Everything is up to debate, yet in any case what is more important it's that in the bigger debate if someone might like more or less R9 or CR and wants to compare them, the exercise of imagine a player in another enviroment/period shouldn't be taken that serious or worse, like a fact.
Every player individual carreer was what it was and f we just play mind games with different scenarios, everything changes, the simple alteration of putting Aguero instead of Crespo in the very same play in the 90's it's only just an imagination excercise.
With just watching a player in their real moments in their respective periods, with their respective styles and atributes we can debate and end prefferimg one above the other, feel that both are equal or dislike both...we should not fall in the: Kempes/Aguero,/Tevez wouldn't have scored as much as Bati in Italy in the 90's or whatever similar conclusion we might elaborate.
Every Era/Period we are analyzing it's with the Monday Paper and it was what it was, but we can never know if Cuper would have get along better with Messi than R9 or even worse and how would that relantionship would have affected the formation and tactics of that team and so on.
What would have happened if instead of Cuper, Menotti was coaching Inter and an endless exercise of "what ifs"
We have tons of examples everyday and in the past of very particular situations that could have sent many players in a very diff path.
Mascherano was in the bench with Pardew minutes to go back to River, it took Rafa lots of effort to convince him to go to Liverpool.
Xavi was tired, pissed, in the brink of leaving Barca.
What would have happened if Rikjaard kept in charge instead of Pep?...and so on, you get the gist of it.
I'm not saying that we should not take notice of every period and their global tendencies, their particular players, etc...but every exercise we try to show as a fact when we play this imaginary games, like the one I've mentioned of Kempes and cia in the 90's, it's flawed from its very origin.
Back on every period tendencies, under a certain enviroment, in other words: the macro enviroment.
It's more important to analyze a player and his perfomances as a whole, in that REAL period.
We can use that to understand better why he had a determinated style and how this style was affected by the ideas of a certain coach, general tendencies and lots of stuff in between.
I remember right now an excellent goal by Crespo doing a sombrero on Maldini and from the way some people treat periods, that simple fact of facing Maldini and making that play/goal almost instantly makes him more gifted technically than Aguero, while clearly he wasn't at all.
Yet at the same time, we don't fecking know if Aguero would have even reach that ball or even try that sombrero if some how we can replace Crespo with in that particular situation.
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We can speculate how a player might have played in a certain period? sure, we can determinate which Period had more teams playing more offensivly, with more or less possesion footbal, being more defensive oriented, etc. We can even analyze how a rule can affect the game or even a certain role like the one of keepers not being allowed to grab it with their hands from a pass of a teammate and take in acccount all these to understand the game of any player under his particular enviroment, of course...but this means that we can later come to a conclusion that the whole Messi in the 60's would have scored 3 goals or 300, it's fecking silly. It's simplisitc, it opens the door to the obnoxious "my league/league is 35 better than yours" and so on.
