Great Soccer Players: Rivaldo

This hub is the third in a series of small tributes to some of the world's greatest ever soccer players, these will be appearing in no particular order and the series has no fixed amount of players to feature! The inspiration behind this series is my hub The Best 5 Footballers of the Nineties, this profile of Rivaldo is almost identical to the one on that feature. Look out for more to come in the series, which I will eventually interlink at the bottom of each hub!

Enough has been said about Ronaldo's influence on the Brazil team in number 2 of this series, and indeed his hugely successful career, but Ronaldo was not the only legendary Brazilian to appear in the nineties. Step forward Rivaldo, a creative and charismatic attacking midfielder whose career brought 34 goals in 74 matches for his national team. Rivaldo was a play-maker pure and simple, the talisman of the Brazilian team and played a huge part in Ronaldo's international success too.

Rivaldo, just like 'The Scientist' and 'The Phenomenom' is a former FIFA World player of the year, having won the award in 1999. He won the European player of the year award in the same year. Rivaldo really was the complete player, he had vision, creativity, a high work ethic, would defend, would attack. An in-form Rivaldo was an unstoppable player. What made him that little bit extra special however, in my personal opinion, was the sheer number of goals he could score from midfield. Although Rivaldo could play up front, he played the vast majority of his career in an attacking midfield role behind behind the front two. If you had never seen Rivaldo play, and were to look at his career stats, you would hazard a guess at Rivaldo being a very competent striker. Approximately one goal in every two for Barcelona, where he enjoyed the most successful years of his career, helped the club to two consecutive La Liga titles as well as other honours.

After five years at Barcelona, where many of their fans consider Rivaldo to be their greatest ever player, he spent a solitary year at AC Milan in Italy. It was a season that brought him the UEFA Champions League winners medal that he so desired and deserved. This success signalled the start of his winding down. A brief move back to Brazil followed, the to Greece to play for Olympiakos and AEK Athens, he is currently playing in the Uzbek league at the age of 37. Rivaldo has left a legacy, particularly in Spain where he was at times completely unstoppable. He fast approaches the inevitable end of his career having scored an incredible 294 goals in 589 games as of summer 2009 and having achieved the three biggest accolades in world soccer. He will leave with him a legacy that will be carried to the graves of all soccer fans of the past fifteen years.