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da gbg bet： He’s one of the players of his generation. The stats tell you that, and so does everything else – his peers, pundits, journalists and your very own eyes. You might even argue that there are only two current players on a higher plane than Manchester City’s Sergio Kun Aguero.
In fact, the first thing that jumps out when you see a stat like that isn’t so much how good Aguero is – because you knew that already – but actually just how good Shearer was. And you knew that already, too. The greatness of neither is in doubt, but it shows how highly we regard Aguero, despite his omission from every PFA team of the year, ever.
Watching Manchester City over the last few seasons has proven as much – without Aguero, City are not the same force; with him they are often unstoppable.
And City will require his talismanic presence when they face Real Madrid in what is now the last ambitious challenge facing Manuel Pellegrini as City manager.
Madrid, have their own goalscoring machine. Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the most prolific finishers in footballing history, a goalscoring machine that runs on goals themselves, like some sort of perfectly-oiled perfectly-efficient perpetual motion engine. One possessing of a winning smile and the wink of a man with hundreds of millions in his bank account and GI Joe style block of abs. He is as frightening as he is super-human.
His record at Madrid is magical, almost unreal. In 234 Liga games, he’s scored 256 goals. It’s one thing to score at a rate of more than a goal a game, but to go quite so far over that rate for quite so long is beyond sensational. To celebrate your 300th goal before you celebrate your 300th appearance looks like a statistical mistake rather than a sensational feat.
Ronaldo has only scored fewer than 50 goals per season once in his Madrid career – that was his first season at the Bernabeu, when he scored a ‘mere’ 33 goals. But then again, he only played in 35 games in all competitions. In his second season he managed 53 in 54 games. Since then, he’s gone well over the rate of a goal per game.
Aguero has never gone beyond that magical rate of a goal per game.
Yet, Ronaldo’s stats don’t simply start in the season he joined Real Madrid. He played for Manchester United, too, and won the Ballon d’Or there in 2008. At United, he never got to 100 league goals yet played in almost 200 league games.
This suggests a number of things. Superficially it might point to the differences in the leagues, suggesting that perhaps it’s easier to score at a super-human rate in La Liga than it is in England. Also superficially, it might point to the quality of players these two marksmen have around them, suggesting it’s easier to score when surrounded by better players or against lesser opposition.
But whilst all of these are true, it should also point out once again the danger of comparing football players for any reason other than trying to understand a game involving the two.
Before Ronaldo, football wasn’t really measured in individual awards. Prima Donnas existed, great goalscorers were cherished, but it’s worth remembering that the two players usually held up as the best the game has ever seen never won ‘Ballons d’Or’. The Ballon d’Or was an award specifically for European players and Alfredo di Stefano. Instead, the best players were just the best players. If they scored bags of goals, great. But it’s whether or not they won games for their teams and made the players around them better.
‘Modern football’ – the stock phrase that we like to use before we have a go at the state of our beloved game, the phrase we use before we go full-on angry pensioner and talk about how the game ‘used to be’ – is decried daily, and a lot of the moans are unfair. This one, I believe, is a real travesty of ‘modern football’. This one means we now measure our greats in terms of goals scored.
Football has always had an attacking bias. Only four defenders have won the Ballon d’Or and one goalkeeper, Lev Yashin, who France Football confirm would not have been given his award if Pele had been eligible in 1963. Yet that attacking bias will only get worse if we start to compare players, and specifically if we start to negatively compare team-players with goalscorers.
Will Sergio Aguero be remembered as a great? Of course he will. He’s a goalscorer whose record will be up there with the best. But if he’d spent his career in La Liga, possibly moved to Real Madrid or Barcelona, would he have been cherished as one of the greatest ever to play the game? Has the Premier League given him some sort of glass ceiling? Would Aguero be better off foregoing the injuries, the physical demands and the hard-as-nails defenders of England?
Maybe we should just take every player on their merits and stop deciding who is the greatest.
#AgainstModernFootball