Every sport has a greatest-of-all-time argument. Football's is uniquely unresolvable, because the sport changed more than the players did.
Pelé played on pitches that would be considered unplayable today, against defenders who were permitted to kick him repeatedly with no meaningful sanction, in an era with no substitutes for much of his career. Messi plays on immaculate surfaces, protected by rules designed to shield creative players, with sports science that extends careers by years. Comparing their numbers directly is not analysis. It is category error.
What you can do is understand what each player's actual case is — the specific thing they did that nobody else did — and then decide which of those things you value most. Here are the twenty players who belong in the conversation.
The Two
The modern duopoly, and the reason nearly every other player of the last twenty years is discussed in relation to them.
Lionel Messi
Country: Argentina · Position: Forward · Era: 2004–present · Ballons d'Or: 8
The most decorated individual in the history of the sport, and the holder of its longest elite peak. Eight Ballons d'Or is not a narrow lead — it is three more than anyone else has ever won.
The case rests on completeness. Messi is simultaneously among the greatest dribblers, the greatest passers and the greatest finishers the game has produced, which is an unusual combination — most great forwards are elite at one of those and merely very good at the others. He spent most of his career effectively functioning as his team's playmaker and top scorer at once.
The long-standing objection was international football: a generation of near-misses with Argentina, including a lost World Cup final. That objection closed in 2021 and 2022 with the Copa América and then the World Cup, in a tournament where he was decisive in almost every knockout round.
Cristiano Ronaldo
Country: Portugal · Position: Forward · Era: 2002–present · Ballons d'Or: 5
The most complete athlete football has produced, and the most adaptable great player of any era. Ronaldo is the all-time leading scorer in men's international football and in the Champions League, and he was a decisive player in England, Spain and Italy — three leagues with very different physical and tactical demands.
His real case is reinvention. He began as a flashy winger who dribbled too much, became the most devastating direct attacker in the world in his Real Madrid years, and finished as a pure penalty-box striker who scored at volume with minimal running. Most players get one peak. He engineered three.
Against him: fewer Ballons d'Or, less chance creation, and a career largely spent inside superteams. In his favour: nobody has ever scored this many goals in this many contexts for this long.
Before the Duopoly
The players who defined the sport when it was still being invented.
Pelé
Country: Brazil · Position: Forward · Era: 1956–1977 · Ballons d'Or: ineligible
The only player to win three World Cups — 1958 as a teenager, 1962, and 1970 with a Brazil side widely regarded as the greatest international team ever assembled.
Pelé's exclusion from the Ballon d'Or is a technicality, not a verdict: the award was restricted to European players for the whole of his career, and France Football later issued him an honorary award once the anomaly became embarrassing. His scoring totals are enormous but include unofficial and exhibition matches, which is why the raw numbers are argued about more than the achievements.
What is not argued about is 1970. A player at his peak, in the first World Cup broadcast in colour, in the best team anyone had seen.
Diego Maradona
Country: Argentina · Position: Attacking midfielder · Era: 1976–1997 · Ballons d'Or: honorary
The greatest single tournament any footballer has produced. At the 1986 World Cup Maradona did not simply lead Argentina to the title — he carried a modest team through it, scoring or creating the decisive goals in every knockout round.
The quarter-final against England is the most famous four minutes in football history: the Hand of God, an outright cheat, followed almost immediately by a solo run past half the England team that is routinely called the greatest goal ever scored. Both, from the same player, in the same match. That contradiction is the whole of Maradona.
At Napoli he did something arguably harder, dragging a club from Italy's poorer south to two league titles in a league dominated by the wealthy north. The city has not entirely stopped thanking him.
Johan Cruyff
Country: Netherlands · Position: Forward · Era: 1964–1984 · Ballons d'Or: 3
The most influential person in football history, which is a different claim from best player — though he was very close to that too.
As a player, Cruyff was the central intelligence of Total Football, the Ajax and Netherlands system where every outfield player could occupy any position. As a coach, he built Barcelona's "Dream Team," installed the philosophy that became the club's academy curriculum, and thereby produced Xavi, Iniesta and Guardiola — and, downstream, the Spain side that won three consecutive major tournaments.
He never won a World Cup; the Netherlands lost the 1974 final. It barely matters. More of the football you watch today came from him than from anyone else on this list.
Alfredo Di Stéfano
Country: Argentina/Spain · Position: Forward · Era: 1945–1966 · Ballons d'Or: 2
The engine of the Real Madrid side that won the first five European Cups in a row — a run of continental dominance nobody has approached since.
Di Stéfano was a forward who did everything: he defended, he created, he dropped deep to build play and arrived late to finish it. The modern "complete forward" template starts here. He never appeared at a World Cup, a gap in his record that has quietly cost him standing in an argument dominated by tournament highlights.
Franz Beckenbauer
Country: Germany · Position: Sweeper · Era: 1964–1983 · Ballons d'Or: 2
He invented a position. Before Beckenbauer, the sweeper was a purely defensive insurance policy; he turned it into the team's deepest playmaker, carrying the ball forward from defence and starting attacks from behind the midfield.
He won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and again as manager in 1990, one of very few to manage both. Almost every modern ball-playing centre-back is working from his blueprint.
George Best
Country: Northern Ireland · Position: Winger · Era: 1963–1984 · Ballons d'Or: 1
The most naturally gifted British player of his generation and the first footballer to be famous in the way pop stars were famous. He won the European Cup with Manchester United in 1968 and the Ballon d'Or the same year, at 22.
