The Best Soccer Players of All Time (And Why the Debate Never Ends)

The rules have changed more than most fans realize, and nearly every change made attacking easier. Until 1992 a goalkeeper could pick up a back-pass, so a leading team could kill twenty minutes without moving the ball forward. Three points for a win replaced two, pushing teams to chase games rather than sit on draws. The tackle from behind was outlawed in the late 1990s. Surfaces went from mud to engineered turf that plays the same in November as in May.

Sports science, video analysis, and squads deep enough to rotate all extended careers and raised the floor of the average opponent. A player in 1970 faced worse defenders more often; a player today faces good ones every week. Both are true, and they pull in opposite directions.

1992

the back-pass rule changes goalkeeping forever

1995

Ballon d’Or first opens to non-European players

3 pts

a win is worth more, and teams defend less

Then there is the evidence problem. Every touch of a modern career is logged and rewatchable from four angles. For the greats of the 1950s and 60s we have highlight reels and the testimony of people who were there. Reels flatter everyone; memory sanctifies. Comparing a dataset to a mythology is not a fair fight.

Pele is the cleanest example of what makes this hard. He won three World Cups with Brazil, in 1958, 1962 and 1970 — a record no other player has matched and one that will likely stand forever. He arrived at the 1958 tournament as a teenager and left it as the most famous athlete alive.

The complications are structural rather than personal. He spent nearly his entire prime at Santos, in a Brazilian league European fans rarely saw, so the head-to-head comparisons people crave mostly do not exist. And the Ballon d’Or was restricted to players at European clubs until 1995, which is why the most famous soccer player of the 1960s never won one.

What survives all of that is the 1970 World Cup, the first broadcast widely in color and still the best argument in his favor. What stands out there is not the finishing. It is the vision, the dummies, and how often he creates a chance by making a defender commit to a ball he never intends to touch.

Diego Maradona is the patron saint of the one-man-carried-a-nation argument, and 1986 is the reason. Argentina won that World Cup with him as the gravitational center of everything: he took the ball in his own half against packed defenses and went through them, on pitches that would not pass an inspection today.

The quarterfinal against England produced the two most discussed goals in the sport — one punched in with a hand the referee never saw, one a run from inside his own half past most of the England team. That the same player scored both, four minutes apart, is why the debate about him is never purely technical.

The greatest players are not the ones who never lose the ball. They are the ones the other team plans an entire evening around.

Napoli is the underrated half of the case. He took a club from the poorer south of Italy to league titles at a time when Serie A concentrated more elite talent than anywhere else — while being fouled relentlessly under rules that permitted it.

The Messi and Ronaldo years broke the sport’s sense of what is normal. For roughly a decade and a half, two players sustained scoring and creating rates the game had previously seen only in short bursts, against modern defenses and modern scrutiny. Anyone searching for a Messi soccer player highlight is really searching for years in which the outlier became routine.

Messi holds the record for Ballon d’Or wins, and in 2022 he won the World Cup with Argentina, which for many people closed the last open question in his case. Ronaldo’s argument is built differently: relentless reinvention, elite output across several leagues, and a physical peak that let him beat you in the air, on the break, and from range.

Data is the gift and the trap of this era. We can measure progressive passes and expected goals for these two and for nobody before them, which biases every ranking toward the recent.

Some all-timers matter less for their output than for what they changed. Johan Cruyff defined Total Football with Ajax and the Netherlands, a system in which any outfield player could occupy any position and the shape reorganized around the ball. Ajax won three straight European Cups in the early 1970s, and the Dutch reached the 1974 final playing soccer that still looks modern.

• Franz Beckenbauer invented the attacking sweeper role, then won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and again as manager in 1990.
• Zinedine Zidane paired size and balance with an absurd first touch — two headed goals in the 1998 final, and a volley in the 2002 Champions League final that is still the reference clip.
• Ronaldo Nazario, before the knee injuries, was the most frightening runner the sport has produced; his 2002 World Cup was a great comeback in any sport.
• Alfredo Di Stefano ran Real Madrid’s first European dynasty from everywhere at once, which is why coaches rate him higher than casual fans do.

This is the category most lists undervalue, because influence does not photograph well. Cruyff has fewer highlight goals than half the forwards on any famous soccer players list, and a stronger claim to having changed the game.

Any honest list of the greatest soccer players includes the women’s game, where the era problem is sharper still, because the infrastructure changed underneath the players mid-career. Marta is the all-time leading World Cup scorer across both the men’s and women’s tournaments, and she won FIFA’s world player of the year award six times — mostly with a federation that gave her little support.

Mia Hamm was the pivot point in the United States: a World Cup winner in 1991 and 1999, an Olympic gold medalist in 1996 and 2004, and the reason a generation of American kids assumed soccer was a game women played on television. Abby Wambach retired in 2015 as the leading international goalscorer in the history of the sport.

Most people watch a 1970s highlight reel, notice that the defending looks loose and the ball moves slowly, and quietly downgrade everyone involved. That reaction is mostly wrong: a reel is edited to show goals and strips out everything that made them hard.

1. 1

   Find a full match

   Full broadcasts of most World Cup knockout games from 1966 onward are easy to find. Ten minutes of a real match beats an hour of compilations.

2. 2

   Watch the surface first

   Check the pitch in the second half. Bare patches, standing water, and a ball that skids or stops dead change what a first touch even means.

3. 3

   Count the uncalled fouls

   Track one attacker for five minutes and note the contact that goes unpunished. Referees then allowed things that draw a straight red today.

4. 4

   Watch the buildup

   Rewind ten seconds. The pass before the pass, and the run that dragged a defender away, are where the all-timers separate themselves.

5. 5

   Check the opposition

   A great performance against a defensive World Cup semifinalist is a different claim than one in a tour exhibition.

Strip away the arguing and a short list of qualities keeps showing up. Longevity, because one incandescent season is a different achievement than fifteen. Production in the matches that decide something. Range, meaning the ability to beat you a second way when the first is taken away. And influence — whether teammates played better, and whether the sport looks different afterward.

Almost nobody has all four. Maradona has peak and range; Pele has peak and the trophies; Messi has longevity and range in unusual quantities; Cruyff has influence beyond all of them. Which one you weight most heavily is taste, and admitting that makes the conversation better.

The best version of this debate happens on a sideline, in the ten minutes before a game, between people about to play badly and enjoy it enormously. If you do not have that game yet, Pickup Soccer will show you the free ones near you. The arguing is included at no extra charge.