Greatest European footballers In football history

@Ariaga II

I will ask it here so the other doesn't go offtangent.

What's your take on the Dalglish BdO positions? Especially in relation to Keegan who not rarely is placed category/categories lower in his own country. Dalglish only seems to register in years he wins something huge?

 

I was going to mention that. I think one reason might be Dalglish's relative failure at NT-level. He has that rep of failing to reproduce his Liverpool form for Scotland. I'll keep an eye out once I get there in my reading. Keegan also has the advantage of peaking in that late-70s lull period.

Are those UK-rankings retrospective ones? Probably just lazy journos/fans trophy counting.

Do the UK-experts on the forum have an opinion on this?

 

Well, this is what @peterhrt wrote, but I wondered about your take.

"He was admired for always giving his all, not least for England. And also for making a decent fist of playing club football abroad, something only John Charles among British players had achieved by that time.

Some critics, notably Brian Clough, accused Keegan of being disloyal and greedy for abandoning the English league. Such blinkered thinking was not uncommon back then. It contributed towards Keegan's replacement at Liverpool, Kenny Dalglish, being constantly talked up at Keegan's expense.

Keegan was undoubtedly more highly regarded in Europe, notably Germany, than in Britain, which contributed to his Ballon d'Or votes and high IFFHS all-time rating in 1999: 38th overall and 5th among Britons after Charlton, Matthews, Best and Moore.

From what I saw, I think your dad was right. Keegan was a very good player, but not a great one."

"One’s first reaction is that the Ballon d’Or judges have overrated Keegan. Almost as soon as Kenny Dalglish replaced him at Liverpool, people were saying that Dalglish was better. Yet the Scot received only 13 points in these calculations and failed to make the Top 100.

Is Keegan rated higher in continental Europe than in Britain? Almost certainly. He was one of the first British players to make a decent fist of playing club football abroad, and was the most successful along with John Charles. Very few British fans would say that Keegan was their leading player over this long period. In fact few would be likely to place him in the Top 5, and some not in the Top 10.

Another factor seems to be the relative lack of competition in the Ballon d’Or at the time Keegan was playing. Looking at the overall Top 10 elected players between 1956 and 2014, the most surprising entry is Rummenigge, a near-contemporary of Keegan’s in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Even allowing for the fact that the award had not yet been opened up to non-Europeans, this was not a particularly distinguished period for European football.

Still the question remains. Have the British underrated Keegan, or has everybody else overrated him?"


*I think* it's well possible the voters didn't get it entirely right around this time (late 70s to early 80s). I mentioned it before but if I look at Platini's habit of delivering/performing against top teams before 1982, then he might have been undervalued a bit as an individual player. 'Statistics' suggest (in my view) he was more crucial for his teams as any of Zico, Keegan, Rummenigge or even maybe/possibly Maradona was. Platini moved to Juventus for a quite low sum, in part because he was out of contract.


There were British managers (rather than journalists), like the then 'overperforming' Ron Atkinson, who valued Keegan highly at the time, that he is or could become the 'best in the world'. This is from 13 december 1979.



"In 1978–79, the team [Atkinsons' WBA] finished third in Division One, their highest placing for over 20 years, and also reached the UEFA Cup quarter-final, where they were defeated by Red Star Belgrade. The team around this time was notable for simultaneously fielding three black players: Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendon Batson; and is considered to be an integral part of the acceptance of black footballers in the English leagues."

(he had a recurring series on dissecting various players, which are a nice read from an 'expert' point of view)

 

In the same trope though, notice peers (managers, ex-pros) in 2004 all around Europe rated Dalglish 24th while Keegan was 40th. Dalglish has four British players placed ahead of him.

https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/champions-magazine-250-greatest-european-players-2004.2029656/

(in terms of polls by peers this is the best I've seen so far, by method and reach)

Also note some players are placed down because their own country has 'clearly' (in perception at least) better players and it's unlikely people will fill all their five choices with players from the same country (say, four French players; three Dutch players; two from Wales very unlikely). As a consequence, some great names clearly suffer.

