Well, in the other thread I backed out of the Romario discussion. And you lied. It are not "five threads". You are again starting the mischief, as with 90% of the time.
@PuckVanHeel and @Pipiolo, you guys must be family, probably siblings. There is simply no other explanation.
It's not just me though, @Puck has constant battles with a number of posters here. If you follow this board routinely you probably have an idea.
That last sentence is right but is true for about any (South American) great player, particularly in centralized economic models (which doesn't apply to Pelé). When Maradona made his name for Argentinos Juniors, and one can read this back in for ex. 'France Football' and 'World Soccer' magazines, part of the state/army money ('Astral') and sponsorship money was used to buy support players to just help to score goals (square balls and pass balls sideways), but who would not be distracted by playing for the national team and/or in friendlies. I can post pictures from the English 'World Soccer' mag perhaps. That's the franchise model (franchise player) or offered franchise product. Zico for 'establishment team' Flamengo was a bit of the same (not entirely because Pelé grew up in a different economic football model). Just something to consider as a thing that can be cancelled out against each other, save for a few exceptions (Ronaldo at Cruzeiro was different).
Strange reasoning and justification. You started it (again) - there can be no doubt about it. That is how it 90% of the time goes. Don't throw it on me (again). I'll never ever bow for the cabal if that is what you're hoping for (besides I expressed on this thread here appreciation for the Pelé analysis). And oh, elsewhere I got corrected that I should have ranked Best as possessing a better technique than Pelé... but if I had done so, then it is 'eurocentrism' again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Grondona#Controversy http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2012/mar/22/forgotten-story-abraham-klein-referee http://www.adl.org/press-center/pre...ional/adl-daia-survey-finds.html#.VrTYWfnhDIU http://imgur.com/fwwwBsJ http://imgur.com/BGrRX7P
Off topic. I never understood the hatred for Jews. I know bigotry has no basis in logic, but Jews have always seemed like a strange sub-group (mostly made up of businessmen as per the typical stereotype) to target, IMHO.
I do it because the 'hate' card is played, while ironically he himself started the mischief (hate the haters). And the paradox is here that it is also not deemed as good to rank Best as a lower level technician. http://forums.bigsoccer.com/threads...o-as-best-ever.2016490/page-385#post-33547115 Very ironic, that link (considering the accusation). If I go along with that call it is eurocentrism again. Anyway, go ahead. I back off now.
No, I understood why you posted the links (though if you ask my opinion, I would request you to make your point without going into the same loop that you dislike others going in, against you). In any case, my question (or wondering) was in a more general sense. I suppose I need to do some recommended reading. Maybe start with one of these - http://azure.org.il/article.php?id=18 http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394841 http://www.aish.com/jw/s/48900712.html http://int.icej.org/media/root-anti-semitism @comme - You might want to move these last few posts to a different topic. Although I'm not sure there would be one here for discussing such things, so maybe you'd need to delete them?
It's not about "bowing to the cabal" so much as your instinctive rebuttals against almost any praise for certain players. Like I had commented in another post, you can try to plug a dam with your fingers or you can accept what is a general truth. It's called social media after all, "social" being the operative word. Your links are completely off-topic so I'm not sure why you have posted them again, though I find it extremely bizarre for a Northern European to hector Latin Americans on anti-Semitism of all things.
This is an interesting post but is there any truth to it? Almost sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory to me
Who are these guys, some players not good enough to be "distracted" with the NT yet notable for their ability to help Maradona score goals... Look who posted it though... Thread about Pele and Santos, and how he and they scored, no word of Maradona or his scoring anywhere, but @PuckVanHeel feels the need to bring him up just to take away from him as always. Austral became state owned in 1980, that is when they struck the deal with Argentinos because of Maradona. Maradona had made a name for himself already by then, had been top scorer more than once, he kept scoring at similar rates and so did Argentinos. Does this need to become about Maradona now?
Everything is about Maradona, just look at how some posters can't help mentioning him anywhere. Maradona is the greatest player of all time not just because of his supernatural talent, but because he is the most hated player of all time.
