The Best I’ve Watched — Maradona
Yesterday, my nephews had a discussion about the best footballer of all time. The younger one, who’s 12, went with Andrés Iniesta, while the 17 year old chose Zinedine Zidane. Both choices surprised me a little, because they aren’t old enough to remember either player at their zenith. In the older one’s case, all he would have seen of Zidane are the highlights reels. But it made me think of what constitutes greatness and how certain players are perceived.
How would I make such a list? If you admit that video snippets online present a distorted or exaggerated picture of a player’s quality, then it’s best to stick to those that you watched in real time. In my case, that rules out the likes of Matthias Sindelar (Austria), Leônidas (Brazil), Alfredo Di Stéfano (Argentine-born), Sir Stanley Matthews (England), Ferenc Puskás, Nándor Hidegkuti (both Hungary) and the Brazilian contingent of Pelé, Garrincha, Didi, Gérson, Tostão and Rivellino. There would also be Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller, Günter Netzer, George Best, Eusébio, Jinky Johnstone, Lev Yashin and many others.
I started watching football in 1982, but I still have to leave out the great Bernd Schuster because he had quit international football by then, and there simply wasn’t any coverage of Spanish football to be able to judge his quality. I would also have to omit Kazimierz Deyna and Antonín Panenka, whose best years were long gone by the time I started following the game.
The first players to leave an indelible impression all wore the yellow of Brazil. How do you choose between that 1982 midfield quartet of Sócrates, Zico, Falcão and Cerezo? Each had his own unique qualities, and together they were magic. Zico would probably win the connoisseurs’ vote, but when I think of the perfect football picture, it’s always Sócrates striding majestically up the field on a sunlit afternoon, so cool that he may as well have had a lit cigarette in his mouth.
The next great group of greats I watched were the French midfield of 1984. Michel Platini dominated that year’s European Championship as no one has done before or since at a major tournament, but the quality around him was just as breathtaking — Jean Tigana, Alain Giresse and Luis Fernández.
That same year, Liverpool won a treble of trophies after beating Roma in the European Cup final in Rome. Aside from the skill and inspiration provided by Kenny Dalglish, that team also had a midfield boss in Graeme Souness and a peerless goalscorer in Ian Rush.
Four years later, the Dutch champions of Europe boasted Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard and Ronald Koeman. Gullit is as close as I’ve seen to the total footballer. He could defend and win you the ball back, create chances for his teammates and finish them off on his own. Add in tremendous strength and the spatial awareness only the most gifted possess, and it’s not hard to see why Best rated him above even Diego Maradona.
The Brazilian teams of the last 30 years have given us Romário, Bebeto, Ronaldo (the original), Rivaldo and Neymar. Of those, the young Ronaldo was the most frightening athlete I’ve seen on a football pitch, the perfect combination of strength and thoroughbred pace allied to unmatched finishing ability.
Across the border, Argentina gave us Gabriel Batistuta, Juan Sebastián Verón, Carlos Tevez and Sergio Agüero. For purely sentimental reasons, I’d include Fernando Redondo in there as well. Injuries and the caprices of his coaches deprived many of the chance to see him at his best, but peak Redondo was a sight to behold.
Zidane was part of a French side that also included Marcel Desailly, Lilian Thuram, Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira. At club level, Henry and Vieira played alongside Dennis Bergkamp, scorer of some of the most thrilling goals English football has seen. Zidane’s Juventus teammates included Pavel Nedved and Alessandro del Piero, while at Real Madrid, he played alongside Luis Figo, Roberto Carlos and David Beckham, as well as the hometown hero, Raúl.
All these back streets of football history inevitable bring us to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, whose exploits have been central to the football narrative for more than a decade. Messi, at his very best, had Iniesta and Xavi playing behind him, and Luis Suárez and Neymar alongside. Ronaldo was fortunate to come into a Manchester United side that had Roy Keane, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Wayne Rooney, not to mention the defensive nous of Rio Ferdinand and, later, Nemanja Vidić.
