Pele still scored 77 goals in 92 appearences for Brazil, dont care who you are or when you played thats some pretty good going.
What a load of ****e. No team ever has and ever will be won by one man. Messi is one bloke out of 11. No matter how good he is, if his other 10 teammates are not up to par against 11 world class players in another team (like Spain) then there's nothing he can do. In the World Cup you're talking about, France knocked out Brazil on penalties, West Germany knocked out France and then Argentina beat West Germany to win 3-2 (with NO goals from Maradona). Argentina had to beat Uruguay, England (with help from 'the hand of god') and Belgium to reach the final. So using that World Cup to measure the quality and ability of a player across an entire career is really quite daft and fundamentally flawed. The only real way of measuring it is to look at the player. The goals, the assists, the quality, the technique, the skill and the footballing intelligence. At only 23, he's already had 31 goals and 18 assists in 33 games in the 10-11 season. In the Champions League, against arguably some of the best teams and players in the world, he scored 12 goals in 13 apps. That's likely to only improve with age. He really is something else.
Canny little player but couldn't be mentioned in the same class as those under discussion. And didn't turnip heed only put him into the England team because of injuries?
Johann Cruyff would still have been class, even if he had played for us. I'd like to see Messi playing alongside some of the ****e we have had in midfield over the years. He would turn into Jeff Whitley before you could say hoss-flaps.
Will you **** off to your own board? [NSFW]God I hate agreeing with Mags even when they're talking sense! [/NSFW]
Maradona won the world cup with an average Argentinian team. He also took the no-hopers of Napoli to their first ever league title. You're a typical mag who knows **** all about football.
I haven't had the honour of watching Maradonna play but from clips he looked outstanding. The thing which Messi has the edge on is the opposition. Today's players are fitter, faster and stronger on the whole (unless your name's Andy Reid....). Messi made Man Utd look like schoolboys in the champions league and got 53 goals in a season. Takes a magician to be able to beat that!
Gordon Banks; Peter Shilton; Bobby Moore; Bobby Charlton; Gary Lineker; Bryan Robson; Gazza and Becks are amongst Englands contributing world class players over the years. IMO of course. We currently dont have a world class player but we have plenty who think they are.
Pele played in an era before money from Europe attracted the best players from South America, and some of the club sides in Brazil were at that time as good as anything in Europe. That 1970 Brazil team was arguably the best international side of all time, and yet Pele still managed to stand out above the rest of them.
I take your point, but what you have to remember is the quality of players he has alongside him every game. If Messi came to Sunderland, and we won the league, fair do's
