The Great Soccer Debate

"My mother says I was the greatest."

Diego Armando Maradona



I'm not terribly into "who is the greatest" type of debate. Pele or Maradona? Who knows? It goes without saying what the Argentinians and Brazilians think.

 Some argue Alfredo di Stefano was the greatest. Others Garrincha. Now Lionel Messi is in the argument. See for yourself.

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I suppose if there's a list to go by, World Soccer is the one to give you the best account. I think there are, the ones I've seen anyway, maybe five comprehensive lists ever compiled. Most books don't bother to rank choosing instead to select the most notable players. Every single I've seen tend to have Brazilians and Italians dominating the overall totals.

And some of the notable, for the record, South Americans (and Frenchmen) are and were of Italian (partly in some cases) ancestry.

They include (about 20% of the list):

Di Stefano, Maradona (Spanish-Italian), Platini, Passarella, Sciaffino, Francescoli, Ginola, Nasazzi, Messi, Rivellino, Sivori, Caniggia, and some distant like Cantona who hails from Sardinia on his paternal side.

It doesn't end with the players. The same thing can be said of some (making up about 15% of the overall selections) of the finest managers in history.

Though I don't quite get how Vittorio Pozzo gets overlooked here. A bit silly given he's the only fricken manager to win back to back World Cup titles.