Paul Scholes.
5th Best player of all time
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Ronaldinho is the reason why I started watching this sport so it has to be him for me. feck what could have been with his career. In his prime, what he could do with the ball was pure magic.
Shoulda just say "NO messi/pele/ronaldo/maradonna"
Really. You don't want to see a team with flanks of Messi and Ronaldo, spearheaded by R9?
Pure fantasy that would be great but I don't think you could afford the defensive issues it would bring. R9 or Pele up front, Messi from the right, Cruyff from the left, Diego supporting from attacking midfield. Midfield 2 would be very difficult to pick.
You are underrating CR7's hardworking pressing. He worked hard when defending. Peak Ronaldo and Messi are fit monsters who can press all day.
Van Bommel
If people are genuinely watching their games then that's fair enough, I doubt there are many out there who offer their opinion based on watching loads of old games from start to finish, surely? I know you mentioned before that you have so I always read your posts when it comes to these players, I think Invictus was another one who did.
There are 5 pillars of football and they are all on the same table.
Alfredo Di Stefano
Pele
Franz Beckenbauer
Johan Cruijff
Diego Armando Maradona
These players have their own table and I believe other players can join them but thier position in the game is secure and noone can surpass them.
Alfredo Di Stefano
Pele
Franz Beckenbauer
Johan Cruijff
Diego Armando Maradona
These players have their own table and I believe other players can join them but thier position in the game is secure and noone can surpass them.
Aye I'm one of those weirdos but I think the broader point is still worth bearing in mind - when people in the 80s were comparing Maradona and Pele back in the day, they were discussing it based on info passed down second hand, snippets of matches from the past and even at the time, and their own imagination. It was practically impossible to see more no matter how old you are, unless you were paid to travel around the world watching live games.
No doubt people have gone a bit crazy with the comparisons these days in a way they didn't before, but this particular discussion has been pretty much ever present and has always been founded on very little evidence - and it didn't matter. It was never meant to be taken seriously.
I think the level of seriousness in this discussion is probably worse than the level of misinformation in it. The standards we set for the amount of football you need to watch to passes as a credible witness is impossibly high, benchmarked against all previous eras of football fans. I don't think that's such a good thing myself. I've watched a shitload of old football for reasons no-one could ever explain, beyond the pure, simple and undeniably weird joy of it. It's not to make informed judgments.
In my mind do Stefano is the greatest of them all, despite only ever being able to watch him a few times at the tail end of his career - there's a magic to him, and a level of romanticism it brings out in me. I think of him as Keane and Zidane rolled into one, a force of nature and a picture of grace. It might be misguided, it might be based on deeply flawed information, it might be more imagination than reality - but that's how it's always been. If you don't take it too seriously, at its core just a celebration of the romanticism embedded into a sport we love for reasons you could never possibly justify.
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Cruijff
Of major trophies
Kaka won:
1 Seria A
1 CL
1 la liga (hardly contributed)
and the '02 world cup thanks to playing all of 25 minutes in the tournament.
Ronaldinho won
1 serie a
2 la ligas
1 copa libertadore
1 copa america
and the '02 world cup as one of its star performers.
I just don't see how you can say Kaka has, by any metric, achieved more. He won less trophies, less individual awards, scored fewer goals, his star shone less individually and his peak lasted about as long. What am I missing?
Totally agree. I've always found it hard to understand how Beckenbauer could ever be downgraded - I don't think you could imagine a player better than him doing what he did. And it's not like he played a supporting role, or an unfashionable role - in a team filled with wonderful players he made the game revolve around him.
They pressed. Some. As you'd expect from modern attackers. Up until they stopped doing it.
It was hardly a standout feature of their game.
I can't really argue with any of that. I guess I'm probably OCD practical in all areas of life, this being a prime example. I'd never compare a player I've seen played 90 minutes x 100's of times to a player I've only seen snippets of and read about, but that's just me and it's obviously fine for others to do so despite it seeming strange to me. I do like to read about these players for sure, though, so it's always good to get opinions from people/posters who've watched their games.
Yes but the conversation started when he said if he could revive a player with a peak form, it would be R9. Then he said he won't put CR7 in his team.
