1. Giorgian de Arrascaeta



2. Son Heung-Min



3. Luis Suarez



4. Jordan Flores



5. Andre-Pierre Gignac



6. Sophie Ingle



7. Zlatko Junuzovic



8. Hlompho Kekena



9. Leonel Quinonez



10. Caroline Weir



11. Shirley Cruz

My favorites are 1-3-4

1. is an excellent athletic bicycle kick
3. is a sheer genius "hackentrick"
4. is technically very difficult and a quite amazing volley

3-4-5 is my top three (in that order).

Son Heung-Min (2) won which was clearly wrong.

the 2 full-volleys off of driven corners are nice

thx for the thread

and #8 by number eight ! Compression

ball looked like it deflated almost lol.

for me #4 is the most eye-opening, those are angles that you just don't see outside of soccer volleyball or cirque du soleil and are sort of shocking in a matrix-breaking way.

and for me son's goal is missing some last degree of zomg, but I'm fine with its winning if only because he has to do ten different things in that play to pull it off. Yes the defending was bad but son made it look worse by accelerating faster than they were prepared to cope with, even though they've spent their entire athletic lives training for that. The best views of son's goal are the closer ones at regular speed that look sped up. Football is designed so that people are simply not allowed to go 90 yards and, especially, to do what he does in the middle third of the field, where he makes a half dozen perfect touches in a row while sprinting, which is why runs like that happen only once every few years instead of weeks.

Of course there's no single best way to compare goals but if you gave all pros a hundred chances at recreating son's goal then 99% of them are never gonna score it, and imo that counts for something. I love Suarez's goal, it's creative and skillful but to me it's more cutesy ephemeral than other epic skill goals like say that berbatov assist to ronaldo which is still as gorgeous as it was a billion years ago

I feel like Son's was the most impressive in that it combined insane athleticism and skill in an intentional way that a lot of the others just didn't.

I appreciate the "Holy ****" moments of some of the insane volley goals, but I just can't help but feel like even for those top top players, they aren't really aiming for the corner. They're just swinging away and hoping to connect flush with the ball and aiming it in the general direction of one side of the goal. To find the corners in the way they do feels more like a combination of 70% skill to hit it flush and 30% luck of it just happens to find the right spot to beat the keeper and find the net.

For me it was between 1, 2, and 3. The correct choice really depends on what you are looking for. For the most difficult shot, 1 is probably the best (also was a big game), but 3 is also crazy from Suarez. For best overall skill/difficulty, Son's is the clear winner imo because it required like 10 perfect touches whilst running faster than anyone else on the pitch and then finishing at the end of an 80+ yard run. I guess it would have been cooler if he curled it top corner or something, but it is hard to complain about basically dribbling the entire opposing team. You never ever see that anymore.

Regular volley goals are trash imo. You see about 10 great ones per year, which devalues them. Even bicycle kicks happen a lot, though the De Arrascaeta one was so far out and much harder than the typical ones you see. 2 and 3 are the rarest, which is a big plus.