Welcome to the Soccer Tavern, where we’re discussing the history, culture, and philosophy of the beautiful game. My name is Dave and in this video, we’re talking about the origin of the soccer term ‘rabona’. Pull up a seat & let’s start the discussion.
A rabona is a move where a player with the ball kicks the ball by bringing their opposite leg behind their standing leg. So, if I have the ball on the left side of my body, I would let the ball drift just outside my left foot and swing by right leg behind my planted left leg to pass, cross, or shoot the ball.
A rabona can be used if a player is not confident with using a weaker foot. It can also be used to confuse or trick defenders. And it can just be used to showboat as a display of skill.
The move gained widespread attention and popularity in the 1970s when Italian player Giovanni Roccotelli famously used the move to assist a goal in 1978. Roccotelli claims he had an intuition to perform the move while playing soccer in the streets in the 1950s while he was a child.
Given there wasn’t television or global media coverage of the sport, Roccotelli likely had never seen the move before and it was intuition to him.
Having said that, Roccotelli was not the creator of the rabona. No one knows for certain who came up with the move, but the first recorded use of it came in 1948 in a match in Argentina.
Estudiantes de la Plata and Rosario Central were playing in a match when Estudiantes player Ricardo Infante scored a goal from 35 yards out using a rabona.
As a result of the never before seen goal, an Argentine soccer magazine called El Gráfico, included a picture of Infante scoring the wonder goal on its cover.
The picture was captioned “El infante que se hizo la rabona”. This translates from Spanish as “Infante played hooky” or “Infante skipped school.” It implied Infante skipped using his weaker foot to kick the ball.
In 1998, for the 50th anniversary of the goal, Infante cited the lack of television and media coverage in the 1940s as the reason he was not given credit as the move’s creator and why many still thought Roccotelli was the first to use a rabona.
Now, you know the first person to use the rabona and why it’s called a rabona in the first place. If you have anything else to add to the discussion, please let us know in the comments section below the video.
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