Hiku said:
Johan Cruyff, Platini, George Best, Gerd Muller, every great player I can think of who played around that time played in Europe. Even before, with Alfredo Di Stefano, and after with Maradona. I don't recall hearing about anyone besides Pele playing only in America. |
Pelé preceads all those you cited fyi (there is some overlaping but they were begining when Pelé was on his way out basicaly), only Di Stefano is from the same time as he was. Fact of the mater is Pelé would make excursions with Santos trought Europe (teams played much less on those days so there was time for that) and Santos basicaly never lost. They played every team of importance in Europe at least once and beat them all. South American football in general was much stronger back them because European teams weren't these multi millionaire enterprises that are slowly killing football by injecting infintie money into it and just buying every good player in the planet even from other smaler European teams and turning eveything into a contest between 5-6 teams that have all the ebst players in the world playing for them.
To put things in perspective the 3 of the top 5 best players in the world today are Neymar, Messi and Suarez, those 3 would all play on South America on Pelé's time. And so would Di Maria, Douglas Costas, Lavesi, Navas, Bravo, Mascerano, Jamez Rodrigues, Cuadrado, Arturo Vidal, Thiago Silva, Aguero, Marcelo etc.
