Oliver Sin Piernas

About

“Oliver Sin Piernas” (lit. “Legless Oliver” in Spanish) is a urban legend which claims that the main character of the anime series Captain Tsubasa, Tsubasa Ozora, wakes up during the last episode, and realizes that all of his football (soccer) career was a dream, lying in a bed without his legs. This legend is mostly localised in Spanish-speaking networks, where there’s a widespread belief that this event actually happened in the anime, however, it never did. ^[1]

The legend also inspired an exploitable image, normally used to indicate that someone is living a delusion. This makes it common among “trolling” Facebook groups that dedicate to make jokes about current events, especially those involving sports. The image is sometimes captioned, and Tsubasa/Oliver’s face is frequently edited to show the face or logo of the target that is supposed to be deluded.

Origin

Captain Tsubasa (Japanese: キャプテン翼 Kyaputen Tsubasa), also known as Flash Kicker, is a popular long-running Japanese manga, animation, and video game series, originally created by Yōichi Takahashi in 1981. The series mainly revolves around the sport of Association football.^[2] Captain Tsubasa is better known as Supercampeones in Latin America, and as Campeones: Oli y Benji in Spain.^[3] This anime was massively popular in both regions, and inspired prominent footballers such as Hidetoshi Nakata, Alessandro Del Piero, Fernando Torres, Zinedine Zidane, Lionel Messi, Alexis Sánchez and Andrés Iniesta to play football and choose it as a career.^[4]

The exact website where this particular template originated is unknown, as is the origin of the widespread myth of the “legless Oliver”. However, Google Trends makes it clear that the myth appeared around 2007, because no references to Tsubasa/Oliver being a leg amputee are available at earlier dates.

Spread

Even though this myth is relatively recent, considering that the original anime was transmitted during the eighties and nineties in the aforementioned regions, it is prevalent among both Latin American football (soccer) fans and otakus.

There are several videos on YouTube showing edited clips of the anime, supposedly showing the moment where Tsubasa/Oliver is in his hospital bed after the amputation of his legs (shown below). The exploitable version of this meme is most commonly found on Facebook groups dedicated to football jokes, used with other memes such as Bad Luck Brian and rage comics. ^[5]