freethedevil wrote:You completely misunderstand the hierarchy of how things work in soccer. While I don't personally like the system, as far as success is concerned in the eyes of soccer fandom..
1. World Cup/Copa America/Euros
2. Champions league
3. Everything else
This is rich. You're calling it soccer and telling me the football equivalent of "water is wet". Did I give the impression that I don't know which trophy means the most? You haven't said anything that disputes what I said. I'll say again:
1. Messi is one of the most successful football players of all time. Karl is not close to that in basketball.
2. Ronaldo just had a phenomenal 5-year run. It's a feat for Ronaldo, not an anti-feat for Messi
When the 2014 wc arrived, soccer media and the public put a milestone messi would have to cross to be considered goat.
1. Win a world cup.
2. Have a assist/goal in the international final
Messi was the best player in the 2014 world cup but he didn't win and that sentiment was repeated post the world cup.
Then we got the copa america, where the milestone was changed to
1. Win an international title
2. Score a goal/assist
Again, Messi was he best player in the tournament but he still wasn't considered goat because he had failed to win in the biggest stage.
Your milestone No. 2 is made up. It was simply to win the world cup in 2014. Noone would've cared about his stats in the finals if Argentina had won. See "coach Ronaldo" winning his oh so special international trophy while cheering from the sidelines for reference.
For the bold, I personally felt that he was not the best player in the WC. He was the best player who happened to play in
the WC though. FIFA and the media were pandering to Messi to an embarassing degree, culminating in that consolation prize golden ball they gave him at the end of the tournament. He disappeared throughout the knockout stages.
Them lowering the bar to just "win an international trophy",
and him subsequently choking in the Copa didn't help my image of him either.
Which is the soccer equivalent of stacking olympic medals and conference final apps. A la liga holds next to no weight compared to a champions league or a euro or a copa. Messi didn't become goat through winning, he became goat through longetivty.
No. The football equivalent of stacking olympic medals is......stacking olympic medals. It's a thing in football too. And no, freaking conference finals apps are not as important as a La Liga or Copa del Rey. The conference finals is literally the semifinals of the NBA championship. A conference finals app is the same as winning a quarter finals tie in the UCL. That's laughably unimpressive.
You may not know this, but these are all separate competitions. The top teams compete in at least 3 major competitions every season, each of which start from matchday one or group stages. Every season, teams have to juggle lineups in order to balance the fatigue and injury risk that comes with playing 2 or even 3 big matches in a week. Some years teams just flat out give up on moderately big competitions like the Europa league and send their B-teams to play knockout games in favour of keeping their starters fresh for a marquee league match that will affect their league title chances.
We can all appreciate that there's only one major trophy in basketball, but that doesn't mean that every trophy in other sports has to be placed on some stupid scale where the NBA title is the highest level. League titles and domestic cups have no equivalent in basketball, don't force it.
Messi was considered > Ronaldo, he was also considered < maradona and pele. Ronaldo won a lot to "catch up" was considered messi/goat level durng the winning, but once it stopped, Messi became a near unanimous goat. Winning gets you hype when it happens. As time passes it stops holding weight. Ronaldo goat consideration is now roughly on par with kobe goat consideration in popularity.
He did not stop winning. His and Barca's trophy cabinet continues to grow every year. I keep saying this. Messi didn't win a UCL between 2011 and 2015, and that period contained arguably his greatest and most hyped years. He was still tearing everyone apart then. Where do you think the hype you're talking about came from? He was just playing the best football anyone's ever seen, that's what it came down to with Messi. Sure the trophies followed naturally, but you just knew that it didn't get better than that. This is why I said that you had to have been following it in real time to get it.
Messi is missing the soccer equivalent of an nba title. Hence karl malone is an apt comparison.
Umm no he is not. The football equivalent of the NBA title is the UCL trophy. The NBA title is nothing before the WC. The WC is seen as a sort of holy grail in the football world that stops the entire world in it's tracks
every 4 years. It's so elusive, and that's why Pele winning 3 has given him a godlike status among fans. So far I've been trying really hard not to get into the context of why Messi and Ronaldo can't win the world cup when clearly inferior players like Cannavaro, Ronaldinho, fat Ronaldo, Klose, Lahm, Iniesta, Torres, Henry, heck even Griezman and Pogba have won it. I'm sure you know that this is a huuuge huuuge discussion which would have its own thread that would go on for a loooong long time. Lmao @ the NBA title being close to that level of significance.
Pele has more goals per game, chances created per game, dribbles taken on per game, and basically evert per game stat you can think of over peak messi, and it's by a significant margin too. Mess's goat worthy resume is based on longevity, not peak. Ronaldo's "goat case" is also based on longetvity.
Not too surprising tbh. Pele was the Wilt/Russell combo of his era. Plus the rules and competition back then inject some context into it, but that's another story.
Longevity on its own means very little in football. If it doesn't come along with team success, it means jack. The only one whose legacy has received any meaningful bump from the past few years is Ronaldo, and that's because he won 4 UCLs in 5 years. At both their peaks (which again, the football gods made sure to align for us), Messi was by far the better player, and was actually the best we'd ever seen. Contrary to what you believe, he continues to win meaningful trophies because he's that good.
Any GOAT case about Messi that does not include his peak is a ridiculous one.