Arda Güler stood over a ball about 25 meters out, in the 20th minute, in his new manager's first match in charge, and bent it over the wall into the top corner. Turkey led Belgium 1-0. It was the kind of strike you rewind.
One free kick against Belgium doesn't prove Güler is one of the best talents in the world right now. A single pretty strike proves you can hit one free kick. That's it.
The people waving it off as "just a free kick against Belgium's reserves" are being lazy, and they're wrong about the player even if they're right about the goal. That kick is a symbol of something that was already there.
Start with what the strike actually was. A direct free kick from distance is one of the lowest-percentage shots in the sport. Most hit the wall, sail over the bar, or dribble into the keeper's hands. Güler picked out the one square meter where a goalkeeper can't reach and found it. Belgium had Senne Lammens in goal, not Thibaut Courtois, who's sitting out this Nations League campaign by choice. Fine. Name me the keeper who saves that one.
And don't pretend this was a stroll against a B-team. Belgium's outfield group was real. Kevin De Bruyne equalized seven minutes after Güler scored, Charles De Ketelaere put them ahead three minutes after that, and by the half-hour Turkey were losing a game they'd end up losing 1-2. Missing Courtois didn't make Belgium weak. Güler scored past them anyway.
Turkey still lost, and that matters too. They sat bottom of their Nations League group, winless through five matches, already out of quarterfinal contention, fighting just to avoid relegation with France still to come in the final round. Scoring a highlight while your team collapses in ten minutes doesn't mean you carried them. He scored, and they lost, again. He's a brilliant player stuck on a struggling team.
I'm still in his corner anyway. It's the pattern behind that kick that convinces me. At EURO 2024 he hammered a long-range goal past Georgia and walked off as Player of the Match. He was the first teenager to score on his EURO debut since Cristiano Ronaldo in 2004. Before Madrid he was Fenerbahçe's youngest Süper Lig scorer, a Turkish Cup winner, and the youngest player ever to score for the national team. At Real Madrid this season he's chipped in goals and a stack of assists in LaLiga, numbers that are still climbing. This is a 21-year-old who keeps producing the spectacular on the biggest stages, for club and country, year after year.
The Messi comparisons are already flying, the Camp Nou free kick against Liverpool that curled around the wall and won UEFA's Goal of the Season. Flattering company. It's also where fans lose the plot. Messi had done it ten thousand times across a decade of finals. Güler has a highlight reel and a trajectory. Those are different things, and pretending otherwise does him no favors, because the moment he has a quiet month the same crowd will turn on him.
Give him the set pieces. Trust him in the big moments, he's earned that. But "best talent in the world right now" is a claim you make with a body of work, and his is still being written. He's one of the most gifted young footballers alive, trending hard toward that top bracket, and this free kick is one more entry in the file. If you needed a single kick in İzmir to tell you that, you weren't watching the last two and a half years.
