Why Are So Few Players Equally Good With Both Feet?

by Stuart James, Jack Lang, and Mark Carey

Gael Clichy couldn’t believe his eyes.

“I could see four or five players playing with both feet, like Santi Cazorla. I’m like, ‘That’s not normal’.”

Clichy, who won the Premier League title with Arsenal and Manchester City and is now assistant coach with France Under-21s, shakes his head.

“We have one (two-footed) player with France Under-21s — (Rayan) Cherki, who plays for Lyon. That’s only the second player that I know who plays like this during all my career. So there’s Cherki, there’s Cazorla… and maybe (Ousmane) Dembele, who plays for Paris Saint-Germain now. And now, all of a sudden, I’m watching this team play, and they have four or five like this.”

That team was South Korea Under-21s, who defeated their French counterparts 3-0 in Le Havre in November.

Clichy had watched South Korea’s previous five matches to prepare for that game and was so taken aback by what he saw that he is already making plans to visit the Asian country to learn more about how they develop two-footed players.

“I can’t stop thinking, what if you take four or five of my players from the French team, or the team I will have if I become a coach in five or six years, and you have the possibility to play them right, left and centre because they can play with both feet?”.

On the face of it, that doesn’t seem too much to ask. Yet two-footed players — genuinely two-footed ones (we’re talking Glenn Hoddle and Kenny Dalglish levels) — are something of an enigma.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the most two-footed goalscorer in Premier League history is also from South Korea. Son Heung-min has scored 46 Premier League goals with his ‘weaker’ left — five more than Harry Kane, in second place. Robin van Persie’s “chocolate leg” — that’s what the Dutchman called his right — is third.

Son Woong-jung, Son’s father and former coach, explained to The Athletic a couple of years ago how their training program went way beyond practicing shooting with both feet at a young age.

“In Heung-min’s case, I knew he was right-footed but I made sure that socks, cleats, shoes, trousers, watch or anything like that, he put on his left side first, so he never forgot about the two-footedness,” he said.

Clichy’s backstory is interesting too, bearing in mind he spent the vast majority of his career at left-back despite being naturally right-footed.

The seeds for that transition were sown at a young age, when Clichy’s father was his coach (there’s a theme developing here) and disallowed any goal that his son scored with his right. Naturally, that encouraged Clichy to improve his left foot. But by far the biggest factor in the development of his then weaker foot was the time that he spent striking a ball against a wall at the football academy he attended in Castelmaurou, in the south of France.

By the time Clichy joined Arsenal in 2003, at the age of 18, his dominant foot was his left and it was his right that needed to catch up. In fact, he had turned into a left-back — and that was why manager Arsene Wenger signed him.

“If I’m being honest, I don’t think my dad thought, ‘He’s going to be a left-back’, or, ‘He’s gonna be playing professionally because of that (disallowing goals with his right)’. But I do believe if I was only a right-footed player, maybe the door for professional football would not have been open for me,” Clichy says.

Cazorla’s name often gets brought up on this topic and for good reason, given that the Spaniard was as close as you will get to an ambidextrous footballer in the modern era.

There is a clip of Cazorla preparing to take an outswinging corner for Arsenal at Watford with his right foot, only for his team-mate Laurent Koscielny to signal that he would like an inswinger instead. In normal circumstances, a different player would trot over to take the corner. Instead, Cazorla walks around the corner flag, readdresses the ball and delivers it left-footed.

The corner came to nothing, but the fact that the footage went viral says everything about how unusual it is to see a player confident enough to strike a dead ball with either foot.

There was a similar fuss on social media when Ivan Perisic took inswinging corners with his left and right foot for Tottenham against Chelsea a couple of years ago.

Within the game, former Premier League players talk about the ability that John Terry had to hit diagonals with his left, how beautifully Tom Huddlestone could strike a ball with either foot, and the way Cristiano Ronaldo worked religiously at a young age to turn a potential weakness into a strength.

There will, of course, be other examples too — that Zinedine Zidane volley in the 2002 Champions League final said everything about the Frenchman’s technique with his weaker foot — but it’s not a long list by any stretch and, interestingly, there’s little to suggest (with apologies to Adam Lallana, in particular) that the generation behind them are markedly different.

The StatsBomb data featured later in this article makes for fascinating reading and shows just how rarely some of the top Premier League players use their weaker foot to pass. Who would have thought, for example, that Mateo Kovacic, a central midfielder, averages only two passes out of every 100 with his left foot for Manchester City?

The data for a certain Brazilian winger at Manchester United is probably less surprising.

