- 08/03/2025
Brilliant beginners and super starters: we reckon these are football's best debuts ever.
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00:00As I was aggressively informed by my girlfriend's father when I turned up to meet him in a t-shirt
00:04that ironically read World's Greatest Love Machine, first impressions count. In fact,
00:10you can likely mask over an entire lifetime of mediocrity if you just get off on the right foot.
00:14The beauty of football, of course, is that the right foot can literally be your right foot,
00:18and using it to make some vital contributions to your team's fortunes before those in the stands
00:22even fully know your name can see you idolised for years to come. I'm Adam Cleary, this is 442,
00:29and these are the 10 Greatest Debuts in Football History.
00:32Number 10, Ronaldo, Real Madrid, 2002. 61 seconds, that's all it took for Ronaldo to
00:39get off the mark in the white of Real Madrid. If you started listening to Frank Sinatra's
00:42my way when he comes on to replace Javier Portillo in the 64th minute,
00:46the big man's not even had regrets, and a few of them by the time Ronaldo's lashed the ball
00:50past the Alaves goalkeeper. Not content there, though, he later gleefully receives a pass from
00:54Steve McManaman of all people for a second, Maka hilariously asking for the ball back after
00:59playing him in, before then missing a fairly easy chance to notch a hat-trick. A miss, by the way,
01:03he has always asserted was deliberate so as to not set the bar too high for the rest of the season.
01:08Very clever. Number 9, Sergio Aguero, Manchester City, 2011.
01:13Two goals and an assist for Sergio Aguero, I don't find that at all impressive.
01:18Yeah, alright, fair enough, there were months-long spells during Aguero's time at City
01:22where it did sort of feel like he was doing that every single game. But what if I was to
01:26tell you that this particular haul came despite him not even muddying his boots until the 59th
01:30minute? Eh, yeah, see, pretty good. In a dazzling half-hour cameo, he arrived on the end of a
01:35Micah Richards cross for a tap-in, played a blind head-height backpass for David Silva to score,
01:40and then just leathered one in from fully 30 yards. Number 8, Alan Shearer, Southampton,
01:461988. A handy reminder to anyone who needs it that football wasn't invented in 1992 here,
01:51as the Premier League's record goalscorer was already banging them in four years before it
01:56even launched. Making his way through Southampton's academy, the Saints saw enough
01:59talent in a rosy-cheeked 17-year-old Alan Shearer to give him a full debut against
02:04high-flying Arsenal, themselves some eight games unbeaten. What followed were three goals that
02:09absolutely scream late-80s British football and come from a combined distance of about
02:15five very muddy yards. This did also make him the youngest ever scorer of a hat-trick in the
02:19English top flight, and that is a record that, much like his statue outside St James' Park,
02:24will likely be standing for a very long time. Number 7, Zinedine Zidane, France, 1994.
02:30Now, if you ever want to discuss the greatest possible contrast between someone's first and
02:34last appearance for a club, Zinedine Zidane's France career is probably where that conversation
02:39both starts and ends. 18 years before he'd head down the tunnel at the World Cup final with sorrow
02:44in his heart and Marco Materazzi's necklace imprinted on his forehead, Zizou arrived off
02:48the bench with his country 2-0 down to the cheques. Immediately looking like someone's
02:53much older brother deciding to bully a game in the playground, he weaved his way through
02:56three players before burying an unstoppable 30-yarder with five minutes to go. Not two minutes
03:01later, he leapt a clear foot and a half above everyone else in the box to score a header you
03:06would struggle to replicate with a stepladder. A great cameo, thought French football fans,
03:11but still surely not enough for him to take Captain Eric Cantona's place in the team.
03:15Not unless, I don't know, in the next few months he was about to dive boots-first into the crowd
03:19at Selhurst Park after being sent off against Crystal Palace and receive an enormous domestic
03:23and international football ban, but that's not gonna happen.
03:276. Fabrizio Ravinelli, Middlesbrough, 1996
03:31Yeah, so Middlesbrough in the mid-1990s feels more like a fever dream than it does actual
03:36footballing history. Returning them to the Premier League, Brian Robson decided that the best
03:40approach was to bring in some of the most creative, expressive players in world football
03:45to a part of the country famous for drowning a chicken cutlet in cheese sauce and 80% of
03:50its buildings being made out of corrugated metal. And apologies to any Middlesbrough fans who might
03:54take issue with that, I personally really like Ipamo, but I'm also crucially not scoring double
03:58figures in Serie A and getting modelling contracts off Dior. And the crazy thing is,
04:02this policy did actually work. For precisely one game. Joining samba stars like Juninho,
04:09Emerson and Robby Musto was Italian goalscorer Fabrizio Ravinelli, who promptly scored a hat-trick
04:15against the mighty Liverpool. Despite them being fourth at one stage, the results then
04:19spectacularly fell off a cliff and Borough were promptly relegated back whence they came.
