As part of our buildup to the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico, we are publishing excerpted chapters from The Soccer 100, The Athletic’s definitive book on the 100 greatest players of all time, courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.The 10 players we will feature are the highest-ranked World Cup winners of our 100. Today, it is the Brazilian who came in 14th in our 100, having decorated the national team’s performances for 11 years.Before the hard sell comes a pause. He stands there, briefly upright. It’s as if he is rifling through his mental hard-drive, looking for the right words for a lover or a child or a jury — although, given what we know about him, it’s more than possible he’s just looking at distant clouds.It’s a split second, over in the flap of a bird’s wing, but it seems longer. It feels like just this side of forever.Then he launches into it: story time, the beats of the plot lovingly sketched out by his eyes and his wonky legs. We are heading to his right, the defender’s left. His shoulders start to lean, and soon his entire body is going along for the ride, a roller-coaster rounding the corner into a death plunge.The defender follows, more out of duty than desire. It is a hopeless pursuit. But here’s the funny thing: It’s hopeless in a way he is not even aware of yet.Look at the ball. The bodies are tumbling offstage, but the ball hasn’t moved. It’s been there this whole time, waiting patiently. It has seen all this before.The defender is committed; momentum and gravity are now his enemies. He digs deep, ignores his complaining muscles, and hauls himself back to centre. There’s only one problem: His tormentor is already there, already departing. And this time he is taking the ball with him.He could be going either way for all the difference it would make to the defender. Zoom out a little and it would probably make more sense to dart left, infield, since a handful of other opponents also bought the initial routine. But no, he’s going right, going where he pretended to go before, where the defender has just returned from, back to the scene of the crime.Why? That’s the easy part. It’s funnier this way.Garrincha in full flight against Wales at the 1958 World Cup (Central Press/Getty Images)One of the best things about football is the sheer variety of responses — rational, emotional, physical — it is capable of eliciting in the observer. Some of them are common and recurring. Those people in shorts running around in front of us or on our television screens make us swoon, make us tremble with nervous energy, make us tear our hair out.One reaction, though, is rarer than it should be, at least when you reach the professional game. Football can be awfully po-faced; it hardly ever makes you laugh.At which point enters Garrincha, the Little Wren, not quite the greatest Brazilian footballer of all time, but definitely, definitely the most hilarious.We’ll circle back to the tragic irony of that fact later and lament the tears of the clown, but when it comes to Garrincha, it really is worth just establishing a baseline appreciation of his oeuvre in all its wriggly, flippant glory.The dribble described above — that full-bodied, Drunken Master feint — has always been my favourite. But Garrincha, not inappropriately, adhered to a version of the old Groucho Marx line: “This is my signature trick, and if you don’t like it… well, I have others.”Watch the videos.Through the fuzz and the bad camera angles emerges an extraordinary catalogue of dummies, flicks, and feints, a hodge-podge of silly tricks. There are fast dribbles and there are slow dribbles, when he seems to want to take in the view. There are slalom runs, all acute angles and twisted ankles, and there are direct bursts. There are hundreds of little forays into forests of legs, an eager little dog pursuing a rabbit, not even sure if he wants to catch it, just enjoying the sheer exhilaration of the chase.There he goes, inside and out, outside and in, twisting, jerking, leaping, skipping. He nutmegs defenders. More often, he just lures them in, makes them think the ball is there to be won, then flicks it away with a nonchalance that manages to be both cruel and cheerful. Occasionally, he just seems to teleport through them.