Yes, otherwise you're comparing for the sake of it. To have an opinion, basically.
I'm not telling you to disregard the opinion of people who watched pele and maradona live regularly. They are the best to judge those two players. But if they haven't seen stefano how can they compare those two to stefano? To compare two individuals you surely have to have seen them both, extensively? In any other comparison outside of football that's how it works. I can't watch federers whole career and claim he's better than Borg after seeing 10 Borg matches. Or visa versa. That's absurd.
Do note that I'm applying this to all time greats where the margins are fine. Obviously watching pele in handful of games will tell that he's better than Rooney.
I think people who've watched a few clips here and there talking about so-and-so is incredibly stupid whether it's talking about the latest muppet target like Roberto Firmino or one of the golden oldies like Pelé, but I think you've gone too far the other way. You're excluding 99% of football fans from having an opinion about one of the most interesting players in the history of the game. There are people here who grew up with Maradona as their childhood hero and were avid football fans throughout his career who saw him play less than 30 games, and you're essentially disqualifying them from having an opinion. The same is true of those who grew up with Pelé but to an even greater extent.
That's an extension of a general attitude in these discussions that I find really odd; one of blatant disregard for people who have actually watched these players play. Thinking they didn't see them enough times to have a qualified opinion is a bit strange to me, but even stranger are the people that come in and put "the overrating of older players" down to nostalgia and getting caught up in the mythology of it all. They're essentially saying to the people that praise these older players that their opinion has very little value because their memories are deeply flawed and/or they are incapable of viewing something objectively. It's a bizarre attitude. On the first page we had a handful of people who saw them live that are unequivocal in their praise for him...
Pele didn't need to play in Europe to prove himself at club level because he already played for the best club team on the planet. They trashed Benfica in Lisbon in the inter-continental cup and he scored a hat trick. It's different now and we can all accept that the European clubs are the top dogs.
I saw him in 1966 when he scored a cracking free kick against Bulgaria. I saw him hobble off the pitch after being roughly handled by the Portuguese defenders at Goodison. I was a young lad and it made me sad to see him limp away. My dad was livid about it and he and my uncle went on about it all the was down the East Lancs Road. Pele in 1970 was unplayable in that side. I dunno about the 1000+ goals but the testimony of his contemporaries is pretty conclusive: Pele was the best there was.
I watched Pele in 1970 (yes, I'm that old), by which time he was already 30. He was simply incredible. It's always hard to say who was "the best" but it's not hard to conclude that Pele belongs in that elite few footballers who can be considered the best.
The combination of his speed, power, technique and vision was astonishing. I wish there was more footage of his play in 1958.
It's really down to Pele, Maradona and Messi for me (never saw Edwards) and right now I'd give the edge to Messi, but let's see what he can do when he's 30.
Winning the World Cup has never been the decisive factor (team game, etc.) but the fact that Pele played a major role in winning two World Cups (58 and 70), was Brasil's best player in 1962 but was out with injury and was Brasil's best player in 1966. That's a run we've never seen from anyone else before or since.
...and yet you get plenty of people who presumably have seen very little of him who happily dismiss the first-hand evidence and go on to tell everyone what they're missing. Then it turns into a Messi and Ronaldo debate.
That's when it becomes all about having an opinion for the sake of it, I think.
The people who've seen 20-30 games and have spent time reading up on these players can contribute something of worth, IMO. You have to take it with a pinch of salt of course but then you have to take anyone's opinion on football with a pinch of salt...that's just how this whole thing works. Trying to restrict people from having opinions based on watching an arbitrary number of games seems pointless and unnecessary. It's worth baring in mind 20-30 games is enough for most people to voice an opinion on someone like Gundogan and feel confident in the validity of that opinion and for it to have merit in a discussion, so I don't see why it wouldn't be here.
Anyway, on topic, Pelé was amazing and I find it hard to believe anyone who has watched even a handful of his games could think otherwise. Perfect physique, flawless (if unspectacular) technique and a footballing brain on par with anything before or since. If you want to pick holes in his career you can and the obvious one is the quality of teams he played for...but then the same applies to almost every player he's being compared against. No player had a flawless career but Pelé's is pretty much as close to it as you can get.
Maradona is one of the very, very, very few great players who never played for a great team, but then if you want to you can pick holes in that too. Did he need to have the team built around him to function at his peak? Could he have played a more selfless role to fit into a team of stars like Pelé in 1970? You'd struggle to find many players that performed to a similar level and showed they could slot seamlessly into a team of stars
and drive them to unparalleled success along with lifting a lesser team to heights they never could have reached without them. Platini with St Etienne & Juve? Cruyff with Ajax & Barca? Even then the St Etienne and Barca teams aren't remotely comparable to Maradona and Napoli, and on top of that they both bottled it - on some level - in the biggest competition they competed in.
There isn't any real way to quantify a player's career and objectively evaluate it so there's never going to be an answer on this that is remotely close to being "correct", IMO. It comes down to personal preference. Pelé had the perfect career, playing a starring role in successful World Cup campaigns at the beginning and end of his career and destroying everything in his path in between that time. Maradona is just your archetypal Roy of the Rovers with dazzling skill and incredible charisma to match, doing things that have just never been done before or since in terms of both success at club level and simply on a technical level. Cruyff is the first truly revolutionary footballer that managed to help create a breathtaking brand of football that tore apart practically everything in its path, in style, and despite numerous attempts to replicate it over the following decades that '70s Dutch team is still seen as the pinnacle of that particular style of play.
They all tick very different boxes. It's just a question of what you prefer. You can separate someone like Denis Law and George Best, sure, but when you're talking about the very best the game has ever seen the margins are so fine that it really does come down almost purely to personal preference. Personally I think di Stéfano is the greatest player I've ever seen and I'm not even sure if I've watched more than a dozen games of his...but he was genuinely incredible, and his career is immaculate to go along with it. He had the presence and work ethic of Keane with the grace of Zidane and the goalscoring instincts of Zico all rolled into one, and he genuinely was mesmerising because of that. All the great players have this inexplicable aura whether it's Beckenbauer or Messi, but di Stéfano was just something else. I think Beckenbauer is the only one that comes close in that sense. Some people spend far too much time trying to knock Pelé and Maradona down off their perches and far too little time appreciating the lesser mentioned elite players, IMO. Beckenbauer was a ludicrously talented footballer that gets so little love on here it's sad.
"Who is this man? He takes the ball from the goalkeeper; he tells the full-backs what to do; wherever he is on the field he is in position to take the ball; you can see his influence on everything that is happening... I had never seen such a complete footballer. It was as though he had set up his own command centre at the heart of the game. He was as strong as he was subtle. The combination of qualities was mesmerising."
Bobby Charlton
"Alfredo Di Stéfano was the greatest footballer of all time - far better even than Pelé. He was, simultaneously, the anchor in defence, the playmaker in midfield, and the most dangerous marksman in attack."
Helenio Herrera - 7 league titles, 2 European Cups, 2 Spanish Cups and an Italian Cup as a manager
"The greatness of Di Stéfano was that, with him in your side, you had two players in every position."
Miguel Muñoz - 3 European Cups and 4 league titles as a player; 2 European Cups, 9 league titles and 3 Spanish Cups as a manager
Never thought that it will be on this topic.