04:23Oh well, it was worth a shot. 5. Gianluigi Buffon, Parma, 1995
04:28You see, great debuts aren't all about scoring goals, unless, well, you know, that's your job,
04:33and Gianluigi Buffon announced himself on the big stage with a shutout for the ages.
04:38Barely 17 years old and only four years after converting from an outfield player in the club's
04:43academy, he was thrown into the deep end against Carlo Ancelotti's all-conquering Milan side.
04:49The game somehow finished completely goalless thanks to Buffon repeatedly frustrating Roberto
04:54Baggio, Marco Simeone and Ali Dier's cousin George Weah. He might have made over 1,000
05:00plus competitive appearances after this and won every single accolade worth winning,
05:05but he'll never have forgotten his first. 4. Zlatan Ibrahimović, LA Galaxy, 2018
05:11Now what can be said about Zlatan Ibrahimović's US debut and indeed his entire career
05:17that hasn't already been said by the man himself about himself?
05:223-1 down, at home, in the Los Angeles Derby which is apparently a thing,
05:27on comes the great one and MLS is changed forever. Two minutes in and his presence alone is enough
05:32to allow Galaxy to pull one back, but the equaliser could not possibly have been more Zlatan
05:38if the ball had been covered in bad tattoos and started referring to itself in the third person.
05:44A volley 40 yards from goal sailed both into the net and into the history books with the same level
05:51of fim. His second arrived in suitably dramatic fashion with the game having ticked into injury
05:56time, he somehow outjumped two defenders and the goalkeeper to nod in the most dramatic of winners.
06:02You wanted Zlatan, he said in the press conference, I gave you Zlatan.
06:073-1 down, Manchester United, 2004 It's a tale as old as time,
06:12a once in a generation talent bursts onto the scene with his hometown team,
06:15secures a big money move to one of the biggest clubs in the world, but the step up is initially
06:20slightly too much for them. Not Wayne Rooney though, Wayne Rooney absolutely took the piss.
06:26Noping out of David Moyes Everton for a pricely 27 million, he arrived at Old Trafford still just
06:3118 years old and promptly put Fenerbahce's head down the toilet. Two goals in the first half of
06:36the second, a delightful long ranger were capped off with a brilliant free kick before his Manchester
06:41United career was even one hour old. And yeah, okay, he looks like he owns a failing chain of
06:46chip shops now, but that night in 2004, no other player in world football looked more exciting.
06:52None. 2-2, Erling Haaland, Borussia Dortmund 2020
06:56Getting two goals against West Ham in his proper Manchester City debut, because nobody
07:01counts the community shield, was an impressive start for Erling Haaland. But it was nothing,
07:05nothing compared to his arrival at Dortmund. With 55 minutes gone, his team's title challenge
07:10looked in tatters as they trailed 3-1 to Augsburg. They threw Haaland on and within
07:15three minutes he'd halved the deficit with a great strike from a narrow angle.
07:1911 minutes after that, and following an equaliser from Jadon Sancho,
07:22he raced through with Thorgan Hazard for a neat tap in. Nine minutes after that,
07:27he burst clear of the defence, doing that big weird gangly look at me, I'm Erling Haaland,
07:32I'm a superhuman freak run, and the turnaround was complete at 5-3. Or to, you know, put that
07:37another way, in Erling Haaland's first 20 minutes of German football, he scored a hat-trick with his
07:43first three shots and only his first 10 touches. He's an alien, he's not normal.
07:501-1, Alvaro Recoba, Inter Milan 1997
07:55Now if a time traveller had appeared in the Inter Milan dressing room ahead of this game
08:03and told those present that they would go down in the annals of footballing debut history,
08:07all eyes would have immediately turned to the 20-plus million Brazilian lacing his boots.
08:12But Ronaldo's debut is frankly nothing compared to that of his fellow debutant, Alvaro Recoba.
08:18Trailing 1-0 to Brescia, the Uruguayan came off the bench and decided to have his own,
08:23personal, goal-of-the-season competition in the half-hour that remained.
08:27The first, a rasper directly into the Cassonete Superiore, would have been enough,
08:32but the winner five minutes from time somehow managed to outdo it.
08:36Fully 30 yards from goal, he somehow both bends and wellies a free kick into the one part of the
08:42goal the keeper can't reach. I mean, look, he's that, he's standing there, he's that side,
08:47and he looks about six years old when it flies past him.
08:53and making it all the way till the end.
08:55Somebody's keen.
08:56While you're here, please do consider subscribing to the 442 YouTube channel.
08:59We've got loads of awesome football content dropping all through the week,
09:02as well as an amazing library of documentaries, player interviews and performance guides as well.
09:07Until next time though, thank you once again for watching.
09:09I do hope you enjoyed yourself and I'll see you soon.
09:12Goodbye.
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