I, too, believe the best players in soccer history never won a World Cup
Posted on January 14, 2012 4:12 pm
I’d say Houston stuck Montreal with a $400,000 white elephant. Except elephants are supposed to have good memories:
“I decided that I want to retire on my own terms,” Ching said at a press conference on Friday. “I don’t want to be dictated into retirement and, honestly, I feel like I have another year of good soccer left in me.”
….
Compounding Ching’s transition is the specter of a potential trade back to Houston that seems to stay in the eye of the national media. But while the discussions play out, the 33-year-old forward is resigned to putting those rumors out of his mind to help facilitate his move.
“I see it as a cat and mouse game that I’m caught in the middle of,” Ching said. “I’m disappointed with how things went down and I’m disappointed where I’m sitting today, but I’ve come to accept it and at this point I’m focused on going to Montreal and playing for my teammates and fans up there, especially the ones who’ve reached out and are excited for me to come up there.”
I assume Brian Ching will track down the fool who decided to make this fight public in the first place. But it won’t be that easy – I had read that person vowed to take a job in the Houston front office, but for some reason he’s not listed here yet.
Speaking of changing the subject. I hate to start a blogger fight with Martin, especially because there are over a hundred comments on his post and you don’t REALLY need my input. So I’ll try and keep it short, and not get sidetracked into a rant about how Bill Simmons’ basketball book was worthless garbage.
It’s difficult enough to compare players who are contemporaries, but play in different leagues. Hell, it’s difficult enough to compare the same players in different competitions. Quick quiz – is Diego Forlan worthless, or incredible? You’ll get different responses from English and Spanish league fans.
So you want to compare players from different eras. Fine. We’ve only got a couple of options.
One: send players back in time machines (or forward, I guess), as finished products. This is basically the T-1000 hunting John Connor option, and yeah. Guys bigger, taller, and faster are going to woot and pwn and God knows what else. And if you went back to Renaissance Italy, you could invent the steam engine, and now who’s the genius, Leonardo?
The other scenario is where the same guy is born in a different decade, or a different country, but is still the same person. What happens then is that environment takes over, and guys who were stars in one era would be stars in any era.
I think that’s a little closer to accurate, for a number of reasons. Take a couple of milestones from the 1950′s, the four minute mile and the ascension of Everest. People obsessed with those accomplishments. Edmund Hillary and Roger Bannister were two of the ten most famous people in the world. Now? I had to Google to make sure Roger Bannister wasn’t guy who shot down the Red Baron.
Either (a) human evolution has sped up thanks to atomic radiation that thousands of people today were born better than literally everyone before 1954, or (b) training and technology has something to do with it. We have the exact same argument here – and we see that even with objective milestones, once the barrier is broken duplicating the feat becomes easier, sometimes even commonplace. In other words – no, you can’t objectively measure across eras. You compare how they did against their peers.
It just makes more sense to me to assume the average player in one era would be an average player in another. There are plenty of variables, and we can argue about those. In American soccer, for example, the game spent the occasional half-century in semi-pro status at best.
So yeah, for the same reason we have track stars that make Roger Bannister look like Regular Gonzalez, I guess we have soccer players that could go back in time and make River Plate’s Maquina or 1960 Real Madrid or whoever look like slow, pitiful, wannabes. I also guess that if Billy Gonsalves or Bert Patenaude or Walter Bahr were coming up now, able to train and play full time instead of having to have a freaking day job, they would have been even more dominant today than they were in their own eras.
So maybe Messi has time to be counted among the all-time greats. Cristiano Ronaldo, though, wouldn’t make an all-time Madrid team. There were giants in those days.
That’s not what I came here to post. For those of you who have just joined us, I have this schtick were, because I have absolutely no idea about any of the players picked in the Superdraft, I go back five years and see how it turned out. Because nothing will ever make me care about college soccer. If my kids get scholarships, I’ll read about them on the relevant BigSoccer threads.
But, after ten years, it has become a schtick. And historically, the correlation between good draft and good team has been pretty close to random. MLS seems to have recognized that this year, knocking the length of the draft to two rounds. In total players picked, that compares reasonably with a four round draft with ten or twelve teams. Realistically, though, two players can only affect a team so much. Let alone two players who weren’t able to go straight to Europe. And it’s been rare when two players picked in a year ended up contributing for a team – having that be the whole draft class? Five years from now, I’ll be handing out A’s to teams who picked a backup midfielder that made the roster.
