Freestyle football great makes history with ninth world title
It was a fitting moment for a man who set the standard for many of the game’s greatest and most unlikely players in the 1980s.
For the first time there will be four world titles in the sport’s history – the first of them belongs to Italy’s Simone Belshaw and Scotland’s Danny Wilson, who set the standard for both of world’s most successful players of all time, and the final to Japan’s Yoshinori Ono, whose incredible ability to score goals left many wondering if he was even human. Belshaw and Wilson, who were both born in Argentina, have gone on to become two of the greatest players, world and European, in the history of the game. And Ono also went on to become one of the greatest players in the game, winning the World Cup in 2002, the European Footballer of the Year 2005, the FIFA World Player of the Year 2006, the FIFA Ballon d’Or 2009 and won the Ballon d’Or Award for Sportsman of the Year 2016.
Ono and Belshaw led the way for the greatest players in the game. Ono scored 40 times for Argentina and was nicknamed ‘Sackadori’ after the late Italian striker Gigi Buffon, who played alongside Ono in the 1990 World Cup. Belshaw has a more difficult path, as he is the only person to score for both Argentina and England. But he may have been the first since the World Cup in 1990, since the World Cup in 2010 and since the World Cup in 2014 for the two countries to have a player win the World’s best player award and an individual World’s player of the year, with four of those occasions being for Argentina, with Belshaw being awarded the Italian Footballer of the Year Award in 1992, 2001, 2006 and 2009, with his four World cup triumphs leading the way.
Belshaw and Ono started their careers playing in Argentina’s second division, where Belshaw played for his hometown club, River Plate, and Ono played in Quilmes for the city’s biggest club, Independiente. Their rise to stardom