Either Zlatan Ibrahimović or Cristiano Ronaldo will be missing from the 2014 World Cup!

What about Gareth Bale ? Should we be sad that Wales didn't qualify ?

Great players have always missed world cups, it's nothing new. The team is more than one player. Portugal is the better team, now they have to prove it, and if they fail, they have themselves to blame for not being able to beat Israel and N. Ireland, and failing to deliver when it counts. Having said that I expect them to qualify.

 

This will be a big loss because both Ibra and CR7 were epic in WC 2010.

 

Yeah, great players always miss tournaments, but we're talking about about possibly two of the best three players in the world here. And they could have avoided each other, and we'd see Messi, Ronaldo, and Sweden at a WC (for the first time?).

 

They were all three in the WC 2006. They managed to score three goals combined. By the way, it was the most successful World Cup of all three.

 

Ronaldo is one of the most overrated players in recent memory, with his success a byproduct of which clubs he's played for (i.e. Man. United & Real Madrid).

Consider that at the World Cup with Portugal he's only scored two goals in ten matches (one a PK against Iran, the other the 7th goal in the 7-0 rout of North Korea), and Portugal have been held scoreless in five of his ten matches.

 

Where does that put Messi with 1 goal in 9 games scored as a 6th goal in a 6:0 thrashing of Serbia?

 

Bullshit.

Scoring more than 50 goals in the past 3 consecutive seasons approves how extremely good he is as a footballer. He also played an important part in Portugal's EC 2012 semi-final and is their best player. The fact that he hasn't played a significant role for the Portuguese NT during World Cups is because he is literally the only ''world class'' player, while a player like Messi plays for a NT filled with world class players. Messi couldn't score a single goals with players like Tevez, Higuain and Agüero in his team. That's overrated.

 

Zlatan has only played like 53 minutes of WC-football . He was injured in 2006 and only played one half against Paraguay and got to play a few minutes in 2002. Sweden did not qualify for 2010.

 

What is a ' deep' World Cup?

 

I see the term "world class" used here a lot and I still don't know how most people define it.

Ronaldo is the only world class player on the team? so Moutinho, Pepe and Nani(inconsistentI know) are not world class, yet Higuain is? surely if you open your mind you must see how silly that is.

In fact, if you look at national team values, and you deduct Ronaldo and then deduct the highest paid player off the other national teams, Portugal ranks I believe 7 or 8.

So are teams over paying for Portuguese players?are there agents amazing?or maybe just maybe Ronaldo is so popular that he over shadows everyone else and thus fooling the ignorant in to only recognizing him.

 

Moutinho, Pepe, Nani and the others are good but none of these players are on Ronaldo's level.

Add on that a coach that has been criticized many times for his decisions on and off the pitch and you could understand why Portugal isn't as good as it should be, even with Ronaldo.

 

No one in the world is on his level except Messi.

Bento is stubborn and refuses to call up younger players despite some players losing there form, but from what I have seen most people never agree with there national team coaches.

The sad truth is, Football is full of politics.

 

Personally when I think of World Class I think of possibly the 22 best players in the world at most. So for a top team to have more than three in this level is an achievement and I fear only Ronaldo from Portugal would fit it for me. Portugal came second in their group and I would doubt they would go beyond the Quarters so to stress so vehemently they have four World Class players seems a bit over the top.

 

I think you have mistaken what I was trying to say, if Higuain is "world class" then so are they.

If you use your criteria, then your right, they are not, however mentioning coming second in there group as a reason they are not doesn't work for me, it's almost become a tradition for Portugal to come second only to do better then the team that finished ahead of them.

If this happens again, it will be the forth consecutive time.

 

A player is judged "overrated" because of a 5-game sample? He has 37 goals in 83 games playing with some of those players you listed (note the word "some" because its not like a team can play with 4 strikers at the same time )

PS... experience has told me that the same posters who act like Messi plays with an "all-World XI" at Argentina are the ones who can't even name half the players in a typical starting XI for Argentina.

 

A 5-game World Cup sample.
And I'm sure most of the goals haven't been scored in World Cups or other relevant NT tournaments.

 

It's still a cherry-picked sample (e.g. why not pick CL knockout stage sample or el clasicos sample?).

But whatever you're trying to argue applies to CR7 too, just remember that.

 

And I'm not saying that Cristiano has been outstanding in a World Cup so far, but when we compare both national teams from both players the difference in attacking quality is significantly big.

 

The difference in the teams isn't that big. Main difference is that Ronaldo fills a hole in a balanced Portugal team, while Messi plays with a couple of world-class players but who all play the same 2 positions on the field (and includes 2 players that Ronaldo plays with at Madrid, while Messi is stuck with Alexis and Pedro so either way you shoot yourself in the foot here).

But even if we say Argentina is slightly better. So what? It's not like we can't compare Juan Mata with Ozil stats just because they play on slightly different quality teams.

 

We hear such lamentations coming out of Europe all the time, but it never seems to convince UEFA to drop its screwball qualification process and use something approaching a sensible qualification tournament. Until that changes, we are stuck with this sort of thing.

 

PS.. I love the additional "so far" for 2 reasons:

1) CR7 might have already played his last WC match.
2) "So far" is rarely taken into consideration when Messi is the subject even though he is 2.5 years younger.

 

Well, you'd be at risk of this happening anyway since UEFA is under-represented at the World Cup final tournament.

But even given that under-representation, Portugal is in this position not because they had such a tough group (it was flat-out easy actually), not because they couldn't beat the best team in their group head-to-head, but because they dropped tonnes of points to teams they are way better than on paper. Their fault for underperforming!

And please ... what sort of qualification format would Sweden breeze through?