Artur Friedenreich, the greatest of all time.

B Cantona

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I'm having a go at your intentions more than anything. That you wish to claim the moral high ground is humorous, especially given you've made sure to not answer about 80% of what I've asked you in this thread. Quit the act, man.

You're obsessed with discrediting the player for whatever reason it is you have (I couldn't care less) and you don't like those views being contested. You say a country wide competition would have changed things considerably yet omit Pele's international exploits at the time. Why would anything change if he scored at the same rate and played the same in his prime against any side he faced?
No Fortitude. You make some good points in the debate, but I'm pretty fecking sick of coming on here and seeing the latest way you're trying to belittle me. I think a lot of what you're saying is bollocks, but I'm not retaliating in kind, I'm trying to keep to point and explain what my opinion is. If you don't agree with it, fine. But stop acting like a cock about it

I have tried to answer all your points. You keep dodging my core fundimental arguement. Which you justify by saying I'm not answering your points, which is frankly... well you know what I think. I note you once again evaded a major question I put to you. So you have no defence of your comment that Sao Paulo state football was easily the match of any European league then? Didn't think so

I'm not obsessed with discrediting Pele, I'm just trying to give a bit of context behind his goal scoring record. I haven't omitted his international exploits, in fact I've referenced them several times. I've also stated what a great player I think he is several times. Not the best for me, but thats my subjective opinion
 

Mr. MUJAC

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Walter Crickmer started it all...
Looking at domestic leagues at the time there are certain things we can ascertain

1. There was certainly higher goalscoring games. And not from the top teams beating lower teams but across the board.

From this we can deduce one of four things

a) the forward play was better
b) the defending was poorer
c) tactics at the time were not as sophisticated
c) a bit of everything

2. In England during the period of the debate between Fortitude and Brad (1950's and 1960's) 11 different teams won the league title with United winning it 5 times. I cannot gauge from internet research what teams were the most successful in Brazil during the same period.

3. Of England's 1966 World Cup team (the debate talked about World Cup Teams)....England had Banks (Leicester/Stoke), Cohen (Fulham), Wilson (Huddersfield), Ball (Blackpool), Hurst, Peters, Moore (West Ham) all from non title winning teams (7 out of 11).......

By this we can deduce that the standard of other players in non-title winning teams was still very high, in fact only Leeds (Charlton), Man Utd (Stiles, Charlton) and Liverpool (Hunt) were title winning clubs that supplied players in that winning team.

Once again without data it is hard to make any assessment and comparisons to the Brazilian teams.

So I wasn't there watching week in and week out.......but I can make an argument based on facts. And I can read extensively about football during that period.

It is fair to say that the teams in England during this period were fairly evenly matched. Thus any one player standing out must have been a very good player. Jimmy Greaves goal scoring record in the 1950's and 1960's is very good because he wasn't scoring against crap teams every week. He was scoring against title winning sides.

The question is.......does anyone actually know (by research or otherwise) the following:

1. Who won the Brazilian leagues in those years
2. Which players in the National Team represented which clubs?
3. Who scored all the goals?

There are probably other reference points but until we can look at the data the rest is pure speculation.

I don't know how good the Brazilian State League was back in 1958.....did Botafogo run away with it? That might explain why they had so many players in the 1958 squad.

Interesting debate

Thanks Fortitude and Brad!
 

B Cantona

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Looking at domestic leagues at the time there are certain things we can ascertain

1. There was certainly higher goalscoring games. And not from the top teams beating lower teams but across the board.

From this we can deduce one of four things

a) the forward play was better
b) the defending was poorer
c) tactics at the time were not as sophisticated
c) a bit of everything

2. In England during the period of the debate between Fortitude and Brad (1950's and 1960's) 11 different teams won the league title with United winning it 5 times. I cannot gauge from internet research what teams were the most successful in Brazil during the same period.

3. Of England's 1966 World Cup team (the debate talked about World Cup Teams)....England had Banks (Leicester/Stoke), Cohen (Fulham), Wilson (Huddersfield), Ball (Blackpool), Hurst, Peters, Moore (West Ham) all from non title winning teams (7 out of 11).......

By this we can deduce that the standard of other players in non-title winning teams was still very high, in fact only Leeds (Charlton), Man Utd (Stiles, Charlton) and Liverpool (Hunt) were title winning clubs that supplied players in that winning team.

Once again without data it is hard to make any assessment and comparisons to the Brazilian teams.

So I wasn't there watching week in and week out.......but I can make an argument based on facts. And I can read extensively about football during that period.

It is fair to say that the teams in England during this period were fairly evenly matched. Thus any one player standing out must have been a very good player. Jimmy Greaves goal scoring record in the 1950's and 1960's is very good because he wasn't scoring against crap teams every week. He was scoring against title winning sides.