His career effectively ended a decade early. The counterfactual — what Best would have been with modern sports science, media management and player welfare — is one of football's genuine tragedies, and the reason he sits lower on lists than his talent warrants.
The Artists
Players whose case rests less on totals than on what they were like to watch.
Ronaldo Nazário
Country: Brazil · Position: Striker · Era: 1993–2011 · Ballons d'Or: 2
At his peak, before the knee injuries, arguably the most frightening attacking player who has ever lived — a striker with a sprinter's acceleration, a winger's dribbling and a poacher's finishing, all at once.
He then did something almost unheard of: after two catastrophic knee ruptures that cost him years, he came back and won the 2002 World Cup as its top scorer. The player who returned was slower and smarter. He was still unstoppable.
Ronaldinho
Country: Brazil · Position: Forward/midfielder · Era: 1998–2015 · Ballons d'Or: 1
The most joyful footballer of the modern era, and the only visiting player in living memory to receive a standing ovation from the Bernabéu crowd — Real Madrid's own supporters applauding a Barcelona player off the pitch in 2005.
His peak was short, roughly three years, and his decline was early. Within that window nobody was close. He is also the direct bridge between eras: he was Barcelona's superstar when a teenage Messi arrived.
Zinedine Zidane
Country: France · Position: Midfielder · Era: 1989–2006 · Ballons d'Or: 1
The most elegant player on this list, and the one most associated with individual moments of extraordinary technique — two headers in the 1998 World Cup final, and a left-footed volley in the 2002 Champions League final that is probably the best goal ever scored in a European Cup final.
His last act as a player was a red card in the 2006 World Cup final for a headbutt. Somehow it has not diminished him at all, which tells you how much goodwill the previous fifteen years bought.
Thierry Henry
Country: France · Position: Forward · Era: 1994–2014 · Ballons d'Or: 0
Never won the Ballon d'Or, and belongs here anyway. Henry was the central figure of Arsenal's unbeaten Premier League season — a full league campaign without a single defeat, which has not been repeated since.
He redefined what a striker could be in England: a converted winger who attacked from wide positions, made the outside-of-the-boot finish into a signature, and combined the athleticism of a sprinter with genuine coldness in front of goal.
The Engine Room
The players who made the great teams work.
Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta
Country: Spain · Position: Midfielders · Ballons d'Or: 0 each
The two most important midfielders of the modern era, neither of whom ever won the Ballon d'Or, which is the single strongest argument that the award measures the wrong things.
Between them they controlled the Barcelona and Spain sides that won the 2008 European Championship, the 2010 World Cup and the 2012 European Championship — three consecutive major tournaments, something no other national team has done. Xavi was the metronome, Iniesta the escape artist, and Iniesta scored the goal that won the World Cup final.
Paolo Maldini
Country: Italy · Position: Defender · Era: 1985–2009 · Ballons d'Or: 0
Twenty-five years at one club, five European Cups and Champions Leagues, and an elite career at two different defensive positions. Maldini is the standard answer to "greatest defender," and the case is about method: he defended by anticipation rather than aggression, and famously described having to make a tackle as evidence he had already made a mistake.
Luka Modrić
Country: Croatia · Position: Midfielder · Era: 2003–present · Ballons d'Or: 1
The player who broke the duopoly. Between 2008 and 2023, Messi and Ronaldo won every Ballon d'Or but one — and the exception was Modrić in 2018, after a season of Champions League success and a World Cup final with Croatia, a country of under four million people.
He is also the best argument for longevity in midfield, still operating at the top level well into his late thirties.
Robert Lewandowski
Country: Poland · Position: Striker · Era: 2005–present · Ballons d'Or: 0
The most complete pure number nine of his generation, and the most conspicuously unrewarded — his best season coincided with a cancelled Ballon d'Or ceremony.
His record includes scoring five goals in nine minutes as a substitute, and breaking Gerd Müller's long-standing Bundesliga single-season scoring record. Both of those sound like typographical errors. Neither is.
The Next
Players whose place in this conversation is still being decided.
Kylian Mbappé
Country: France · Position: Forward · Era: 2015–present
A World Cup winner at 19 and the scorer of a hat-trick in a World Cup final — a feat achieved only once before, more than half a century earlier. His acceleration with the ball is arguably unmatched in the sport's history.
The remaining question is whether he assembles the sustained club dominance that separates the very great from the merely brilliant.
Erling Haaland
Country: Norway · Position: Striker · Era: 2016–present
The most efficient goalscorer the modern game has produced, with a debut Premier League season that broke the single-season record. He is a genuinely new physical archetype — the size of a traditional target man with the top speed of a winger.
His case will be decided by whether he can be decisive in the biggest matches over a decade, not just prolific across a season.
Neymar Jr.
Country: Brazil · Position: Forward · Era: 2009–present
Brazil's all-time leading scorer, and the most gifted player of his generation not named Messi or Ronaldo. His years at Barcelona alongside Messi and Suárez produced one of the great attacking trios in club history.
The case against is availability — a career interrupted repeatedly by injury at exactly the moments that would have defined it.
The Data
Every player here — country, position, era and Ballon d'Or count — is available as a structured, downloadable dataset.
Explore the GOAT Debate dataset →
Related: Footballers with 500+ Goals → · Greatest Soccer Clubs → · World Cup Winning Players →
Cast Your Vote
Every pub in the world has settled this argument at least once, and none of the verdicts agree.