But when you look back to the first great side that Sir Alex Ferguson built, it’s impossible to envision all that success without the great Danish wall that was Peter Schmeichel in goal. And in this list heavily loaded in favour of attacking talent, it would be criminal not to mention the likes of Gaetano Scirea, the most regal of centre-backs, Daniel Passarella, Alan Hansen, Franco Baresi, Alessandro Nesta, Fabio Cannavaro and the moderns like Vincent Kompany, Virgil van Dijk and Diego Godin.
But it’s one name mentioned thus far only in passing that will always top my list. Maradona is best remembered for the summer of 1986, when his dazzling brilliance and the Hand of God goal against England shared headlines as Argentina lifted the World Cup for a second time. But if anything, it’s what he did with unfashionable Napoli that deserves even more attention.
Between 1986 and 1990, Napoli won Serie A twice and finished second the other two seasons. They also won the UEFA Cup and the Coppa Italia. All this while up against an AC Milan side that had Gullit, van Basten and Rijkaard, and an Internazionale team marshalled by Lothar Matthäus, who would lead West Germany to World Cup glory in 1990.
Why do I place him above a Messi or Zico? One true test of greatness is to imagine their teams without them. Would Brazil of that era have been markedly weaker without Zico? Not really. There was so much talent around, just as there was in 1962 when Amarildo stepped in for the injured Pelé.
A Barcelona team with Xavi and Iniesta pulling the strings in midfield, and the likes of Henry, Samuel Eto’o and Suárez in attack would likely still have won plenty of trophies. Real Madrid may not have dominated the Champions League as they did in Ronaldo’s final years there, but there’s no denying that he had a stellar line-up around him, from the goalkeeper and full-backs to the other forwards like Karim Benzema.
Most of these players were fortunate enough to play alongside other titans. In sharp contrast, not one of Maradona’s teammates from the 1986 World Cup-winning side would be an automatic pick for an all-time Argentine XI. At Napoli, when they won Serie A for the first time, the second-highest scorer was Andrea Carnevale, capped just ten times by Italy. Careca joined the following summer, but if you look at the Napoli squad of that era, the names don’t exactly trip off the tongue as they do with Milan or Inter.
The Argentina team of 1978 was unquestionably better than Maradona’s, as were the 1990s vintages which didn’t win anything. The counter-argument might be that Maradona would not have been able to shine as much with such talent around him, but that doesn’t really hold water when you look at the careers of Francesco Totti and Steven Gerrard, neither of whom won the trophies their talent perhaps deserved.
Both played their best when the support cast was at its strongest. Totti won Serie A with Batistuta alongside him, while Gerrard’s best years were spent dovetailing with Fernando Torres and then Suárez. One of the greatest defenders of the modern era, who played against most of those mentioned here in a long and storied career, was in no doubt when asked his opinion. “The best ever I played against was Maradona,” said Paolo Maldini.
Finally, are trophies and victories the only guide to greatness? Jay-Jay Okocha won the African Cup of Nations in 1994 and an Olympic gold two years later, but little else. But I’d have scrounged my last penny to go and watch him play, such was the joy he was able to transmit each time he had the ball at his feet. To reduce football purely to stats and trophy tallies is to make it an accountancy exercise.
What too of those who inspired generations with their leadership or example? Elías Figueroa in Chile, George Weah in Liberia, Álex Aguinaga in Ecuador, Teófilo Cubillas in Peru, Roger Milla in Cameroon, Cha Bum-kun in South Korea, Kazu Miura in Japan and Lucas Radebe in South Africa are a few that immediately come to mind.
Spare a thought too for Agostino Di Bartolomei, who killed himself on May 30, 1994, exactly a decade after the Roma team he led had lost the European Cup final to Liverpool. Roma didn’t win as much as Juventus, but in the half-decade that he wore the captain’s armband at his hometown club, the fans saw Di Bartolomei as “a point of reference, a monument reflecting our passion for these colours, immortal, just like Agostino’s spirit”. It’s hard to think of any greater glory.