Shame, really, because for once we have a team that you could say made a serious difference in the quality of their drafts. The Galaxy, who everyone agrees is the best team in American history – can you imagine what they’d do to Fall River if they had met? It would have been premeditated murder – built themselves up through the draft.
And stealing Landon Donovan from the Earthquakes. And getting one acceptable year from Beckham, and turning Juan Pablo Angel into Robbie Keane.
But the 2007 draft – that was a Super hot cup of nothing. Maybe not as bad as 1999, but the long-term effects of this draft were almost entirely negative.
TORONTO: Maurice Edu, Andrew Boyens, Richard Asante, Jeffrey Gonsalves. Kinda tailed off there pretty severely, but getting a great player at the overall number one spot is an A+. Since we’re grading on an MLS Superdraft curve. As we will see, this probably was the best draft of the year. Years of playoff success would not follow.
CHICAGO: Bakary Soumare, Jerson Monteiro, Nate Norman, Mike Banner, Simon Omekanda. Since we’re grading on an MLS Superdraft curve, this is an A. Should have been better, but Soumare and Denis Hamlett soon put a stop to that – and with it, the Chicago Fire as a meaningful factor in the East. I liked Mike Banner a lot more than everyone else seemed to, and I have high hopes to his full return after his Achilles injury. He’s still with the same team that drafted him, isn’t he? That’s another MLS Superdraft milestone, sadly. A
KANSAS CITY: Michael Harrington, Edson Elcock, Kurt Morsink. Harrington lost his starting spot to Seth Sinovic last year. Sinovic is now an Impact, so we’ll see whether Harrington is extremely prematurely washed up. Morsink has at least one fan in Curt Onalfo. A, with a plus if Harrington starts 29 games again. [EDIT - no, per comments below, apparently Harrington has to win his starting spot first after all. Research is such WORK.]
REAL SALT LAKE: Chris Seitz, Steven Curfman. Seitz has been a career backup, but to some pretty damn good keepers. Still, not the draft of a team that would make it to MLS Cup anytime soon, right? B-
NEW ENGLAND: Wells Thompson, Amaechi Igwe, Ryan Solle, Bryan Byrne, Adam Cristman. Like everything else about New England, this seemed better back when they won the East every year. Both Thompson and Cristman would eventually get their MLS Cup rings. And I still think Cristman was railroaded back in November. B+
This may be the least flattering picture of anyone ever – congrats, Wells
COLORADO: Nico Colacula, Greg Dalby, Omar Cummings, Nick LaBrocca, Justin Hughes. Only Cummings would still be around for their championship year. And I keep waiting for Cummings to turn into an All-Star – maybe I should get over that. I still want to give this draft an A, though. Best Rapids draft ever, that’s for sure.
CHIVAS USA: John Cunliffe, Cameron Dunn. For a long time, I assumed “Chivas USA draft pick” meant a quality player. I’m over that now. By the way, the other thing CUSA did in this draft was trade a pick, plus a Designated Player slot, for Amado Guevara. Preki worked in MLS for years after this. F–
FC DALLAS: Anthony Wallace, Fuad Ibrahim, Andrew Daniels, Ryan Guy, Scott Jones, Tommy Kirzanovic. Not really Dallas’ fault that they thought Ibrahim would be better. Wallace turned out to be a good enough player, although he’s another guy who ended up winning his ring with someone else. C+
DC UNITED – Bryan Arguez, Brad North, Jay Needham, Ricky Schramm, Luis Robles. Hard to say that Arguez’ career is over, but he’s due for some success. Robles is in the national team pool. Needham shunned DC United for Puerto Rico, because DC United didn’t feel he commanded the kind of salary he was asking for – and that caused a ten days’ panic on BigSoccer on whether MLS was losing its best players to the USL. The D stands for comedy.
HOUSTON: John Michael Hayden, Corey Ashe, Mike Sambursky, Eric Ebert. If Ashe had risen to the occasion in November, this would have been an easy A. I have absolutely no memory of the others, though. B+, anyway, seeing as how they still love him down in Houston, and I guess this draft didn’t hurt the Dynamo when it mattered that year.
