If Barcelona wins the ECL this season..will they be considered as the best European side ever?

Your argument can also be used against Real's record. Look at who Real had to beat to get that 57/58 European cup (Royal Antwerp, Sevilla in their first ever time in the competition, and Vasas SC) before beating AC Milan 3-2 aet in the final. So one close extra time win against the only top team Real had to play gave them the cup that year. That was hardly a one year fluke either. The next year Real crushed Wiener Sportclub in a quarterfinal. Winning the old ECC was often as much about getting an easy path to the final as it was about the quality of football. Not that the Real of that day weren't a great club but rather that they faced a very different competitive environment in european cup competition. Winning the CL usually requires that you beat more than one top team along the way and you rarely see blowouts on the scale of the old European cup. One of the many problems of comparing club's record from very different time periods.

If Barca win the CL this season (especially as part of a double/treble) they certainly are closer to that Real Madrid side than your statement suggests but I'd agree that they need a longer run as European champs and continued domestic success to deserves the "best ever" name. Now three CL title back to back....hmm.

 

Vasas wasn't a bad team. Hungarian clubs were much stronger then.

Wiener did thump Juve 7-0 in one match.

 

not better than the great milan side of the early 90's or madrid side of late 90's and early 2000's

 

Well Hungarian clubs were stronger that is true (Honvéd of course was the top Hungarian club pre-revolution) but Vasas were hardly a top European club at the time. You might be giving them credit for more of Hungary's football reputation than they deserved. Vasas only contributed a single player to the the Magical Magyars and he was a backup. The Real game was post revolution remember and the destruction of Honvéd which was the only reason Vasas was even in the European Cup. Vasas finished fifth in their domestic league the same season Real beat them.

True. That might still be Juve's worst day at the office since WWII but you are actually making my point here. Think about it.

 

The way Barca has been playing this season, they may not lift any silver this year. We'll see once Eto'o and Messi are back.

To qualify for such a statement, you need a trophy case which looks more like Real Madrid or Manchester United's. Barca simply is not there yet.

 

That's the best European team of all time. They ran rings around Inter, Bayern, Juventus, etc.

 

You are making some valid points. I do agree that wining a single ECC was easier than winning a single CL. The point I was trying to make is that Real did it time after time ("regularly winning the old ECC" statement) and that was a great deal harder under the old format. I was trying to point out that Real of the early 60s wasn't much worse than real of the late 50s (as is evident by their league record).

 

I don't want to. Please explain.

 

Wiener thumped Juve 7-0, and this was indeed a strong Juventus.

Barca will never be considered a top club when compared to the past until they do something incredibly impossible like consecutive trebles.

Not going to happen.

 

If it was really harder to win multiple European Cups back then, why did it happen regularly and often back to back while we've haven't had a single club win consecutive CL and only two with more than one? That difference remain even when you control for the length of time difference between the two names/formats. Real Madrid, Benfica, Inter Milan, Ajax, Bayern Munich, Liverpool, Nottingham Forest, and AC Milan all managed consecutive European Cups. Sorry but if it was really more difficult to win it multiple times then it wouldn't have happened so often and certainly not back to back. The old format was clearly easier (unless you assume that all those consecutive winners were somehow that much better than every team to play in the CL) and if you look at the path to the final year after year you'll see it full of teams towards the bottom of the all-time UEFA cup table and often below the level one would expect in even the knockout rounds of the UEFA cup today.

Simple really. The fact that they managed to thrash Juve but then were quickly found wanting and got thrashed themselves suggests that the first win was a typical cup shock outlier and not a sign that they were a top european club at the time. This kind of result is fairly typical of the old European cup and a reason why it was less likely to force the winners to match the top clubs of the time. The current group stage format all but ensures that such one off results don't knock out a top club and you end up with fewer mistmatches in the late rounds and thus more of a challenge for the eventual winners.

 

2000-2002 real madrid sides is far much better than the current barcelona side

 

I agree that winning the old ECC was tougher, mainly because just to qualify a club had to win their domestic league.
But your comment of succesfully defending the ECC was "a great deal harder under the old format"... how can that be when, as champion, the holders are automatically qualified for the following season and, thus, the toughest part of winning the tournament - qualifcation by winning the domestic league - is no longer a factor?
Today's CL is easier to qualify for, but the competition itself it tougher than the old ECC because of the number of quality teams in the field is much greater, thus there are more tougher opponents on the road to lifting the trophy.
This is the reason, I feel, it's tougher to win successive CL trophies compared to the ECC.

