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The Athletic is delighted to announce the release of The Soccer 100, the definitive ranking of the greatest male players to have graced the beautiful game, published by William Morrow. Our carefully chosen panel of experts, featuring award-winning journalists with decades of experience covering soccer all over the world, have voted for and selected the greatest soccer players of all time. From those whose tricks and flicks have lit up competitions from the World Cup to the Premier League, or decorated the Copa America and Serie A with their goals or defensive prowess, the book tells the stories of the best to have crossed the white line. We look at those who have left a legacy, whether they are known for a distinct trademark flash of skill — such as Johan’s Cruyff celebrated turn — or if they have reinvented tactics or even an entire position. We reflect on national icons from Pele to Paolo Maldini, Cristiano Ronaldo to Diego Maradona and, via their stories, revisit some of the game’s most glorious matches and incidents. Here, lead writer Oliver Kay sets the scene with his introduction for the book. Advertisement In the summer of 1981, six years old and bitten hard by the football bug, I used my pocket money to buy a book from a rummage sale. I never knew the book’s title. By the time I got my hands on it, it had lost its cover. But turning its dog-eared pages, causing its spine to creak horribly, felt like entering another world. Besides a chronicle of every World Cup from 1930 to 1974, it contained a list of the greatest players of all time. It was dominated by British players, some of them familiar, but sprinkled among them were exotic names I had never seen before, legendary players from far-off lands. Some had evocative nicknames: Lev Yashin, an acrobatic Soviet goalkeeper dressed in black from head to toe, was the “Black Spider”; Ferenc Puskas, the scourge of goalkeepers and defenses all over Europe, was the “Galloping Major”; the name Garrincha, a mesmerizingly gifted Brazilian who had been born with a defective spine and crooked legs, meant “Little Bird”. Greatest of all, the book said, was another Brazilian: Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known universally as Pele, who had started out kicking a grapefruit around the streets of Sao Paulo. He had won the World Cup three times, the first of them as a 17-year-old, and ended up scoring more than 1, 000 goals in his career. His nickname? “The King”. That treasured book fell apart in the end. My old football magazines and sticker albums usually went the same way, having been read from cover to cover again and again and again. I was desperate to cram my young brain with knowledge about football and footballers. And… what else was there to do? Football was hardly ever on television. More than four decades later, the world is very different for sports fans. The opportunities to immerse yourself in sport seem boundless. There are TV sports stations offering wall-to-wall coverage. There are dedicated sports websites like The Athletic. There are social media outlets where athletes can communicate with their fans at the push of a button. Video-streaming platforms offer instant access to just about any goal of the hundreds that Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have scored in their careers. Advertisement But has something been lost? With so much attention and energy focused on the here and now, are we losing a connection with those stories and those great names whose contributions have reverberated through the game’s history? That is what The Soccer 100 is about. It is a celebration of 100 of the greatest players in the sport’s history. In an ideal world, that last part would read “the 100 greatest players in the sport’s history” — and perhaps it will be marketed as such — but deep down, we know it cannot possibly be that. Football has been played professionally for a century and a half. It is played and followed in every corner of the world. Comparing players in different positions, across different eras, is fraught with difficulty. How do you even begin to rank players whose careers and skill sets are as diverse as Giacinto Facchetti, Gordon Banks, Gerd Muller, Zinedine Zidane, and Neymar? Data was not our friend here. Comparing eras is made so much harder by changes in tactical trends, competition formats, and even the world map. The proliferation of fixtures, many against small countries, has seen so many long-standing international appearance and goal records toppled over recent years. Puskas, Eusebio, Muller, and the rest never got the opportunity to rack up goals against Lithuania, Andorra, San Marino, and the like. There might be an algorithm that could take appearances, goals, and trophies won into account, but any such appraisal would be as flawed as it was dull. On paper, Diego Maradona’s goalscoring record does not look spectacular, but anyone who watched him in his prime — indeed, anyone who has taken five minutes to watch some of those goals on You Tube — knows he scaled heights rarely, if ever, reached before or since. We decided to put it down to a vote among 10 of our most experienced football writers and editors. We started by proposing every great player we