-Was something like this done at the end of the '90s? If so, we'll
follow those guidelines. If not, I'll make up some rules and, a la
Milivella the Great, solicit feedback.
-Does anyone recommend soliciting some sort of benediction from the
RSSSF gods (whomever they may be) if I want this to end up in the
archives and get taken more seriously?
-Should I wait until December? Argument for : It will be the end of
the decade (if you count back from January 1 of 2000). Argument
against: No player is suddenly likely to qualify for an honor if they
haven't by now, and running the vote sooner might breathe some life
into this NG.
I cant wait for all the rules to be laid out so here's my XI :-)
Casillas
Cafu Lizarazu
Thuram Cannavaro
Vieira Pirlo
Figo Henry
Kaka
Sheva
Subs: Buffon, Maldini, Lucio, Lampard, Zidane, Del Piero, Ronaldo
(original)
Honorable mention: Nedved, C Ron, Ronaldinho, Eto'o, Gerrard, Nesta,
Totti, RVN
>
> > -Should I wait until December? Argument for : It will be the end of
> > the decade (if you count back from January 1 of 2000). Argument
> > against: No player is suddenly likely to qualify for an honor if they
> > haven't by now, and running the vote sooner might breathe some life
> > into this NG.
>
> I cant wait for all the rules to be laid out so here's my XI :-)
Nothing wrong with a dry run! Can't wait to see your Beta.
Casillas
Cafu Lizarazu
Thuram Cannavaro
Vieira Pirlo
Figo Henry
Kaka
Sheva
--------
Glaring omissions: Raul, Roberto Carlos. Other possibilities: Inzaghi,
Gattuso, Beckham(!).
I don't see what Lizarazu has done to be here, and I'm not all that hot
about Figo. RVN should start ahead of Sheva.
D
The decade ends dec. 31 2010. (Which has the added bonus it includes
the next WCup.)
Casillas
Zanetti Nesta Lucio Roberto Carlos
Figo Zidane Pirlo Ronaldinho
Kaka Sheva
Subs: Buffon; Cafu; Maldini; Nedved; Riquelme; Henry
in that case the decade didn't start until dec 31, 2000??
Jan. 1st 2001, to be precise.
I looked it up on Wikipedia. They say that the decade starts wit a
multiple-of-10 year, as in the 50s, the 60s etc.; but the centuries
start with e.g. 1901 and end with 2000. Which is a bit inconsistent.
At millennium however, they say there's a debate for all 3. :-) So I
guess it's safe to assume it's debatable. Considering that the next
WCup will feature players like Messi, C. Ronaldo, Kaka, Robinho and
others, I'd include it in this decade.
On second thought, maybe not. All of these will naturally belong to
the next decade.
I should've clarified, my selections were heavily biased in favor of
players who won things, and takes into account Jan 1st 2000 to date.
>
> --------
> Raul,
Nah.
> Roberto Carlos
Overrated.
> Inzaghi,
Too many strikers in consideration already. Sheva, Henry, Eto'o,
Totti, RVN, and Ronaldo all way ahead of him.
> Gattuso,
Considered him for DM, but Vieira got my nod.
> Beckham(!).
Yes. Definitely underrated, but didnt win any of UCL/WC/EC.
> I don't see what Lizarazu has done to be here,
Mainstay in legendary France and Bayern teams, won EC, UCL,
Bundesliga.
> I'm not all that hot about Figo.
Premier winger of last decade. (along with Giggs, who i should've
mentioned)
> RVN should start ahead of Sheva.
Sheva -> Ballon D'or, UCL, Serie A
RVN -> EPL, La Liga
Casillas
Carvalho Ferdinand Nesta Maldini
Makelele
Figo Gerrard Zidane Ronaldinho
Ronaldo*
*not Cristiano
yes, that was worded badly
I like to uphold the convention of having one decade hosting 3 WCs and
the next 2. The 90's had three so this one must have only 2, etc...
>> Raul,
> Nah.
I honestly don't get the Raul-hating. The guy holds almost every conceivable
goalscoring record, in la Liga, in the CL, for the Spanish national team,
has won tons of stuff, has proven to be decisive in the big games, and is a
class guy. It is completely absurd not to include him in this list.
His career has marched in parallel to Del Piero's, and in almost every
category you look at, Raul comes ahead. And you won't find around here many
bigger Del Piero fans than me.
> > Roberto Carlos
> Overrated.
Disagreed. A lethal offensive weapon, more than makes up for his defensive
liabilities.
