The Soccer 100, published in the UK today, is a rundown of the greatest male footballers of all time, as decided by a crack team of Athletic writers.
But we are nothing if not democratic, so we thought we would give the readers the chance to have their say and compare their choices with ours. Readers were asked to vote, from the list of 100 players, for their top 10 in no particular order. From that, the players have been ranked according to how many votes they received, which results in this top 10. Readers were also invited to nominate players who they believed belonged on the list, but that we had missed.
The top line is that both the book and the general public are absolutely aligned on the top man: Lionel Messi, who was deemed worthy of the top 10 by 93 per cent of respondents. You do wonder slightly about the seven per cent who didn’t think Lionel Messi — Lionel Messi — is among the 10 best players ever, but that’s the beauty of the democratic process.
We’re also on the same page for the rest of the top five, just in a slightly different order: the readers had Pele second and Diego Maradona third, then Cristiano Ronaldo at four and Johan Cruyff in fifth place, whereas for The Athletic writers, it was vice versa in both cases.
After that, there’s a bit of a divergence. The Soccer 100 has Alfredo di Stefano in sixth place, but the readers’ vote has him in 10th. The readers have Paolo Maldini in ninth place, whereas in the book, he’s down in 17th. Ronaldo (Nazario) gets seventh place in the public vote but is 12th according to us, and you readers clearly aren’t as impressed with Ferenc Puskas’ boda fides, putting him in 14th when the book ranks him at number nine.
But these are not massive disparities, which is nice, isn’t it?
There were some interesting shouts in the ‘name a player for the top 10 we forgot’ section. And by ‘interesting’ we mean in both the ‘yes, perhaps that player should have been included’ and the ‘erm…what?’ senses.
Messi was the clear No 1 in the subscriber poll (Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
Suggestions in the former category include Samuel Eto’o, Claude Makelele, Juan Roman Riquelme, John Terry, Virgil van Dijk, David Beckham and Mohamed Salah. All fine players, all from a loosely similar era, and perhaps with a few more years’ distance, we would have considered them all.
Hats off to the history buff who suggested the Austrian forward Matthias Sindelar, who was part of the ‘Wunderteam’ in the 1920s and 1930s but died in mysterious circumstances in 1939. Ditto Alex James: we assume this reader meant the Arsenal forward who was part of their all-conquering team in the 1930s, rather than the Blur bassist/cheese purveyor.
There were a few ‘banter’ suggestions, too: we confess ‘all Hereford United players’ weren’t considered in our deliberations, nor were ‘Rob’, Mark Noble, Gary Breen, or, inevitably, Ali Dia.
Still, hopefully it was as fun a process for you as it was for us. Now all you have to do is buy the book…