Xavi/Iniesta better than Zidane?

I don’t see why that’s implausible. What you’re referring to is from just a 7-game sample. Why wouldn’t it be possible for R9 to have 1.9 dribbles per match in a 7-game sample? What even is your theory here? That OPTA is wrong and undercounted WC dribbles specifically in the 1990s and early 2000s???

 

I don’t know how many dribbles per game he was producing in his club season. I suspect it probably wasn’t actually much above 2 or 3, to be honest, but I don’t know. What I do know is that I would be highly skeptical of dribble numbers for R9 that look like those that the random anonymous Twitter user posted for Zidane.

Anyways, the rest of your screed above, which very unhelpfully responded to me with bold responses inside quotes is all just silly rationalizations and doesn’t require a response. Half of it involves you repeating a talking point that I dismantled later in my post. And it ultimately culminates in the below:

Which really says it all. You are just delusional. I suppose I shouldn’t expect any different though, after almost a decade of you desperately clinging to this same nonsense, trying to latch onto whatever you think might be a life raft as you drown in the absurdity of your beliefs.

If you want to believe that Zidane dribbled more than Robben and Messi based on the tweets of a random anonymous Zidane fan on Twitter, then I suppose you can go ahead and do so. This sort of thing makes it impossible to discuss anything with you in any reasonable manner though, because your views are fundamentally grounded in delusion.

 

They don’t “trigger massive confusion and surprise at first glance,” because the person you are interacting with has spent almost a decade now on these forums trying to argue that Zidane dribbled more than Messi (using data that gets repeatedly proven to have been wrong or completely misinterpreted, and he has even been known to come back and use the exact same data on this question years later after having explicitly admitted years earlier that he was wrong about that data). He just genuinely thinks that this sort of thing makes perfect sense and is what he would expect, and is posting anything he possibly can to try to provide evidence for it. This is just the most recent episode of this. Before this, it was him insisting that OPTA’s old “dribbles & runs” stat was the same as today’s “dribbles” stat. That’s unfortunately the context here.

 

Lol, my only interaction with you is to point out that your publicly expressed beliefs on BigSoccer are crazy. It takes some real narcissism to portray that as “stalking” hahaha. Meanwhile, you once went to a different forum that I’d never said anything about previously posting on and pulled up my posts there from many years earlier, and then quoted them here to try to attack me for them. Even that was not actually “stalking,” though it was weird. You perhaps should recognize that people who strongly disagree with you about something aren’t obsessed with you. No one here is obsessed with you. There’s just people who think your views about football are particularly wrong and express that on a forum that is specifically designed for discussion about views on football. Anyways, let’s move on. I’ve made my views clear on your latest argument.

 

I unblocked you long ago, after mods told everyone to cool it such that it didn’t seem necessary anymore. There’s not enough people actively posting on this forum to really want to have anyone permanently blocked—it genuinely significantly limits how much one can be involved in discussion. Anyways, none of this matters. On the actual substance, I’ve made my views clear on the argument you’re trying to make. I think it is manifestly nonsense. Others can make up their own minds, but I don’t think there’s virtually anyone who would think your claims pass a basic sense check. There’s not much more to say beyond that.

 

I don’t disagree with your premise, and I think if I wrote that OP today I’d focus it a bit less on team success (though obviously team success is an important indicator of great players’ quality). I wrote the OP almost a decade ago! This is a very long thread, and my arguments ultimately involved a huge amount of film analysis and data.

I will note that the reason Bill Russell isn’t typically considered the GOAT despite winning more titles is more about the NBA being a really nascent league in his era, and didn’t have many teams. So the general thing animating him not being the GOAT is basically that the sport wasn’t fully developed yet when he won those. It’s fairly similar to people not rating Giuseppe Meazza very highly, despite him leading his team to two World Cup wins.

