This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of World Soccer, which you can read here
Scoring an iconic, acrobatic volley for his club made Scott McTominay a contender to be one of World Soccer’s People of the Year for 2025. Doing the exact same thing again for his country made him a certainty.
In May last year, the Scotland midfielder scored the goal that sealed the Serie A crown for Napoli, a stunning scissor-kick in a 2-0 win over Cagliari. It was one of those moments that separates top-level footballers from mere mortals; the imagination to conceive of the strike, the athleticism to reach the ball, the technique to perfectly time the contact, and the character to deliver for his team in a crucial moment.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the goal, though, was that he managed to better it six months later.
Maybe the stakes were even higher for the World Cup qualifier against Denmark, with the prospect of Scotland’s first finals appearance since McTominay was in nappies on the line. Maybe the nerves were higher, with a packed-out Hampden Park desperate for success but so emotionally scarred by previous failures. Certainly the ball was higher, perhaps eight feet from the ground as McTominay flung himself towards it. The photographs of the goal almost don’t seem real; a man suspended horizontally in mid-air, his foot pointing skywards at an unnatural height, while the ball fizzes towards the goal. It was the finest volley Hampden had seen since Zinedine Zidane’s against Bayer Leverkusen in the 2002 Champions League final – and on a frenetic Glasgow night, no Scot would have swapped their man for the former Real Madrid maestro. If this was simply the Scott McTominay story, the drama would have ended there, with Scotland clinging on for a nerve-jangling 87 minutes to win 1-0. But the Tartan Army aren’t used to seeing their national team do things the easy way and the opener was, if not overshadowed, perhaps matched by Kieran Tierney’s curler and Kenny McLean’s long-range, lobbed clincher.
Yet neither of those players impacted the qualifying campaign like McTominay. He was one of three men to play every second, and their best attacker with two goals and an assist. More than that, he led his team-mates, elevated them, showed them they were capable of scaling the heights that he had.
It capped an extraordinary year for a player whose renaissance had began in a Scotland shirt two years earlier. He had an exceptional 2023 for the national team, scoring seven goals in ten appearances to send them on their way to Euro 2024. It was a run of form that suggested he was a player capable of more than he had shown at Manchester United, a genuine match winner.
Those suspicions were confirmed by a move to Napoli after the Euros. Liberated from the glare of his boyhood club, he thrived in his new surroundings – last year he told The Athletic with relish about his love of Italian tomatoes – and quickly established himself as a key cog in Antonio Conte’s side.
When Napoli sold star winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia to Paris Saint-Germain midway through the 2024-25 season, McTominay stepped up, becoming a very different kind of talisman for the team. Nine of his 12 Serie A goals in the campaign came after the turn of the year, including that stunner against Cagliari. His heroics saw him named the Serie A MVP as the league’s best player. He was presented with the Goal of the Month award for that effort, an honour he won again in October for a beautifully-struck half-volley against Internazionale.
As far as Scotland fans are concerned, the one that followed a few weeks later was the goal of the century.
