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Football's greatest - where does Lionel Messi rank?


Dave

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Juventus: Peruzzi; Torricelli, Iuliano, Montero; Di Livio, Deschamps, Davids, Pessotto; Zidane; Inzaghi, Del Piero.

 

Inter: Pagliuca; Fresi; West, Colonnese, Zanetti; Moriero, Winter, Simeone, Cauet; Djorkaeff, Ronaldo.

 

Look at the difference in the starting lineups of those teams man.

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I wonder if we would have been talking about C. Ronaldo amongst the best players ever had it not been for Messi.

 

Nah as he's not even the best Ronaldo of the last 15 years.

 

I was checking some of his stats last night and they're really bloody insane. I was unfortunately too young to appreciate his PSV/Barca years when they were happening so all I have to go off are videos and compilations which I've watched and rewatched. But f***ing hell man. What a player in all regards of his game.

 

I know you're a particularly big fan of his, would you say he's underrated in the general context of players of the past 30-40 years? I still think he's unfairly tainted because of his more turbulent later years.

 

 

 

He is by a lot but if you go on forums where people tend to know their football then he's quite highly rated. I think as you've said it's his latter years which unfortunately have led to a tainted image of him from the generation below mine, Fat Ronaldo etc when they never got to see how good he really was before his injuries. I totally agree with Sewelly when you're talking about him being the most naturally talented player of the past 20 years.

 

Not to take anything away from Cristiano but I could not envisage him doing the same that Ronaldo did when going to Inter and Serie A at the age that he did. He took them a whisker to their first title for years which was taken away by corrupt officials in his first season there in what was the toughest league defensively at the time. Plus as I have stated on here before that Inter team from then wasn't anything particularly out of the ordinary either.

 

Another one whose career was littered with bad advice and was corrupted by his advisers.

 

I do rate Ronaldo, just think his career never got where it could have gone, which is something ridiculous to say of a guy that won two WCs. His year at Barça was just magical, I don't think I have ever been so f***ing devastated because of a transfer as when he asked to be sold.

 

As a Barça fan, for years I have dreamt of what would have been to have Ronaldo - knees intact - playing for us for 4-5 years. Until we got Messi.

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:lol: Aye HTT I don't know what you are going on about :lol:

 

However, brah, go check out the league table from La Liga from 58/59. Check the goal amounts and compare to today. It's not a massive difference.

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Then why has the average number of goals scored fallen dramatically? Your argument makes no sense HTT, you say it was harder to score yet the bare facts say that everybody scored more goals?

 

:lol: HTT just thinks it was harder to score then, damn the facts and evidence, man.

 

His arguments are as cloudy as yours though tbf. Arguing that CRonaldo would be among the absolute best ever. Oh god.

 

I talk about statistics and I back what I say with facts. This Ronaldo is insanely good, there's no doubt about it. No team in the world can stop him from doing his thing, it's just that his thing isn't as effective as Messi's thing, but it's more effective than anyone else's in the past twenty years, when you take into account how long he has done it for.

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Guest Howaythetoon

That still doesn't make sense to your original argument HTT.

 

Which was?!

 

For me I don't buy the it was easier to score back then line basically because it wasn't no matter what the stats may say. Alan Smith won more trophies than Shearer but I know who was the better player...

 

It was just as hard if not more so to score back then than today.

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Juventus: Peruzzi; Torricelli, Iuliano, Montero; Di Livio, Deschamps, Davids, Pessotto; Zidane; Inzaghi, Del Piero.

 

Inter: Pagliuca; Fresi; West, Colonnese, Zanetti; Moriero, Winter, Simeone, Cauet; Djorkaeff, Ronaldo.

 

Look at the difference in the starting lineups of those teams man.

 

So they had Paglicua, Zanetti and Ronaldo? Taribo West ffs. :lol:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Peyroteo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Bican

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Binder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eus%C3%A9bio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferenc_Puskas

 

Look at those goalscorer records :lol: Yes, before Pele's era but it shoes you the transformation of the game tactically and in terms of professionalism.

 

There will be short-term trends where the game is more defensive or attack minded (I'd say right now the game is more open in Europe than it was say 5-6 years ago, say) but on the whole the progression of the sport has lead to less goals being scored decade on decade. That's what makes Messi's achievement all the more impressive, I don't think anybody expected Mueller's record to be broken in the modern era.

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I wonder if we would have been talking about C. Ronaldo amongst the best players ever had it not been for Messi.

 

Nah as he's not even the best Ronaldo of the last 15 years.