But this is another 'evidence' his peers somewhat rated Keegan (40th is not where journalists or 'the internet' place him), and Dalglish even higher.

 

For my part, I always thought Keegan was seen as the superior one, even before I knew anything about BdOs and stuff. At the very least he's not a step below.

I also thought about the possibility of the English might resent him going on to rake in the dough with the Jerries. Keegan was "greedy" in the sense that his team choices seemed to be based on financial considerations rather than sporting. I'm sure he'd be valued a lot more had he stayed in Liverpool and kept lifting those ECs. As it is, Keegan is a lot more lacking in high profile achievements, with very little tournament pedigree or EC-final moments, and that's generally poison for a post-career reputation.

I don't usually give much consideration for all-time lists. They can be fun, but usually they're just "here's some players you know in an order". I also don't trust player/manager opinions. They're proven BS-machines who'll say the craziest things. The list on that link starts off with Tony Cascarino, so they've already got a long hill to climb. Erik Hoftun over Rummenigge, that's it you guys. I'm sure #1 warmed your heart, though.

 

I was raised on English football, so I was always told that King Kenny was the superior player. I suspect his success as manager also played a part though.

I do wonder if Liverpool would've signed Dalglish anyway if Keegan never left.

 

Would they be able to function in the same team? What do you experts think?

What about Rivera and Mazzola? Opinions?

 

Yes I agree with that, though not sure whether his reputation was ever that high in his own time to begin with.

I don't see why journalists - whose full-time job is not to watch football either - would be inherently better placed than coaches or managers, who get paid for making those judgements and often climb up to better jobs because of that (okay, okay, meritocracy is to an extent a myth).

Journalists can provide some pretty bold calls too. Just to pick a high profile name: Ferenc Puskas was league topscorer and European Cup topscorer in 1963-64. He received zero votes in the BdO - is that beyond dispute? No one could be bothered to give at least one 'career vote'?

Cascarino got in by a #1 vote from Roy Keane. That can happen.

The Hoftun example is explained by what I say above: certain great players 'suffer' from being clearly behind others of their own country, in perception at least. There are few voters who would place four Germans/French etc. to fill in their five names. The #1 represented country in the voter pool was Germany btw.

As I said/explained in this thread I see now also a case for Cristiano Ronaldo, but yes, as it was in 2004 that would be my number one. Here is him at the age of 36/37 doing his damage against top sides (at a consistent rate; e.g. solo goal against eventual UEFA Cup winners Tottenham). Here three other videos from the same season with all different goals and scenes (one, two, three). I think the factual evidence to demonstrate delivery and influence/impact it is there, next to a certain 'subjective' dominance (even in magazines as Placar, El Grafico) that lasted for about eight years (he was also treated not too gently, in particular in Spain and also evidently the 2nd spell back home).

 

Same here I think. At that time both were active as a manager (Dalglish even directly following him at Newcastle) so still living material in a football sense.

 

Yes I saw that after you posted this (but before I read your post!).

Also saw:
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport...inal-doping-cheating-calciopoli-a8860746.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/footbal...factory-johan-cruyffs-velvet-revolution-laid/


Obviously I agree with him. There's a limited amount of obvious names and after that it becomes arguable (there are also names like Rivera or Bergkamp who were almost unanimously seen as among the best of their generation without ever being 'the best' - in perception - and that are some other obvious ones). For Cristiano there are now proper arguments as an individual to put him up there (others like PDG etc. might feel slightly different still).

As I said, I also think 'junior' Jordi is often harshly put down. He's pretty much the only son of a great footballer to score in a major tournament and/or a major final (he did both).

It seems he's protecting 'the estate' well so far and that was always a risk. Those charitable inner city 'Courts' for example are probably a good idea but the weakness was and is funds/money are only readily available with the name, person and reputation directly linked to it.

