Of course he is slowly declining in many areas of the game. That wasnt the argument. The argument was that the significant decline is noticeable in his stats and/or he is having trouble to play for Barcelona and in the new league. I claim that that is inconclusive based on the data available and that his season at Barca actually follows his trend in the past few years considering he plays for a more defensive team in a more defensive league. However, it will never be 100% clear whether the gap between this season and the last few at Bayern is due to the major decline in his game or completely explainable by the change of circumstances. Have in mind that at Barca Lewandowski is asked to play differently than he did in Bayern and that can result in moments of awkwardness/uncomfortbleness that you are noticing.
Benzema: 3rd most Ballon d'Or nominations in history 4th all-time leading scorer in the UCL 2nd all-time leading scorer for Real Madrid Real Madrid's all-time leading assist provider 5x UCL winner Most decorated French player in history More G/A than Premier League GOAT Thierry Henry I think he's being underrated here. How in the world he is "inconsistent" with these numbers? His CL record is by far better than Ibra and Suarez and he have a CL as the main protagonist to bring on the table. Suarez might be better on domestic level but he underperformed in UCL even playing for prime Barça and Messi. He already scored 2 goals in 20 games from 6 xG or something in UCL
Suarez for me, and Benzema last. But only considering one, best, season Benzema would be ranked first, in my opinion. Lewandowski would be second for me, so I agree with the results of the poll.
I’ve written about this earlier in this thread, so if you search for posts by me in this thread you can find a lot more detailed analysis on this, but the bottom line IMO is that Benzema had a bunch of seasons in the middle of his prime where he struggled to get a lot of minutes (though obviously we should note he was competing for minutes with great players), and more generally he wasn’t really featured very highly at all in Ballon D’or voting until that two-year span quite recently (I think those were the only years he ever got higher than 16th in Ballon D’or voting). At the same time, though, his best year is definitely up there with essentially anything these other guys did in their best years, and Benzema also had impressive longevity in that he had very good seasons quite a lot of years apart. If someone has really good seasons very far apart and had a peak year that is as good as or better than the other guys’ peak years but he also was generally not as good in a typical prime year as the other guys were in a typical prime year, then I think that could reasonably be called “inconsistent.” I do also think one could reasonably get to an optimistic conclusion on Benzema by heavily weighting absolute peak and length of prime, while explaining away some of the less impressive prime years in various ways. But I also think it’d be perfectly reasonable to see his record and ding him a lot (at least in comparison to these other guys—we’re talking about rarified air here) for inconsistency.
It’s the biggest weakness in Suarez’s resume. But let’s remember that he has played very well in a CL-winning campaign (2014-2015), and as you imply he was very good in 2015-2016 as well. So it’s not a question of thinking Suarez wasn’t well capable of being very good in the Champions League. Meanwhile, he basically didn’t have virtually any opportunity to play in the CL in the years before that, because of the teams he played for. So the argument against Suarez would basically have to entirely just be that he wasn’t great in the several CL campaigns he had in his 30s. And that’s a pretty narrow point IMO, which rests on a relatively small sample size of games largely outside of Suarez’s very best years. In terms of knockout-stage matches, we are talking about just 1,597 minutes of matches post-2015-2016. And in those matches, Suarez had 0.68 G+A per 90 minutes (using Transfermarkt, so this is wide rules). That’s not amazing, of course, and Suarez surely could’ve done better. Just to give some context, though, I think we can agree that Benzema has been a very good performer in the Champions League, but just at first glance we can easily identify an even longer 2,362 minute span of CL knockout-stage matches from 2014-2015 to 2020-2021 (all in the middle of Benzema’s prime) where Benzema had just 0.38 G+A per 90 minutes in CL knockout-stage matches. And that’s even on a team that was doing very well in that timeframe (i.e. probably a somewhat easier situation than the one Suarez was in on average in the post-2015-2016 timeframe). Granted, Benzema racked up some good numbers in some of the CL group stages in those years, but I don’t really think those are the types of matches you’re particularly focused on here. Bottom line is that we’re just talking about some low sample sizes of relevant matches here, such that I think it would be pretty unfair to put too much credence in Suarez’s stats/performance in the CL post-2015-2016. All that said, if you are completely focused on the Champions League when ranking players, then that focus will not be advantageous for Luis Suarez. Lewandowski and Benzema both have more to show for their career in the Champions League specifically than Suarez does. But the Champions League really isn’t everything, and it certainly shouldn’t be considered everything when we are looking at a player who spent a significant swath of his prime on teams that weren’t even in the Champions League. Other competitions matter. Luis Suarez has been an amazing player in domestic league play, and has a great record in domestic cups. He has won Uruguay (not a top-tier country) a major NT tournament, while being player of the tournament (not to mention being very good in a semifinal appearance in the WC as well). And, yes, he has very good Champions League campaigns (including winning it once), but also some prime years where he didn’t play in the CL and some prime years where he wasn’t great there. So the CL is a relative weakness for him, but the Champions League is really just one piece of the overall puzzle. It is not the whole puzzle, and Suarez has other areas where he outstrips the others being considered in this thread. One’s conclusion should be based on a balancing test of all factors, not just blind devotion to one thing to the exclusion of everything else. Overall, I voted Lewandowski in this thread, though, so I’m not arguing specifically for Suarez over everyone else.
Ratio: 0,86 C. Ronaldo 0,85 Lewa 0,82 Messi 0,76 Mbappé 0,68 Kane 0,62 Suarez 0,59 Aubameyang 0,58 Benzema 0,58 Immobile 0,54 Salah