Kaká

Kaká was a playmaker who did his best work at full speed. A Brazilian attacking midfielder standing a little over six feet, he was unusually tall for a playmaker. He collected the ball in midfield and ran at the defence with long, gliding strides, able to beat his man, split the defence with a pass or shoot from distance. Andrea Pirlo, his teammate at AC Milan, put it bluntly: "There was a point when teams just had no idea how to stop him." Milan signed him from São Paulo in 2003 for a fee owner Silvio Berlusconi later called "peanuts", and within a month he had replaced Rui Costa behind the strikers. In the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul he ran the first half, winning the free kick for Paolo Maldini's opener and releasing Hernán Crespo with a long curling pass for the third goal, before Liverpool came back to win on penalties. In 2006–07 Carlo Ancelotti pushed him further forward behind a lone striker. He ended that season's Champions League as its top scorer, Milan beat Liverpool in the final, and he took the Ballon d'Or along with FIFA's World Player of the Year award. Acceleration was the heart of his game. ESPN's Tim Vickery wrote that Kaká running with the ball "had the power of a freight train". His own favourite goal came in a 2006 friendly against Argentina, when he picked up a deflected corner and outran Lionel Messi over three-quarters of the pitch to score. He was naturally right-footed, yet he could strike the ball hard and accurately with either foot and bend it from range. His vision made him a creator as much as a scorer, and he led the 2004–05 Champions League in assists. In his Milan prime he was intelligent and hard-working, dangerous one against one and on the counter. The catch was how much his game leaned on that burst. After a €67 million move to Real Madrid in 2009, knee and groin trouble, including left knee surgery in 2010, took away what the BBC's Carl Anka called the "explosive half-yard burst" he needed. Vickery felt that without it he no longer had the subtlety to stand out. He still won La Liga and the Copa del Rey in Madrid, but the Milan version never fully returned. For Brazil he was a 20-year-old member of the 2002 World Cup-winning squad and won the Golden Ball at the 2009 Confederations Cup. After a second spell at Milan and stints with São Paulo and Orlando City, he retired in 2017. Anka argues that because he was the last FIFA World Player of the Year before the Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo era, his standing has been "lost in a haze". Ronaldinho was more direct: for two or three seasons in Milan, "he was the best player in the world."