The question is.......does anyone actually know (by research or otherwise) the following:

1. Who won the Brazilian leagues in those years
2. Which players in the National Team represented which clubs?
3. Who scored all the goals?

There are probably other reference points but until we can look at the data the rest is pure speculation.

I don't know how good the Brazilian State League was back in 1958.....did Botafogo run away with it? That might explain why they had so many players in the 1958 squad.

Interesting debate

Thanks Fortitude and Brad!
Welcome Mujac. As you rightly say, you can make arguements based on recorded facts, and by watching programs / documentaries / footage of the era

To try and help you out - for a start Botafogo, who you rightly say had some of the best Brazilian players of the era - Garrincha, Didi, Zagallo, Nilton Santos etc, weren't in the same state championship as Pele, they played in the Campeonato Carioca (Rio state championship), and won it 5 times between the 50's and 60's. Other top sides who won the Rio championship at the time were Vasco (4 times), Botafogo (5 times) and Flamengo (5 times)

Looking at Brazil national squads - link here - you can identify the breakdown of players from the national team who played in the State Championships:

1958: 7 representative (2 Santos) from active finals playing squad of 16
1962: 6 (4 Santos) from 12
1970: 6 (3 Santos) from 16

Certainly players from Rio and Sao Paulo state were the dominant make up of those squads, though the non Santos representation wasn't so high (bar '58, although of the 6 players to play every game in the tournament, only 1 came from Sao Paulo state football - Gilmar).

Sadly as far as finding out the scoring ratio's of other domestic football players of the time, it seems a bit of a closed shop! I'm yet to find the resource that allows me to do so

For me, it's pretty clear top players from Brazil weren't competing against each other in regular domestic competition, and thus the goal scoring achievment of Pele in domestic football has to recognise this. Of course, we all judge Pele off the performances he gave on the world stage, and rightly so. He produced at the top level, he was the best of that era (other Brazilians might argue for Garrincha). But I often hear people cite his insane goal records, and personally I think they are slightly misleading, because as I've explained, the great majority came in domestic competition weakened by the way it was organised; and in exhibition and friendly games
 

dicko

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A possible way og gauging the quality of different regional leagues might be through Copa Libertadores results. Is anyone interested in trying to find links to results of this in the 50s and 60s?
 

B Cantona

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Heh, just re-read this thread after it became useful for me to cite in another more recent thread

I enjoyed this joust with you Fortitude, even though we clashed pretty fiercely there! :)

It was a good debate which if nothing else should have sparked some extra interest in that particular period from younger posters who will probably know absolutely sod all about, when some of the greats of all time player their football
 

MrMarcello

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Leônidas da Silva’s career finished in 30th October 1951, he scored an amazing 140 goals in 211 professional appearances,

Am I missing something here? He only played in 211 professional matches in nearly 20 years?
 

Marcosdeto

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excellent thread, i have read every post, i think that fortitude and brad made fair points and in the middle is the truth

what fortitude is saying is that brazil had the players that over two decades formed an almost unbeatable national team

what brad is saying is that even so, they where divided in 27 different tournaments, so there was not a Brazilian League so Pele didn't have to play against every great player brazil had

but the truth is that we don't know every player or team Pele and his santos had to face every year




anyway, i want to point out a couple of things

Argentina vs Brazil record is almost equalized, in fact i think they beat us three more games than us, and that happened in the last 20 years

in fact, when they were that good, argentina used to beat them properly -with and without pele-

Brazilian and Argentinian teams rivalized a lot in the libertadores cup

argentinian teams won it in 22 ocasions (7 different teams)
brazilians in 13 (7 different teams)
uruguayans in 8 (2 different teams)

here:

Copa Libertadores de América - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

just to put some things in perspective :cool:
 

Eriku

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The football I saw in Brazil (and I travelled from North to South over the course of three months) was stuffed with haphazard treatment of possession as well as disjointed defending... as you can tell from the fact that Brazil fosters keepers that can score from free kicks, let alone the numerous defenders, they LOVE to shoot from range, to try to make a name for themselves. But more often than not a shot from 35 yards in the 94th minute would frustrate the shit out of us if United were trailing.

São Paulo state was really the only state in which I witnessed football that seemed to have the organisational elements that I identify as necessary in modern intelligent football. I far more enjoyed the quality of football in Argentina.

As far as their tremendous performances in tournaments... a country where people joyously feck like bunnies and revere football, and which has over a hundred million people, is going to have a good shot at rounding up enough good players to represent it.

Not gospel... just a first hand account from someone who saw a fair share of football in Brasil.
 

RedRonaldo

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Its always difficult to compare legends between the modern games and the past, simply because you never know how good the legends might get with today's training, football knowledge knowledge and nutriution, and vice versa.