I’m not sure I agree with that. It’s all a bit of an unfalsifiable premise either way (and probably not worth arguing about, as per the paragraph I wrote just below this), but at the very least I do think that France’s defensive line was meaningfully superior overall (certainly at least in 1998 and 2000). I think they also had an advantage at DM (though Busquets is very good, of course—France actually had multiple DMs that were better). I don’t really think it can be said that Spain had an advantage at striker—both teams were actually weak there at times (and strong at other times), but Spain actually had to opt out of playing any forwards in Euro 2012 and still won, and obviously Henry is the best player of the bunch (albeit not optimally overlapping in age). I do think Spain had a better GK (though Barthez was good), and I think I’d take Spain’s depth in subs over France’s (though France was able to have guys like Vieira and Pires as subs, so they certainly were not lacking there). And, of course, Xavi and Iniesta had each other—which is a big deal! I think the team quality is pretty close, with both teams being extremely talented.

Notably, though, the point I made wasn’t to make a granular comparison between the two teams. Doing that isn’t super helpful, since it will just lead to a ton of subjective views about a ton of different comparisons (for instance, you might subjectively agree or disagree with the stuff I said above, and it’d be a rabbit hole to discuss it all in any detail) and of course there’s other variables at play anyways (strength of opposing teams, etc.) that also could lead to an endless subjective rabbit hole. So my point was more general than that. It was merely that Xavi and Iniesta and Zidane all played in their country’s golden generation, so it’s not a point that can be made to downplay the achievements of Xavi or Iniesta without acknowledging that Zidane benefited in a similar way. I don’t think any of these players would’ve won a major NT tournament without being lucky regarding the era they happened to be in.

I think I addressed a lot of this either in the OP or later posts in the thread. Yes, having Messi means we should expect Xavi/Iniesta to have had more club success than Zidane. It makes a comparison of team success not a direct one. But Zidane had a pretty disappointing amount of club success for the talent his teams had, while Xavi and Iniesta had immense success for one of the best teams ever. I think one can try to boil that down to other factors, such as coaching (and the fact that team success has so many other variables is why I probably wouldn’t focus as much on it if I wrote the OP today), but it is something that weighs in Xavi’s and Iniesta’s favor.

As for being the clear standout player on the team, I don’t really see that as a meaningful point, since Zidane obviously wouldn’t have been the clear standout player on a team with Messi either.

I don’t think my OP used lack of team success at club level as evidence that Zidane was inconsistent at club level. I think what I did was recount his relative lack of team success at club level and then say that Zidane’s inconsistency was a cause of that lack of team success. The OP itself basically just stated that inconsistency as fact without really backing it up with evidence. But, over the course of 100+ pages of this thread, I ultimately backed up that claim with a huge amount of film analysis—granularly going through a ton of individual matches from all these players at club level and identifying their mistakes and sloppy play. So, while I think it’d be fair to say I didn’t actually prove this inconsistency point in my OP (I think I must’ve thought it was so obvious that I didn’t need to prove it), I did actually eventually spend countless hours providing tons of evidence and analysis to prove this point. You can find those somewhere in this thread (though at this point the thread is so long that anything in it can be very hard to find). Unfortunately, I think a good deal of the videos I used have been pulled from YouTube in the meantime, but the analysis was definitely there (and, I have to say, is not something I’m willing to do again with stuff still on YouTube now—since the analysis I did was genuinely extremely time-consuming).

 

