Beyond Pele, Maradona or the World Cup.

Somehow football, or the beautiful game as the Brazilians call it or soccer as the Americans call it, never found a fan following in India (except in West Bengal, Goa and Kerala) as it has in the rest of the world, even among the working class. Why it is so is one of biggest mysteries in the world, considering that this sport can pay rewards that can exceed cricket or tennis by a long way and that the lower middle class and working class from which all players have sprung from is plentiful in this part of the world as well.

There is a shocking degree of disinterest about the sport here. The popular media here only covers The World Cup and The Euro Cup. Thats the only time when the sport gets wide coverage here. Therefore the only players who gain recognition here are the ones who play and shine in these two tournaments.

Hence whenever the question of who was the greatest comes up, people dont look beyond Pele or Maradona.

But as anyone who follows football will tell you, international matches (match between national teams ) are hardly five to ten percent of the football matches that are played during a given year, or lesser than that. The rest is club football, which being professional is much more tougher and challenging. The toughest football tournament is not the World Cup or the Euro, but the UEFA Champions League where 32 of the best club teams in Europe battle it out from September to May every year since the tournament began in 1956.

The reason why the World Cup was conceived in 1930 was to have a tournament involving national teams to be prestigeous enough for the top players to participate. Same with Europan cup which was started in 1960.

I would first like to make clear that I'm by no way belittling Pele or Maradona or international football. But before calling them the greatest footballers, one needs to take a few things into account.

These two were strikers.

A striker has the possession of the ball for not more than 5-6 minutes from the entire 90 plus minutes of the match. How well a striker plays or whether he scores or not is determined by the midfield. It is the midfielder who has the bulk of possession of the ball, it is him who decides the pace of the match. Defenders are seldom superstars because people forget that stopping/saving goals is as spectacular and important as scoring goals, sometimes even requiring more skill than scoring, risky as well as  it is replete with the challenge of getting booked.

No need to explain how thankless a goalkeeper's role is. Thats why the likes of Kahn, Shilton, Yashin, Casillas, Buffon will never get half the spotlight of their 10 counterparts in the team.

So the game is much more about who scores a goal or who gets to be the one that scores it.

Defenders like Franz Beckenbauer, Carles Puyol, Paolo Maldini and Lillian Thuram (just to quote four examples) are worth their weight in precious stones. The way they stop the goals is at times much more pleasurable to watch than the goals being scored. Their tally of goals is hardly into double figures. So are they not to be called great just because they arent the goalscorers?

And what about the soul of football, the midfielders like Zidane, Rivaldo, Charlton, Giggs, Cryuff, Di Stefano and Messi? (the last three being able to play the roles of forwards as well) ?

The number of goals scored by them is not eye boggling, but their role is the deciding factor.

The reason why Pele is termed as the greatest footballer is given as he scored the most goals till date, 1200. Maradona because of the spectacular Argentina triumph of the 1986 World Cup mainly.

Pele can be termed as the best striker in international football where he scored 77 goals in a hundred odd matches he played and played a great part in Brazil winning the 1958 and 1970 World cups.

But he played all his career in the Brazilian League with Santos FC. The Brazilian League has a lot of flamboyance at the cost of substance and high scoring matches are the norm, with four or five goals being scored in a game being commonplace. It was therefore easy to see how Pele and another Brazilian great Romario who played for Vasco da Gama FC got to a thousand goals. Maradona by that comparison played in much tougher conditions, for FC Barcelona and then for Napoli, even though he played the bulk of his career for Boca Juniors.

The conditions in European leagues are not so liberal for high scoring. The conditions in EPL, Primera Liga, Serie A and Bundesliga to name the top four are very tough and there is hardly any open space for a goal to be squeezed in. 3-2, 2-2 are the normal scorelines (or in case of Serie A, 1-0 ). Hence the arguably greatest players to never paly the World Cup Alfredo di Stefano (who according to many is the best ever) and the tragic George Best playing in Spain and England respectively stand out. Their total tally of goals is not even half of Pele, but the conditions in which they scored them were and remain much more testing.

The best players always look forward to playing in Europe and not in any Latin American or Asian League. Any Argentine would look forward to play in Barcelona instead of Boca Juniors or any Brazilian in AC Milan instead of Fluminese . Thats where the biggest money and the best quality is.

Thats where the contemporary players like Messi, Rivaldo,Raul, Zidane,Maldini etc stand out as they have played their entire careers in much more testing conditions than any league in Latin America. Its unfair that they be put below the past greats just because somehow the present cant be romanticized or glorified.

Messi has joined the all time greats by playing Barcelona where he effortlessly skips between midfield and forward positions. Maradona had a miserable two years in the same team.The name of the great Gerd Muller who was the mainstay of the attack of Bayern Munich through all the 1970s and was instrumental in the then West Germany winning the World Cup in 1974 is not even mentioned in the same breath. Neither are Johann Cruff and Alfredo di Stefano, "total footballers" who could play in any position. Strange.

When deciding greatness, all aspects of the game have to be taken into account. Its unfair to ignore club football over international football and vice versa. The media of country like India conveniently ignored club football till the end of the 1990s and never mentioned players who were never able to play the world cup, e.g., players like Ryan Giggs or George Best, because Wales and Northern Ireland couldnt produce ten other worthy players to play alongside them.

So in simple words, its not just the ones who score goals that are great, but also the ones who create them or stop them. As Zidane once said "This is a team game. Individual glory here is worth nothing. You pass the ball to the next guy 99 out of 100 times".

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