>> I don't see what Lizarazu has done to be here,
> Mainstay in legendary France and Bayern teams, won EC, UCL,
> Bundesliga.
But most of that stuff was very early 00s.
> I'm not all that hot about Figo.
> Premier winger of last decade. (along with Giggs, who i should've
> mentioned)
Started to decline in 2003.
D
My problem with Raul is that he became extremely pedestrian for 2-3
years in the *peak* years of a sportsman's age. It would be different
if he started slow (e.g. Zidane) or faded early (e.g. Sheva) but the
timing of his slump brings up serious question marks about his mental
fortitude.
Agreed. Spain's inability to win anything with him in the team doesn't
help his case, but you can't lay that all at his feet.
Consider also that in 2002, at his peak, he was forced to observe from the
bench as his teammates were being rob...^H ^H ^H, beaten by South Korea.
D
> I don't see what Lizarazu has done to be here, and I'm not all that hot
> about Figo. RVN should start ahead of Sheva.
Have to agree about Figo. For someone who's widely considered to be
among the three or four best players of his generation, he had
preciously few great seasons, perhaps no more than two (roughly
1999-2001).
> My problem with Raul is that he became extremely pedestrian for 2-3
> years in the *peak* years of a sportsman's age. It would be different
> if he started slow (e.g. Zidane) or faded early (e.g. Sheva) but the
> timing of his slump brings up serious question marks about his mental
> fortitude.
Well, I see things just the opposite. I value more the guy who has slumped
and been able to come back and stay close to the top of the game for almost
15 years, than the guy who had 2-3 years of glory and then declined quickly.
That's also the reason why I would take RVN over Shevchenko, whose decline
in the past three years has been quite sad.
D
>> Beckham(!).
>
> Yes. Definitely underrated, but didnt win any of UCL/WC/EC.
Eh?
Was Barcelona 1999 just a (very bad) dream?
> The decade ends dec. 31 2010. (Which has the added bonus it includes
> the next WCup.)
The first decade of the 21st century and of the third millennium does, but
when people speak of decades, they invariably mean "the 70s", "the 80s",
etc. Hence "the 00s", 2000-2009.
For Bayern, yes. It was however not this decade.
Buffon - Only Casillas comes close for consistency
Lahm - Much better at international level than at club level. I would
argue Bobby Carlos' best years were at the tail end of the 1990s.
Nesta & Thuram - The standout centre backs of their era. Cannavaro owes
his reputation to the 2006 World Cup. He was always a dirty player who
got away with murder because of the shirt he wore.
Cafu - Like Bobby Carlos he was finished in 2006 but no one matched his
consistency in the previous years. Maicon is even better but doesn't
have the silverware to show for it, yet.
Nedved - Another who hit a wall in 2006 but consistently brilliant in
Serie A for an entire decade. Ballon D'or winner.
Gattuso - The best DM of his generation. Unbelievably good big match player.
Kaka' - Six years of consistent brilliance. All that is missing is a
World Cup. Ballon D'or Winner.
Gerrard - Mr. Champions League
Shevchenko - The most devastating striker in the World, until he joined
Chelsea. Ballon D'or Winner.
Van Nistelrooy - Top scorer in the EPL, La Liga and on three occasions
the Champions League. Should have a lot more silverware to show for his
goals.
http://soccer-europe.com
Rss feed : http://soccer-europe.com/RSS/News.xml
Apart from Benny, everyone has picked Casillas for goal. Casillas has been
in the game for a long time, but I never heard him mentioned as one of the
greats until recently (maybe a year ago?). Why is he suddenly so highly
regarded?
He has always been good, but in the last couple of years he has been
mostly outstanding. One statistic that supports that is the number of
shots he faced in both of Real's recent championship seasons - among the
most in the league, and he led the league in saves.
People also remember the 2002 CL Final.
--
ciao,
Bruce
drift wave turbulence: http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~bds/
It's because his team didn't start to perform really well until the
past 2 years.
The fact that his team remarkably improved has helped boosting his
confidence,
which lead to this amazing performance we all saw in EURO 2008.
If Real Madrid, as a whole, is playing good, Casillas will surely play
good. It's that simple.
Suddenly?
He played in a winning CL side in 2000 and topped off the decade with
great performances in Euros in 2008. In between, apart from a brief
period when lost his place in Real side, he has enjoyed other domestic
and continental honours and has been consistently one of the best
keepers around. Buffon is the more solid keeper for sure (makes less
mistakes) but Casillas, I feel, is capable of the more outstanding
saves, and he has proved this over the course of this decade.
