WHETHER they’d be numbers one and two is subjective but it’s safe to assume Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi would be pretty close to the top of anyone’s list of the greatest footballers of all time.
Comparison between the two became inevitable from a long way out. Both relatively small in stature. Both goalscorers. Both geniuses. Both left-footed.
But did you know they were both right-handed?
If it feels irrelevant now, it soon won’t.
People who are left-footed and right-handed, or vice-versa, are referred to as cross-lateral or cross-dominant.
To be left-footed and right-handed is relatively rare.
For a start, around about 90% of the general population is right-handed.
A 2020 study found that only 3.2% of right-hand dominant people were left-footed.
Studies in this are few and far between. Sports like football offer rare windows of opportunity because outside of their usage there, which foot you are can be pretty irrelevant in life.
Messi and Maradona were both part of this exclusive club.
Argentina’s Lionel Messi runs at France’s Antoine Griezmann during the FIFA World Cup final at Lusail Stadium, Qatar. Picture date: Sunday December 18, 2022. (Nick Potts/PA)
On a surface level, what is that really beyond happenstance?
Let’s go deeper then.
It’s accepted in most science that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body.
The left hemisphere of the brain controls things like speech, maths and writing.
In around 90% of people, it is the dominant side. Most people are right-handed and right-footed.
But the brain’s right hemisphere, which controls the left side of the body, looks after creativity, spatial ability and artistic skills.
Go back to Maradona and Messi.
Their respective career-long battles to be recognised as the best player in the world were also remarkably similar.
Diego Maradona scored his famous Hand of God goal with his left hand, but he was naturally right-handed.
Pele and Cristiano Ronaldo were goalscoring machines. They could both go on the left but the right foot was dominant for both.
But when asked about his rival, what was the thing Pele went to in pursuit of a fitting compliment for his Argentinian counterpart?
“He had great vision.”
Same with Messi. In almost 200 fewer appearances, he contributed 381 goal assists to Ronaldo’s 257.
You think of all their goals and rightly so but what seemingly separated Messi and Maradona was their ability to spot a pass and weight it perfectly.
Here’s the really scientific bit. Between the brain’s two hemispheres, there’s a bridge called the corpus callosum. It transmits messages from one side to the other.
“Research would say that in left-sided players or people, the corpus callosum is thicker i.e. the wiring. And the thicker it is, the more efficient the transmission of messages between two hemispheres is.”
Those are the words of University of Limerick PHD student Karol Dillon.
A Kerry native, he’s undertaken research on the subject and applied to Gaelic football.
The results are fascinating.
Think of the best footballer in Ireland, you’re probably going for one of the two Cliffords.
Both have shown evidence of being cross-lateral. Left foot, right hand.
If you look at a photograph of David signing an autograph, it is always with his right hand.
Paudie has been known to use both hands. In one picture, he’s signing with the right, the other with the left.
When he collected his All-Star in 2022, he approached his compatriots and then-president Larry McCarthy with his right hand extended to shake hands.
Being interviewed on TV, he’s held the microphone in his right hand.
Those decisions are instinctive.
The whole world leans right. From work tools to golf clubs to everyday utensils, just about everything you lift will either be neutral or right-hand aligned.
That is probably reflected in sports like golf and darts.
It’s estimated that only around 5-7% of golfers play left-handed. Players like Greg Norman, Jordan Spieth and Arnold Palmer were naturally left-handed but played off their right. Was that because of the scarcity of left-handed equipment?
Jordan Spieth became just the sixth man to win the Masters and US Open in the same year (Andrew Matthews/PA)
Only five players have won a golf major playing off their left hand – and all five of them, Phil Mickelson, Bob Charles, Mike Weir, Bubba Watson and Brian Harman, were naturally right-handed.
Of 128 PDC tour card holders in darts, only seven are left-handed.
Mark Webster (2008) and Les Wallace (1997) won BDO World titles. They are the only two. No left-hander has ever won the PDC World title.
There are in-built disadvantages in the sport. When a player collects their darts from the board, they’re obliged to exit the oche to the right, mostly for safety and TV purposes.
Professional darts players will instinctively remove their darts from the board with their non-dominant hand. For most, that means pivoting off to the right and obeying that custom. But left-handed players have to constantly fiddle with the mind to go against their natural inclination.
That’s insignificant in terms of winning world titles, but it speaks to the way the world is rigged against left-handers.
Karol Dillon, who undertook the fascinating research on cross-laterality.
Karol Dillon’s research into Gaelic football offers a unique insight into the whole area of cross-laterality.
While sports like soccer allow for examination of which foot a player uses, the golden nugget in terms of studying Gaelic football is that its players use feet and hands together in tandem.
We only know what hand Maradona used because of pictures of him using them, but with David Clifford, you can cross-reference photos with watching him play ball.
His ball-drop and bounce are almost exclusively off whichever side has most distance from the defender he’s facing. He’s as comfortable bouncing on the right hand as he is the left.
Paudie Clifford almost exclusively uses the right hand to control the ball when he’s in possession.
Watch his first half point in the League final against Mayo, when he was superb. He took nine soloes in 13 seconds. All nine times, he dropped the ball right hand to left foot. His right hand manufactured the bounce dummy, and his right foot kicked the score.
In the course of his research, while involved coding 121 games (76 male, 45 female) and actions from 696 players, Dillon found that Tyrone had a significant number of the most bilateral players.
Saturday 26h April 2025 Darren McCurry of Tyrone in action against Barry McCambridge of Armagh during the Ulster Senior Championship S/F at Clones, Co. Monaghan. Picture Oliver McVeigh
It has been recognised by other counties as both a challenge and an opportunity.
