I'd like to know if there are any players that have had highly successful club careers in major leagues (mainly active, but you can list past players too) that have played for national teams that are absolutely awful. Like I'm talking ranked 125 or below on FIFA rankings, teams that are pretty much never close to qualifying for a World Cup.
George Best, Northern Ireland Regarded by many as the greatest player of all time. Career included: Manchester United, LA Aztecs, Fulham, Ft Lauderdale Strikers, Hib's & San Jose Earthquakes. George Weah, Liberia 1995 FIFA World Player of the Year, European Footballer of the Year, and African Footballer of the Year. Career that included stops at: Monaco, PSG, AC Milan, Chelsea, Man City, & Olympique Marseille.
Ryan Giggs, Neville Southall and Ian Rush. Those guys are legends in England (even though Giggs is still playing, he will go down as one of the best to have played in England) but Wales is a joke of an NT. It would have been different for them three if Paul Bodin didn't miss a penalty in one of the World Cup qualifiers. Jari Litmanen is worthy of a mention. He was a star with Ajax in the 90s but Finland has never produced a decent team for him to play in.
who the hell told you Egypt are awful, you don't know anything about football, they're only African champs. Educate yourself before making stupid statements.
Weah really came close to qualifying for 2002, I think if he had won on the last day of qualifying Liberia would've qualified but they lost or tied IIRC...
Adrian Ilie (Albania), Sergej Barbarez (Bosnia), Shabani Nonda (Congo), Andres Oper (Estonia), Alexiandr Hleb (Belarus), Maris Verpakovskis (Latvia), Dwight Yorke (T&T), David Suazo (Honduras), Giannakis Okkas and Michalis Konstantinou (Cyprus)... Maybe not all of them are "real" dead end teams, but they are definitely no crackers...
This post brings to light a question I had when I first clicked on the thread. What, exactly, qualifies as a "dead-end" national team? Where do we draw the line between "dead-end" and "not dead-end, but no better off in terms of ultimate success"? The Cup is there to be won, and so grouping those teams that do not win in different categories seems a bit artificial IMO. It's clear that, for most teams, just reaching the World Cup finals is a great accomplishment. It's a clear goal for any player with competitive spirit. But real competitive spirit cannot be satisfied by a first or second round appearance. If, at the end of his career, a given player has appeared in two or three World Cup finals and continental NT cup finals, but never lifted his continental trophy or the World Cup, his NT was no more successful, really, than the team whose players watched from home.
Shevchenko and Eto'o don't belong on a thread that started out with Best (N. Ireland) and Weah (Liberia). The first two were WC quarter-finalists or saw their country reach the WC quarter-finals and could do so again with them on the team, the other two never qualified for the World Cup. In fact Weah's country never qualified at all, with or without him.
I don't know if he's a "great" player, but Canadian Dwayne de Rosario could play on a number of major national teams.
At least, he played in one European Championship Finals. That should disqualify him from this thread. What was the names of the two brothers from Pananma?
I'd define a dead-end national team as one for which it would take a miracle to qualify for a World Cup. Jari Litmanen is perhaps the most underrated player in this category - as recently as 2005, despite being well past his prime, he was still the Finnish national team's biggest attacking threat. Also: * Cha Bum-Kun. While South Korea in the 1980s doesn't fully fit the definition of dead-end national team (qualified regularly for the World Cup), they did not win their first World Cup match until 2002. The argument for calling them a dead-end national team in the 1980s is that they probably would have had little chance of qualifying from any other continent at the time despite fielding one of the best strikers of the decade. * They're not world-class, but Jason Roberts and Shalrie Joseph, who both play for Grenada (population 90,000), each would have been good enough to start regularly for at least a dozen teams in the last World Cup. * Also in the "ridiculously above his national teammates" category is Zeshan Rehman, who made his debut for Pakistan - perennially near the bottom of the FIFA rankings - in a season in which he made a reasonable number of first-team appearances in the English Premiership. That has to be one of the greatest-ever disparities in level of play between one man and the rest of his national team.
The best choice is Wynton Rufer (New Zealand)! Former Werder Bremen striker, who was one of the best during the early 90s.
Goran Pandev- Macedonia Eidur Gudjonsson- Iceland Jorge Valdivia & Matias Fernandez- Chile Sherman Cardenas- Colombia Hossan Kaabi- Iran ( Qualified for WC....)