Well then, if you can get CR7 and Messi at their physical peak, pressing won't be a problem.
Most people put Beckembauer, Cruyff, Di Stefano, even Zidane above R9, but if you watch their highlights Ronaldo looks like a different species of human than those players.. In a vacuum I have R9 and Messi as my top2 just in terms of what a footballer can achieve physically and technically..
R9 and Ronaldinho had extremely high peaks but didn't fare well in terms of longevity.
These threads are the best. Debating whether Cruyff, Best, Garrincha or Di Stefano were better than Puskas, even though none have seen them play outside maybe a gritty Youtube video
Because in a goat discussion, you can't just include the best players of your era, but of all times! And that means, obviously, making some assumptions based on what people thought about them at the time, a few clips of their best performances, the trophies they won, and whatever other info is available. Implying that a goat discussion is never possible or allowed and we should all shut up, is just silly.
Indeed. This obsession with ranking players is a bit silly.These threads are the best. Debating whether Cruyff, Best, Garrincha or Di Stefano were better than Puskas, even though none have seen them play outside maybe a gritty Youtube video
Who was the 17th best player of all time? I'm really curious to see what the caftards think.
My opinion is mine, and while Ronaldo was injured a lot during his career - he was also fit for long enough to show what he can do. He found time to win World Player of the Year 3 times and the World Cup twice for a start. It would have been great to see R9 at his best for longer, but I saw him at his best for long enough to know how good he was.
Why greatest needs to be judged over an entire career is beyond me anyway. The lack of longevity of R9s peak is very explainable, so I’ll focus on what I did see when he was fit. Which wasn’t a 6 month spell. His WC record was just beaten by Klose in the last tournament, and he’s still Brazil’s second top scorer ever. Not some fecking flash in the pan. He was probably the best player in the world when he was 13 - a complete one-off.
He did well for Brazil nobody can doubt that but when talking about greatest ever surely longevity has to play a part. It’s your opinion mate and your welcome to it but other players have smashed his stats and trophies won, Messi alone will have close to 200 more goals than Ronaldo when he finally retires that for me instantly kills any Ronaldo GOAT arguments especially when I remember his latter career which was a complete joke.
Ronaldo did well in small bursts it’s not enough for me.
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I think it's a bit strange to count him as a 1994 winner seeing as he hadn't played even a minute there
Beckenbauer for me.
I was going from memory I didn’t say he definitely has won more. I didn’t really watch Ronaldinho much so don’t really remember what he did or didn’t win tbh.
Kaka played 27 of the 38 games in Madrid’s title winning season so I don’t really agree he didn’t contribute much.
He also won the Confederations Cup twice with Brazil, one more than Ronaldinho. He might have been the star at the World Cup in 2002 but Kaka was just coming onto the scene back then.
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I think it would be better to have Categories for them since Goal keepers, defenders, midfielders tend to go mostly overlooked.
This makes a lot of sense. We shouldn't shoehorn players on some list to make a point. Just bloody add to the list.
Fair enough. That said, if not for extreme circumstances in 1998 then who knows? He was certainly the best player in the world at the time.
personally think Ronaldo shouldn't be above Cruijff, but that's just the high regard I (biasedly) hold Cruijff in.
Van Basten needs to be in Tier 3 though for sure
Considering our own Sir Bobby Charlton was outstanding for BOTH Manchester United and England, I think he's vastly underrated outside United fans (and sometimes within). The guy wasn't even a striker but it took what, 40-odd yrs to discard his record for both club and country? Best player of the tournament in England's only WC title, too.
He also ‘did well’ for Barcelona and Inter Milan. And PSV if you want to include that.
