Marco van Basten: the perfect number nine
Elegant, powerful and impossibly complete, Marco van Basten was the ideal centre-forward of his era — a striker whose brilliance was matched only by the cruelty of how early it ended.
The complete striker
Marco van Basten seemed to have been designed as the perfect centre-forward. Tall and slim, he combined the aerial power of a target man with the touch, balance and finishing of a far smaller player. He could score every kind of goal — headers, volleys, curled finishes, improvised flicks — and made the difficult look inevitable. Emerging at Ajax as the heir to the club's great attacking tradition, he scored at a relentless rate from the start, marking himself out as the most gifted striker of his generation.
The Milan years
Van Basten moved to AC Milan and became the spearhead of one of the greatest club sides ever assembled, alongside his Dutch compatriots Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard. Under Arrigo Sacchi, that Milan team played a pressing, attacking football that reshaped the European game, and van Basten was its finishing point. He won league titles and European Cups and was named European Footballer of the Year three times, the ultimate individual recognition of a striker at the very peak of his powers.
The volley
His single most famous moment came with the Netherlands at the 1988 European Championship. In the final against the Soviet Union, van Basten met a high, looping cross from an almost impossible angle near the byline and volleyed it first time into the far corner — a goal so audacious it seemed to defy geometry. It sealed the only major international trophy the Netherlands have ever won and remains one of the most replayed strikes in the history of the game.
The cruel ending
For all his brilliance, van Basten's career was cut tragically short. A chronic ankle injury, worsened by repeated challenges and operations, forced him to stop playing when he was still in his twenties and should have had years at his peak ahead of him. The sport was robbed of one of its supreme talents far too soon. He later returned as a coach, but he is remembered above all for what he was as a player: the closest thing the game has seen to a perfect number nine.