COLUMBUS: Brad Evans, Aaron Chandler, Ben Hunter. Well…the coach did make Evans in to a serious contributor for his current team…wow, tough one to grade from a Crew point of view. C, I guess. I suppose I’m factoring in “maybe Evans shouldn’t have been exposed after the 2008 season,” which isn’t the point of the exercise.
LOS ANGELES: Robbie Findley, Josh Tudela, Ty Harden, Tally Hall, Bobby Burling. Hall went to Denmark before joining the Dynamo a couple of years later, Harden quit MLS altogether before joining Toronto, Burling played for Chivas USA and San Jose, Findley you all know about. Actual contribution to the Galaxy, though, spells out D. The day before this draft, however, the Galaxy signed a certain midfielder from Leytonstone, so it’s possible the brain trust wasn’t necessarily focused on Indianapolis.
NEW YORK: Dane Richards, Sinisa Ubiparipovic. I don’t care much for Richards, but Red Bulls fans do, and I suppose it’s their opinion that matters. Ubiparipovic was a useful player opponents came to hate, although he will be irritating for the Impact from now on. That’s an A. I wonder whatever happened to the Red Bulls’ coach from this season, he seemed to know what he was doing.
Don’t forget, by the way, the Jay DeMerit contest is still going on. Post here, on the other thread, or on Twitter, or basically find some way to get your entry to my attention. Win a DVD, or an awesome autographed poster. You have until Tuesday, get to work already.
Hell, it’s difficult enough to compare the same players in different competitions. Quick quiz – is Diego Forlan worthless, or incredible?
His skill at the 2010 WC caused my friends that hate soccer want to start coming to games after watching him play. I’d say he’s pretty incredible.
Also, why don’t you rate Dane Richards? I’m legitimately curious because most NY fans used to hate him with a passion, but have come around to respecting him. He can be a complete demon on the wing and Henry has taken the pressure off of him.
I, too, believe the best players in soccer history never won a World Cup
lol’d hard
Is funny reading the “experts” grade the teams draft every year. They say a certain player is a stud and should be able to jump into an MLS starting lineup in place of the same guy the called a stud 2 years ago.. and enough mock drafts (Ives), do people really care?
From the pic and headline, I thought you were going to tell us why Wells Thompson is the best player in soccer history.
It would make about as much sense as saying Edson Buddle is greater than Eusebio, because we better training and nutrition these days.
sinovic is an impact?
Nope, he’s back with KC. FO really showed its chops getting him back, too.
One record that will never be broken that happened before 1956 is Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, so we’ve got at least one record that today’s freaks of nature… er, athletes won’t break.
I agree with Dan that you can’t say that someone today is greater than someone years ago just because the results of their performance are better. You can’t can’t compare athletes from different eras by absolutes like that.
Many people consider Paavo Nurmi to have been the greatest distance runner of all time. But his world record time for the mile of 4:10.4 in 1923 wouldn’t have ranked among the top 20 high school milers in the United States in 2011. Are we thus going to say that all those high school kids were greater than Paavo Nurmi? I certainly wouldn’t. Faster, yes; greater, no. I think that the way to compare the greatest athletes from different eras is by how thoroughly they dominated their own eras.
On another subject: That article about Brian Ching’s press conference that Dan links to ends with a quote from Ching: “Eventually, I’d like to retire in Dynamo colors. Be it a trade tomorrow or when the year’s done, I’d love nothing more than to retire in a city that I’ve given my heart and soul to….Hopefully, whenever it is that I come back to Houston, we’ll continue with the great relationship we had.”
Maybe I’m misinterpreting him, but it sounds to me like Ching is saying that the reason he’s willing to play for Montreal is that retiring would close the door on the possibility of being traded back to Houston. Not a sentiment likely to heal the ill feeling between Ching and Jesse Marsch.
So, does this mean we should abandon the draft altogether since hardly any quality comes out of it?
Well it boils down to your views on athletes- do you judge them by the joy/wonder/whatever poppycock feeling they give you, or do you judge them by their production. Personally I think the greatest player is a toss up between Lev Yashin and Saeta Rubia, but I am biased- but greatest isn’t best. Same reason your Paavo guy might be the greatest distance runner, but is worse than a modern high school track star.
