Hiku said:
DakonBlackblade said:
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.
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I know, but I don't think there are any other notable players to mention around that time. When Santos played other European teams, those were friendly matches, iirc. I wouldn't even bet on Barcelona to beat Manchester United in a friendly pre-season match today. But if they play in the CL, my money is on Barca, easy.
I'm skeptical about South America being stronger than Europe even back then based on every other notable player I've heard of going to Europe. Though I know that South American football has always been great, and European teams weren't as strong as they are today because money wasn't as big of a factor then as it is today, so it may be true. But European countries like Italy, England and Spain have always had a very strong football culture as well.
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Check copa intercontinental results, in the 60s Santos won it twice and you can see Argentinian and Uruguayan teams also won it. Also, World cup winners of the brazilian teams mostly played in their League, there you get more legends.
Check players like Elías Figueroa in wikipedia , as a chilean is the closer example I can give you. Marketing isn't as strong but he is easily considered the best player we ever had and you can ask Ronaldinho, Beckenbauer or Pelé that consider him one of the best of all time
