The awful haircut that helped Brazil win the World Cup in 2002
Nearly a full quarter of a century later, it’s still one of the most unforgettable sights in World Cup history. Perhaps even football history as a whole.
It’s one of the most memorable parts of one of the tournament’s most memorable winners. The ultimate front three of Ronaldo Nazario, Rivaldo and Ronaldinho all but won Brazil’s fifth World Cup with a dazzling display of attacking excellence that flies in the face of the accepted wisdom that international football has to be a stodgy, dull affair full of tackles and seven-foot-tall centre-backs. I wish I could be talking about one of the several goals they score, but I’m not.
I’m talking, as if anyone who gives a damn about football wasn’t intimately aware of this, about that fucking barnet.
Ronaldo Nazario was arguably the best player in the world at the time. A striker sublime at pretty much everything he turned his mind to. Yet he turned up for the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea with one of the most catastrophic haircuts ever seen on a professional footballer. Anyone who has ever switched on a football match knows just how immense a statement that is yet… Come on, though, look at it.
There’s a throwaway line in the first Harry Potter book about how, in an act of fury at the titular wizard’s unruly hair, his tyrannical aunt Petunia shaves his head save for the fringe, as it covers the scar on his forehead. Maybe Ronaldo was just a die-hard Potterhead in 2002 because that’s pretty much the haircut he decided upon for the World Cup. With the eyes of the entire world upon him.
Thank God he won the damn thing because he’d never have been able to live it down had he not. Yet while this is often cited as the ultimate fashion faux pas committed by a footballer, he has since sworn blind that he cut his hair into such a strange fashion for a good reason.
In an interview with ESPN, he explained, “I had an injury in my leg, and everybody was talking about that, I decided to cut my hair and leave the small thing there. I come to training, and everybody saw me with bad hair. Everybody was talking about the hair and forgot about the injury. I could stay more calm and relaxed, and focused on my training.” It’s a hell of a statement, one that coming from any other player would have been nonsense. However, I can actually see where he’s coming from here.
By summer 2002, Ronaldo was coming to the end of five years spent playing for Inter Milan. Five years that, due to injury, had translated into 68 appearances. In that time, the club played around 250 matches, meaning that their star striker, the best player in the world, was available for just over one in every five matches they played in that time. On average, he played around 14 matches for the club every season.
His injury issues, especially near the end of his time at the club, had also seen him put on some weight, which also added to the sheer amount of discourse surrounding his appearance at the World Cup in 2002. Especially after his last appearance at the tournament had been a disastrous appearance in the final, where he’d come down with food poisoning that morning, and played like it too.
However, then he turned up at the Brazil camp with that monstrosity on his head and all the discourse about his size, his legs, his fitness, how he was carrying the hopes of the most football-obsessed country in the world on his shoulders all fell away. Because what the fucking hell was that?
He concedes that it might have been a little too effective, saying in the same ESPN interview, “I’m not proud about the hair itself because it was pretty strange. But it was a good way to change the subject.” Can’t say fairer than that!