Payet's Latest Free Kick Verges on Perfection

Dimitri Payet is a bad, bad, badbadbadbad man. Oh lordy. Just the other week, I was extolling the dude's free kick virtues, with this beauty of a goal. But perhaps today's effort trumps even that stunning effort. Sure, this week's goal was shot from closer up—but that's exactly what makes this kick the platonic ideal. It is immaculate.

Let's talk physics for a second. You have an obstacle at a set height—let's just say six feet, for the height of the players. If you need to surpass that obstacle, and your objective is farther away, you have a wider range of parabolas that can hit your objective. If it's closer up, that's gotta be a pretty fucking tight parabola to clear your obstacle, y'heard? So, with an 18-yard-ish distance from goal, Payet finds the kind of curl and moxy to send the ball perfectly into the upper right corner. Michelangelo couldn't have drawn it up any better.