I was searching a little bit further on Ron Atkinson (who obviously rated Keegan quite well, see his points total) and I came across this 'The Guardian' piece (not saying I agree with him put over Pelé!!):

------------

Cruyff the conductor edges the successful solo artists

Ron Atkinson

Fri 15 Dec 2000 23.04 GMTFirst published on Fri 15 Dec 2000 23.04 GMT

I notice Fifa fudged the issue of whether Pele or Maradona was player of the century by giving an award to both. For me Pele was the better of the two, although top of the lot in my book is Johan Cruyff.

He was quick, lively and agile, and he not only scored great goals but made them. He orchestrated those fantastic Holland and Ajax sides in the way Alfredo di Stefano did with Real Madrid in the 50s and 60s. But as well as being the conductor, Cruyff was a real team man.

I loved watching him. The "Cruyff turn" against Sweden in the 1974 World Cup was unforgettable, and I remember going to Villa Park to see him play for Barcelona in the 1977-78 Uefa Cup. I was manager of West Brom at the time and it was billed as the last time Cruyff would appear in England. Barca were winning 2-0 with a few minutes left and took Cruyff off so the crowd could pay their respects. The home supporters were clapping, cheering and stomping, but then went absolutely wild as Villa scored twice in the last minute to equalise. Barca won the return 2-1.

Another Cruyff memory that stands out was seeing him in his latter years with Feyenoord. I was in Holland watching Jesper Olsen before signing him for Manchester United and Feyenoord hammered their bitter rivals Ajax.

A great moment, though, was when Feyenoord had a free-kick about 30 yards out. Cruyff was lining up to take it when a big, precocious black guy came up and whacked the ball into the net. It was Ruud Gullit. We made a few enquiries about Gullit but were told he wouldn't leave Holland.

For me there was something extra special about Cruyff, with his individual talent and team ethic, but Pele was hardly far behind. Nor, of course, was Maradona, but for me the Brazilian just gets the nod.

Pele had more all round. He could do the unexpected but, if his side were up against it, which admittedly Brazil weren't very often, he could fit into a team pattern. He was a better collective player in terms of joining in with others, whereas Maradona was more a case of: we've got a problem, give me the ball and I'll sort it.

Pele had everything: goals, spring, vision, skill, and a lot of people don't appreciate how powerful he was. One of his stock-in-trades on the ball was the way he held his arm out, almost rugby-fashion, to make it hard for defenders to get close.

I can recall Pele coming to Sheffield and playing in a friendly at Hillsborough with Santos in 1962. He scored a memorable penalty past Ron Springett, doing a hop, skip and jump before stopping and coolly flipping the ball into the top of the net.

Ten years later he was back there again. The kick-off was switched to the afternoon because of a power crisis and I'm told he sat in the dressing room for two hours afterwards signing autographs. The queue went from the dressing room, out of the ground and along the back of the stand to the main road.

The shame was that the English public were robbed of seeing Pele's full majesty in 1966. I was at Everton when the Portuguese kicked him out of the World Cup, and the best we saw of him was in 1970. I watched on the telly and will never forget some of the things he pulled out: the dummy on the Uruguayan keeper, the long shot against the Czechs, the pass to Carlos Alberto.

Pele was also involved in one of the funniest things I've seen. After Brazil reached the 1994 World Cup final I saw him in the VIP car park doing an interview. The Americans had put Alexei Lalas in with him discussing World Cup football and I was thinking: "Hold on a bit, one of them knows everything and the other's a guitar-playing American."

Having said that, I understand Pele could play guitar. Some of the lads who were involved in Escape to Victory with him said every night he would come down, open a bottle of Jack Daniels and sit with the boys and strum.

As for Maradona, I admired not just his power, pace and supreme confidence but his bravery too. Hard as people tried, it was difficult to kick him out of a game. He played against my United team for Barcelona in Europe, although he was carrying an injury and made little or no contribution.

The same doesn't go for the first time I saw him live. That was for Argentina against England at Wembley, when he had a phenomenal dribble, went past everybody and stroked it just wide.

