Ranked! The 100 best football players of all time (2024)

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90. Roberto Carlos

The diminutive Brazilian spent 11 seasons flying down the left flank at theBernabeu, helping Real Madrid to three Champions League titles.

His attacking ability originally earned him a call-up to the national team aged 18, when he was playing for Uniao Sao Joao. He followed that by joining one of Palmeiras’s best-ever teams and then Inter, before Real Madrid came calling. There he becamea cult hero for carrying a smile almost as big as those monster thighs which allowed him to fire the ball towards goal at 105mph. No wonder goalkeepers (and fans in the stands) feared him.

Career highlight: The 2002 World Cup winner could defy the laws of physics. Striking the ball with his three outside toes, a free-kick that was apparently heading to the corner flag curved back and hit the net in a 1-1 draw against France at the 1997 Tournoi.

89. Hristo Stoichkov

A roving forward of glorious unpredictability, Stoichkov was a mainstay of Johan Cruyff’s ‘Dream Team’ Barcelona side that won four league titles on the trot - and the club’s first European Cup – in the early 1990s.

The Bulgarian was famously improvisational and infamously hot-tempered (you can see why Cruyff took to him), and complemented his direct dribbling with a handy habit of catching goalkeepers off-guard with rocket-powered shots fromunlikely distances.

Stoichkov turned in a similar level of performance for his national side, most notably at the 1994 World Cup. His six goals in the U.S. took Bulgaria to the semi-final and made him joint top-scorer of the tournament.

Career highlight: His frustratingly fleeting partnership with Romario during the 1993/94 season, the Dream Team’s fourth title campaign, which reaped 54 goals and will go down as one of the all-time great forward pairings.

88. Sergio Busquets

Arguably the most complete defensive midfielder of all time and the standard to which the bar was raised.

Sergio Busquets became a by-word for Pep Guardiola's vision of the game in the late noughties, combining a combative nature in transition with the will to break lines vertically and be his team's first playmaker building from the back. All contemporaries have been judged against him; everyone who's followed has been influenced by him.

Career highlight: A World Cup trophy alongside Xabi Alonso in Vicente Del Bosque's 2010 Spain midfield. The world title was sandwiched between Champions League wins in 2009 and 2011.

87. Allan Simonsen

A hard-working, fiercely committed centre-forward with a knack for important goals, Simonsen is recognised as one of the most important Danish footballers of all time and enjoyed a splendid three-year spell at Barcelona.

Yet his most impressive exploits came in Germany, where he helped Borussia Monchengladbach to three consecutive Bundesliga titles in the mid-'70s. He’s also the only footballer to have scored in theEuropean Cup, UEFA Cup and Cup Winners' Cup finals.

Career highlight: Winning the Ballon d’Or in 1977, beating Kevin Keegan and Michel Platini in the process, and becoming the first Danish player to take the honour.

86. Alan Shearer

He's still no.1 in the Premier League with 260 goals: don't let the dad jokes on Match of the Day fool you into thinking he was anything other than a complete monster in his prime.

One of the most ferocious and reliable strikers of a generation, Wor Alan was, at different points in his career, an up-and-coming future star, the most expensive player on Earth, the Euro 96 top scorer and an eternal goal-getter in English football. He could have gone anywhere in football and won even more – perhaps scored even more – but chose to return to his beloved Toon.

He may be simultaneously one of the greatest English footballers ever… and underrated.

Career highlight: Winning the Premier League with Blackburn Rovers will always be his footballing profile picture but breaking the all-time Newcastle United goal record? That'll probably rank as his favourite moment.

85. Philipp Lahm

One of those players whose greatness only dawns on you over time. Lahm was present and crucial to a number of era-defining sides of the modern era – Jupp Heynckes’s Bayern Munich, Joachim Low’s Germany and latterly Pep Guardiola’s Bayern – and yet his understated style meant for a long time that his majestic standards went underappreciated.

Not any more, though: Lahm retired this summer as a bona fide modern great, a footballer of astounding intelligence and technique who played two very different positions to absolute perfection. His medal collection (from World Cup triumph with Germany to every trophy worth winning at Bayern) provides sound evidence of a career well spent. “Perhaps the most intelligent player I have ever trained in my career,” reckons Guardiola. “He is at another level.”

Career highlight: Reinventing himself as a central midfielder, with astounding ease, to captain Guardiola’s shimmering Bayern side to three consecutive Bundesliga titles.

84. Wayne Rooney

It was never a debate between Ronaldo and Messi in the early days: Wayne Rooney was far more highly-rated than his Manchester United colleague. And considering that he would smash goalscoring records for both club and country, it's somewhat strange that his career paled in comparison to those two since.

The Merseyside lad was equal parts power and precision across a career that began as a 16-year-old netting on his debut against Arsenal. Rooney was physically supreme, pacy and aggressive but could caress the ball like few other Englishmen have ever have.

Career highlight: His astounding Euro 2004 tournament in which he top-scored and announced himself as the most exciting wonderkid on the continent.

83. Hugo Sanchez

Comfortably the finest Mexican player of all time and one of the leading scorers in Real Madrid and La Liga history. He played for both Madrid clubs, but it was at Real (after moving in 1985) where Sanchez and his somersaulting goal celebration became legend.

Sanchez won five consecutive league titles between 1985 and 1990, was the competition’s top scorer in four of those seasons, and decorated Spanish grounds all over the country with his spectacular range of finishes. Predatory inside the penalty box, certainly, but also extravagantly gifted outside of it, too.

Career highlight: 1989: a Ligawinner’s medal, victory in the Copa del Rey final against Real Valladolid and, after a staggering 45 goals in 42 games across all competitions, the European Golden Boot.

82. Jimmy Greaves

Were it not for injury ruling him out of the World Cup final, Jimmy Greaves may have been the most famous English footballer of a generation. As it was, he just had to settle for being one of the best.

The highest goalscorer in the history of English top-flight football (357 goals), Greaves was a byword for brilliance in the 18-yard area, showing composure that few others could. The Essex-born forward still has an astounding goals-to-game ratio that holds up against modern-day forwards, 44 times for his country in just 57 matches. He still holds the record for most England hat-tricks with a whopping six – one every 10 games or fewer.

Career highlight: Two Cup Winners' Cup final strikes in a 5-1 rout of defending champions Atletico Madrid, as Tottenham became the first Brits to lift a European trophy.

81. Josef Masopust

Masopust represented fair play better than anyone. When Pele was injured during the clash against Czechoslovakia at the 1962 World Cup, but had to stay on the pitch, the midfielder refused to tackle him. The Brazilian superstar was left stunned by such generosity and always admired Masopust, while Eusebio claimed that he felt inferior when playing against him.

Outrageously versatile, he was able to "play the violin and wash the dishes", winning a lot of balls, distributing them and taking on opponents with amazing ease. He won eight Czechoslovakian titles with Dukla Prague.

Career highlight: Masopust led Czechoslovakia to the World Cup final in 1962, scored the opening goal in the 3-1 defeat to Brazil and won the Ballon d'Or that year.

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