could think of, even if that meant trawling the history books and previous lists of this nature. We then cast a vote in which each of us proposed our top 100, in order, with points awarded for each ranking position. We put the results into a spreadsheet, looked at them… and gasped: “How is he below him? ” Seconds later, another gasp: “How is he not in the top 100? ” Advertisement We debated whether it might, on reflection, be worth deciding the rankings by committee instead. But no, we stuck with the original vote, putting our various gripes to one side, and went off to write the stories of 100 men who have left an indelible impression on the game. And yes, they’re all men. Women’s football is booming, its popularity growing by the year, and it is hoped that in time we will produce a book about Mia Hamm, Marta, Aitana Bonmati, and the greatest players in the women’s game. But this one is about the men’s game, a companion to The Baseball 100, The Football 100, and The Basketball 100. Similarly, the selection very much concentrated on what these players delivered on the pitch. Some in their number have courted controversy off it — wealth and fame have brought their own pitfalls — but this was never designed to be an assessment of their characters. Rather, it is an appreciation of their quality as footballers and the brilliance they provided on the biggest stage. All of this brings us to our top 100 and the need for us to apologize to some wonderful players who did not make the cut. The long list extended to hundreds of players, any one of whom would have been a worthy inclusion in this book. But we could have turned this into The Soccer 200 — and left the rankings out of it, in the interests of diplomacy — and it would still have upset people. The difficulty was outlined by John Hollinger in The Basketball 100 when he pointed out that “if we’re covering more than 75 years’ worth of players, more or less, and only naming 100, that’s basically one player a year”. Consider football’s longer history, its global reach, and the depth and richness of the game’s culture in so many countries across the world — and the task becomes even harder. There was discomfort when we realized only three players from Africa, one from North America, and none at all from Asia or Oceania had made our top 100. We briefly wondered whether there was a case for putting the voting process to one side in pursuit of a wider geographical spread. Landon Donovan (USA), Abedi Pele (Ghana), Harry Kewell (Australia), and Son Heung-min (South Korea) are players of global renown, but selecting players on geographical grounds would have been against the spirit of the exercise, and there were more contentious omissions than theirs. Some of the game’s first real stars, such as the Argentinian forward Jose Manuel Moreno and the prolific Austrian-Czechoslovakian striker Josef Bican, fell by the wayside. It is gratifying that Dixie Dean, Giuseppe Meazza, and Matthias Sindelar made it since their stories, written by Michael Walker, James Horncastle, and Mark Critchley, respectively, are among the most compelling in the book. Advertisement Inevitably, there is a slant toward the modern era, but it does not seem to extend to the modern day. Two of our top five are still playing at the time of writing (albeit in the twilight of their glorious careers… yes, you know the two), but only one other current player made our top 30. It probably says something about the difficulty of evaluating contemporary players that he, Kylian Mbappe, might have been ranked lower had our ballot been held a few months later after a difficult start to his Real Madrid career. The only other current players who made The Soccer 100 are well into their 30s. In time, the likes of Virgil van Dijk and Rodri might earn the kind of reverence that has been bestowed on Luka Modric and Karim Benzema toward the end of their careers. So might, for example, Erling Haaland, Vinicius Junior, or Lamine Yamal in years to come, but you never can tell. As for English football’s “golden generation” of the 2000s, only one of them makes The Soccer 100. David Beckham is one of the most famous athletes on the planet. But among the top 100 footballers of all time? Sorry, Becks. There are 15 Brazilians among our selection, more than any other nation, but arguably, there could have been at least another five. There was no place for Sergio Ramos, the defensive linchpin of the Real Madrid team that dominated the Champions League in the 2010s. We could not find room for either Spain’s celebrated Luis Suarez or his Uruguayan namesake; there was an argument for including both. There is something particularly enduring about that generation of athletes who lit up a world emerging from the darkness of global conflict: Wilt Chamberlain in basketball, Willie Mays in baseball, Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Robinson in boxing. The same is true of football: Alfredo Di Stefano, Puskas, Yashin, names that cropped up in the sports press and then, very occasionally, appeared in grainy footage on television screens as international competitions began to gain prominence. Their greatness is set in stone. The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the game’s global governing body, has named annual awards