“IF you said to the average person how many people have scored in a World Cup final, most people will say maybe 200.
“But the fact is, in the entire history of the World Cup final, only 58 people have ever scored in one.”
Belfast-born photographer Michael Donald, 51, has had the privilege of photographing music legends the Rolling Stones and Leonard Cohen.
But it is a project about football that has him buzzing to SunSport.
His book, ‘GOAL!’ delivers a fascinating portrait of men who have lived the dream of scoring in a World Cup final.
From Uruguayan Alcides Ghiggia, who broke Brazilian hearts in 1950 to Mario Gotze’s volley in 2014, Michael’s pictures are coupled with the goalscorers’ accounts of the day.
To ensure the idea was financed, Michael convinced ESPN to produce a movie called ‘I Scored a Goal in the FIFA World Cup Final’.
Released in 2010, the documentary was nominated for an Emmy Award and it gave the enigmatic snapper the opportunity to work on his book.
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“This is an exclusive club. It’s black and white. You either scored a goal in a World Cup final or you didn’t,” he said.
“The numbers are tiny, so when I came up with the idea I thought I had to do something about it.
“There was a mate of mine who was a film director, so I mentioned the idea to him.
“He thought it would make a film, so we made a documentary for ESPN.
“They kept the video footage and I kept everything else.
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“The only reason it happened was because of that film, no publisher would’ve put the money forward.
“When we started the book, only 34 World Cup final goalscorers were alive. Now, there’s just 29 alive today.
“That’s amazing to think about. That was what inspired me to create this book.”
But Michael was keen to avoid the cliches of writing about the feeling of scoring that goal.
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He was more interested in uncovering the more irreverent moments of the occasion.
“I didn’t want to know what it felt like to score in a World Cup final, I can pretty much imagine how it felt,” Michael said.
“I wanted to know who they roomed with the night before, what they had for breakfast, what music they were listening to.
“And they liked that because they had to go deep into their memory and it transported them back to that day.”
Footballers including Pele, Emmanuel Petit and Andres Iniesta are just some of the names that have contributed to GOAL!
Michael told SunSport how easy it was getting access to members of the most exclusive club in football.
“They were very enormously accessible,” he divulged.
“Some of them were very easy to get hold of, you’d phone them and either they’d answer the phone or their missus would.
“But in the case of Iniesta, we didn’t speak to him until the day we did the shoot.”
And that was thanks to his then-Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola, who insisted Iniesta feature.
“Guardiola actually organised our time with Iniesta.
“By that stage the project was almost finished and we’d made the film, so we wanted to follow it up with the next World Cup, which Spain won.
“Guardiola understood the concept immediately. He was well aware someone who scored in a World Cup final would love to be in a book about it.
“It’s the most exclusive club in football, so that’s why Gotze and Iniesta were happy to do it.”
GOAL! took Michael around four years to make intermittently.
He travelled to South America three times and went on various trips to Germany, Italy and France.
But in Rio de Janeiro, while doing a photoshoot with 1970 World Cup-winner Jairzinho, it all got a little dicey in the Complexo do Alemao favela.
“Whenever you shoot in Brazil, you always have to have security. And they are normally ex special forces or policeman,” Michael said.
“We went to a favela in Rio, which is nicknamed The Gaza Strip.
“They have police cars around the parameters. And the purpose of the car being there is when you’ve passed that point, you’re on your own.
“It’s sort of an unspoken thing and that’s how things work. It’s a public safety, it’s a ring around the favela.
“We asked the security guy to come in with us and he said, ‘No.’
“He explained not only would it be dangerous for him, it would also be insulting to the ganglords in the favela.
“To get around that, we decided to hire some locals in the favela to offer our security.
“Whenever it gets dark in the favela, you want to get out. At 5pm the security guys we had got bored and left us.
“None of us were particularly worried, and we had a Brazilian producer with us, so we imagined we were safe.
“We were filming and I could see this menacing looking guy coming towards us on a motorbike.
“Then I could hear him talking to our producer, who turned to me and said we should go.
“I didn’t want to leave, and I turned round a couple of minutes later and noticed that apart from my producer the rest of the crew had disappeared.