His premature decline is heavily mitigated as well all know. Robert Lewandowski or Harry Kane, providing he too doesn’t have to miss years with serious knee injuries, will also possibly score more goals over a normal career span. Means nothing. The fact that he reached a level arguably nobody else could reach, and held it there for a few years, should absolutely allow that level to be discussed as the best we have ever seen. You can then add in the specifics of ‘imagine he got to do this and that’ but the sample is still big enough to conclude how good he was. If we are talking about a player who had one amazing season, or 6 amazing months, and then returned to their ‘normal’ level - then it would be hard to conclude that was the player they were. This is not the case with Ronaldo, as we all know. And his injuries didn’t come at 18. He is not a story of a talent the world didn’t get to see because of injury. He is one we definitely got to see, at the highest level, for a good few years. The injuries are just a loss to the rest of the sport who couldn’t enjoy it for longer. Van Basten is also often mentioned amongst the greatest. We don’t need to speak forever about what could have been, when there is more than enough of what actually was.
Using the end of his career, several cruciates later, against him is pointless. Even still, his Real Madrid level was still better than many top class strikers in recent times.
Original Ronaldo is the second best player I've seen. Just ahead of Messi. He was something else.
Forget 5th, George Best will always be my number one.
I like that. Clear generational spread as well.
Probably easier framing the discussion around tiers IMO. Something like this from @antohan:
His top level still wasn’t Messi or Ronaldo level no matter how you try and dress it up. You mention the World Cup in 02 but that season he scored 7 goals for Inter, again nobody remembers that.
His best year at Barce was 29 goals, I mean Messi is almost doubling that season after season whilst leading Barce to trebles it’s just not comparable.
His Madrid days resulted in and around 20 goals a season I don’t need to link Cristiano’s record to prove he’s almost trebling them numbers on a consistent basis whilst helping Madrid to 4 CL titles in 5 years.
Ronaldo was good but to put some prospective on it Ruud took his place in the team and relegated him to the bench, I mean I love Ruud but we’re taking GOAT levels here for me the nostalgia is insane with R9.
His Milan days really fecked him too, he was about 18 stone and scored 6 goals in 2 years meh he was wank for the majority of his career.
You're not really contextualising the changes in the club game since the 1990s. Teams were needing 65-80 points to win a league title then, now they need 90-100 - all because teams are getting more and more stacked as the gulf in resources within leagues becomes ever wider. It's the same as looking at Van Basten's best season at Milan, 25 goals in Serie A, and then saying Higuain shits on that with his 36 goals in 2015/16.
Don't know where you get this 29 goals figure from either. He scored 62 goals in total for Barcelona and Brazil in 1996/97.
Yeah, Van Basten should be somewhere in tier 3, I think. Arguably only Pele, Muller, Puskas, and Eusebio were better pure strikers than him. I rate him around as much as Luis Ronaldo. It is sad that both could have been much more if not for injuries, maybe him on the level of Cruyff/Di Stefano while Luis could have easily been the GOAT if he didn't have injuries.
I think that most of people rate Best higher than Sir Bobby. Also, if you look the final in 1968, it was all about Best who was just 22 and was clearly the best player in the team.
Sir Bobby has the longevity argument, but his peak wasn't extremely high (in comparison with the likes of Best, Cruyff etc). A bit like a lite version of Di Stefano (or a better version of Giggs), and one of the most complete players of all time though. I also think that he tried to model his game on Di Stefano, and said that Di Stefano was the only player whom made him feel inferior. When I watched both play, the similarities were clear. He can easily be put on my tier 3 though. In fact, he should be. He has been every bit as good as someone like Zidane, and actually played football longer, winning everything bar an European Cup. He is also the only English player whom won a World Cup (where he was the best player of the tournament), an UCL and multiple league titles, being an integral part on all of them. A legend of a game!
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In all likelihood, Ronaldo will finish with double the Ballon D'Ors, either double of close to double UCL (with him being the best player on all of them) and one international trophy (although Cruyff 1974 is so much better than Ronaldo has ever played in an tournament), while having in addition the longevity argument, and scoring at least twice as many goals (career wise than Cruyff). In fact, there is a real possibility that Cristiano - when he finishes his career - has scored more competitive goals than any other player in the history of the game.
I think that Cruyff's peak was higher, but Cristiano has better achievements (not counting Cruyff's off the field legacy). Cruyff is arguably my favorite player of all time, so have no problem with people putting him ahead of anyone.
Did you watch him play? I'd be surprised if you had and feel this way regardless. Blankly looking at statistics is an awful way to judge the effectiveness and talent of a player.