Lev Yashin Print, Vintage Football Poster, Soviet Union Retro Wall Art, Goalkeeper Gift, Black and White Sports Print

YASHIN'S USSR — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of URSS di Yashin, 1956-1960.

One. In seventy years of the Ballon d'Or, exactly one goalkeeper has ever won it. He won it in 1963, he played for one club in one city for twenty years, and no goalkeeper has come near it since.

His name was Lev Yashin. He dressed entirely in black, which was partly practical and partly not, and the people in western Europe who saw him only now and then called him the Black Spider. In Moscow they mostly just called him Lev.

He was a factory boy before he was a footballer. When the war came his family was moved east, and he went to work at a machine bench at about twelve, in the way children did then in that country. He came back to Moscow, joined Dynamo, and spent his first years as the third goalkeeper, watching. He was also good enough on ice to win a cup with Dynamo's hockey team, and he chose football, which at the time was the less certain of the two.

What he changed is easy to write down and was not easy to do. Before him a goalkeeper stayed on his line and waited. Yashin left it. He came out for crosses, punched, took charge of his area, shouted at defenders older than he was, and when he had the ball he threw it out quickly to start the attack instead of hitting it away. Every goalkeeper playing today does a version of what he did. Almost none of them know whose idea it was.

He won Olympic gold in Melbourne in 1956, and the first European Nations' Cup in 1960, a competition so young that only seventeen countries bothered to enter. In 1962 he had a bad World Cup and the press at home took him apart. He was thirty-three and it was meant to be finished.

It was not. But he never played a single season outside the Soviet Union. He was not allowed to, and by then nobody was really asking.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.