in honor of Yashin (best male goalkeeper) and Puskas (best goal). EA Sports’ long-running football franchise allows gamers to play with an “Ultimate Team” featuring the likes of Yashin, Puskas, Eusebio, and Pele (though not Maradona, for licensing reasons). Such tributes bring a degree of name recognition that might otherwise be lost, but with them comes a danger that they are reduced to a mere reference point. Tim Spiers’s chapter on Yashin brings the goalkeeper’s story to life in a way that, frankly, an “Ultimate Team” animation of him cannot begin to. Advertisement Rather than a series of profiles, we wanted to tell the players’ stories in a more varied way. Jack Lang wrote about Garrincha’s signature move; Phil Hay explored Johan Cruyff’s genius through the eyes of Swedish defender Jan Olsson, the man on the wrong end of the Cruyff Turn; Sarah Shephard focused on the “otherness” of Socrates, the chain-smoking Brazilian medic; Michael Cox microanalyzed Maradona’s brilliance through the prism of a career-defining performance against England at the 1986 World Cup; Daniel Taylor went to the Portuguese island of Madeira to learn more about its favorite son, Cristiano Ronaldo; Nick Miller wrote about the goal for Santos against Flamengo in 2011 that announced Neymar as Brazil’s newest fenomeno. We were lucky enough to interview some of our subjects. I spoke with Kenny Dalglish. Greg O’Keeffe went to Denmark to meet Michael Laudrup. Felipe Cardenas had an audience with Mario Kempes, the Argentinian goalscoring hero of the 1978 World Cup. Adam Crafton recalled a riotous afternoon in the company of Zlatan Ibrahimovic. George Caulkin wrote from the heart about Alan Shearer, once his idol, now a close friend. It’s not all sweetness and light. I wrote about how the Munich air tragedy hung over Sir Bobby Charlton throughout his illustrious career; Jacob Whitehead explored the trauma that overshadowed Marco van Basten’s goalscoring exploits in his own mind, if nobody else’s; Mark Critchley dug deep in search of the truth about Sindelar, whose death in 1939, as a symbol of the Austrian resistance movement, has been a source of intrigue for decades. That is the thing. This book is about the stories. The rankings? Not so much, we hope. To quote Joe Posnanski in The Baseball 100, “I don’t care about the rankings. Every one of these players has a fascinating story — about persistence, about confidence, about pure talent, about amazing moments, about the lengths people will go to to become quote-unquote ‘great’. ” Can there ever be a definitive verdict on the greatest footballer of them all? Even during Pele’s prime, some would argue for Di Stefano, Puskas, Garrincha, or, later, Franz Beckenbauer or Cruyff. Maradona scaled breathtaking heights with Argentina and Napoli in the 1980s, but his career was pockmarked by controversies and ultimately curtailed by a self-destructive nature. It’s complicated. For all the fluctuations and contentious omissions from this list, though, the selections higher up were more settled. There was a clear top 20, a clear top 12, and a clear top six of (and let’s keep them in chronological order to avoid any spoilers): Di Stefano, Pele, Cruyff, Maradona, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Messi. To return to an earlier point, these names are set in stone. It was never going to be a unanimous choice, but for The Soccer 100, we settled on a No 1, a choice that reflects not just greatness but sustained greatness: era-defining greatness, jaw-dropping greatness, the type of greatness that can leave you feeling like you are watching football from another dimension. Again, it comes back to something Posnanski wrote in The Baseball 100, this time about his No 1, Mays. “To watch him play, to read the stories about how he played, to look at his glorious statistics, to hear what people say about him is to be reminded why we love this odd and ancient game in the first place, ” he wrote. “Willie Mays has always made kids feel like grown-ups and grown-ups feel like kids. In the end, isn’t that the whole point of baseball? ” Advertisement Posnanski could easily be writing about football there. He could certainly be writing about Messi, Ronaldo (either version), Maradona, Cruyff, Pele, or so many others featured in this book. And yes, that is the whole point of sport. It can feel like such a serious business these days, compromised by political and commercial interests, but at its heart, it is still the same old game we fell in love with, illuminated by comic-book heroes, ordinary people with the power to do extraordinary things. This book is about them. Excerpted from The Soccer 100 by Oliver Kay & James Horncastle with The Athletic soccer staff, published by William Morrow and available now in the United States and for pre-order in the United Kingdom. Copyright © 2025 by The Athletic Media Company. Reprinted courtesy of Harper Collins publishers. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Before joining The Athletic as a senior writer in 2019, Oliver Kay spent 19 years working for The Times, the last ten of them as chief football correspondent. He is the author of the award-winning book Forever Young: The Story of Adrian Doherty, Football’s Lost Genius. Follow Oliver on Twitter @Oliver Kay