Here it is, then. After a multi-tiered census taking in all 19 tournaments to date from Uruguay 1930 to South Africa 2010, the Guardian’s top 100 players of the World Cup is upon us. It has, needless to say, been a lengthy process of refinement. Star judges on the Guardian’s panel included Lothar Matthäus, Zico, John Barnes, Sunday Oliseh, Kelly Smith and Itu Khune; plus of course all your favourite Guardian football writers, the Guardian sports desk’s industry-leading editorial team, and an expert panel culled from Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.
As ever with such a list there is a huge margin for quibble, gripe and dissent. The most obvious objection, before we even get to the players, is that lists such as these are too arbitrary, too much an exercise in guesswork and false comparison. Is Zinedine Zidane a better World Cup player than Garrincha? How do we compare Lev Yashin and Roger Milla? How many superbly well-grooved Italian centre-backs is it necessary to include before we feel we’ve probably got the point by now?
On the other hand World Cup success can be quantified to a degree via the outline statistics: victories, goals, big matches, big moments, medals won. This is after all what the World Cup is for. It’s a popularity contest, a self-contained matrix of greatness at the end of which one team gets to leap around being demonstrably the best of its age.
So, that list again. It is pretty hard to argue with the top 10, albeit this is unlikely to stop people trying and indeed succeeding. Pelé gets top spot over Diego Maradona, an aggregate of voting rather than a coherent point of view with a single clinching reason. As far as this judge was concerned Pelé gets it on sheer high-end persistence: a major influence in two glorious victories 12 years apart, and a role model in style, tactics and good grace, not to mention – a side issue, but an issue nonetheless – the first genuinely global black superstar in any sport. Against this Maradona won a World Cup as close to single-handed as anyone’s likely to get, the outstanding individual performance in any tournament to date. He played above his level of fitness in 1990 and returned again in 1994. On the downside at least one of Maradona’s three tournaments will always be tainted by drug-taking.
There are quibbles and oddities even at the top of this list. Personally I’m a little surprised by Johan Cruyff’s position here, given Cruyff only played in one World Cup, in which he was, to be fair, player of the tournament. On the other hand Xavi at 15 looks a little low: like Cruyff, he defined the style of his team (who were World Cup winners) and was the outstanding player at South Africa 2010. Brazil will be his fourth World Cup.
Similarly, what to make of Just Fontaine? The Frenchman is of course one of the World Cup’s hoary old staples in his capacity as record scorer at a single tournament. But his entire World Cup existence spans 20 days in June 1958. Putting him a whole 31 places above Gary Lineker (who also reached a semi, and who was prolific across two tournaments) smacks a little of sentimentality.
Similarly there is the oddity of Lionel Messi’s presence at No51, reward for scoring a single goal (the last in a 6-0 thrashing) in 2006, and setting a few more up four years later. Clearly Messi’s presence is based on feats elsewhere, not least his standing as arguably the greatest club footballer of all time. But how he gets to be above Geoff Hurst (hat-trick in a final) Andrés Iniesta (winning goal in the last final) is not clear.
At the other end of things, spare a thought for poor old Jürgen Klinsmann, to whom the years have not been kind. In 1990 Klinsmann produced one of the great World Cup striking performances in West Germany’s 10-man victory against Holland and was a star all the way to victory in the final. He scored five goals in 1994 and three in 1998 and is sixth top scorer overall. And yet he scrapes in at No96, just above Tomas Brolin, and miles below Jay-Jay Okocha and Gazza. Sorry, Jürgen!
In fact it is possible to nitpick endlessly once you get started. The presence of Zbigniew Boniek above Gregorsz Lato, for example, seems unfair. Lato was a goalscorer at three tournaments, scored seven times in West Germany in 1974 and was usually Poland’s best player in the big matches across that nation’s golden decade. There is a separate treatise to be written on bald-ism in international football (with its distinctions, ie the tonsure exception). But Lato looks like another sufferer here.
A little extra interest comes with the disparity between the voting subsets. The legends had Zidane at No3, and both Xavi and Ronaldinho higher. The Guardian favoured Bobby Moore. The international panel liked the looks of Cruyff, Eusebio and Cafu. Then there are national subsets. Five Brazilians make the top 20, along with three Germans, one Dutchman and one Argentinian. Beyond this 13 Brazilians in the top 40 looks like a fair reflection on the 20th century’s dominant superpower. England get six overall, which seems about right, while a single African in the top 50 – Roger Milla – is evidence of where the powerbase has been in world football since 1930. A similar list from the next 84 years will perhaps look significantly different.
Most glaringly of all there is nobody in the top 50 from before the second world war, with the first three tournaments effectively chucked away. This is understandable in many ways. The World Cup was a diminished, selective competition, and football was still an infant sport. More obviously there is the simple fact of passing time and fading glory.
Personally I gave up trying to cull a World Cup XI out of the top 20. If you went with a standard 4-4-2 you might come up with: Dino Zoff; Cafu, Franz Beckenbauer, Bobby Moore, Paolo Maldini; Garrincha, Lothar Matthäus, Johan Cruyff, Zinedine Zidane; Pelé, Diego Maradona (for the away leg on Mars I’d probably switch to a double defensive midfield pivot of Nobby Stiles and Luis Monti and a back four of Stuart Pearce, Claudio Gentile, Benjamin Massing and Beowulf).
Of course, this is an entirely self contained exercise, a chance simply to enjoy these treasures again. This is the real beauty of the World Cup, the players that remain fixed in its receding four-yearly glow: Carlos Alberto forever pummelling Pelé’s sideways-yawn into the far corner, Igor Belanov clanging the Belgian stanchion, Salvatore Schillaci flukishly, gloriously on the spot. None of this changes, no matter how we sort or sift or rank it from the fringes. And best of all there’s another one just round the corner.