That's actually a very fair point. I like that argument.
But it's still quite different.
Military history and strategic warfare is a several thousand year old field of study.
Even though we could never witness old warlords and generals, their military tactics have been so thoroughly studied, documented and recreated, that we can qualify and rank their effectiveness with high certainty.
We even have schools (military academys, war history sections at universities and much more) solely dedicated to this field of study.
The same can not be said about football.
It's a game that has existed for only 170 or so years, and up until the 1990s had a severe lack of stat tracking and video documentation, outside of big tournaments, cup finals and select, important games. And not until the 2010s did we start to get really serious about applying scientific methods to studying football.
But it will still be very hard to go back and give proper analysis on players from bygone eras, because there simply isn't enough data.
Video is often lacking, and all the written reports from those days are very surface level.
Sports journalism in those days mostly consisted of telling you who scored, and what the crowd was like.
Like I said before, Billy Meredith is the perfect example of this. Duncan Edwards as well.
Meredith is our first ever legendary player, and was considered a superstar for his time.
We know he must have been a lot better than most players at that time, because his goal records tells us he was quite prolific.
But we have no video of him.
Barely any photographs either, just a few.
And the written text about him from those days give very little insight to his actual abilities or what type of player he was.
We know he played with a toothpick, and that he was involved in a match fixing/betting scandal.
But actual writings on his technical ability is practically zero.
So how should we rank Billy Meredith?
We really can't in good faith say that he should be above or below anyone else on the list.
For all we know, he was even better than Maradona was in relation to his peers at the time.
Or he could also have been the Andy Cole of his era. Which is also fantastic, but certainly a far cry from the very, very best. We simply have no clue.
Duncan Edwards is often hailed as our biggest ever talent. There does in fact exist clips of some games from him, and in particular one full game in a cup tie against Villa. I've watched that entire game. He does not play well in that match, but he is certainly physically imposing.
In that game. You can easily tell that he looks like a 30 year old while still essentially a kid.
In this game, he is mostly playing in a position we would call a defensive midfielder in today's game. And to be fair, United does not play well in general in that match. It looks nothing like what we have been told Busby's football was like. Everyone just boots the ball, and can't string more than a few simple passes together.
Probably very unlucky that this is one of the few recorded matches of Busby's first team, as it does not represent what the legends say about that team. But that's the nature of the era, so few matches were recorded. So again, I'm not doubting Charlton, Busby and everyone else saying Edwards was amazing. He must have been special, or they would not have been so full of praise. His legendary status is not in question. But since we can't watch him outside of a few clips and a match where he didn't really perform well, we can't sit here and pretend that we know exactly how good he was. We know he was probably very good, but was he better than Rooney or Scholes? You have absolutely zero way of knowing based on the lack of evidence. So ranking him in a certain spot on such a list is an arbitrary exercise. You're mostly just going by gut instinct based on word of mouth. Which is ok, but let's not pretend it's a proper ranking then.
So when you see people arguing with such certainty on how and where to place these older era players on a top 10 list, it's just amusing to me.
Unless we're talking strictly legendary status.
That's a completely different thing.
We can rank someone's legendary status quite easily compared to ranking players we've barely seen play by skill.
Law is one of our biggest legends.
But unless you are 80+ years old from Manchester and still have a sound mind, you simply have no way of knowing who was a better footballer between him and Rooney.
If we are lucky, there might be one or two inactive members on the whole forum who would actually be able to speak with authority on such a ranking. Some 80+ year old bloke who regularly watched United under both Busby and Fergie. Most likely, there's none.
At best, there will be users with dads who can offer insight. But then again, at best it's unreliable secondhand information.
