Andrade
Rebuilding Expert
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2022
- Messages
- 2,460
His point I think is that in the past, the person who scored the most goals was not necessarily seen as the best player. E.g. Cruyff and Beckenbauer being considered the best footballers around at that time (and also Best before he fell off) and not Muller. If a person who did score the most goals was seen as the best player, it's because they did a lot of other stuff as well, and there was a high proportion of their goals that were brilliant or beautiful, like Pele or Puskas or DiStefano. Pure poachers were not put on that kind of level.I don’t think that’s true, you can enjoy watching Haaland at his craft and equally enjoy a Hazard or a Ronaldinho. Some people are determined to undermine Haaland at every opportunity also and diminish goals. There’s more to football than goals but also goals matter.
If Messi wasn’t a goalscorer then you could make the argument about Muller to prove your contrived point but Messi is as good a goalscorer while being better at assisting and dribbling too.
Now there is a much greater obsession with stats. Football is a spectator sport after all; whilst it is enjoyable to see a player scoring a simple goal, it's much more enjoyable to see players exhibiting great skill that we couldn't do ourselves. That's supposed to be the point of watching the sport, no?. Anyone can tap a ball in from 2 yards out. Obviously most of us (and most players) do not have the energy to keep making the runs that lead to easy goals or the IQ to read the game and continuously get into positions where they can score easy and frequent goals but that doesn't change the fact that it is not as stirring to the spectator as what the great geniuses of the game can do.