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It may surprise you to know that athletes worldwide have their own little ritual or “superstition” that they performed before the start of the game. The athletes do this to bestow themselves or/and their team to boost their confidence, but mostly to ensure they walk out of the game victorious.  This is an article on good luck rituals.

Even the world of football is in on these bizarre rituals or hocus pocus (whatever you may want to call it). Most players prefer to wear the right footgear before starting a game to grant them good luck. However, some engage in even more bizarre practices than this. But whether the fans find it weird or creepy, it really doesn’t matter so long as our team gets to win in the end, right?

So, without further ado, let’s take a gander at some of the most unusual/bizarre/interesting/fascinating football rituals that we’ve ever seen in our lives.

Article on Good Luck Rituals

• Kolo Toure

Starting off this article on good luck rituals is Ivorian Kolo Toure. Toure insists on being the last player to come out on the pitch. It might sound a bit of a harmless superstition, but it once landed him in hot water amidst the Champions League game between Roma and Arsenal, his former club.

With William Gallas, a former central defensive partner of Toure, getting halftime treatment after an injury, Toure would then stop coming out before Gallas and the game restarted without them. Later on, Toure got on the field without the referee’s permission and was penalized with a yellow card as a result.

• Johan Cruyff Chewing Gum

Whoever thought chewing gum, of all footballer rituals, would be one of the good luck rituals to success? The late great Johan Cruyff did, and he did this every time before the start of a match. The first thing that the Dutch player would do would be to box his own goalkeeper right in the stomach, before walking over the pitch and then spit out his chewing gum in the same direction of his rival team’s goal.

Nobody knew exactly what was going on when they saw Johan doing this, but he later admitted during an interview that he did this ritual only to concentrate better in a game. There was one time during the European Cup final in 1969, where he forgot his chewing gum, which resulted in his team Ajax Amsterdam going down against AC Milan 4:1.

• John Terry

Another entry in our article on good luck rituals is John Terry. Normally you’d see either one or three superstitions at Max from a certain player during a game. Still, former England skipper John Terry admitted to The Mirror’s John Cross that he has approximately 50 superstitions to attend to before the start of a match. As a matter of fact, these superstitions are so lengthy that they could also give the Rain Man a run for his money.

You might want to sit down and write this one. Before starting a game, Terry gets into his car and always listens to the same Usher CD, parks his car at the exact same spot, sits on the same seat of his team bus, ties tapes around his socks about three times, cuts his shin pads’ tubular grip at exactly the same length among so many others. Terry has even used the exact same pair of ‘lucky’ shin pads for the last 10 years before losing them in Barcelona at an away game.

One of his rituals also involved wearing a complete kit (featuring his lucky shin pads) for a match that he even got suspended for. Now that’s taking the bizarre to a whole other level.

• Cesc Fabregas Always Kisses a Ring from His Wife Four Times

Cesc Fabregas, current Monaco and Spain midfielder, has a strange, if not cute, the habit of kissing his wife’s gifted ring four times before going onto the pitch. Strangely though, Fábregas says that even though he isn’t superstitious, he considers this an act of good luck.

Fabregas says that when he started doing this, it didn’t stop as it went well. After kissing his wife’s gifted ring four times, he would leave it in his locker and head straight out onto the pitch. The strangeness doesn’t stop there as Cesc believes kissing his ring four times is equivalent to his lucky number, which also happens to be 4, and is also the exact number of the shirt that he’s been wearing throughout his whole career.

• Laurent Blanc’s kiss on Fabian Barthez’s Head

The 1998 FIFA World Cup was the beginning of one of the strangest game-opening behaviors that football fans had ever witnessed when Laurent Blanc planted a kiss upon the ball, shiny head of French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez.

As a matter of fact, the French team engaged in a string of odd and bizarre rituals before winning their first-ever World Cup. Every team member would sit in the same spot on their team bus before making their way to the game, but not before listening to the feminist anthem of Gloria Gaynor ‘I Will Survive’ in their dressing room.

• Malvin Kamara

And the cap off this article on good luck rituals, we present to you perhaps the strangest of them all. The former footballer Malvin Kamara played for several teams such as Port Vale, Cardiff City, MK Dons, Grimsby, and Huddersfield before focusing his attention on non-league football. 

But before venturing off to the unknown, Kamara will always be remembered for practicing the strangest of strange rituals before heading out to a game. Kamara’s pre-match ritual involved watching the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. We honestly couldn’t make this up even if we wanted to. Kamara just that watching the film puts him in the right mood, saying that it calms his nerves and offers him good luck. 

Well, everybody has a favorite childhood film that they like to go back to in order to calm or cheer themselves up when they’re feeling down, so that’s pretty relatable.