THREAD — 10 tweets:

There are a few accounts on here reviewing players of the past and they produce good work generally.

However, there are many others who just engage in basic, cross-era comparisons without laying down any groundwork.

I broke down my thoughts on that:

I don't think any cross-comparison of eras is intelligent without clarifying those eras in detail first. Otherwise you're effectively just taking players out of their time, sitting them in a room and comparing how their respective environments shaped them...

...which is useless.

Before delving into players from those eras tell me about the eras themselves: coaching; finance; knowledge of the game; medicine at the time; training; the culture of football then; what teams and players saw as success; and much more.

The rest is irrelevant until that is done.

This is even more important to do in football as there are multiple leagues each with their own influence on clubs, managers and players. These things must be clarified in detail otherwise we really don't go anywhere with the discussion.

When people compare players today there is always a quick reference to the leagues players are in, teams they're playing for, etc. People bring context for today's era but completely ignore it for cross-era comparisons...which is just mad!

If the response becomes “it's too difficult to research this” then that's just the way it is. However, you don't skip a vital part of knowledge because research will take you a long time. That's not a sincere approach to knowledge let alone to the game.

In the last year or so I've seen quite a lot of comparisons that haven't clarified what environment the players in question were shaped by and cultivated in. The comparison just ends up being filled with multiple back-and-forth claims made almost entirely without context.

For example, football has changed drastically since the late-00s — Ronaldo and Messi being the main reason — and so comparing players being cultivated in this era with previous eras isn't the way.

The best way to inherently rate and compare players is to look at how good a player was in their own era; this removes the external factors to the era that were out of the player's control (e.g. medicine, physiology, training regimes, knowledge of the nature of the game, etc).

After this has been done then comparing players’ dominance and impacts in their respective eras would be excellent to see. This would contextual the arguments made and bring much needed historical knowledge to modern-day football.

This is something I feel was important to mention. I get DMs from people sending me others’ tweets on this topic and it usually results in a “is this actually true?”

My advice would be to ignore anyone engaging in cross-era comparisons unless they've done the above.

Peace.