Based on the videos, I don’t think Pele was greater than Maradona, and surely wouldn’t even be in the top 10 of the current world players. But I gotta disagree a bit on one point:

Messi’s 213 goals for Barcelona were mostly scored against top-level talent. A lot of Pele’s over 1000 career goals were scored against the local equivalent of minor league teams.

Given the spending disparity between Barcelona and the rest of Spanish teams (excluding Real Madrid), I don’t think the majority of teams in Spain are top-level talent.

and the last European Championship. But by the eyeball test, Messi is by far the best player I’ve seen, and it doesn’t sound like there is really any dispute to that. So the only way I can make sense of how good he is, is to compare how much better he is to everyone else compared to someone else. The only person I can say dominated his sport like Messi is Barry Sanders, I don’t think I will ever see another athlete make fools out of his competition like Barry did.

He didn’t go to Europe while the club hierarchy was still evolving, we’re going to use that against him?

Pele had a great cast around him, so does Messi. Let’s see what Messi does the rest of his career.

Also, I don’t think we can just throw out his performance for Argentina. If Messi was from somewhere like Slovenia or Honduras, it would be ok to write off international success. But, come on, the guy is from Argentina and hasn’t seen success with his country, that is a mark against him.

I’m a Sporting KC fan and I kind of follow European soccer. My question is: why do Americans who like soccer seem to always randomly pick a European (usually English) team to root for? Any by randomly, I mean whoever won the EPL the year before they choose their favorite team. It’s ridiculous. Go on people’s SBN profile. A lot of people have a EPL blog they follow. For NO REASON! In my personal life as well, people do this. I see people walking around with Manchester United jerseys on. I go to a Sporting KC game and see people wearing Manchester United jerseys. A couple years ago when Man U came to KC, the stands were half Wizards fans, half Man U fans. What gives, people? I know Will has a favorite EPL team, but at least it’s completely random. I mean, nobody’s rooting for Norwich City. They’re terrible. But you live in the DC area, right Will? DC United? Ever heard?

And when it gets closer I’ll post a fanshot.

but I have a spreadsheet from the last European championship with a tiered scoring system for the purposes of gambling on the tournament. Im not sure if we want to do this for fun, or if we want to try and set up some sort of pay league through paypal or something. I really have no idea how we could do this, but if this is something people want to do there are people smarter than me who can help make this happen… Of course I would have to do some translating since its all in German (thankfully math is an international language. I’ll have to email my buddy for a refresher on it.

The real beauty of the spreadsheet is that I could just email it to everyone ones they bought in and they can follow along on their own.

..but does the greatest soccer player have to be a big-time goal scorer? Given the nature of the game, isn’t is possible that the actual greatest player ever might be a defender who was just unbelievably awesome? Yet since that would be so hard to measure….people seem to just assume that all the best players are just those that score the most. Just because goals are easiest to track doesn’t mean those that score them are the best.

I’d argue the same in football. Just because the QB or RB racks up the prettiest stats doesn’t mean they are actually the best players. It’s entirely possible that the best actual player in football is an offensive lineman who is just super-dominant.

And I’d still rather that than kicking for Barca.

Take that.