“What I didn’t know was that this guy had showed them he was carrying a gun and told the crew to leave. I was too busy shooting at the time.
“It was just me and one producer and the guy, who waited for us to finish while his finger was resting on the trigger of his gun.
“Before that, people threw stones at us and Jairzinho, which was quite depressing.
“It was very disappointing to see the lack of respect shown to such a hero in the favela.”
Another hero of that 1970s Brazil World Cup-winning squad is Carlos Alberto, famous for scoring one of the best ever team goals in the 4-1 destruction of Italy.
Michael humourously recalled how the marauding defender was mistaken for a bodyguard during their shoot.
“We shot Carlos Alberto in the Maracana,” he said.
“It’s run daily as a museum and the people who run it didn’t want to close it down for the day.
“So they said to me, whenever we were ready, they’d stop the traffic of people taking the tour and we could get clean pictures.
“We did the interview up in the stands and we shot the pictures on the pitch.
“When we were pre-lighting it, my assistant stood in so I could see what the image would look like.
“And I could see people who were taking the tour looking at my assistant, wondering who he was and thinking he was famous.
“Then Carlos Alberto came down, and he knew we were pre-lighting the shot, so he stood behind my assistant till I was finished.
“I could then see that people were then thinking, ‘Wait, now that guy’s got security. He must be really famous!’
“But when Carlos Alberto stepped in, you could see the penny drop.
“It was chaos after that and we had to keep all the fans away.”
In 1998, then-Arsenal star Emmanuel Petit’s injury time goal condemned Brazil to a 3-0 defeat against France.
Cue party scenes all along the Champs-Elysées. But it was a goal that Petit used to diffuse an argument with club teammate David Seaman.
Michael explained: “Emmanuel Petit and David Seaman were big mates at Arsenal.
“After the 1998 World Cup, they had had an argument about who had the best car as they were leaving training.
“Petit could see the argument was slipping away from him, and he just said to Seaman, ‘Have you won the World Cup?’
“Seaman replied, ‘No.’ He then asked him, ‘Have you scored a goal in a World Cup final?’
“Seaman knew right then he’d lost the argument and that was the end of it.”
England’s hat-trick hero Sir Geoff Hurst is another World Cup immortal that features in Michael’s nod to the greatest international competition in the world.
“When you talk to Geoff Hurst, he does after-dinner speaking so he doesn’t have to go into his memory,” Michael spoke of their encounter.
“He’s told his story so many times, he just lifts it off the shelf.
“But, at one point, Geoff Hurst didn’t have enough money to pay his kids’ school fees after he quit playing.
“He had to get a job as a insurance salesman, and he told us going to visit someone to sell insurance and that person saying, ‘I don’t deal with footballers.'”
Despite Hurst’s admission, and the moderate digs footballers of yesteryear live in compared to today’s heroes, none hold a gripe, Michael told us.
“We did ask them about the money players are earning now and if they’d swap the era they played in,” Michael said.
“And not only did they not want to swap, they were not bitter about the money the current crop were earning.
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“They’d all say, ‘That was then, this is now’ and they’re not twisted about it at all.
“Post 1986, you may have earned enough money to never work again.
“But pre-1982, footballers had to find an alternative way of living.
“Like Paolo Rossi, who now owns a vineyard, producing olive oil and fine wines.”
However, Michael’s funniest story is about meeting Pele.
“Pele has spent more time being Pele than he ever did playing football,” Michael joked.
“He talks about himself in the third person. He would say, ‘Pele would like a cup of tea,’ for example.
“It’s really quite discombobulating. You’re thinking, ‘Would you like one too?'”
And just like Pele, who often offers a romantic slant on the beautiful game, Michael is equally as poetic about the World Cup and his book.
“It’s an amazing story,” he concluded.
“It’s about the essence of the World Cup and what we hope the World Cup is.
“It’s very romantic, very sentimental. Men are romantic fools, scoring a goal in a World Cup final is a romantic idea.
“This book is about the romance of the World Cup.”
- Sun Sport will be publishing exclusive extracts from Michael’s beautiful book over the next 10 days.
GOAL! By Michael Donald, published by Hamlyn, £20 www.octopusbooks.co.uk
Photographs ©Michael Donald
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