So first I put in all the ballon d'or votes received
by everyone from 2000-2008.
I then took log (base 10) of the votes to avoid screwing
up the numbers in favor of Kaka and Ronaldo who got
440+ votes in 07 and 08 while earlier winners barely
got 200.
I then added up all the numbers.
So here is my Sum(Log-Ballon) Decade XI till 2008.
4-4-2 :
buffon
dani alves, nesta, cannavaro, maldini
luis figo, kaka, zidane, c ronaldo
henry, ronaldinho
4-3-3 :
buffon
dani alves, nesta, cannavaro, maldini
kaka, zidane, c ronaldo
henry, shevchenko, ronaldinho
The numbers can be found here -
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pKYXTt23WLV3vRDXJnz6LMA
Of course, Ballon D'Ore votes are subjective too. Do you have the vote
tallies for the top 15 or so players in order? I know all the data is
there in the link but I'm too lazy to do the calculations myself.
Seems like a very reasonable approach, and the results are quite reasonable
too. The only problem is that you would probably want at least one defensive
midfielder, and Maldini moved from left-back to center-back around the year
2000.
> 4-4-2 :
>
> buffon
> dani alves, nesta, cannavaro, maldini
> luis figo, kaka, zidane, c ronaldo
> henry, ronaldinho
...
Ok, after playing around with your data a bit, I came up with two possible
alternatives.
First, instead of doing the log transformation, I just normalized the number
of votes in every year so that the total number of votes equaled 780 (which
is the modal number of votes in your data). So, Kaka's 444 votes in 2007
become 240.16.
Second, I imposed the restrictions of having at least one "defensive"
midfielder (broadly defined).
Third, I switched Maldini to CB
Method 1: Based on the total number of votes obtained during the decade:
4-4-2
Kahn
(228)
D. Alves Cannavaro Maldini Roberto Carlos
(8) (176) (162) (181)
Xavi
(53)
C. Ronaldo Zidane Nedved
(410) (420) (218)
Ronaldinho Henry
(450) (500)
Method 2: Based on the number of times ever appeared on the ballot (rewards
consistency over one-season wonders)
Buffon (6)
D. Alves (1) Maldini (5) Nesta (3) R. Carlos (4)
Pirlo (2)
C. Ronaldo (5) Zidane (7) Nedved (4)
Ronaldinho (6) Henry (8)
D
Ranking of the top 40:
Points Name
1 294.2 Thierry Henry
2 218.5 Andriy Shevchenko
3 215.8 Zinedine Zidane
4 194.0 Ronaldinho
5 158.4 Cristiano Ronaldo
6 140.9 Kaka'
7 138.6 Rau'l Gonza'lez
8 117.0 Paolo Maldini
9 116.6 Lui's Figo
10 114.9 Lionel Messi
11 111.5 Gianluigi Buffon
12 110.6 Pavel Nedve(d
13 107.9 Oliver Kahn
14 107.8 Roberto Carlos
15 105.0 Ruud van Nistelrooy
16 100.4 Zlatan Ibrahimovic'
17 97.2 Didier Drogba
18 91.4 Rivaldo
19 89.8 Steven Gerrard
20 88.4 Frank Lampard
21 85.7 Deco
22 84.9 Francesco Totti
23 84.1 David Beckham
24 80.8 Ronaldo
25 76.9 Michael Owen
26 75.5 Samuel Eto'o
27 69.1 Fabio Cannavaro
28 66.1 Michael Ballack
29 63.3 Alessandro Nesta
30 61.5 Adriano
31 59.5 Andrea Pirlo
32 49.0 Fernando Torres
33 46.8 Iker Casillas
34 42.5 Wayne Rooney
35 38.6 Gaizka Mendieta
36 37.5 Theodoros Zagorakis
37 37.5 Xavi Hernandez
38 37.4 David Villa
39 32.8 Gabriel Batistuta
40 32.8 Andrei Arshavin
--
No, no, you can't e-mail me with the nono.
I purposely did not impose subjective judgements like "who is
a defensive midfielder", though I completely agree that one
is needed in both the 4-4-2 and 4-3-3. For instance, if
one were to look at the numbers based on log(10), Gerrard
is the highest ranked midfielder one could consider
'defensive' ( I believe I spelled out my thoughts on this
position as did many others in a thread some time back ).
