Best Soccer Players Of All Time

How To Actually Evaluate The Greatest Footballers Without Losing Your Mind

Everyone and their cousin has an opinion on the greatest soccer players of all time, and most of it is noise. I spent years building ranking models for a sports analytics outfit, and the hardest part wasn't the math — it was dealing with the fact that every system you build will piss off at least three separate generations of fans. Here's how to do it properly, or as properly as you can when the subject is fundamentally subjective.

Building Your List Of Best Soccer Players Of All Time

Start with a defined timeframe and league scope. "All time" is meaningless without those constraints. I always anchored mine to FIFA-recognized senior men's international competition plus top-flight domestic leagues, roughly 1950 onward before video analysis and global scouting made cross-era comparison slightly less absurd. Before 1950, you're basically guessing because match data is spotty and the game was structurally different — the offside rule alone was completely different until 1925. The metrics that actually matter, in order of importance: goals plus assists per 90 against elite opposition, progressive actions per 90 (carries and passes into the final third), and defensive contribution if the position demands it. Then you layer in peer-reviewed contextual adjustments — strength of schedule, era scoring rates, and team quality around the player. A striker on a team that averages 2.8 goals per game is going to look infinitely better than an identical striker on a team that averages 0.9. This is where most amateur lists go wrong. They count trophies and goals without normalizing for context. I ran into a specific problem with my second model iteration where I tried to quantify "clutch" performance in knockout matches. I defined it as goal involvement rate in tournaments versus league play, and the results were hilariously noisy. Some players had tiny sample sizes — a few knockout games here and there — and a couple extra goal in a World Cup quarterfinal skewed their numbers into stratospheric territory. What I ended up doing was setting a minimum threshold of 400 professional minutes in knockout competition before including that metric at all, and even then I capped the weighting at 8 percent of the overall score. Anything more and you're just rewarding small-sample variance.

The Categories You Need To Cover

Forwards and attacking midfielders: goal and assist production against top-tier defenses, chance creation, and progressive carrying. ThinkMessi, Pelé, Ronaldo Nazário, Gerd Müller, Lyudmila Pavlichenko in women's football if you're expanding the scope. Strikers who don't create for others are worth less than they appear — modern xG models show that a high finisher on a weak team often regresses hard year over year. Central midfielders: passing networks, progressive pass completion into the final third, defensive interception and pressing metrics, and tactical versatility. Zidane, Xavi, Iniesta, Pirlo, Lothar Matthäus. The tricky part here is separating players who dominated because they were good from players who dominated because their teams controlled possession by design. A midfielder on a team that averages 70 percent possession will naturally accumulate more progressive passes, and some of that is systemic, not individual. Full-backs and wing-backs: progressive carries, cross accuracy, defensive duels won, and overlap frequency. Maldini, Cafu, Roberto Carlos, Pueblita. This position is underrated in all-time lists because the conventional stats don't capture what these players actually did. Modern metrics like progressive carries and defensive actions in the final third help, but they didn't exist when many of these players were active, so you have to estimate from match reports and observational data.

Centrals defenders: aerial duel success, interceptions per 90, passing accuracy into advanced zones, and one-on-one defending. Maldini again, Baggio, Nesta, Beckenbauer. The ball-playing center-back revolution started earlier than most people think — Beckenbauer was essentially a sweeper-libero hybrid who initiated attacks from deep, which is basically what a modern ball-playing center-back does.

Common Mistakes That Ruin These Lists

Trophy counting is the biggest one. Winning a World Cup doesn't automatically make you the best player. It makes you part of a winning team. You can be the weakest player on a World Cup-winning squad and still get the medal. I've seen entire ranking systems collapse under this weight. Gullit won the World Cup and the Ballon d'Or, sure, but he was also injured for large portions of several seasons. Trophies are a factor, not a primary driver. Recency bias is the second killer. People who grew up watching Messi and Ronaldo inflate their numbers because those are the players they watched dominate for 15 years. That's fair emotionally but it skews comparisons. A player like Di Stéfano, who won five consecutive European Cups with Real Madrid and was arguably the most complete forward the game has ever seen, consistently ranks lower among casual voters than he should because he played before most living fans were born. The third mistake is positional inflation. Forwards always get more credit than they deserve because goals are visible and easy to count. Midfielders and defenders do things that don't show up in traditional stats — pressing triggers, spatial manipulation, defensive line coordination. You need expected goals (xG) and expected assists (xA) models to properly evaluate forwards, and you need advanced defensive metrics for the back line. Without those, you're just counting what's convenient, not what's accurate.

What Any Serious Ranking Should Include

A weighted composite score is the only approach that doesn't fall apart under scrutiny. I used a framework that looked roughly like this: peak performance (30 percent, weighted toward the player's best three to five seasons), longevity (25 percent, measuring sustained excellence over ten or more seasons), peak dominance (20 percent, how much better was this player than the average professional at their position during their prime), trophy and award weight (15 percent, normalized for era difficulty), and positional rarity adjustment (10 percent, because being an elite defensive midfielder is rarer and harder to do than being an elite striker). The positional rarity adjustment is controversial but necessary. Elite passers are common in modern football. Elite ball-winnng central midfielders who can also dictate tempo are genuinely rare. The same applies to center-backs who can play out from the back under pressure. If you don't account for positional scarcity, your list will be stacked with forwards and attacking midfielders who had great numbers in supportive systems. There's a hard ceiling on this whole exercise though, and I need to be straight about it. Cross-era comparison is fundamentally flawed. The physical demands, tactical sophistication, recovery between matches, nutrition, sports science — none of it is constant. A player from the 1970s couldn't directly compete with a 2020s player in most physical metrics, and vice versa in terms of tactical awareness. What you're really doing is estimating how each player would perform if they existed in the same timeline, which is speculative by definition. No model fixes that. You just acknowledge the uncertainty and move forward.

If you want a shorter path than building your own model, the IFFHS has published historical rankings that attempt something similar, though their methodology isn't fully transparent and they lean heavily on voting panels which reintroduces recency and regional bias. For a purely data-driven attempt, Opta and The Athletic have done season-by-season positional rankings that you can extrapolate backward, but the data quality drops significantly before 2005. Before that, you're combining scattered statistical records with extensive match footage review, which is where the real work lives.

The Reality Of Making These Lists

Any list you produce will be wrong in ways that matter to the people who care about those specifics. That's inevitable. The best you can do is be transparent about your methodology, acknowledge the blind spots, and let other people challenge your assumptions. The conversation itself is what makes the exercise worthwhile, not the final ranking. The players who consistently appear near the top across multiple serious frameworks tend to be the ones who actually were extraordinary — Messi, Cruyff, Di Stéfano, Pelé, Maradona, Maldini, Beckenbauer. Where exactly they land relative to each other is mostly academic. The disagreement is the point.