Gee I kind of hope we can get rid of all this soccer stuff and just make this bigpedantic.com
Personally, I think the entire compulsion to compare players is a bit pathological to begin with. Instead of looking at how to go about doing this, perhaps we should be asking “Why bother at all?” If the answer is “Because it’s fun.” then fair enough, but I’ve never really gotten my kicks out of setting up a long set of rules of engagement for such comparisons. If I was all that rule-happy, I’d be an NFL fan. It’s enough or me to enjoy the fact that Stanley Matthews was great, or Eusebio, or Pele, or Maradona, or Messi, or di Stefano, or Socrates, or Bahr, or Brazil 1970, or…… Comparing them is not necessary to establish their greatness really, now is it? And if so, why is it?
Best player never to win a World Cup: Alfredo di Stefano. Next question.
As for Ching, speaking purely as a Houstonian, as the season grinds along, and he needs money to make a move, any move, and he looks at L’Impact’s salary commitments, and sees that $400,000 albatross weighing him down, I hope he thinks back to Thanksgiving and says “Now why did I think this was a good idea again?”
Why would they abandon something that gets people talking about MLS in January?
I concur with Andy’s point, but, also, “hardly anything” includes occasionally something. The first choice in 2009 was on Steve Zakuani. Before Brian Mullan broke his leg, Steve Zakuani was a very bright star, and he came to MLS through the draft.
I agree that production should be valued over joy/wonder/whatever poppycock feeling, and I think that Nurmi’s nine Olympic gold medals and six world records were production. Just like Pele’s and Maradona’s World Cup victories were production.
I disagree, with much respect to Roger. If there is anyone who can understand being on the cusp with the Nats and not quite getting there, it is Jesse Marsch.
If there is anyone who can understand that planting and growing a successful MLS operation is a messy business, it is Brian Ching.
These two men may have history, and they may not like each other much, but neither of them are idiots, and they would not have gotten as far as they have if they were impractical men, however passionate they both obviously are.
I think Ching respects that Marsch needs to build a team. I think that Marsch knows he was being a bit of an ass to draft Ching, and I think he was hoping to somehow make Houston pay for taking him back if Ching did not want to move north. I think that, after his Chivas USA experience, Jesse should know what it is like to be a mercenary, and he should not have drafted Ching unless it was to trade him to San Jose or back to Houston. Does he really rate an injury prone, expensive 30-something who doesn’t want to be there so highly? Dan has been critical of Ching in this matter, and he has been cynical about Houston in this matter, thinking they wanted to dump Ching’s salary. That is too cynical by half. They were willing and happy to pay Ching’s price tag. They could not mortgage the future on it by protecting him over younger players, but they figured other teams did not have any reason to, either.
I think Ching and Marsch are burying the hatchet in mutual interest at this point. They are stuck with each other. I think both Ching and Marsch would be happy with a Houston deal that benefitted Montreal without giving away the store and included Montreal paying some of Ching’s price tag. It’s only for this year. Ching only wanted this year.
If nothing can be worked out, then Montreal better goddamn kiss Ching’s ass, even if he spends half the year nursing injuries. If you draft a guy with a big salary against his wishes and his club’s expectations in very ungentlemanly fashion, the only fashion Jesse Marsch, to this point, seems to know, when he is trying to go out in style after a very respectable career, then you should be nothing but chipper and genial when he overcomes his own emotions and decides to report.
In this case, it is Ching who is sucking it up. He was within his rights to retire. I am not aware of slavery being legal on either side of the border. His initial emotional reaction to the situation is understandable. I can understand if NeoSmurf fans wished he had said “the only other team I would play for is San Jose.”
I admit to certain tugs of sympathies as a fan of the Gonzaga Bulldogs, but, really, on balance, if Sigi Schmidt had not made that fateful decision all those years ago to send Ching packing when, by his own words, he was looking favorably upon Ching until he got injured, this space here would be a blog in which Dan Loney was complaining bitterly against Jesse Marsch, hated foe from two teams and now a third.
What I saw in the comments on Martin’s post was a lot of “How DARE you say my childhood idol wasn’t the bestest ever?!?!?!?!??” You hear that in America with the likes of Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax.