“If Antony got on a bike, he’d just cycle round in circles, wouldn’t he? Because his left leg is brilliant and his right leg is practically not there,” Steve Wilson, the BBC commentator, said during United’s 4-2 victory over Newport County in the FA Cup last month. Ironically, Antony went on to score with his right foot later in that game.

More commonly, television commentators say the opposite to Wilson and end up defending a player who squanders a chance by highlighting how it “was on their weaker foot” — a comment that leaves a lot of football fans scratching their heads.

Their argument is simple: How can a professional footballer, who is playing at the highest level and often getting paid millions to do so, be excused for a poor shot because it was on their weaker foot?

A quiz question for you to put to your friends: Only two players have scored both a right- and left-footed penalty in the Premier League. Who are they?

The answer is Obafemi Martins, the former Newcastle and Birmingham striker, and Bobby Zamora, who played in the Premier League for Tottenham, West Ham, Fulham and Queens Park Rangers.

Zamora laughs. “I only knew that (penalty stat) when I was at QPR, towards the end of my career in the Premier League,” he says. “I’d scored a couple of free kicks with my left foot and I could very easily have done it with my right foot too. I thought, ‘S**t, let me do that, because nobody is going to do that as well!’.”

Naturally left-footed, Zamora wasn’t showing off when he scored a penalty for Fulham against Newcastle with his right. Andreas Brehme famously, and remarkably, did something similar for West Germany against Argentina in the 1990 World Cup final, as did the USWNT player Brandi Chastain in their 1999 World Cup final against China — after being asked to do so by her coach to confuse the opposition goalkeeper.

For Zamora, who had already scored several outstanding goals for Fulham with his right foot, including a fantastic strike against Shakhtar Donetsk during their run to the Europa League final in 2010, his Newcastle penalty seemed perfectly “normal”.

“I think I’m naturally left-footed,” Zamora explains. “But all the kids when I grew up — I’m talking about aged five or six, in the street — seemed to be right-footed. I thought to myself, ‘I’m a bit weird. That’s not right.’ So I ended up playing with my right foot. And I suppose when you learn something when you’re young, it’s maybe a little easier. But by the age of 10 or 11, when I played in Sunday teams, I was just happy with both.”

In the case of Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne, who scored a hat-trick of goals with his ‘weaker’ foot against Wolves two years ago and is a superb striker of the ball with both, everything goes back to one of his friends’ parents scolding him for ruining their back garden when he was a child.

“I wasn’t allowed to shoot with my right, because I was killing all the flowers,” De Bruyne said. “They told me to shoot with my left, and I was really young, so I think I practiced it a lot and it became more natural to shoot with either.”

There is some creative outside-the-box thinking going on elsewhere.

At AFC Wimbledon in League Two, English football’s fourth tier, academy players have to wear an odd sock on their weaker foot during training sessions and even in matches.

Wimbledon accept that by highlighting a player’s weaker foot it helps the opposition in games, but that in itself provides another incentive to practise, improve and work towards the ultimate reward: matching socks for anyone who becomes two-footed.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of developing both feet at the earliest opportunity.

“You have to start encouraging it at academy level and stimulate it from a young age, when the central nervous system is still developing,” Vitor Pereira, the Al-Shabab manager who previously coached Fenerbahce and worked in the Porto academy, told The Athletic when discussing Arda Guler, a gifted Turkish teenager who signed for Real Madrid last year.

“It’s like learning to swim or ride a bike: it’s easy when we’re kids, because we assimilate everything easily and we have good coordination, but it’s much harder if you start after the age of 20.”

Some professional footballers try to play catch-up on their own time — and out of sight, too. As bizarre as this sounds, there are Premier League players who pay for one-to-one coaching in their back gardens, where they focus on improving their weaker foot without fear of anyone seeing their mistakes.

Ultimately, though, there is no shortcut to success, whether training in private or in public.

“You need to have a very resilient player, because it will take some work,” Clichy adds, reflecting on the difficulties he went through when trying to bring his right foot up to speed after he joined Arsenal. “Sometimes as a player, you also will feel ashamed of that, because you will see yourself struggle, you are exposed.”

Clichy remembers Arsenal team-mate Thierry Henry regularly taking him aside for weaker-foot practice after training, to work on striking the ball with their laces.

“I was like, ‘My right is not that good any more, I’m actually left-footed’,” Clichy recalls. “At the beginning, (shooting with) my right was like bananas, going this way and that way. But then, after a few weeks — because it goes quickly when you’re really into it — you grow in confidence.”