One Ulster county recorded how many touches each development squad player had on their dominant side in a year and tried to find ways to replicate it on their non-dominant side.
You might assume inter-county footballers would be comfortable playing a handpass off either side, but that’s not the case.
Kick-passing, even less so.
Building true two-sidedness it’s not just as simple as the traditional throwaway “ten minutes on our bad foot” block turfed in at the end of a session.
“The most two-sided players, a lot of it is coming from home,” says Dillon.
“Coaches are trying to develop the selection and the choice of the non-dominant side, but blocked it by saying we’re all using our dominant side now for ten minutes. That takes away the choice.
“Bi-laterality is about learning to use the appropriate limb in close contact as well. The appropriate hand for the hop, the appropriate foot for the solo.”
David Clifford kicks with the left foot but is naturally right-handed.
Because of the depth of analysis done by opposition teams now, the impact goes far beyond the individual.
The safe direction kick-passing has taken has developed a trend where players will primarily kick a straight ball. So a right-footed player will go down the right wing, and left to left, rather than the less favourited diagonal ball.
In one inter-county game a few years ago, one team noticed early on that both of the opposition midfielders who ran a lot of their side’s attacking game were heavily right-sided. They shifted their shape in accordance.
Sweepers and corner-backs can predict the angle of a kick pass just as readily as the forward it’s intended for.
That creates a vicious cycle. The attacking team is equally aware of it, and then they don’t kick the ball because of it.
There’s been an historical misconception that left-footed players tend to be so left-footed that they become predictable.
Yet the evidence suggests that naturally left-footed players are more organically predisposed to being two-footed.
The greatest exception to the rule here is Shane Walsh. The Galway man’s right is his natural side for both foot and hand. He is perhaps the most two-sided footballer since Maurice Fitzgerald, who was also predominantly right-sided.
Not that you’d know it to watch the 1997 All-Ireland final. His first free, from under the Hogan Stand, curled in majestically by his left peg from almost on the sideline. At the death, he swings one over from the other sideline, scoring at the Hill end off the outside of the right boot.
It’s not that it doesn’t exist in reverse or that it’s all entirely down to genetics.
In the course of his research, Dillon ended up down a Son Heung-Min rabbit hole.
Of Harry Kane’s 213 Premier League goals, 19% (41 goals) were scored with his left foot.
Mo Salah’s right foot accounts for 14% of his Premier League goals.
That’s the general area where you’ll find most top-end strikers.
Yet out 127 top-flight goals, Son has scored 74 with his dominant right foot and 49 with his left. That’s just shy of 40%.
Son’s father, Son Woong-jung, runs a football Academy in South Korea.
Son Heung-min (right) battles with Ipswich’s Ben Johnson during Tottenham’s 2-1 loss (Steven Paston/PA)
In an interview with Football Asia, he said that his son “washed his left foot first since he was young. [He] wore socks with his left foot first, and his left foot came first when he entered the stadium.”
“He is fanatical about the non-dominant side,” says Dillon.
“His philosophy is that to improve your non-dominant side, to give it to the level, you need to work on it 66% of the time.
“And he said it starts with everything in your daily life before you introduce a ball. The foot you put up the stairs with first. Brushing your teeth. The foot you tie first when you tie your laces.
“I have no idea what foot you are, but I’d be quietly confident you go to your dominant foot first,” Dillon challenges.
And he’d be right for me and almost everyone reading this.
Being two-sided is absolutely coachable. That goes back to the corpus collosum. If there’s a genetic advantage there for players who are left-footed and right-handed, all they might need is to not be obstructed.
But did you know that you have a dominant eye?
Pick an object across the room. Make a small circle with your hand that you can see the object through. Now close one eye. Whichever eye you can still see the object through, that’s your dominant eye.
Ronnie O’Sullivan is cross-dominant in that way. Left eye, right hand.
Arguably snooker’s best long-potter, Neil Robertson, is right eye and left hand dominant.
TJ Reid has long established himself as one of hurling’s all-time greats. He is right-handed naturally but hurls off his left, a trait discovered early when pucking around his father and grandfather.
You could go so far down this rabbit hole you could end up living in it.
When it comes to Gaelic football, there’s been a long-held assumption that inter-county players cannot survive at that level without being two-sided in some shape or form.
But Dillon’s research indicates that the number of players who have that skillset is limited.
He also found “minimal differences between males and females with respect to laterality profiles.”
Profiling the 50 most bilateral male and female players in Ireland left him with a list that included some of its very best footballers.
“Left-footed players were vastly over-represented in the most bilateral players in the top 20 or 30 in the male and female game.
“So then you’re looking at the why, and statistically, it wasn’t just the naked eye saying this, we ran statistical tests and it showed there was a significant difference in the laterality, or bilaterality of left and right sided players.
“Left-sided players tended to be more two-sided than right-sided players, and that would go against the common perception that left-sided players are more one-sided.
“And we found, there’s two possible reasons for that. There’s cerebral issues, the wiring of the brain essentially, and then obviously it’s the right-handed world hypothesis.
“Left-footed, right handed people, they tended to be more two-sided. What we were finding initially was that the level of difficulty for the kick pass is quite high because you’ve two non-dominant limbs working in tandem, that’s a big difference.
“With cross-lateral players is that at least they didn’t have a dominant hand feeding the ball to the non-dominant foot. Straight away you’ve lessened the difficulty. Your right hand’s feeding your left foot.”
There is no perfect formula for greatness.
But if you happen to be right-handed and left-footed, you’re at a distinct genetic advantage before you start.
