8 players who won the World Cup and nothing else in their entire football career | OneFootball

Lifting the World Cup is the ultimate dream for every footballer – and for a select few in the history of the sport, it’s the only dream they fulfilled.

Generally to be good enough to reach the absolute pinnacle of the international game, you have to be pretty special. Take a look at the recent World Cup winners – Argentina, France, Germany – who all had squads stacked with world-class, ludicrously decorated superstars.

But through a quirk of fate, there are a few World Cup winners who managed to not win a single other thing. If you’re only going to win one trophy, you might as well make it a good one.

Here are the only eight players we could find who won the World Cup and no other trophies in their football careers.

Ruben Moran

Dusting off the history books to get us started.

‘El Tiza’ became the first player to win the World Cup as a teenager, representing Uruguay in 1950. He only played one match at the tournament, but it was the historic, legendary 1-0 victory over Brazil – not the final, with a round-robin format back then, but the decisive match.

Details about Moran are relatively scarce, but he retired four years later. He didn’t win anything in his brief time at Montevideo-based Cerro.

Toni Turek

A name you’re probably unfamiliar with unless you’re a football history buff with a few Jonathan Wilson books on your shelf.

If you are that kind of footballing anorak (no judgement; you’re among friends here), you’ll recognise Turek as West Germany’s goalkeeper when they produced the mother of all upsets to defeat Hungary in the 1954 World Cup final.

Ferenc Puskas scored past Turek after just six minutes. Moments later, the Mighty Magyars were two goals up. But he didn’t concede any more against that era-defining team as West Germany produced an unthinkable three-goal comeback.

Turek represented Eintracht Frankfurt and Fortuna Dusseldorf in his club career, but nothing ever came close to matching the miracle of Bern.

George Cohen

Fulham legend Cohen played every minute of every game for England at the 1966 World Cup.

George Best claimed he was “the best full-back I ever played against” and remains the standard-bearer for English right-backs to this day.

But he didn’t represent any club besides Fulham, who have famously never won a trophy.

Jimmy Armfield

A non-playing member of Alf Ramsey’s squad, Armfield earned 43 senior caps for the Three Lions but was a back-up to Cohen in ’66 and never made it off the bench on home soil that summer.

He was also a legendary one-club man, having made over 600 appearances for Blackpool over the course of his 17-year club career. But he only came into the team the year after the club’s only-ever major trophy, the 1953 FA Cup.

Armfield later came close to completing a unique double, having led Leeds United to the European Cup final in 1975 after succeeding Brian Clough.

A defeat to Bayern Munich, shrouded in refereeing controversy, stopped him from adding the most prestigious trophy in club football as a manager, after winning the biggest of all as a player.

Uwe Bein

Overshadowed a bit by the likes of Rudi Voller, Jurgen Klinsmann and Lothar Matheus, Bein was a humble squad player but no bench-warmer.

The midfielder started four of West Germany’s seven games at Italia ’90, although he was an unused substitute in the final victory over Argentina.

Bein can consider himself unfortunate that his solid club career didn’t have more to show for it.

He was a better-than-decent schemer for Koln, Hamburg and Eintracht Frankfurt in the 80s and 90s, making the Bundesliga Team of the Season four times and topping the assist charts thrice.

Simone Barone

A good shout at a Pointless answer if Italy’s 2006 World Cup squad ever came up as a question (you can try your luck here), Barone was a functional and fairly forgettable midfielder who made a handful of appearances for the Azzurri in the mid-noughties.

He wasn’t one of Italy’s heroes that summer in Germany, but he allowed Marcello Lippi to rest Mauro Camoranesi’s legs in the earlier stages. He replaced the Juventus midfielder as Italy saw out relatively comfortable victories over the Czech Republic and Ukraine.

Barone’s club career wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t any wonder he never challenged for silverware, going from Chievo to Parma to Palermo to Torino to Cagliari. A proper Serie A journeyman career.

Christoph Kramer

“I can’t remember that much from the game,” recalled Kramer of his performance in Germany’s 2014 World Cup final victory over Argentina.

“I don’t know anything from the first half. I thought later that I went straight off after the incident. How I got to the changing rooms I do not know. I don’t know anything else. The game, in my head, starts only in the second half.”

The midfielder, unbelievably, made his first competitive start for Germany on the biggest stage of all. He’d been drafted in as a late replacement for Sami Khedira, who was injured in the warm-up.

He suffered memory loss after a shocking coming together with Ezequiel Garay and was eventually withdrawn for Andre Schurrle, who set up Mesut Ozil’s match-winner.

Kramer started out at Bayer Leverkusen but spent the bulk of his club career at Borussia Monchengladbach, who haven’t won anything since the DFB Pokal in 1995.

Ron-Robert Zieler

Another member of Germany’s squad from the 2014 World Cup.

Die Mannschaft’s third-choice keeper, Zieler was never going to play with Manuel Neuer at the peak of his powers.

He watched every game from the bench out in Brazil, with his five caps in the early 2010s coming intermittently, invariably in friendlies, when Joachim Loew rotated. So “World Cup winner” is a bit of a technicality, but Zieler’s medal is very real.

He’s spent the bulk of his career with Hannover and Stuttgart between his bench-warming stints with Manchester United and Leicester City, having signed for the latter when they were the reigning Premier League champions in 2016.

As a youngster, he was an unused substitute for a League Cup third round match in Manchester United’s run to winning it in 2008-09.

But he didn’t make another matchday squad and ended up with a grand total of zero appearances for the club. No chance that counts.

Zieler could yet add another trophy to his collection, though. He’s 37 and has not yet hung up his gloves, albeit silverware looks unlikely as a veteran back-up at FC Koln.