Bump This Thread When Jimmy Carter Outlives Someone Nonterrible

So which famous football critics put Pele at 5th? Also which documentaries have actual footage of Pele in Brazil? I have no idea why you are always so certain of things while at the same time not convincing anyone.
Comparing sportsmen of different eras is hard as training methods have improved immensely and so has medicin but Pele did stuff years before anyone else did anything similar.

4 Likes

https://twitter.com/ESPNUK/status/1608912054206824448?t=cXtAJYZ4nK3FnTYuOChJuQ&s=19

Like genuinely everywhere? If you do a basic search you just won’t find many lists with Pele top 2.
For big organizations or journalists I’ve seen Cruyff someone I wouldn’t put up top, more often than Pele.

For major publications I’d include stuff like SI, ESPN, Fourfourtwo, BBC, guardian, l’equipe, marca. I looked at all time lists from a bunch of these yesterday. The only site I found that put Pele up top I believe was bleacher report, which is uh, not a top tier source.

If you’re on like the main soccer reddit or ones for any major team you will just get super raised eyebrows going Pele #1

Nothing wrong with being a top 5-10 player of all time! It’s not some major insult.

Got two Michael Cox books for Xmas as well, really enjoying them. Cover a ton of history of the sport tactically.

I thought about saying Russel instead because their actual in game stats beyond rangz was very poor, but wilt/Richard are just more of “the game is so much different.” It’s not an insult to the players, but the games they played don’t resemble the modern game in the slightest.

Please just stop

That’s the problem with time machine questions. You have to change all their behaviours on and off the field and instil new training and dietary regimes so it’s not even Maradona any more.

Maradona played against players who’d just eaten a steak and had a hangover from the previous night (mind you, so did he).

This article is greatest players at the world cup, not a general list of best soccer players.

re: general discussion. Just like every other sport, can’t really rank Pele vs R9 or whatever, just too different. Whatever your list is coming from will just be whatever the writer(s) valued most and not some source of truth. From my perspective.

That was world cup dude. The arguments against Pele are his week to week play in Brazil, not their world cup performances.

I think it’s weird to get mad if someone puts Lebron 4th, Lemieux 1st or Pele 4th or whatever. These are all time greats, and as Krayz said some people value more skills or longevity or introducing new things to the sport.

European leagues were also pretty shit in quality at that time.

Pele even invented what would become known as the Cruyff turn. Not a lot of people know that.

And this is why I rate Cruyff so highly. They just changed the sport. It would be tough to have Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Pep etc without them.

You go from Pele most times 5th to providing lists where he is never lower than 3rd. All European publications that never rated the Brazilian competition Pele played in highly even though that competition brought home 3 world cups during that time. It is pure recency and location bias that has people putting Messi above Maradonna and Maradonna over Pele. Anyway GOAT discussion never come to an agreement. I do always enjoy the British press having to put Maradonna number 1 because he embarrassed England on the world stage.

Cruyff was wonderful but he could only do 80% of what Pele could, Neeskens wasn’t far off Cruyff in many (not all) ways.

Isnt there a football thread for you folks to debate this stuff in?

3 Likes

Messi would have grown up to be 3’ 9” if he was born in Pele’s era, I’m going to arbitrarily deduct some points from him since there are no rules to these arguments

7 Likes

LOL

You cant say they didn’t rate Pele because Brazil when on all these lists you will see 3-4 teammates of Pele in the top 50 of all time lists.

Maradonna never had a Garrincha, Gairzinho. Neither did Messi.

For their WC winning teams you probably have Burruchaga and Di Maria as the second best players.

Right, now carry on and name the best players in Brazil’s 58 team.

Also it’s Jairzinho with a J, which leads me to suspect too many of your opinions are regurgitated from random YouTubes and assorted podcasts.

Garrincha should be ranked higher in those lists as well. I would rank him above Cruyf.

While we’re at it, Matthaus seems way too high on that Guardian list.

It corrected weirdly, I had it right originally! I think my phone remembers me getting mad at Gervinho too often, I had high hopes for him.

And none of us watched the world cups in the 50s and early 60s, how is that against any of us.

None of us saw Wilt, Richard and I doubt many saw Orr.

1 Like