 

Not even close? If Barca wins the CL the next 3 years in a row as you said, then they will most certainly be one of the greatest teams ever. Without a shadow of a doubt. Goal differential is nice, but championships actually count for something. And I consider that Milan side perhaps the best of all time. Again, winning the CL is very, very difficult, and in my opinion, counts for more than the old EC tournament (for those readers who keep pointing to winning the older tournament multiple times as being equal to Champions League trophies, which it is clearly not). I respect the tradition of the game a great deal, but it just isn't the same.

 

Good point

 

The current system also allows runners-up and third-place teams to participate so of course the current format will encourage more top matches. The old format was a true competion and a true Champions Cup. There were League winners only unless you were the defending the Cup and there was no group stage stage to save their arse. If you were crap over two legs, you had to go out. With the group stage, you could play badly against one team but against the other two, if you could beat them you were fine. Look at Juve in 2003. In the second group stage, Juve were poor against Man U but their performances against Deportivo and Basel were good enough to get them over the line. The beauty of knockout tornaments is that there will be more upsets than in a League or Group Stage.

 

I don't think we disagree on most of those facts although what you see as a negative I see as a positive. The current system has more matches that pit the top teams in Europe against each other and is less likely to have upsets based on a bad game or two. That is exactly what I've been saying since the beginning.

Whether this is a good thing or not is a different issue but I'd say that the current system increases the odds that the team playing the best football in Europe at the time ends as up with the CL title (even if you still have unlikely winners like Liverpool because of the potential for upsets that still remains in the knockout stages and in any single game final). The current format combine a league format with knockout phases in a way that allows for some upsets but still rewards consistent quality. Under the old system a team could coast to a final by beating up on some of the weakest league champions in Europe and then win the title in a final often against a team closer to their level. Sure it only had "champions" but I don't see that a big selling point. The team that comes in second in Spain, England, Italy, etc is much more likely to be playing the best football in Europe the following season when the games are actually played than the team that won the Luxembourg league title the prior season for example. The old system ignored that obvious fact.

When a team like Vasas can win a truncated 11 game season, enter the European Cup as a "champion", and reach the semifinals despite coming in 5th in their domestic league the same year, then you have to wonder about the value of restricting the competition to domestic champions. I prefer a CL that rewards the best European team at that time for beating other top teams on the pitch with few "free passes" to the later stages of the competition against inferior opponents. The old European cup was many things but not that. For me that raises interesting questions about how to compare titles won under that system to those won under the current format of the CL.

 

However hard the European Cup is to win compared to now, winning however many trophies doesn't make you a great team. You need to win trophies, whilst hammering the opposition. This 'great' Barca team has never beaten a top team in Europe by more than one goal. Not even on aggregate.

Let's see Barca go to Chelsea, Arsenal, Milan, wherever, and put three or four goals past them with ease. Then we can talk about them as a great team.

 

no!!!​

 

Could you repeat that?

 

Interesting work done by IFFHS (International Federation of Football History & Statistics). According to them, these are the world's best teams since 1991. Interesting.

1. Barcellona 270
2. Juventus 235
3. Milan 224
4. Manchester United 218
Real Madrid 218
6. Bayern Monaco 197
7. Inter 186
8. Arsenal 180
9. River Plate 155
10. Ajax 126
11. Parma 123
12. Porto 122
13. Boca Juniors 117
14. San Paolo 115
15. Chelsea 111
16. Liverpool 107
17. Valencia 99
18. Lazio 98
19. Paris Saint Germain 96
20. Atletico Madrid 83

From the article...

"An All-time Club World Ranking can only be meaningful and useful if it can be determined by taking account all the results of the national championships, the national cup competitions, the club competitions of the six continental confederations and the FIFA. It is therefore only possible to determine an All-time Club World Ranking from January 1st, 1991 – when the Club World Ranking began taking all these details into consideration."

Read all about it here with 107 teams ranked.

 

Juve second? That's interesting.

I can agree with this part but I think we have to agree to disagree on you other points.

 

I'm pretty sure the rest of the teams in that top 5 have won more trophies than Barcelona since 91, so how the hell are Barca top????

 

Don't be that sure.

League / Cup / Champions League / Cup winners' cup / Uefa Cup

Barcelona 8 / 2 / 2 / 1 / 0 total 13
Juventus 5 (7) / 1 / 1 / 0 / 0 total 7
Milan 6 / 1 / 2 / 0 / 0 total 9
Manchester 8 / 4 / 1 / 1 / 0 total 14
Real Madrid 4 / 1 / 3 / 0 / 0 total 8

That said, I'm sure you can invent five different ranking criteria, each of which pulls a different team first. It's always recreational statistics.