Join The Club
A great diving header is the perfect marriage of anticipation, athleticism, and technique.
Naturally enough, that means the biggest stage in international football has been blessed with a few of them down the years.
Here's some of the most iconic diving headers from World Cup history.
Play our FREE match predictor and win £1k
Robin van Persie (Netherlands vs Spain, 2014)
Not just the best and most iconic diving headers in World Cup history, but one of the best goals ever scored at the tournament.
Context was important, too. Fate had conspired to draw the Netherlands and Spain together in both sides' first game of the group stage in a repeat of a dreadfully bad-tempered final won by Spain four years earlier.
Van Persie's header cancelled out Xabi Alonso's penalty just before half time, with the Dutch going on to win 5-1 and contribute to Spain's shock elimination at the group stage.
But the goal was brilliant in its own right, with Daley Blind delivering an inch-perfect cross from just past the halfway line that found Van Persie's storming run into the box for the striker to soar onto and loop past a helpless Iker Casillas. Beautiful.
Yordan Letchkov (Bulgaria vs Germany, 1994)
And speaking of surprise defeats for reigning champions...
Bulgaria were one of the surprise packages of the 1994 World Cup, shaking off a 3-0 defeat to Nigeria in their opening game in impressive fashion with a 4-0 walloping of Greece and a 2-0 upset over Argentina
A victory on penalties over Mexico put them into the quarter-finals, where their story was expected to come to an end against 1990 winners Germany.
Lothar Matthaus' penalty seemed to have the game on script, but Hristo Stoichkov's free kick drew them level. Germany were stunned, and just three mintues later, Yordan Letchkov got himself free in the box to power home an unstoppable diving header that dumped Germany out of the competition.
Jurgen Klinsmann (West Germany vs Yugoslavia, 1990)
Jurgen Klinsmann was notoriously fond of a dive, but he actually put it to clinical effect in West Germany's opening game of the 1990 World Cup.
That surely can't have been what left-back Andreas Brehme had in mind when he looked for Klinsmann at the near post: a back-header on to a teammate across the six yard box would have been the more sensible way for Klinsmann to meet it.
But the striker had other ideas as he caught a defender off-guard by launching himself at the ball and getting a delicate but precise touch that found the far bottom corner.
Martin Dahlin (Sweden vs Russia, 1994)
Yeah, they loved a diving header in the early 1990s, apparently.
This effort from the group stage at USA 94 is about as bread and butter as a diving header gets: a cross from the Sweden right, weighted just right for Martin Dahlin to run onto and butt into the net.
The actual diving element of it looks like an unnecessary flourish at first glance, but no pun intended there, quite intentionally, because it is Dahlin's leap that imparts all the pace onto the ball and powers it into the top corner.
Joe Gaetjens (USA vs England, 1950)
Good luck finding any decent footage of this one - but it earns its place on this list purely for what it meant.
You'll know the story by now. England finally deigned to actually show up to a World Cup, having previously snubbed the competition feeling they had no need to prove their obvious superiority to the rest of planet Earth.
Yeah...not so much. After beating Chile in their first group stage game, England went head-to-head with a team of American part-timers who humbled the Three Lions with a 1-0 victory, courtesy of Haitian-born Joe Gaetjans. It remains one of the most infamous results in England's history - and one of the most celebrated in the United States'.
