Why the ‘greatest ever’ tag is redundant
We have to consider ourselves lucky that the football gods have blessed us with two of the game’s most talented players in their prime at the same time.
It may be some time until we see the likes of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo again and, make no mistake about it, their proficiency in front of goal mean they will take their place in the record books.
It seems that any blog written about Messi or Ronaldo, however, cannot be written without the phrase ‘could be the greatest ever’ being used in it.
They go a little something like this: “Messi breaks another record by scoring 18 goals in one game – is he the greatest ever or is La Liga just not that strong?”
Or something to that effect. You get the point, though, and there are a lot of column inches dedicated to this particular discussion.
The debate rages on and on, who is the best? Messi or Ronaldo? Is Messi better than Pele? Was Pele a better play than Maradona? It makes for great football fan debate but really, in the end, it is irrelevant because no one will ever agree on one individual.
How do you decide it? Do you base it on how many goals have been scored? Or on number of successes? We go round in circles but that is the nature of the football debate. It is also difficult to name one particular player as the ‘greatest’ as they can only be compared to their contemporaries.
For example, if you were going to decide on who is the best out of Diego Maradona and Messi than surely you would need to see how they perform against each other’s contemporaries.
What we should do is drop this ‘greatest ever’ tag and just appreciate how great some of the current players in this generation are and stop wasting breath on whether or not they are the best of all time.
0 comments