We have to ask this first. “For me, it’s the best goal I ever scored in my career,” says George Weah, and it is good to have one of the immutable truths of football confirmed first-hand. We are talking, of course, about his solo effort for AC Milan on the first day of the 1996/97 Serie A season against Hellas Verona, a goal which has no equal in the modern game.
You know the one, Weah charging coast-to-coast from one penalty box to the other on what one of his teammates that day, the great Zvonimir Boban, described as an “incredible” run, before smashing home to seal a Rossoneri win.
It is a goal that gets greater every time you watch the footage and, remarkably, it still tends to be the first thing you think of when you think of Weah. Remarkably, because the Liberian centre-forward piled up landmarks throughout a stellar, near-two-decade career in the professional game, the peak of which encompassed 13 years as one of the most feared strikers in European football.
Even if it was more typical of the time, it feels astonishing viewed from a modern perspective that Weah was 21-years-old before he was brought to Europe. Today he is of no doubt of the major outside-protagonist who put him on the road to success. “God bless Arsène Wenger for making this career work out,” he emphasises, without any prompting. The legendary French coach leant heavily on African talent to build his AS Monaco teams but Weah is insistent that Wenger’s human side made it all work.
“[I thank him] for welcoming me personally,” he continues, “as a father figure. He made me what I was in my career. He’s the brain behind the talent. He was the angel that God sent to rescue me. I say that because I had the talent, but nobody thought that talent would be shown to the rest of the world. Thank God for Arsène Wenger.” After four prolific seasons in the Principality – and despite fulfilling a dream – it turned out Wenger and AS Monaco was only the beginning.
In 1992 Weah headed north to Paris Saint-Germain, and over three wildly successful campaigns he made all of his – and PSG’s – craziest dreams come true. There was only the second Ligue 1 title in the club’s history in 1994 among four trophies but it was really all the European nights that lit the French capital’s passion for football like never before. Coach Luis Fernández surrounded the striker with great players (Rai, Alain Roche, David Ginola) who thrilled the Parc des Princes.
But Weah reached new heights on a personal level, being the UEFA Champions League’s top scorer in 1994/95 on PSG’s way to the semi-finals and on his way to becoming the first African Ballon d’Or winner. He seems to enjoy talking about perhaps his second most famous goal, the solo winner for PSG at Bayern Munich’s Olympiastadion in the autumn of 1994, even more as he swishes his right hand in a slalom motion, complete with a ‘whoosh!’ every time he goes past a defender, much to the delight of everyone in the room.
There was a bit of extra motivation. “I remember Lothar Matthäus saying ”George Weah’s not one of the best,” he smiles, “so I had to show them. But I was frustrated when I got there because I was on the bench. [The coaching staff] told me I was going to finish the game, so I had to show what I could do. The first ball I got, I had to display my dazzle, so [Matthäus] could know. He was among those guys, the defenders [I beat]. I love him; Lothar is a great defender, but George Weah is a better attacker. He was just against one of the greatest number nines in the world, which is what I was.”
Despite his individual feats, Weah firmly believes his collective efforts won him the ultimate prize. “I think the Ballon d’Or, at the time when I won,” he reflects, “was about everything, not just scoring goals. I was one of the strikers who was about team play. I made other players score. In my mind it was never about being the top scorer. I wanted my team to win championships. And that’s why the goals I scored were about my team winning titles – 1-0s, 1-1s, 2-1s. I scored goals that brought victory.”
He leaps forward to his second Scudetto at Milan, in his final season at the club. “A game that I remember is against Juventus,” he recalls of the third-last game of the season, with Sven-Göran Eriksson’s star-studded SS Lazio breathing down Milanese necks. “We saw that Lazio were already leading. We came back [from half-time], I scored the two goals and we went one point ahead. I was a masked man! When the team needed a goal to win, that’s the kind of goal I scored.” As he speaks, the light in the room goes off. Weah clenches his fists and it comes back on, to laughter. “I make things happen!” he chuckles.
While Weah is more than confident in his own qualities as a player – “I was fast, strong and had technique” – he is also at pains to point out his industry. Describing that goal against Verona again, he talks of it being the result of “struggle” and “applied effort,” not just inspiration. “First of all I just tried to take the ball out of the [Milan] area,” he admits, “and then I saw the opportunity to move forward. And then I saw the way through.” Then, and always, it was about appetite. “You can see I was fighting,” he continues. “I fought for that goal. When I came home, I ate three steaks.”
The finish, Weah concedes, was the most enjoyable part. “The best part of the whole action was when I pushed the ball one last time and lifted my head to see the corner [of the goal].” The rest is history. Yet still, all these years on, he remains amazed by his own composure. “After struggling through, falling… who does that?” We all know the answer to that one: George Weah does.
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