he was some player in his day, but in my opinion, george best was the best in the world, probably because of who i support and where i from, but also because maradone never played in england with the likes of ron harris.
i understand your feeling mate, and it's very fair from u to admit wich may be the reason of your preference for best..... it's not even about being biased, imo, it's just about pride

. Probably if u ask to 100 italians who was the "greatest" some of them will reply by saying baggio or rivera, or baresi.... it's quite normal in the end.
anyway i usually try to stay away from this kind of discussions. as anybody else, i find this such an axciting argument, this is probably the most frequent discussion about football.... "who was the only one?!?".
but i think it's almost impossible to give an objective reply to this (useless, if we have to be honest) question..... and it's impossible on different levels.
first of all, it's impossible to compare players of different "eras". football change, the way football is played and concerned change, athletes change. how can we compare pelè to ronaldo, platini to zidane, nesta to beckembauer, or buffon to yashin? their eras were different, their football was different... it's just useless.
then, we can't compare players who played in the same moment, but in a different role. of course it's impossible to compare gerrard to rooney and terry or iniesta to fernando torres and puyol or pirlo to toni and cannavaro...... and it's quite easy to understand this.
even if our spanish friends don't think so (:lmao: ), each role has his dignity. So someone could say that the best player of the last 20 years, wasn't maradona or ronaldinho or baggio, but baresi.
finally we cannnot even compare players who played in the same era and in the same role too. this because there isn't just one way to play football, there isn't just one way to play as a defender, as a midfielder or as a wing. And this is what make football so special. It's not like in others sport. Football isn't bound into rigid rules, it's opened to human fantasy. football isn't not jut about phisique, pace, strenght, endurance, dribbling, shoting or tackling ability. football (especially when it's played by legends like best, eusebio, maradona......)it's also about afflatus, moodiness, inspiration, creativity, genius. when we're looking at theese players, we're not looking at football players anymore, we're looking at artists. exactly as it happens for artists, those football players gave their interpretation of their role, they added something that is unique, and that makes them "unrepeatable" and uncomparable. we just can't compare zidane to platini, or ronaldinho, or totti; coz each of them gave a different and unique interpretation of the role of advanced midfielder.
The same way we can't compare raffaello to tintoretto, picasso to de lempicka, dalì to caravaggio.
that's the reason why i prefere not to talk about "the greatest of all times". i think there's a gotha, an olympus of players (many players, for our pleasure

)who can be considered as the greatest playerS of all times. i'm talking about cruyff, van basten, eusebio, beckembauer, baggio, platini, pelè, rivera, vavà, garrincha, mazzola, santillana, zidane, baresi, yashin, zoff, best, and many others.
but still (and let me just add this) there were 2 artists who showed to the world something the world never saw before: they were leonardo da vinci and michelangelo buonarroti.
the same way there were two players who showed to the world something we never saw before; one of them was ferenc puskas, the other was diego armando maradona
i'll continue to post here any news about maradona's conditions until he'll be safe