It has been asserted that Santos their rise in successes, results and the goaldifference not only coincided with Pelé his arrival but also the immediate arrival of a Coutinho and Dorval in 1959, and other key players at about the same moment (Zito and Pepe were already there when Santos won the Paulista in 1955 and 1956 - for first time since 1935). My reply is that this might be true, but holds as well for many 'franchise players' serving as a cornerstone in the South American context. Especially and in particular in centralized economic models (which Santos before 1964 was not located in). Do with it what you like but here's some relevant background info. (source: World Soccer 1981 - first inspected issue was immediately 'bingo') Either way, the forward Pasculli is a player with more caps (20) than aforementioned goalscorers Coutinho and Toninho combined (16 caps combined). And like Toninho, Pasculli also accomplished things without the main star. So it is not unique to Pelé obviously (this is very obvious I think, but before we say "overrated as a scorer" one has to think about whether the these points apply to more to him, to a greater extent, than others in this regional context). Specific example: in the now famous match where Maradona scored four past Gatti (his 'signature match' for AJ), Pasculli had a notable assisting role. As was described in his own autobiography. https://books.google.nl/books?id=aAonAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT146&dq=maradona pasculli autobiography&hl=nl&pg=PT48#v=onepage&q&f=false Therefore: if (only: if) the same applies to other franchise players in the South American context of the 1950s to 1980s, does that mean that (almost) all are "overrated as a scorer"? Zico at Flamengo certainly and even more than Pelé, surely? Receiving assistance from role players and assisting scorers? Old post (link): " Finally, to a certain level I think it is wrong to degrade Argentinos Juniors to some obscure pub team, which is occasionally applied to a surreal level. Amidst the misty finances, they received officially US$400000 as special subsidies from the AFA (Argentine football federation). That was for that time not a small sum for keeping the team together and Maradona in the team/country, and softening debts. They received special funding from airline Austral(good for at least US$250000) and state-owned raw materials company YPF. The president of the club was Prospero Consoli, who was for a few decades the tailor of the armed forces. The chairman and treasurer of the club since September 1977 was Suarez Mason (on the verge of his judicial process widely nicknamed as the "Adolf Eichmann of Argentina"), boss of the 1st Army Corps, securing the nation's capital and surroundings. ---- "When Saturday Comes": However, the most common way for officers to connect themselves to clubs was through patronage. The most notorious patron of all was General Guillermo Suárez Masón, charged with 430 disappearances and 39 murders before his death in 2005. Shortly after the 1976 coup, Suárez Masón became a member of one of Buenos Aires’ smaller clubs, Argentinos Juniors, for whose youth side he had played as a goalkeeper. The teenage Diego Maradona began his career at Argentinos, with whom he was the league’s top scorer for four consecutive years from 1977. Bigger local and foreign clubs tried to buy Maradona almost from his first season as a pro in 1975 and humble Argentinos could have done little to retain him had it not been for Suárez Masón. The general ran the state-owned petrol company YPF and the airline Austral, both of which became sponsors of Argentinos and allowed the club to hold on to “El Diego” until 1980, when he moved to Boca Juniors. http://www.wsc.co.uk/the-archive/103-Politics/469-military-tactics http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jun/25/guardianobituaries.argentina http://cafe.comebackalive.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=10848 https://news.google.com/newspapers?...AIBAJ&sjid=N1kMAAAAIBAJ&pg=4064,2464702&hl=en http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1988/F...f-Torture/id-d8f1d874dfb4b7e9e3310dc5cdcd634c " As further evidence and details: Book excerpt 1 Book excerpt 2 Book excerpt 3 Book excerpt 4
So, you are trying to make it about Maradona... Afraid that if Pelé´s status takes any kind of hit then Maradona's stock automatically rises and cant live with that? Pasculli was a very good forward for everything I have read about him. Not world class, but a very good forward nonetheless. Him and Maradona only coincided in the very last tournament Maradona played before leaving for Boca, that is the 1980 Nacional. Argentinos looked great in that tournament indeed, with Maradona scoring 17 goals and Pasculli 8 (out of 35, so yes, together they scored 70% of the goals in that one tournament). Then Maradona had to miss the first phase of the playoffs because to the Mundialito and Argentinos was eliminated by Racing de Cordoba (1-1 at home and 1-3 away). He was probably signed by Argentinos thanks to Maradona indeed. As were several players in 1982-83 when Labruna took the team and started building the base of the team that would do great a couple of years later with Batista and Borghi already added. How important is this one tournament within the Maradona entire picture anyways? PS: look at all that data and detail compiled by the hater for when it is time to, using his own term, "puncture" Maradona. He loves doing that.