I had been introduced to him earlier in the day at a hotel in Kensington, where Alberto Tarantini, who had a spell at Birmingham City, told me: "This is the best player you'll ever see."

He was close, but my vote goes to Cruyff.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2000/dec/15/sport.comment

 

The full article without paywall here:

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Inside the Ajax talent factory: How Johan Cruyff’s Velvet Revolution laid the foundation for latest golden age

When Ajax step onto the Johan Cruyff Arena pitch to face Juventus this evening, more than half their team could be graduates from the club’s fabled academy.

To have reached this stage is in itself a stunning achievement, given their meagre spending that puts them on a par with Championship sides like Aston Villa and Middlesbrough. And while Ajax being involved in big European nights may seem like the natural order of things, this will be their first Champions League quarter-final since 2003.

Significantly it will also be the first since 2010 when Cruyff and his band of loyal disciples ripped up the Ajax blueprint and started it all over again. The period, which ended with Cruyff’s ousting in 2015, came to be known as the Velvet Revolution, and it was during these years that the seeds for the current success were planted.

This is the story of what a successful reboot looks like. No individual is more synonymous with Dutch football than the great Johan Cruyff.

It started with a column
The revolution began when Cruyff vented his anger at Ajax’s stagnation in a column for Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf in September 2010 after a dismal 2-0 defeat at Real Madrid. Cruyff believed that the club’s board needed to be replaced by former players who understood what Ajax represented. He was adamant that the route back to the top was re-establishing Ajax as the world leader in producing and nurturing home-grown talent.

Viewed as a demi-god by supporters, who were falling out of love with the club and their turgid football, Cruyff was welcomed back as the prodigal son returning and set about restoring the club to its former glories and entertaining way of playing. As a player, Cruyff had won the European Cup three times with Ajax, and saw no reason why the club’s financial disadvantages could not be overcome. As he famously once said: “I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.”

Flanked by former Ajax midfielder Wim Jonk and the legendary Dennis Bergkamp, Cruyff set about reawakening the soul of the club. “He had the power to change something, and also had an energy and the spirit of innovation. It was more a spiritual thing with Johan,” says Ruben Jongkind, who became head of talent development during this period and was another key member of the revolution.

It started with a column
The revolution began when Cruyff vented his anger at Ajax’s stagnation in a column for Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf in September 2010 after a dismal 2-0 defeat at Real Madrid. Cruyff believed that the club’s board needed to be replaced by former players who understood what Ajax represented. He was adamant that the route back to the top was re-establishing Ajax as the world leader in producing and nurturing home-grown talent.

Viewed as a demi-god by supporters, who were falling out of love with the club and their turgid football, Cruyff was welcomed back as the prodigal son returning and set about restoring the club to its former glories and entertaining way of playing. As a player, Cruyff had won the European Cup three times with Ajax, and saw no reason why the club’s financial disadvantages could not be overcome. As he famously once said: “I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.”

Flanked by former Ajax midfielder Wim Jonk and the legendary Dennis Bergkamp, Cruyff set about reawakening the soul of the club. “He had the power to change something, and also had an energy and the spirit of innovation. It was more a spiritual thing with Johan,” says Ruben Jongkind, who became head of talent development during this period and was another key member of the revolution.

The Cruyff Plan centred on more specialised, individual coaching and four key principles:

• Playing attractive football that stuck to Ajax’s expansive principles;
• Half of the first team should be comprised of players who had come through the youth system – and of good enough quality to be in the best eight teams in Europe;
• Sustainable scouting – only players with more quality than the youth players coming in would be bought;
• Creating a performance culture: Everybody had to work together, and be open to continuous positive feedback.

On a philosophical level, Ajax’s management were guided by principles of identity, Ajax DNA and non-stop innovation. In practice, this meant Jonk, Jongkind and others searching far and wide for ways of revitalising the club, with Cruyff driving the revolution in an advisory capacity.