 

I was checking some of his stats last night and they're really bloody insane. I was unfortunately too young to appreciate his PSV/Barca years when they were happening so all I have to go off are videos and compilations which I've watched and rewatched. But f***ing hell man. What a player in all regards of his game.

 

I know you're a particularly big fan of his, would you say he's underrated in the general context of players of the past 30-40 years? I still think he's unfairly tainted because of his more turbulent later years.

 

 

 

Another one whose career was littered with bad advice and was corrupted by his advisers.

 

How was his career littered with bad advice?

 

Here is how Ronaldo reacted when he was sold from Barcelona to Inter-Milan for an unheard of sum, a combined $48 million in transfer fees: he cried in sadness. He cried all night. Ronaldo had been happy in Barcelona. He’d built a house over the cliff on the Bay of Castelldefels, and the view reminded him of Rio. He was in Norway for the weekend with the Brazilian national team, and he learned of the sale by telephone from his agent in Italy. The next morning at the training table, Ronaldo’s eyes were red and he asked to be excused. That afternoon, Brazil suffered their first defeat in three years.
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Juventus: Peruzzi; Torricelli, Iuliano, Montero; Di Livio, Deschamps, Davids, Pessotto; Zidane; Inzaghi, Del Piero.

 

Inter: Pagliuca; Fresi; West, Colonnese, Zanetti; Moriero, Winter, Simeone, Cauet; Djorkaeff, Ronaldo.

 

Look at the difference in the starting lineups of those teams man.

 

So they had Paglicua, Zanetti and Ronaldo? Taribo West ffs. :lol:

 

Djorkaeff was :fwap: to be honest.

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Then why has the average number of goals scored fallen dramatically? Your argument makes no sense HTT, you say it was harder to score yet the bare facts say that everybody scored more goals?

 

:lol: HTT just thinks it was harder to score then, damn the facts and evidence, man.

 

His arguments are as cloudy as yours though tbf. Arguing that CRonaldo would be among the absolute best ever. Oh god.

 

I talk about statistics and I back what I say with facts. This Ronaldo is insanely good, there's no doubt about it. No team in the world can stop him from doing his thing, it's just that his thing isn't as effective as Messi's thing, but it's more effective than anyone else's in the past twenty years, when you take into account how long he has done it for.

 

You don't back up you're stats though do you. I told you to check out the amount of goalscored in the La Liga back then and you will see its not that different to today as you try to make it out as.

 

It's on the international scene, where Messi doesn't excel anyways that it really has changed A LOT!

 

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Juventus: Peruzzi; Torricelli, Iuliano, Montero; Di Livio, Deschamps, Davids, Pessotto; Zidane; Inzaghi, Del Piero.

 

Inter: Pagliuca; Fresi; West, Colonnese, Zanetti; Moriero, Winter, Simeone, Cauet; Djorkaeff, Ronaldo.

 

Look at the difference in the starting lineups of those teams man.

 

So they had Paglicua, Zanetti and Ronaldo? Taribo West ffs. :lol:

 

Djorkaeff was :fwap: to be honest.

 

But he was french. And in those days no one liked the french. :lol:

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:lol: Aye HTT I don't know what you are going on about :lol:

 

However, brah, go check out the league table from La Liga from 58/59. Check the goal amounts and compare to today. It's not a massive difference.

 

Scoring has declined about 10-20%, in general, over the past forty years. I think it's declined by even more in the Brazilian league, meaning Pele played in a time which was far easier to rack up goals. Why has scoring declined? Probably lots of reasons: advance in technology has eroded the difference in athleticism between the most athletic and the average, meaning most players are strong and fast, leading to a higher average level than before. Also, the population of footballers has increased exponentially. This again means that the best teams will now have multiple players who are sublime whereas before, simply due to a lack of players, teams had lesser good players, therefore there was a greater difference in quality between teams in general. I'm not sure this is true, you'd have to look at goals difference of the best and worst teams and do a regression. I'd say that since money exploded in football, there has been a reversal in this trend to a point but we are still seeing more parity today than before, although that's now restricted to the foremost tier of teams. There are also more teams today, so the population argument only goes so far.

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Guest Howaythetoon

But your theory is contracting itself man, you say teams/players were given more freedom to be expressive and as such the game was far more open which meant more teams scored... then claim it was harder to score? It makes no sense  :lol:

 

It's not, I'm arguing against the it was easier to score back then line when in reality it wasn't or certainly no more easier than today. More goals were score back then than today aye but not because it was err easier, that's just doing teams, players and that era injustice. I'm saying more were scored because teams and players were less defensive and given more freedom to express themselves etc.

 

Andy Cole never scored as many as he did for us in a season for Man Utd despite playing in a better side with better players why was that? Mentality man...

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