The art of goalkeeping: memorializing Lev Yashin

Abstract

Lev Yashin remains, in the eyes of many, the greatest goalkeeper, ever to have played the game of football. Since his death in 1990, coinciding with the dying days of the Soviet Union, his legacy has played an important role in post-Soviet history, a factor that is gaining more importance as Russia prepares to host the 2018 World Cup tournament. Yashin’s memory is notably being maintained in the public perception not least through the material form of two key sculptures erected in Moscow in the late 1990s. Yet these works, part of a wider international trend to memorialize footballers in the form of public monuments, offer more than a unique insight into Yashin’s career, status and reputation. They also address concerns about the relationship between art and sport as it emerged historically in the Soviet Union and how that cultural legacy is being re-explored in a post-Soviet context. Accordingly this essay examines these two key examples of football statuary as significant case studies through which issues relating to Soviet sport, history and art can be more widely analysed.

Notes

1. Though selected for the USSR squad, the then 40-year old Yashin did not play at the 1970 World Cup finals in Mexico, though his experience was regarded as invaluable as a squad member.

2. At least three biographies of Yashin have been published in Russian in recent years. These include Asaulov 2008; Galedin 2014; and Soskin 2014.

3. For an overview of football in the late Tsarist period see McReynolds 2003.

4. For a critical analysis of this film, see Haynes 2007.

5. Lyrics reproduced in von Geldern and Stites 1995.

6. It should be noted, however, that Starostin was protected from the worst excesses of camp life as a consequence of his footballing reputation; the football-loving camp commander instead recruited Starostin to coach the local football team.

7. As Yashin’s widow ValentinaYashina has indicated, Yashin’s famous black jersey was in fact dark blue, and the famous flat cap he wore in his early days was stolen by a spectator during a pitch invasion following the Soviet Union’s victory in the 1960 European Championship final (Rabiner 2013).