Back of the fenêtre: football's toughest spot kick is through a French window

The shootout in a Paris suburb began as a viral trick that Messi fluffed. It’s now a reminder of the pure joy of the sport

- Megan Clement

They call it the most famous window in France. And say what you will about the cerulean splendour of La Sainte-Chapelle or about Notre Dame’s rose windows - none of them has appeared in an advert with Lionel Messi.

No, the most celebrated window in the country is la lucarne d’Evry. It measures 43cm across and belongs to the bin room of an apartment building in the southern suburbs of Paris.

La lucarne d’Evry is a window to the bins, but it is also a window to glory. The story begins in 2019 with brothers Malamine “Mala” and “Gay” Sissoko filming their attempts to kick a ball through the window. It's the kind of sacred urban art that has existed for as long as there have been cities and for as long as there have been footballs.

In French, lucarne has a double meaning: it denotes a small window or skylight, but it also refers to the top corner of a football net. This particular lucarne sits two metres above the pavement, while the kerb opposite is 12 metres away - a distance and height that just so happens to roughly mimic a penalty kick aimed at the top-right corner of the net, with an added curve for extra difficulty.

A clip of Gay effortlessly nailing his first attempt went viral, taking off during the lockdowns of 2021. “It was incredible,” Mala says.

Soon, scores were trying their luck on the tiny street and the craze reached as far as Messi himself who, in an ad for Adidas, blasts a ball across Paris that rebounds off the lucarne.

The crowds eventually became too much for residents. And just as those other French sites of world-historical significance, the Lascaux caves, were reproduced in their entirety to protect the integrity of the original, so a replica