Judo and jumping
As well as having worked with Ajax youngsters like Christian Eriksen, Toby Alderweireld and Daley Blind, Jongkind’s coaching background was partly in athletics, and so he was keen to tap into thought leaders from a range of different sports. Experts from disparate fields like pole vault, American football and judo were brought in to give the young Ajax players exposure to a range of different disciplines and develop them as athletes. Eddie Jones has employed similar techniques during his time as head coach of the England rugby union team.

Perhaps most pertinent to the current Ajax team was the hiring of former Dutch 800m specialist Bram Som, who specialised in running technique and at Ajax gave individual tuition to a talented but raw youngster named Matthijs de Ligt.

Now 19, De Ligt has emerged into a masterful ball-playing centre-back, already a Dutch international and the Ajax captain – despite still looking about 12 years old. He is so highly regarded that even Cristiano Ronaldo will hold no fears in the two legs against Juventus. Come the summer he is expected to join Barcelona for a fee well in excess of £50m.

As a youngster though, De Ligt’s running technique was “not good”, Jongkind told Telegraph Sport. His subsequent improvement is testament to another key tenet of the Cruyff Plan, which was to identify and then develop individual’s strengths and weaknesses. “We did a lot of running training with Matthijs because of this,” Jongkind explains. “It’s very important for players. Cruyff understood and said that in golf we have specialists for the putts and for the swing. In football we have one coach for all 25 players, which he said was ‘absurd’.”

Coaches then set to work on De Ligt’s lack of physical strength, boosting his stability and power with a bespoke training plan. Aged just 17, De Ligt was strong enough to make his international debut and play a key role in Ajax reaching the Europa League final two years ago. His rapid improvement is testament to De Ligt’s adaptability and intelligence, which saw him complete the highest level of secondary education in Holland. De Ligt is also known for possessing almost Cruyffian levels of single-minded focus on the pitch – going into games with one or two ideas in his head and executing them flawlessly.

Midfielder Donny van de Beek is another who will start for Ajax tonight having been guided through the club’s youth system. And like De Ligt, he prospered once his athletic flaws had been identified and worked on. When Van de Beek was not even out of his teens, Bergkamp, working as an Ajax coach at the time, said his technique was such that he would undoubtedly play for the first team if coached correctly. Spotting what Van de Beek needed to improve was not difficult – “he knew he was running like s—”, Jongkind says, laughing.

“He had good endurance but not that much power in his legs, so work was done on that – often with double sessions – and his explosivity,” Jongkind added. Van de Beek is now one of Europe’s most accomplished young midfielders and has been linked with a summer move to Tottenham.

By the 2015-16 season, Van de Beek was joined in the gym by Frenkie de Jong, who is expected to be Ajax’s main source of inspiration against Juventus and will join Barcelona in the summer for £65m. A considerable talent, Ajax only got their hands on De Jong when he was 18, by which time he had already developed most of the precocious technical gifts that have marked him out as a superstar in-waiting.

Growing up at Willem II, De Jong admits he largely ignored the advice of coaches and played on instinct. The result is a player that is spontaneous and almost impossible to tackle because of his unpredictability and exceptional dribbling skills. All Ajax really had to do for De Jong was work on his physicality, while acknowledging that trying to make him conform to a particular style or set of guidelines might be counter-productive.

Learning the game
To ensure Ajax committed to their pledge of continuous innovation, it was not just experts from other sports that were consulted.

Jonk and Jongkind also reached into their deep contacts books to speak to those at the cutting edge of coaching and player development in football.

During this time, Ajax set up a methodology and talent development department that was based partly on discussions with experts from Spanish clubs like Barcelona, Villarreal and Athletic Bilbao. Jongkind also consulted with innovators like Romeo Jozak, whose three-year spell as the Croatian FA’s technical director played a major role in the nation’s World Cup final appearance last year. There was dialogue too with Bob Browaeys, the long-standing coach of the Belgium Under-16 and Under-17 sides who helped develop stars like Eden Hazard and Kevin De Bruyne.

