This Unknown Malaysian Soccer Player Just Won FIFA’s Goal of the Year Award

For all the drama, unpredictability and moments of divine inspiration that make soccer perhaps the most enthralling professional sport on Earth, FIFA’s year-end awards — which were announced earlier this week in Zurich — are kind of a bore. The Best Men’s Player Award will inevitably wind up in the hands of either Cristiano Ronaldo, as it did this year, or his rival Lionel Messi; the Best Women’s Player Award will almost always go to someone on either Team USA or Germany. Which is what made 2016’s Puskás Award for the year’s best goal so damn great: it went to a complete and utter unknown plying his trade in one of the world’s least-popular professional leagues.

Faiz Subri, a 29-year-old striker for Penang FA of the Malasyia Super League, became the very first Asian player to receive the prestigious award. He beat out nine other candidates — including Messi and Neymar — on the merit of this absolute hair-singeing screamer of a free kick from last February:

My word. If that ball had curved any further, it would’ve come straight back and hit him in the face.

What made Faiz’s win all the more heartwarming, though, was how utterly thrilled he was just to be at the awards ceremony. He mumbled his way through a short, humble acceptance speech — which he later admitted he was “so nervous” to give, not that we couldn’t tell — and then proceeded to do what any sane human being would do upon finding themselves in a room jam-packed full of their lifelong idols: he took some selfies.

Here he is with Cristiano Ronaldo:

And with Germany keeper Manuel Neuer:

And one more for good measure with Fergie himself:

Congratulations, my dude. You won FIFA’s Goal of the Year, and all of our hearts.

H/T: Asia One