Ok, so they couldn’t possibly have picked everyone.
But even so, France Football’s ‘Ballon d’Or Dream Team’ is exceptionally weird.
Even putting aside the unhinged formation and the most top-heavy selection of players ever assembled, there is a list of former award-winners and nominees who you just cannot believe have been overlooked for a spot on the team.
And, with a little help from 90min‘s definitive list of the 50 greatest footballers of all time, here is just a few of them.
One of the finest players Brazilian football ever produced (and that’s saying something, by the way) Zico did it all with Flamengo. 12 years of extraordinary dominance saw him score close to 400 goals in 500 appearances for the club…from midfield.
Regarded widely as the best free-kick taker of all time, he is cited as having scored 101 times directly from set-pieces, and he is the fifth highest scorer ever for the Brazil national team.
Again, he was a midfielder.
Pele himself would later describe Zico as the player who ‘came closest’ to his greatness.
I mean why the hell isn’t he in the team, right?
AC Milan’s player of the century and also Serie A’s player of the century, Baresi’s influence led Milan to six league titles and three European Cups. He also marshalled the right flank on Italy’s way to lifting the 1982 World Cup.
He never won Ballon d’Or, which is an injustice in itself, but he did finish runner up in 1989…which is more than Cafu ever managed.
Yet Cafu is in the team, and Baresi isn’t. Make it make sense.
Puskas was so good, and more importantly the quality of his goals were so good, that he later came to have a France Football award named after him.
The Puskas Award goes out to the scorer of the best/most pleasing/most-generic-Mohamed-Salah goal of the year, and that’s a fitting tribute to one of the most entertaining players of all time.
Across his 629 appearances for Budapest Honved and Real Madrid, he scored goals at a rate of basically on per game (622 in 629).
Staggeringly, however, he also never lifted Ballon d’Or. Turns out that’s a difficult trophy to get your hands on.
In eight of his 20 seasons as a professional football player, Gerd Muller scored more goals than games played.
In 1972/73, he scored 66 in 49.
Whether it was for West Germany, Bayern Munich or the famous Fort Lauderdale Strikers, Muller just scored goals wherever he went.
It may just be that there is no player on the planet who enjoyed a better peak than Der Bomber, whose goalscoring record is outstripped only by his ludicrous list of trophies.
To be an elite footballer nowadays, you have to be completely committed to the professional game.
Your lifestyle, diet, sleeping pattern…all of it has to revolve around performance. Ask Cristiano Ronaldo.
It wasn’t always like that though, was it?
Mane Garrincha wasn’t interested in anything other than the joy of playing football, foregoing an agent and not even bothering to train, yet he dazzled the world on his way to lifting two World Cups with Brazil with his dribbling ability revolutionising the way football was played,
If Di Stefano needs introducing then you really need to swot up on your football history because you’ve done it all wrong so far.
Two-time Ballon d’Or winner, five time European Cup winner, and scorer of over 500 professional goals for club and country, few have ever done it like Di Stefano did it in the late 50s and early 60s.
Deserved owner of the best nickname in football history, the Divine Ponytail was untouchable. Simple as that.
The best player of one of the strongest eras enjoyed by any league in the history of football, Baggio’s savvy defined Italian football in the 1990s, his blend of classy playmaking and mesmeric dribbling helped him to league titles with Juventus and Milan, though he was frustratingly never able to win the World Cup despite being a fixture of a formidable Italy team.
From a trequartista role, he scored as many goals for Italy as Alessandro Del Piero, and scored more than 200 times in Serie A, making him the seventh highest scorer in the history of Italian football at the time.
Decent going.
Yeah yeah Platini is a bit of a wrong ‘un who was chased out of the UEFA presidency on some pretty strong corruption allegations.
Before that, though, he was seriously good at football.
I mean he won Ballon d’Or three years on the spin, something no player wouId manage again until Lionel Messi two-and-a-half decades later. I don’t know what more evidence you need than that.
Imagine you famously headbutt someone in a World Cup final, receive a red card for it, and ultimately cost your team the game. Then imagine you go on to win three Champions Leagues on the bounce as a manager, and all of that still pales in significance compared to what you did before.
Imagine how bloody sublime your prior achievements would have to be.
Ok, then times all of that by ten.
And then by ten again.
Good effort, but you’re still nowhere near as good as Zinedine Zidane was.
Johan Cruyff invented ‘total football’, the philosophy that went on to become the entire basis of the future of the sport, and he didn’t even mean it.
He was that good.
There isn’t a footballer whose influence will prevail as much as Cruyff’s has to this day. He’s the Godfather, the original, the Tony Stark to the modern football MCU.
Basically, he was really, really good, and any all-time XI for which he is eligible immediately loses all merit if he isn’t in it.
I don’t make the rules.