> Ok, after playing around with your data a bit, I came up with two possible
> alternatives.
> First, instead of doing the log transformation, I just normalized the number
> of votes in every year so that the total number of votes equaled 780 (which
> is the modal number of votes in your data). So, Kaka's 444 votes in 2007
> become 240.16.
Cool. Seems better than taking the log.
>
> Second, I imposed the restrictions of having at least one "defensive"
> midfielder (broadly defined).
>
Ok.
> Third, I switched Maldini to CB
>
I wanted to do this, seeing that Roberto Carlos would then
get a look in and I could throw out that waste
of space Fabio Cannavaro, but I just put him in his
well-known position.
> Method 1: Based on the total number of votes obtained during the decade:
>
> 4-4-2
>
> Kahn
> (228)
>
> D. Alves Cannavaro Maldini Roberto Carlos
> (8) (176) (162) (181)
>
> Xavi
> (53)
>
> C. Ronaldo Zidane Nedved
> (410) (420) (218)
>
> Ronaldinho Henry
> (450) (500)
>
Wow! A very nice interpretation of the data and we
get very good results.
> Method 2: Based on the number of times ever appeared on the ballot (rewards
> consistency over one-season wonders)
>
> Buffon (6)
>
> D. Alves (1) Maldini (5) Nesta (3) R. Carlos (4)
>
> Pirlo (2)
>
> C. Ronaldo (5) Zidane (7) Nedved (4)
>
> Ronaldinho (6) Henry (8)
>
Hmm, I wish Pirlo wouldnt be there but there is something
to be said for consistent ordinariness.
> D
I thought of using ranking ( 20 pts to the top place ), down to
1 for #20. But I got tired. I am not that good at Excel.
Also, I do believe votes count for something. A player who
has been "too good" in one season should be ranked ahead
of a player who has been "better" in another season. Daniele's
normalization approach also gives some credit to this fact.
> A better approach would be to use the ranking
> - first, second, and so on. I took the data from the spreadsheet (btw,
> there's an error there - the winner in 2002 is Ronaldo, not Ronaldinho),
Thanks for spotting that. Correcting for the error,
Shevchenko pips Ronaldinho in the log(10) based approach
and gets into the 4-4-2.
The spreadsheet has been updated.
There are 3 approaches so far, all quite reasonable.
1. Count votes in some sense ( best is after normalization )
2. Count number of appearances
3. Count rankings.
Maybe I will do all of the above, grant 1/3rd weightage to
each and publish the top 3 decadal teams.
The spreadsheet has been updated for the Ronaldo/2002 error
and is now editable.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pKYXTt23WLV1udHcbMFAUYw
Please add sheets to it with ideas you come up. I will
consolidate them at the end of 2009.
Ok this is based on the numbers in the last sheet (whatever they are
supposed to mean):
-------------------Buffon
---Nesta-------Maldini-------R. Carlos
C. Ronaldo--Zidane--Raul--Ronaldinho
----------Shevchenko---Henry
or, replace Raul in the line-up (and tweak formation as you please)
with either first, Messi(5.2) second, Figo(5.1) or third, Gerrard(4.8).
Forget all that, Kaka(7.3) is in! (I forgot him\\\\\\\\\\
So now:
----------------------------Buffon
----------------Nesta---Maldini---R. Carlos
-----C. Ronalddo-----Zidane-----Ronaldinho
---------------------Kaka -------Raul
---------------Sheva-----------------Henry
> The spreadsheet has been updated for the Ronaldo/2002 error
> and is now editable.
> http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pKYXTt23WLV1udHcbMFAUYw
I've added two sheets: one with the rescaled votes, one with my subjective
definition of player roles: GK, RB, CB, LB, LM, DM, RM, OM, FW.
D
> Hmm, I wish Pirlo wouldnt be there but there is something
> to be said for consistent ordinariness.
Or inconsistent brilliance.
Wow, what happened in 2007? Voters jumped from 780 to 1440 or so.
Any particular reason?
Noticed you havent added the Consistency Chart. Maybe I will
do that later. Also the ranking chart. I am a bit poor
at Excel, so if you can do this that would be great.
Some remarks on the ranking list -
1. Owen at #7, Eto'o at #36. This is the World Cup effect.
2. C Ron and Kaka at 1 and 2 due to their
huge winning numbers even after rescaling. This is evidence in
favor of using either ranking (1-20) or consistency.
3. The rankings page seems to have many duplicates.