Closer to home, Ajax started to work with 40 amateur clubs to improve their level of scouting and ensure they were finding the very best young talent.

Based on these new links and conversations, Ajax started doing this a little differently. For example they built a school on the training complex, so young players would receive a more balanced education.

Most fundamentally, they altered the playing experience for youngsters, replacing 11 v 11 matches for 11 year olds on full-sized pitches with six-a-side matches on quarter-sized pitches to improve players’ technique.

Fluidity and flexibility became increasingly important, and De Ligt again acts as a case study. As a clearly gifted youngster, De Ligt rapidly moved up the different age groups in his early teens and was tasked with playing in a number of different positions. He was seen as too slow at receiving the ball and moving it forward so was deployed in central midfield. The short-term loss to the Ajax youth team’s defence has been the senior team’s long-term gain. Because as Juventus will find out this evening, De Ligt has evolved into one of Europe’s most adept ball-playing defenders.

Another of the Ajax defence, right-back Noussair Mazraoui also had to be managed carefully in his youth. Mazraoui, who will miss tonight’s first leg through suspension, has developed into a key part of this Ajax side but he was a late developer and was close to being let go as a callow, diminutive teenager. It was at this point that a couple of prosaic points were made. The first was that he was very young for his age group and the second was that his parents were tall and so he was likely to grow.

“So we got him to train with the year group below because it was only a few months difference in age,” Jongkind says. “They did it and he was like Cristiano Ronaldo all of a sudden.” Mazraoui, who incidentally now stands at 6ft tall, has not looked back since.

Van de Beek meanwhile had to be taught to stop being so conservative with his passing. Jonk introduced him to two key Cruyffian principles: one was to always look to pass forward not sideways, and the second was the importance of the third man run as a way of finding space. In Cruyff’s teachings, the third man should begin making his run as soon as the first two players have begun exchanging passes.

“We designed training sessions where you would get points from receiving the ball as a third man or you were only allowed to score from a third-man situation,” remembers Jongkind.

Were Cruyff still alive, he would surely be beaming with pride at Van de Beek’s forward-thinking approach and mastery of the third-man run, which has helped him to nine goals already this season.

During this period, Ajax players as young as six were introduced to these principles with the hope that over time they would become instinctive. The current Ajax side certainly play as if quick-fire passing is ingrained in their DNA.

Eating right
With echoes of Arsene Wenger replacing chips with broccoli, the Ajax overhaul also saw a revolution in the club’s nutrition.

Experts from the Dutch Olympic training centre were summoned to fill the kitchens with high-quality elite sports provisions. And in keeping with the principle that all players should be individually coached, Ajax’s youngsters were placed on individualised nutrition plans to help with their development.

On a broader level, out went sweet and chocolate machines and in came a more scientific approach to nutrition intake and protocols like allergy checks.

What happened next
At the end of 2015, a power struggle saw Cruyff, Jonk and Jongkind leave the club. Cruyff felt his principles were starting to be ignored, and declared an end to the Cruyff Plan.

Sporting director Marc Overmars and the then marketing director Edwin van der Sar helped guide the club through the subsequent transition. Van der Sar has since become the club’s CEO, and helped by his shrewd business sense Ajax have enjoyed a renaissance in Europe that saw them reach the Europa League final in 2017 and this year’s Champions League quarter-final – fulfilling the Cruyff Plan aim of becoming one of Europe’s best eight sides again.

The success has been achieved while sticking to the broad principles of ensuring half the team is made up of academy graduates, and that players are only signed if they will substantially improve the team. The outstanding Dusan Tadic, who joined from Southampton last summer on the recommendation of assistant manager Alfred Schreuder, has scored 27 times this season and is a good example of this principle working in practice.

Manager Erik ten Hag meanwhile has ensured the team sticks to Cruyff’s expansive, attacking principles. In fact through Ten Hag’s work at Bayern Munich with Pep Guardiola – a Cruyff devotee – there is clear lineage to the godfather of Dutch football.

