin took the award in 1963, has never been joined in that category, and is still considered by most people who know football history as the greatest goalkeeper of the sport.
Lev Ivanovich Yashin was born on October 22, 1929, in Moscow, into a working-class family that lived through the worst years of the Soviet era. He worked in a factory as a teenager during the Second World War, suffered a breakdown from exhaustion at 18, and found his way back through sport. He joined Dynamo Moscow in 1945, initially as an ice hockey player, before the football side took notice of what he could do between the posts. He never played for anyone else. He stayed at Dynamo for 25 years.
The Career That Made Him a Legend
Yashin's technical innovations alone would have made him significant. He was among the first goalkeepers to organise his defensive line through constant communication, command his penalty area physically rather than staying on his line, and use his feet as a deliberate first option. The style modern goalkeeping coaches now teach as standard was, in the 1950s and early 1960s, being invented by one man in Moscow.
The statistics hold up alongside the artistry. He saved an estimated 150 penalties and kept more than 270 clean sheets across his career. He won five Soviet league titles and three Soviet Cups, earned 78 caps for the national team, won Olympic gold at the 1956 Melbourne Games, and helped the USSR win the inaugural European Championship in 1960. At the 1966 World Cup he helped the Soviet Union finish fourth, their best ever result, giving his gloves to Eusébio at the end of his final international match.
The Ballon d'Or came in 1963. He was 34 and had spent the previous year being publicly blamed by the Soviet press for a poor 1962 World Cup, a period in which his home windows were smashed and threatening letters arrived by post. The award was his response to all of it.
What He Left Behind
Yashin died on March 21, 1990, from stomach cancer, aged 60. In 1998, the International Federation of Football History and Statistics voted him the best goalkeeper of the twentieth century. France Football named the annual award for the best World Cup goalkeeper the Yashin Trophy in his honour, first presented in 2019.
He remains the only goalkeeper to have won the Ballon d'Or. Nobody has come close since.