Curling Free-Kick – Bending The Ball Around The Wall And Into The Net

The curling free-kick is a strike that sees you bend the ball through the air, wrapping it around the defensive wall and back towards the goal. It is one of the most admired skills in the entire game, and the reason so many youngsters can be found practising it in the park for hours on end. Unlike the knuckleball, which is all about removing spin so the ball wobbles unpredictably, the curling free-kick relies on putting as much spin on the ball as possible so that it follows a lovely, predictable arc into the top corner, which the goalkeeper can do almost nothing about.

The reason it is so effective is that it lets you get around the obstacle of the wall, which is placed precisely to block the direct route to goal. By bending the ball around the outside of the wall and getting it to dip back down in time, you can find a way into the net that the goalkeeper simply cannot cover. The player most associated with the skill is David Beckham, whose ability to whip the ball around a wall and into the top corner made him one of the finest dead-ball specialists the game has ever seen, none more so than the famous free-kick he scored against Greece in 2001 to send England to the World Cup.

To carry it off, you approach the ball from a slight angle rather than straight on, which gives you the room to swing your leg across it. The key is in the contact, striking across and through the ball with the inside of your foot, brushing around its outer edge to impart the sidespin that makes it curve. A full, sweeping follow-through, with your foot finishing high across your body, is what generates the bend and the dip. Getting the ball up and over the wall whilst still bringing it back down in time takes a fine combination of height, power and spin.

There is no getting away from the fact that this is a difficult skill to master, requiring you to get a number of different elements working together all at once. That is exactly why the best free-kick takers spend so many hours practising, drilling the same technique over and over until they know exactly how the ball is going to behave. The best thing you can do is to set up a wall of some sort, even if it’s just a few objects, and practise bending the ball around it and back down towards a target. Get it right, and you’ll have the sort of weapon that can win a match out of nothing.