Ten Hag likes his players to express themselves, and has fostered a spirit of adventure that was plain to see in the thrilling 4-1 win over Real Madrid at the Bernabeu.

As for Jonk and Jongkind, they are continuing to spread the Cruyff gospel by running Cruyff Football, a consultancy that provides club and international sides with individual coaching services.

We can’t know what Cruyff would have made of the current side, but we can hope that the side’s success and its roots in the Velvet Revolution might have pleased him.

The revolution began with Cruyff decrying: “This isn’t Ajax anymore.”

Nine years on, Ajax are Ajax again.

And an even better one in French:
https://www.eurosport.fr/football/l...-revolution-de-velours_sto7215734/story.shtml

Combine this with the national team against the odd overperforming for about five decades (#3 in all-time Elo since mid-1960s) and it is a travesty how certain 'cartel zombies' rate a contemporary of him as the greater football personality.

 

For me the two greatest European Footballers ever are Cruyff and Puskas. The two of them would make a perfect Mount Rushmore in football history with Pele and Maradona had they won their World Cup finals. One game is all that separates them from the South Americans in my opinion, which is silly.

Maradona had one of his worst games of a fantastic tournament in the WC final but his teammates come through and deliver the win. Cruyff had one of his worst games of a fantastic tournament in the WC final but his teammates did not come through and deliver the win. Neither were bad in the WC final, just not as good as the rest of the tournament. Cruyff's club career is better as well. Not to mention what could have happened to his legacy if he had gone to WC 78.

Puskas had he not been wrongly called offsides he would have likely scored the winning goal of the WC final, after heroically playing with an injury. A very different narrative than him coming back to soon and hurting his team by demanding to play. The rest of his career is impeccable. And imagine what he could have achieved under different circumstances. What is he and the rest of Hungary players stayed in Hungary. Does Real win 5 straight European Cups, or does Honved take a couple off of them? What happens if full strength Hungary is in WC 58 looking for retribution? Does Pele's legend take a hit? Imagine Puskas's goal scoring records for the national team is he continues to play with them and remains highly productive until 1963, as he did with Real. Imagine his career being the same as it was now transitioning to Real from Hungary but just having a clean transition where he does not miss almost two years of his playing peak.

Now things are left on the table for other greats as well, but both Cruyff and Puskas are overlooked so much because of one game they did not win.

 

As much as it pains me to post it lol (only joking but it is against Forest!) this can be a good example of him in prime period on a very good day, for you to look at and assess:


The most technically gifted can be defined in slightly different ways I suppose, especially with regards to incorporating dribbling ability, but generally speaking I'd say no Hoddle would likely be the most technically gifted English player probably. Both Barnes and Hoddle were somewhat known as players who overall England (the national team) didn't see the very best of, at least for an extended period of time. So Gascoigne, Beckham etc showed a bit more in the national team shirt I suppose, even though arguably they didn't have quite as good a selection of prime seasons/years at club level, or cumulatively as good a career in the top English league (playing abroad more partly contributing to that though of course). Barnes slowed up a bit after injury issues, and converted to a very useful, probing central midfield player in his later days (first at Liverpool, then Charlton for example) but he wasn't an England player anymore at that point. Many argue both Barnes and Hoddle should have been selected more for England (and given roles more similar to what they had at club level, in more similar team set-ups built for them). Many others argue they under-performed at times when they were selected, and certainly at both Euro 88 and Italia 90 Barnes didn't shine like he'd done in the previous seasons respectively (that can be down to things like condition at that point in the year etc to an extent perhaps also).

 

This game can also be seen in full on Footballia I notice by the way for example:

https://footballia.net/matches/liverpool-fc-everton-fc-first-division
https://footballia.net/players/john-charles-barnes

England games he does do well in on that list are the Argentina World Cup game (coming on as sub and nearly changing the game to England's favour in the closing stages), and the Brazil game from 1984 where he scores his Maracanã wonder goal.

 

Can't find the better version right now but had this on my channel.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3zmwrt