I think you are right that it's not at all unique for the arrival of one top player to coincide with the arrival of other top players. I certainly didn't mean to be saying that the arrival of Coutinho around the same time as Pelé was a unique circumstance. Rather, I just meant that it obviously would've had an effect on those goalscoring numbers, and I didn't think Estel was taking that into account. It doesn't have to be a unique circumstance for that to be true. But I hardly think this phenomenon is limited to the South American context: - Marco Van Basten arrived at AC Milan at the same time as Ruud Gullit - R9 arrived at Barcelona just a year after Luis Figo - R9 arrived at Real Madrid just a year after Zidane - Cristiano Ronaldo arrived at Real Madrid at the same time as Benzema, Xabi Alonso, and Kaka - Maradona arrived at Napoli just as Napoli was strengthening its squad a great deal in general - Neeskens arrived at Barcelona a year after Cruyff went there - Müller and Beckenbauer started at Bayern at essentially the exact same time I could go on. This makes sense. In general, top players don't go to teams that don't have ambition to strengthen themselves. And top players like to play with other top players. So good players have always gone to teams that other good players have gone to. It makes it harder to isolate the effect of one particular player, but this is hardly just a thing in South American football.
I think it's not a bad point. But again, I think we could apply the same thing to virtually everyone. And that's what we often try to do. We look at who a player had around him and use that to decide how impressed to be by his achievements. Having Pasculli is relevant to measuring Maradona's success at Argentinos Juniors. Having Coutinho is relevant to measuring Pelé's success at Santos. But, at the same time, having Gullit is relevant to MVB's success with Milan. Having a slew of world-class players is relevant to the success of Messi and CR7. Playing alongside tons of stars is relevant to the success (or lack thereof) of R9 and Zidane at Real Madrid. We have to always look at this stuff. It's not something that we should only do for Pelé (nor is it actually something we only do for Pelé; people always talk about the quality of Messi/CR7's teammates, for instance). One of my points in this thread, though, is that people forget or don't know that Pelé had an incredibly good team around him. So I think the quality of his teammates isn't a factor that people adequately take into account. I've made this same argument regarding Maradona at Napoli; I think people undersell the quality of his teammates there. And I try to be careful not to act like Messi doesn't have incredible teammates. So I wouldn't directly compare his trophies won with Barca to those won by other greats who perhaps weren't on as great a team.
You guys all think of accomplishments by one player in an individual context. Of course these players needed a good team behind them to accomplish those goal scoring numbers. Messi and Ronaldo are too players who have always played with great teammates. That always helps. Messi probably scores the most individual goals of anybody I've ever seen, but he benefited from an amazing midfield and playing system to play in. That in itself, in my view, does not diminish his goal scoring skills. Why ? Because all you have to do is look at the types of goals he scores along with the tap ins. They are many world class goals some of which only him or very few players could score on a consistent basis. The same applies to Pele'. People can bash all they want that he had great teammates and all (at Santos and NT), but if you look at the quality of many of his goals, his extraordinary goal scoring skill in undeniable. Look at the goal vs Sweden in the final where he applies a sombrero on the defender. Then the great header in the 1970 WC final. The famous goal vs Benfica in the Intercontinental final. These are only a few examples. The Toninho Guerreiro example is not that valid IMO because they played different positions. If you have a decent striker that fits the team's style, and you have a dominant team that can create lots of goal scoring chances, of course they will score a lot. Maybe if Pele' played in that position he'd score even more. But he did much more than scoring goals.
