I do not think that anyone is disagreeing that he was great. The only registra players who are rated better than him are Xavi, Modric and Pirlo, maybe Kroos but there I wouldn’t disagree if people put Scholes higher. Which at worst case puts him as the fifth best player in that position for the last 20 years.
What is ridiculous is when people start calling others trolls or know nothing about football cause they disagree that he wasn’t as good as Xavi or Modric (hint: he really wasn’t), or that he was our best player always (even when a certain Cristiano was playing here), or that the only reasons why he didn’t win awards was cause he didn’t have a PR (but then Xavi, Pirlo, Modric didn’t have too and yet won so many individual awards).
The equivalents of that Chelsea poster who was claiming that Hazard doesn’t score as much as Ronaldo or Messi cause he doesn’t want too.
NB: there is also the agglomeration of two different versions of Scholes. He was as good at dictating the play as Xavi, Pirlo or Modric (he never was), while scoring as much as Gerrard and Lampard (he didn’t score as much). But importantly, Scholes who scored many (before 2005-2006) was not dictating much the play. And the one who reinvented himself as deep laying playmaker (after that season) didn’t score as much (very comparable to Xavi and Pirlo in that aspect).
I agree with some of this. If we are talking about Xavi, Modric, Pirlo, Kroos and Scholes, I would place Scholes at #4 in that list.
However, I disagree that Scholes was less good than any of them at dictating play. He was brilliant at it but, in particular, he was brilliant at dictating the attacking “squeeze” in the last 20 mins of games. I have seen no-one better at that.
Where Xavi, Modric and Pirlo have the edge is they all have a little extra dimension, in my opinion. A little extra stamina, or mobility, or better dribbling, set piece taking, better defensive acumen, more personal charisma (the kind that drags team-mates along). It’s fine margins but these things make a difference. Scholes was not without his flaws; he is in the same tier as all those guys but not quite at the top.
A few people have posted that Scholes can’t have been important because we were able to win quite easily without him. To me that’s just not a meaningful argument; teams win games without Paul Scholes every day, it doesn’t make him any less important or any less good. I wouldn’t say those people don’t understand football, they just understand it in a different way to me.
Scholes was important because of the way he played the game. The multitude of quotes praising Scholes are really people seeing the same thing - football being played as they believe it should be played. The same people, of course, have praised other players - there are other good players on this planet.
That said, Scholes is widely (but not universally) regarded as the most talented midfielder in the last 30 years but it’s probably true that he was not always the most effective because his game, physique and personality had some shortcomings.
How good was Paul Scholes? It depends what’s important to you as a fan and a viewer of the game.