The Chigwada Spin: Analysing a football skill you won't have ever seen before (2024)

When did you last think, “I have never seen that before” while watching a football match?

While the Manchester City first team were preparing for Arsenal’s visit to the Etihad last Sunday, City’s under-17s were playing in the Future Cup, an annual youth tournament organised by the Dutch club Ajax, their opponents last Saturday.

At the Etihad Stadium, there was little room for unpredictability and off-the-cuff brilliance as Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta micromanaged their sides to a 0-0 stalemate, dubbed “one of the worst games of the season” by talkSPORT radio presenter Jeff Stelling. Only if you had never seen a football game before would you have come away from that fixture having been inspired by something new and unique.

Fortunately for us, over in Amsterdam, the City youngster David Chigwada was liberated from the creative shackles of what many had billed as a Premier League title decider.

With City leading Ajax 1-0 in the 33rd minute, Chigwada chased the ball towards the left touchline with his back to goal. With nobody in a City shirt in view and an Ajax defender in close pursuit, the 16-year-old’s options were limited: Hold the ball in the corner and wait for reinforcements; hook a pass 20 yards back down the wing towards a team-mate near the halfway line; or produce a moment of magic to lose his man and break ahead towards goal.

He chose the latter. Let’s break it down…

Dat wordt een nachtje niet slapen… 👀🥜#FutureCup pic.twitter.com/1RNMIRlXiB

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— ESPN NL (@ESPNnl) March 30, 2024

The England youth international takes a quick look back down the line and realises he does not like his options. He then shapes to play a pass in that direction, leading his marker to slightly drop his body weight towards his left foot while standing upright. This leaves the defender with his legs wide open, offering a route to goal for Chigwada if he can engineer a sharp and clever turn.

With his marker a yard away, he shapes to roll the ball away from goal, seemingly moving away from danger.

Crucially, however, he begins this manoeuvre while lifting his standing left foot off the ground and behind his right. Instead of rolling the ball away from goal or going for a ‘Cruyff turn’ made famous by Ajax legend Johan Cruyff, Chigwada backheels the ball with his right foot to his left while pulling his marker towards him by his shirt.

Then, in one genius move, he spins and nutmegs the Ajax defender with the outside of his left foot. The backspin on the ball means it is almost stationary when he catches up with it.

His body’s momentum from the skill pushes him backwards, and he takes the defender in that direction, but he shows great power to push off his left foot and sprint past his opponent to recover the ball and break towards goal.

To the defender’s credit, he did catch up with Chigwada and help nullify the City attack.

The first reply to ESPN Netherlands’ tweet of a clip of the skill translates to English as: “If I were to make that movement, my cruciate ligaments would be behind the billboards.”

We asked some experts what they thought.

“What stands out to me is the freedom and personality to try something like that,” said Harry Brooks, director of RH Football, a football coaching, mentoring and analysis company tailored to academy players. “If you asked any football player to do that skill in isolation, they’d be able to do it. It’s not that difficult, technically. But the instinct to do it in the moment and make it happen there and then is what is so impressive to me.”

It feels fitting that the turn would reach its next stage of evolution on the Ajax academy grounds, where Cruyff developed from prodigious talent to one of the greatest players in football history. Though he later said he did not practise “tricks” — in his view, the Cruyff turn was intuitive and natural — it has been a breeding ground for generations of technically gifted Dutch talent, from Cruyff to Dennis Bergkamp to Frenkie de Jong.

“I never did tricks in training or during my free time,” Cruyff said when recounting his trick against Sweden during the 1974 World Cup. “I saw something, I did it, and it just came off. There was an opponent there, and I had to outplay him, and (the Cruyff turn) was the easiest way.”

Whether the same applies to the ‘Chigwada spin’ or the ‘Chigwada chop’ — we welcome better suggestions in the comments section — remains to be clarified. Still, given the intricacy of the three-part move, it’s fair to conclude there’s something more deliberate about the process in this case. Chigwada may have taken inspiration from Yannick Bolasie, one of the Premier League’s most maverick tricksters and entertainers of the past decade.

“There are two things that stand out with that skill,” says Ricky-Lee Griffiths, an FA-qualified coach and analyst. “First, how quickly he shifts his body to face the opposite direction, and then how he moves his feet so quickly. It reminds me of Bolasie when he was at Crystal Palace. He’d be backed into a corner but manage to shift his feet so fast that the defenders have no chance.”

Playing for Palace against Tottenham Hotspur in December 2014, Bolasie debuted the self-titled ‘Bolasie Flick’, where, while on the half-turn near the touchline, he dragged the ball from his right foot to his left and flicked it over Christian Eriksen at waist level.

🌪 Bolasie flick 🌪

Skill of the Decade, but #PalaceMomentoftheDecade?

You decide 👉 https://t.co/uZRgqC5qnI #CPFC pic.twitter.com/ypbBsIQypH

— Crystal Palace F.C. (@CPFC) December 19, 2019

“Now and again, you’ll get a player who goes outside the box, with a coach who allows him to do that stuff,” says Brooks. “That’s what Bolasie had and it’s what I’d like to think happened here. Nowadays, these skills are not always the most natural and free-flowing because coaches want players to try things in certain areas and stick to certain roles. This can hurt a player’s ability to build ingenuity.

“You don’t always see that freedom, even at youth level. But every now and again, you’ll get personalities that can go above that.”

Bolasie later claimed he had first demonstrated this trick in the playground at secondary school and was prompted to use it in the Premier League by a former class-mate.

Chigwada, who joined City from Blackburn Rovers in 2022 and is still in school, will surely have been asked to replicate the trick on his friends this week during a jumpers-for-goalposts game of five-a-side. Here’s hoping he continues to be encouraged to display that playground trickery on the pitch as he progresses through the ranks in academy football.