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People love Top 100 lists, right?
Nothing drives debate better than arbitrary rankings of players by some undefined or loosely defined criteria. What makes Cristiano Ronaldo better than Lionel Messi? Or Messi better than Luis Suarez or Alexis Sanchez? At least those guys pretty much play the same position, so some measure of comparison can be justifiably made. But how do you rank goalkeepers against goalscorers? Defenders against attackers? Midfield controllers against rampaging full backs? It's all a bit futile. But we do it anyway.
FourFourTwo's Top 100 from this morning is the latest such list to make the rounds. Like most lists of "best" football players, they underrate defenders (defending is easy, right, everybody?) and non-goalscoring midfielders (something about new coats of paint on the Bentley, etc). Except for Philipp Lahm, because adoring Philipp Lahm, just like spelling Philipp with two Ps, is the hipster cool thing to do.
Here's their top 10:
- Cristiano Ronaldo
- Philipp Lahm
- Lionel Messi
- Manuel Neuer
- Gareth Bale
- Zlatan Ibrahimovic
- Diego Costa
- Luis Suarez
- Angel Di Maria
- Arjen Robben
So that's 5-6 players who can single-handedly change and dominate a game, plus ZLATAN, plus the world's best goalkeeper, plus Pep Guardiola's attempt to reinvent the wheel, and Diego Costa. Does Costa's goalscoring nous make him the seventh best player in the world? Apparently so.
There are seven more Chelsea players in the top 100, which makes us the fifth most-represented club on the list after Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Juventus and easily the Premier League's cream of the crop with five of the league's ten best players. Surprisingly, John Terry's nowhere to be found.
- Diego Costa (#7)
- Thibaut Courtois (#11)
- Cesc Fabregas (#19)
- Eden Hazard (#26)
- Nemanja Matic (#37)
- Branislav Ivanovic (#44)
- Oscar (#58)
- Cesar Azpilicueta (#83)
While I'd like to see Matic higher, and would love to see Hazard convince observers that he deserves to be higher, Terry's omission is a bit of a head-scratcher. But defenders do tend to get under-rated, so perhaps there was just no room on the list for him. Let's take a look at the center backs who made the list ahead of Terry:
Diego Godin, Sergio Ramos, Thiago Silva, Vincent Kompany, Jerome Boateng, Leonardo Bonucci, Giorgio Chiellini, Mats Hummels, Ezequiel Garay, Javi Martinez, Dante, Raphael Varane, Martin Caceres, Mehdi Benatia
Are these guys better than the Chelsea captain? Presumably the list is based on the current season and the player's current ability. In order then, we have: yes, no, yes, yes, no, LOL, lol, yes, no, no, no yes, LOLOLOL, no. At least they didn't put Pique on there (though he is on the list of first-outs.) Small victories.
Be sure to check out the rest of the Top 100 list over at FourFourTwo if that's something that interests you. You can choose between 10 players/page or a lovely 1 player/page slideshow for ALL the pageclicks.