Oleh Blokhin

Blokhin was the weapon of Valeriy Lobanovskyi's Dynamo Kyiv, the first team trained like a laboratory and rewarded like a dynasty: the 1975 Cup Winners' Cup and the Super Cup that followed, taken off European football's table by a club from behind the Iron Curtain. Blokhin scored in both. His game was acceleration — a sprint champion's burst from the left channel, defenders stepping up to mark him and finding air where he had been.

The 1975 Ballon d'Or was his, the second Soviet prize after Yashin, a rare award for the eastern half of the continent at the height of its isolation. He later coached Ukraine at the 2006 World Cup. In the ledger of the Cold War's football, Blokhin is the entry the West read twice: the pace was real, the goals were real, and the science fiction of Lobanovskyi's methods is now every club's operating manual.