In sports with objective measurements, it’s obvious to see the progress across time. See the Paavo Nurmi example above. Why wouldn’t the same thing be true in other sports?
***
I’ve never heard of anyone hating Ubiparipovic (announcers, maybe). Are you sure you’re not mixing him up with Dema Kovalenko?
You don’t even have to bring the World Cup into the discussion: both Messi and C-Ron have played in continental championship matches under favorable circumstances. Cristiano was on the Portugal side that played Greece in the Euro 2004 final in Lisbon; while Messi got to play in the 2007 Copa América final with Argentina, by far teh best team in that tournament (for people that say that Mehei’s compatriots always let him down). You would think that the best players of all time would have inspired their national teams to win those games.
“the” best team*
So now, for the first time ever. Championships having nothing to do with how great they were. Convenient.
Somehow, Ching needs to end up with Chivas USA. From a comedy perspective, this must happen…
Yes, and large transfer fees have come out of Edu and Altidore.
I agree. Lot of butt-hurt over something that was fairly obviously true.
About as convenient as the weird world you’ve invented for yourself where Messi and Ronaldo haven’t won championships.
Because “true” in this case is so superficial. The human genome has not improved so much that high school kids today are inherently superior to world champions of a few decades ago. Natural selection doesn’t work like that – if it did, we’d have real life X-Men by now.
How would Messi have done with a soaking heavy leather ball and boots that weighed ten pounds? He’d have been great – he’s Messi. But I draw the line at Cristiano Ronaldo – guy subs in when either Puskas or Di Stefano couldn’t go, and that’s the end of it.
I guess the question is, should you measure people against an absolute standard that never changes (minutes and seconds, for example) or should you measure them against the standards of their own era? If you measure them against an unchanging standard, then the answer to who is better seems obvious. The best players of 1950 would have no more chance against the best players of 2012 than a Studebaker would against a Lexus. There’s nothing to argue about. But measuring them against different standards for each era is a lot more fun.
No one ever said Martin was making a particularly interesting argument.
Well you take away the steroid treatment he got and suddenly I doubt he is quite as great.
If dropped back in time as he is now, Messi would be great, at least until he got hacked down for the 8,745th time in a single game by somebody yet again going two-footed and studs-up into a tackle from behind.
But (as k0d points out) if Messi had been born a generation or two ago, he’d never have gotten the hormone therapy Barça gave him and therefore almost surely wouldn’t even have become a professional player at all, much less one of the greatest of his generation.
I don’t have a lot of patience with people who get angry at the idea that a team consisting of today’s best professional would pretty thoroughly beat a team of, say, 1962′s best professionals. The differences in nutrition, training, medicine, and even tactical sophistication are enormous. But precisely because they’re so enormous, it doesn’t seem like a very interesting point to make. If one wants to argue what would happen if a time-traveler swapped Baby Messi with Baby Maradona, that’s much more interesting. Of course, it’s only more interesting because it’s entirely subjective and thus suitable only for entertainment purposes.
First of all, Dan, your work was done when you posted that photo. You could post that at least every other week and get by. (Wait – might have stumbled on a blog concept here…)
Second, the Ching/Marsch thing remains legitimately interesting. I was thinking, with the likes of Arnaud and Ching, Marsch was trying to build the club mentality… Marsch must relate to some of these genuine competitors – who are the real engines of MLS. You think Bruce Arena really wanted to give up his Dema Kovalenko?
Lastly, Bannister was gonna break the 4 minute barrier. He was thinking about poon.
“I can understand if NeoSmurf fans wished he had said “the only other team I would play for is San Jose.”
We wouldn’t expect that – he’s got some hard feeling towards us these days. During Houston’s first visit back to San Jose in 2008 (after the relocated team had won two championships) some of the fans were surprisingly rude to them: “The crowd booed Houston even though Kinnear fielded a starting lineup with eight former Earthquakes:[...] but the fans chanted “You’re not Earthquakes any more!” (http://www.ksdk.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=146817) And there were some unfortunate incidents in other visits too. Brian made some angry statements afterwards and I don’t think he has much love for his former home with the Earthquakes- so he probably wouldn’t have wanted a trade here, either.
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