I’m no expert on exactly how OPTA counts dribbles (and, by the way, not being an expert in this is a big reason why that random anonymous Twitter user’s posts aren’t worth much—substituting in your or my own equally-non-expert view isn’t really better), but I don’t think there’s even close to 9 dribbles in that match. I counted like 5. I’m not sure what you’re counting to get to 9, but I think you may be counting first touch beating a pressing opponent, and I don’t think those count as dribbles (and if they did, Xavi’s dribble stats would surely be way higher!). Or maybe you’re counting something else that I don’t think counts. I don’t know. This sort of thing demonstrates why trying to compare a random person’s tally to tallies from a professional organization is just a fool’s errand. The criteria just inevitably isn’t going to end up being applied the same way that the professional organization applies it (and, while they have different employees, they surely have organizational precedent governing most things, and random people don’t have that), and that can create massive differences. When those differences lead the random person’s tally to indicate absurd things like Zidane dribbling more than Messi, then it seems obvious that that’s caused by a difference in how the numbers are being tallied. Obviously you disagree since you don’t think that’s an absurd conclusion, but instead think that Zidane absolutely dribbled more than Messi. But I don’t think you doing an equally uninformed, non-expert tally of dribbles in some random games actually validates that the random anonymous Twitter user’s tallies are remotely consistent with how OPTA tallies it. (Nor would you purportedly cross-validating your methodology with games we do have dribble stats for, since you can very easily just be more stringent in what you count there in an effort to prove your point. Not to mention that the differences in what you count may show up more for Zidane than for Messi—to take my prior example of a potential difference, Messi didn’t try to beat people with first touch as often, so if you counted those and OPTA didn’t, then it’d inflate Zidane’s total a lot more than Messi’s).

 

If you’re talking about some sort of broader conception of “beating players,” then you’re no longer talking about just “dribbling.” At that point, you’re talking about something different and significantly broader (since you can beat players with first touch, etc.), which makes comparing a tally of that to the “dribbles” stat just comparing apples and oranges. If you want to embark on analysis of how often Zidane “beat” players, then have at it—it could be interesting! But just don’t talk about it in terms of the “dribbles” stat, because you’re obviously aiming to encompass something broader. (I’ll also note that I spent significant amounts of time in this thread analyzing Xavi’s ability to beat players with his first touch. Both Zidane and Xavi were great at this, and it is an important skill! It’s just not “dribbling”).

 

Please note that if you’re counting beating people with first touch, then I really don’t think you are going by OPTA’s definition, since OPTA’s definition requires that the player attempts to “beat an opponent when they have possession of the ball.” I think the latter part of that textually excludes beating someone with first touch. And even leaving aside the wording of the definition itself, again OPTA as an organization surely has organizational precedent for what they do and don’t count under that fairly vague criteria. If we try to tally it without that organizational precedent, we very likely will get to substantially different results. It’s like how in the law there is typically a pretty vague legal standard, and then a bunch of precedent that sets forth the contours of what that legal standard actually means and what counts and what doesn’t. If you just take the vaguely-stated standard on its own, you very often wouldn’t come to the same result as someone who is more specifically guided by the precedent on how to apply that standard. And, without that, it’s just comparing apples and oranges. So yeah, if you want to say Messi had X apples and Zidane had X+3 oranges, then that’s fine, but also pretty meaningless. As for timestamps, you can feel free to provide timestamps of what you’re counting, though I’m not that keen on going down an event-by-event rabbit hole with you about a ton of potential “dribbles.” My point really isn’t about one match or specific events—regardless of any particular dribble or non-dribble, the fact that you and I tried to apply the same criteria and came to very different results is simply evidence that there can be vast difference in how to apply a vague standard in the absence of organizational precedent on how to apply it. And that fact demonstrates why comparing the “dribble” tallies of a random person to OPTA’s tallies is comparing apples and oranges.

All that said, I am definitely happy for you to analyze Zidane’s ability to “beat” players more generally. It could be interesting! It’s just not something that should be grounded in “dribble” stats. You are not right in your general view of how much Zidane “dribbled,” no matter how many times over the years you’ve tried to launder this claim that he “dribbled” more than Messi. But Zidane did beat players a lot and in various ways, and it could potentially be fun to see analysis of that.

I think some reading comprehension is due here. I said the following:

I spent significant amounts of time in this thread analyzing Xavi’s ability to beat players with his first touch. Both Zidane and Xavi were great at this, and it is an important skill! It’s just not “dribbling”

Where in there did I talk about Xavi dribbling? I talked about something Xavi was great at, and then very explicitly said that that thing is “not dribbling.” Given this response, I think you should go back and read my last few posts again, to make sure you understand what I’m saying.