One of the more curious things about Puck imo, is that he seems to enjoy "puncturing" the likes of Maradona, Messi, Zico, Romario, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho. I actually agree with some of the stuff he says about Maradona. But when it comes to Zidane, a player that many fans agree is ridiculously overrated, his stance is the complete opposite (of what it would typically be); Puck doesn't even flex a single muscle in trying to scrutinize a legend whom is particularly easy to scrutinize (let's face it, a "big game player" who won *one* out of three CL Finals, isn't particularly difficult to scrutinize, and particularly so when he also happens to be a low scoring playmaker who also was nothing special in terms of assisting goals). The same one-sided narrative kinda repeats itself in the Zico vs Platini debate. Platini gets hyped into something that sounds "at the same level as Maradona." And Zico gets reduced into "I've never gotten the hype about this player." (And I somewhat agree with that, to be honest... but it's the fact that Puck's opinion is so one-sided, that it becomes easy to predict basically by just looking at the styles and nationalities of the players in discussion.) It gets to the point where, at least to me, it becomes clear that football ability isn't as relevant as the nationality of these players.
Ultimately, I think this is the correct response to a lot of what I've said. Pelé wasn't an out and out striker for the vast majority of his career (I think he was more of one very early on, though). But the legend of Pelé is, to a large extent, predicated on the idea that he is the greatest, most prolific goalscorer of all time. I don't think that's true at all. I still put him #3 all time, because he was a great passer and a great dribbler, and still scored a boatload of goals while also contributing that other stuff to his team. Not many players scored, passed, and dribbled at a world-class level. So I absolutely agree that he did more than score goals. But the case for him as the obvious GOAT (and many people do contend that it is obvious) invariably centers around the idea that he is the most prolific goalscorer ever. IMO he was a fantastic goalscorer who also did lots of other stuff most fantastic goalscorers don't do, but he was not the greatest goalscorer ever. You can't give Pelé credit for the playmaking he did, and simultaneously give him credit for goalscoring he merely could've done if he had been an out-and-out striker. If he had been an out-and-out striker he would've scored more. Hell, he might very well have been the greatest goalscorer ever in that case. But he wouldn't have been nearly the same playmaker.
Well, he mostly gets the greatest player player ever label but I agree many, including himself, will initially cite his goal scoring. When you dig deeper many will say he did more than that. I agree the goal scoring thing probably gets more attention than it should although I think his goal scoring wouldn't be that much different had he played in a top team in a different league. The question of how good the Sao Paulo league was at the time will always be impossible to gauge to be honest.
I dunno. I remember Hugo Sanchez talking about Cristiano recently. I posted his comments here and noted there was somewhat of a contradiction in there, because at the same time he marveled at the incredible number of goals Cristiano scored without even being a box striker, but in the next sentence he was saying Cristiano would have it harder to score goals if he actually was the spearhead inside the box within the highest density of defenders. In fact, didnt Rafa try to use Cristiano in a more CF position to poor effects in his personal scoring? I think Pele needed that presence up front to open the spaces and serve him the same way Cronaldo needs Benzema. Thats my opinion. Not that Pele would not have been able to score otherwise of course, but I doubt very much he would have scored as much or more had he been the reference CF. Look at the 1970 team for instance. Looking at the games it is clear to me that Tostao was a better conductor/playmaker/passer, and Pelé a clearly superior finisher. However, they had Pele withdrawn and Tostao working it up front. But was Pele there to service Tostao so the nominal CF could score or was it so that Tostao was there to hustle with the defenders, open up spaces and service the more withdrawn Pele coming from behind (and the other attackers too, of course)? I think it is the latter. I also think Pele, just like Cronaldo, did/do their thing better with a playmaking CF in front of them and neither would have scored more any other way. Also, in both cases their main purpose or function is/was to do the scoring, not the chance creation for the forwards in front of them (feeding from them rather than feeding them). Thats my opinion at least.